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What’s the drill – April 14: A new approach to problem-solving

14 Apr

If I were to write a country music song, which, let’s be honest might never happen.. I’d call it:

“Focus on the person, not the problem”.

It seems like it could be a catchy song, if only people would listen to it.

When an employee comes to you with what you see as an unsolvable problem, it’s time to dig deeper. As an Improviser, I’d ask you what the “offer” is. What is the employee really asking for? Furthermore, what does your employee need right now?

Our basic human need is to be heard. When managers respond to an emotional need with rationale data, an employee is not truly heard. Besides, chances are it’s not about the data. There is something else going on.

Get clear on the issue.

Our goal is not always to problem-solve. It’s to build relationships. That comes from noticing the offer in the room, accepting, and building off of it. We can’t “yes, and” if we aren’t fully paying attention to the other person.

How to “Yes, And” by saying “No”

9 Apr

When I first started Improvising, I took the phrase “Yes, and” very literally. My mind was blown by this new concept and I wanted to play with the idea of saying YES to everything I could.

And so… I went skiing. I really dislike skiing. Those darn chair lifts! As the chair lift wobbled and swayed in the cold and my kind friends distracted me from my fear by talking baseball and “Friends” trivia, the phrase “Say, Yes And” pierced through my head.

I thought, I really should say YES…when in my gut I knew I wanted to have said no.

This “Yes, And” experiment lasted a few more months. Until I realized a key distinction:

It’s more important to “Yes, And” your instincts than to say yes to everything.

Well-timed NO’s are strategic. They allow us to create space for more YES’s. 

Improv helps us develop our instinctual muscle, so that we are attuned to what feels true for us and what doesn’t.

This attunement also helps us feel what’s true or not true for the characters we play on stage. We know what makes them tick.

Most of us work-out our NO muscle more often than our YES muscle. Usually there is a reason for it. Ask, where is the NO coming from? As long as the “NO” comes from a real, honest place we are still supporting our partner, ourselves, and the scene.

The key is to not feel like we have to say YES to everything our partner says or does on-stage, but to still find a way to accept it and build on it.

A tricky nuance perhaps. I’d argue that the key is balance — How does your “NO” keep moving the story forward? What about this offer can you still accept?

The more we Improvise (on stage and in real life) the more we may realize that “Yes, And’ing” is less about rules and more about intention and instinct.

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The art of feedback – why we should serve more than a “praise” sandwich

5 Apr

A couple of days ago, my good friend and classmate Kendalle Harrell sent me a link  to the latest research article on Performance Feedback… I know what you’re thinking…quite a sexy topic for an Organizational Psychology grad student.

Yes, gosh darnit, it is! We’ve all been given feedback – welcome or unwelcome, formal or informal, yearly or monthly.

Performance feedback is an art. So let’s draw some connections to the art of Improvisation, shall we?

Peter Sims gets us thinking about how, and compares this art to the artsiest folk of all, Pixar animators.

  1. Make it personal – no cookie cutter feedback here. Not everyone likes a praise sandwich, in fact, some people will throw away what’s inside and just focus on the praise, or visa-versa. Strong performance feedback has…
  2. A narrative – a journey, a co-created one at that… between the feedback giver and receiver. Decide on a vision that you can co-create. To help you write this narrative focus on…
  3. Agreement – what can the feedback receiver agree to (and come up with themselves) to improve? Utilize the power of give and take (Thanks, Adam Grant!).
  4. Be specific – focus on specific behaviors, action items, and examples.

Pixar utilizes “plussing” as a developmental tool (you may call this “Yes, And…as you wish).

“The point, he said, is to “build and improve on ideas without using judgmental language.

Here’s an example he offers in his book. An animator working on “Toy Story 3” shares her rough sketches and ideas with the director. “Instead of criticizing the sketch or saying ‘no,’ the director will build on the starting point by saying something like, ‘I like Woody’s eyes, and what if his eyes rolled left?”

Using words like “and” or “what if,” rather than “but” is a way to offer suggestions and allow for the creative juices to flow without fear, Mr. Sims said.”

Performance feedback is a muscle that can be developed with practice.  I’d argue that many of us inherently know this already, but don’t always put it into practice. If we want to improve, we can think about it as we would our own performance feedback. Focus on the specific behaviors we can improve on tomorrow, and who can help keep us accountable as we learn and grow?

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The Secret to Getting Ahead, via the NY Times

31 Mar

It would be easy to read yesterday’s NY Times profile of Professor Adam Grant and his book “Give and Take” and conclude the secret to success is to give more and take less.

We could come to similar, easily digestible conclusions with other, recent management development offerings. We could “lean in” more, “be more mindful”, or say yes or say no more often. But would this stick, or just make us more resentful, anxious, paranoid, or busy?

One thing is certain, I completely agree and appreciate Grant’s work and his message:

“The greatest untapped source of motivation, he argues, is a sense of service to others; focusing on the contribution of our work to other peoples’ lives has the potential to make us more productive than thinking about helping ourselves.”

As I see it, the key to encouraging more giving is by focusing on the feeling it brings.  In essence, we follow the feeling. Sometimes it is indescribable, but it sticks with us. 

If giving more, leaning in, taking more time for yourself, or saying no more often makes you feel better, more whole, more on purpose, then that is reason enough to do more of it. Perhaps it will allow you to give with more gusto, to listen in a way that offers the support your friend or co-worker needs.

We can save the quantity vs. quality of giving debate for another time. I feel better when I give help, advice, support, encouragement, and that is a powerful, potent, push to do more of it.

Mixing motivation and giving isn’t easy. If we view giving as a means to an end, (“matchers”, as Grant calls them in his research) than we’re missing the point.

Improvisers give in the form of making their partner look good. We give because it is the Improvisers credo. It builds trust. And it fuels creativity by opening us up to more possibilities and points of view.

But we are also good at saying no when we need to, when it feels instinctively wrong.  We are skilled at the polite, “NOPE!”. Guilt or pushing doesn’t motivate giving, that is certain.

“The most successful givers, Grant explains, are those who rate high in concern for others but also in self-interest. And they are strategic in their giving — they give to other givers and matchers, so that their work has the maximum desired effect; they are cautious about giving to takers; they give in ways that reinforce their social ties; and they consolidate their giving into chunks, so that the impact is intense enough to be gratifying.”

The impact of this work is profound if we give it and share it with others. It is the foundation of a learning organization, of a company of shared social capital and support. And it is sustained not because your boss told you to give more, or because you read about it in an article in the NY Times, but because you know how it feels when someone gave selflessly to you, and you want to pay it forward.

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The power of a “Power Pose”

29 Mar

How much space do you take up? No, we’re not talking about oxygen or your belongings. Literally, when you stand or sit, or enter a room, how much space do you take up and how do you convey that to others?

This is one of the tenants of “Status” – a tool Improvisers use to communicate, influence, empathize, and… play. Status is present in our every day lives and asks us to consider how we act, talk, and feel along a continuum of submission to dominance.

We can choose our status. It is ever in flux. Choosing our status can help us gain the confidence to own the stage.

Amy Cuddy of Harvard Business School does a wonderful job of teaching us how to play with status, how being more mindful of status and body language helps shift us neurologically to act the way we want to feel.

Want to learn how? 

Or watch her TED talk, here.

A power pose is one way. What else triggers you and helps you act the way you want to feel?

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When failure is part of the rules

19 Mar

A few weeks ago, a woman in one of my workshops raised her hand and asked a very important question: “Are you telling us that it’s okay to fail?”

A group of incredibly smart, focused, and skilled future leaders was confused. No one had ever given them permission to fail before.

I told her what one of my mentors, Randy Nelson told me: life is not about error avoidance, it’s about error recovery.

I wasn’t actually encouraging them to fail, I simply encouraged this group to change their reaction to failure.

Most of us fail inward – meaning, our bodies tense up, we get smaller and we let the world know that we are ashamed.

Improvisers practice what same may see as a silly exercise called the “Failure Bow” – we turn failure from an inward defeat to an outward celebration. This small practice helps us act the way we want to feel.

Seth Godin speaks brilliantly about failure, here in this interview. Some of the highlights:

  • those who fail more often, win – The people who don’t win are the ones that don’t fail at all and get stuck, or the ones that fail so big that they don’t get to play again.
  • What are the risks that you can take that keep you in the game even if you fail?
  •  Following the rules can lead to a fear of initiation and a fear of failure. Where can you work where failing is part of the rules?

The concept of embracing failure is broad and confusing for some – depending on your profession, and your past experience. This concept is also juicy and full of connection to vulnerability, innovation, creativity, you name it.

Simply put…error recovery builds resilience, it provides a new kind of reward…perhaps one that we aren’t teaching or recognizing enough.

 

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The value of not knowing the rules

12 Mar

I’m hearing the phrase “Lean In” a lot lately. You too? Ok good, it’s not just me.

Leaning in, in my world, essentially means “Yes, And”. Some call “Yes, And” an Improv rule. I call it a guideline, a mantra, a choice.

The choice is… to accept or to block. Leaning in means to accept what comes our way, to explore it, live in it, get messy with it… instead of push it away.

When faced with a new experience, task, or even a game we often want to know the rules. “Tell me what to do, and how to do it, help me feel certain”, say some of us. To hammer out the ambiguity is essentially what we are asking for.

Give me the boundaries, my role, task – let me feel comfortable by telling me the rules. The rules give me something to grab onto to keep me psychologically safe.

I see it in action all the time – in Graduate School class assignments, explaining a new Improv game, or big decisions.

When we are about to jump off the uncertainty cliff, we want to make sure our safety harness is attached.

Not knowing the rules produces a vulnerability unlike any other, especially when we don’t feel well-equipped for it. What if I don’t do this correctly? What if I fail?

The United States Army prepares its leaders for a life without certainty with a strategy called “Broadening”. Their development curriculum includes several stints of purposeful broadening – men and women are given assignments outside of their comfort zone to break the assembly line and predictability of the path. It’s more than a stretch assignment.

We won’t always know the rules. How comfortable are you when there might not be a right or wrong way to do something?

A broadening experience means truly leaning in – being able to sit with ambiguity and uncertainty. There may not always be rules in the places you need or want to go – but there is a purpose.

Forcing yourself out of your comfort zone prepares you for something else, allows you to make the rules, or teaches you that you may be comfortable with less rules than you thought.

Lean in.

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I Have a Great Idea – via Harvard Business Review

8 Mar

Bear with me for a couple hundred words, can you? I have a “great idea”.

There is an HBR Article floating around that got me fired up. Really fired up.

It was sent over by my friend Phil O’ Brien of Climbing Fish.

The article, written by Umair Haque, argues that the rise of “TED-style thinking” is one cause for our broken relationship with great ideas. He argues that the rise of bite-sized, easily digestible, talks, blogs, learning opportunities are…easy solutions. Here:

We’ve come to look at these quick, easy “solutions” as the very point of “ideas worth spreading. But this seems to me to miss the point and power of ideas entirely. Einstein’s great equation is not a “solution”; it is a theory — whose explanations unravel only greater mysteries and questions. It offers no immediate easy, quick “application” in the “real world,” but challenges us to reimagine what the “real world” is; it is a Great Idea because it offers us something bigger, more lasting, and more vital than a painless, disposable “solution.”

It’s true – audiences (especially adult audiences) want to know: how can I utilize this information now, how is this relevant to me, and what is the ANSWER?! I’ve seen it in the workshops I teach, the consultants I work with, and in my own experience.

I am not unlike the audiences of today. As I sit through each Graduate school class in my Master’s program I find myself struggling with classes that don’t provide immediate utility, relevance and answers. I worry about the cost, both opportunity and financial.

But what Haque is arguing, is for these learning experiences to encourage more questions than answers. To give us space to reflect and the time to transform these great ideas into more great ideas of our own. The learning I receive in graduate school makes me uncomfortable, far more than I’d argue a TED talk ever could. It is me at my most vulnerable self.

Why? It’s because I’m not given the simple, quick solution and immediate utility. But, I have the space to ruminate on it, share with my learning community and make the process relevant and meaningful for myself.

It’s a hard lesson to learn – especially when you are impatient, passionate, excited, and anxious.

“That is precisely how Great Ideas change us: not merely by pleasing us, but by challenging us. That is precisely how they elevate us: not merely by pandering to us, or by provoking us, but by enlightening the whole of us. That is precisely what makes Great Ideas truly worthy — not just easily palatable, and commercially profitable.”

I think of this often as I design and deliver corporate workshops and engage in many others. I remember that when I was first learning how to Improvise (which, I consider the “Great Idea” that changed my life), it wasn’t boiled down into one class or one 18-minute talk. Improv teaches you there is no right answer, or one solution. Sure, it’s also relevant and applicable, but not just in one clear way.

This “Great Idea” keeps me constantly off-center. This sort of learning helps a person truly come into their own, the learning isn’t spoon-fed, it’s up to them to grab the spoon. And, it’s stuck with me longer than any TED Talk, blog post, article ever could. It didn’t just spew knowledge, it fueled reflection and a desire for more experience.

Not all great ideas are intended for the masses or for digestible consumption, but that also means the ideas don’t have to be perfect or fully-formed to start to spread.

Learning is personal. Learning is meaningful. Learning is powerful. How can we as educators help keep this alive with the boundaries that technology, time, money, have set? I want to hear your great ideas.

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Nine words on leadership and learning

6 Mar

“For the rest of my life, I want to…”

Can you finish the sentence?

This is the question posed by Learning and Leadership expert Kevin Eikenberry, here.

What do you want to learn about for the rest of your life? What holds your attention enough to keep you motivated and interested, especially during tough times?

When you have a clear purpose and strong desire to learn…well, you are unstoppable. And, if you can combine this drive with a constant beginner’s mind…well, you are my hero. These are nine powerful, wonderful, vulnerable words.

Leaders inspire and help others to finish their sentence, or turn it on its head, or keep you out of your comfort zone, who pose more questions instead of answers and who stress the importance of a mission.

Sometimes, nine words are enough.

 

 

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What’s the drill – February 26: Controlling the outcome

25 Feb

Try as we might, we can never really know the outcome of anything. My book might not sell, I may not get hired for a job, the group project may actually exceed expectations.

The more we try to exert influence over circumstances we can’t and don’t actually control, the more frustrated we can become.

Beginning Improvisers are often fearful their first time taking the stage. Neurologically they feel threatened, and this fear shows up in different behaviors. Often times the feeling of threat or lack of safety makes us want to control the scene because we think we can control the outcome.

In spite of what we think, we never know the outcome of anything.

When the stakes are high, our task to not control the outcome gets tougher. We feel that we have something to lose. When money, pride, reputation are on the line, the job gets even tougher – especially if you are a leader.

Teaching others to let go, accept offers, and say “yes, and” means controlling less and supporting more. It can be a fundamental shift to our psychological and neurological safety.

In tough, stressful and threatening situations, we revert back to our natural instincts and habits. If we are to help others lead through change and high-stakes, it will take practice and it will take work but the outcome will be worth it…of that we are certain.

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What’s the drill – February 22: Know your objective

22 Feb

‎”Whenever someone comes to me for help, I listen very hard and ask myself, ‘What does this person really want? And what will they do to keep from getting it?” – William Perry, Harvard Professor of Education

Navigating life without a script means finding the balance between freedom and structure. For Improvisers, it means getting clear on the basics of the scene, feeling grounded in the structure so that we can move and build new ideas with complete freedom.

A trick we use to keep us centered, motivated, and able to navigate ambiguity is to know our objective in the scene. What is it that my character wants, and why?

Once we get clear on these answers, a scene can really flow.

But, how often do we go into a scene, a meeting, a phone call, a class, an opportunity and truly know what our objective is?

Getting clear on our objective does more than just help you – it helps your partner in crime. If I don’t know what it is you want, how can I support you?

For me, the most memorable Improv scenes to watch and to play in are those where characters have a clear objective that comes from a very truthful, sometimes vulnerable place. For example, they don’t just want to win the science fair, but they want someone to tell them how great they are… for the very first time.

Having a clear objective is a way to measure change. Did we get what we wanted? Did it mean something to us? What’s my temperature reading before and after? How am I progressing?

When I’m coaching Improvisers or those in a professional development setting, it’s common for people to either not have an objective or to not verbalize it.

We can’t always think of the objective spontaneously, but we can tune into the character, or ourselves to think about what is it that I really want? Sometimes it takes some work, and some encouragement:

  1. Know the “why”, not only the “what” – figure out why your objective matters to you. Sometimes asking “The Five Why’s” can help with this. 
  2. Be open to your objective changing. Don’t hold so fast to it that you close yourself off.
  3. Finally – don’t be afraid to ask for help.

 

 

 

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How to give yourself permission to be more creative

14 Feb

High on a mountaintop sits the creative genius. Not to be bothered with, talked to, or talked down to. He speaks in short, punctuated sentences, rides a scooter (yes, on a mountaintop) and abstains from yellow food. Who is this person? Surely he must be creative.

If you ask me, the great divide between “the creative person” and the non-creative type is phony.

Anyone can be creative. It’s not a category you fall into, the job you are assigned, the assessment you take. Creativity starts with permission.

To be creative is to give yourself and to give others the permission to explore, to have new ideas and to follow them. 

Creative people are more comfortable with the freedom inside structure than just the structure itself. They are more comfortable exploring, less on logic and rules and more on what could be.

They take risks because they have given themselves permission to. They think broadly, in opposites, in analogies, or in obvious straight-forward methods.

It’s a shift – from a judging to learner mindset, a mechanistic or organismic structure, technical to adaptive problem solving, or whole-brain thinking. But, becoming more creative involves not just a neurological shift but an environmental shift as well.

Peter Sims talks about this in this article, “Ultimately, while basic design and creative methods can be learned much like muscles, and developed and strengthened through practice, this shift in mindset requires a different kind of leadership.”

Helping others become more creative involves giving them permission to fail, to have big ideas, to take risks and to blur the lines between who is deemed creative and who isn’t.

 

 

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Video

What the Super Bowl blackout can teach us about navigating ambiguity

4 Feb

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50140297n

Check the books, but I’d wager that no one bet on a blackout during the Super Bowl.

What happens in a moment of complete ambiguity, where a scheduled and somewhat scripted control room has to go off-script?

This clip from CBS News takes us behind the scenes of the moment, and also reveals an important lesson in how to improvise.

Improvisers are skilled at succinct communication, especially in the beginning of a scene where everything is unknown including our characters, their relationship, and the environment. We establish the platform of the scene so that our fellow players feel safe and knowledgeable about the basic parameters. We practice being obvious and clear to help make our partner look good. We work to speak a common language as quickly as possible.

Watch about 60 seconds into the clip as two crew members work to clarify what’s happening in “their scene”. The crew member’s partner twice asks, “what does that mean?” before his partner says the obvious…. we have a game delay.

In a moment of ambiguity, when emotions and adrenaline are high, those who are skilled at navigating ambiguity help make their partner look good by communicating in a way that helps get us out of the dark.

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2 questions to help you crack the employee engagement code

3 Oct

Stan the salesman was not engaged in his work. He felt isolated, lost, and flat-out miserable.

(Just wait, this story has a happier ending).

Stan is not unlike many workers these days. For many, work lacks meaning, it lacks a feeling of true responsibility and purpose.

So, what to do, when we could bury our heads in motivation theory or simply wish there was a quick fix.

Brilliant and experienced management consultant, Suzy Norman, wants you to consider these two questions:

1. How much do you feel needed, and that you matter to your community?

2. Do you feel in control of your future?

For Stan, he’d probably tell you, “not much”.

There is a shift that takes place for us when we feel like our work and just being who we are makes a difference – that we can do something no one else can. That powerful feeling of being needed resonates for us at a human level, and not just at work. Furthermore, not only does it boost our self-esteem, but I’d argue it also allows us to feel more control over that scary word: future.

The next time you feel like Stan, check-in with these two questions.

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Ready, set, socialization!

16 Sep

The blog has been quieter than normal lately — I’m chalking it up to an unintentional side-effect of lots of self-induced change.

For me that has meant a new city, a new social environment, and a new academic home. I’m smack-dab in the middle of a socialization bonanza. And it’s got me thinking about how we as teams, and organizations make sense of, and orientate around “what’s new”, and “what’s changed” in a new environment.

As adults, is this something we want to discover for ourselves, and/or at what point in the process would we rather learn the ropes with an instructional guide and a buddy by our side?

Socialization as a process goes both ways, from person to organization and visa-versa. But, as we age, and add more experience to our belts, do we want or need to rely on our organizations for the lay of the land?

We all go through some sort of formal on-boarding process. It can last an hour, a week, 6 months even. My graduate school orientation lasted for just a few hours. There, a new cohort of 100 people who would be spending the greater part of the next two years together walked out of orientation not having formally learned anyone else’s name.  I have to say, it bothered me.

How much mandated socialization is too much socialization? I don’t have the answers, yet.

But a diversity of experiences helps us tune in to how much socialization we need to feel comfortable, especially when we feel like the stakes are raised. Maybe there is no secret formula, but if there is, I envision successful socialization as having these elements:

1. Differences are a commodity, not a liability

2. Socialization is personal

3. It starts before you arrive on campus

4. We are given time to reflect on the change

What would you add to this list and why?

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Saying Yes to the Mess – The Improvisational Mindset of Frank J. Barrett

9 Sep

In the midst of change (large or small), our natural instinct is often to try to control the chaos and the mess.

What if instead of fighting it, we said yes to this mess?

This question and more is one posed by author and professor Frank Barrett in his new book, “Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz.”

His approach is one we might recognize, as the author of “Appreciative Inquiry – a Positive Approach to Building Cooperative Capacity.

We can safely say he is a fan of the tenants of Improvisation and Positive Psychology and their application to leadership and management.

This Improvisational mindset is one we’ve discussed:

  1. Face the mess
  2. Learn to take action with incomplete information – you can’t always stop and problem solve
  3. Build affirmative competence by learning how to respond in the moment
  4. Solo and Support – Learn to play both roles, let others shine, while following your instincts.

Learn more from Barrett in this insightful interview here!

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Leadership as Jazz: Becoming an Improvisational Leader

19 Aug

Sometimes articles pass through your news feed that, when you read them, make you nod your head so consistently you fear you’ll give yourself a headache.

If Miles Davis Taught your Company to Improvise

“Nurturing spontaneity, creativity, experimentation, and dynamic synchronization is no longer an optional approach to leadership. It’s the only approach. The current velocity of change demands nothing less. It demands paying attention to the mental models, the cultural beliefs and values, the practices and structures that support improvisation.”

How do we as individuals, leaders and organizations prepare to Improvise? It can be done. In fact, here are 5 tips.

It’s why Improvisers rehearse, warm-up, and spend a lot of time building trust. We learn the structure first, and then find the freedom within the safety we’ve created.

1.  Approach leadership tasks as experiments – Be open to what emerges by suspending a defensive attitude. Improvisers are skilled at withholding judgement – with both our own ideas and the ideas of others.

“An experimental approach favors testing and learning as you go. It means presenting ideas, then observing how others pick up and build on them. This is leadership with a mind-set of discovery”

Being more open and receptive to the ideas of those around you also helps to break up a routine or automatic habits that may be weighing you, and your team down.

2. Expand the vocabulary of yes to overcome the glamour of no - Saying “no” is a habit for many of us, for many different reasons. To use what’s in the room, and accept all offers is to heighten and find the positive in what is already available to us. In improvisation, wishing things were different is truly a useless game.

“Too often, in established cultures, cynicism is a way to attain status, and cynical responses to ideas seem justified because they are more “realistic.” It is much easier to critique than to build. Yet equating cynicism with realism shrinks the imagination.”

3. Everyone gets a chance to solo - Learn the give and take. And, at the same time, if you’re passionate about an idea, do you have the freedom to go solo and experiment beyond your comfort zone?

4. Encourage serious play. Too much control inhibits flow.

5. Cultivate provocative competence: create expansive promises as occasions for stretching out into unfamiliar territory. - Competence versus a learning and growth mindset? Is there a happy medium?

“The need of leadership in a distributed age has never been greater. Instead of imposing competence–a virtual impossibility–leaders provoke it by designing the conditions that nurture strategic improvisation and continuous learning, and thus help their organizations break out of competency traps. Great leaders like Miles Davis are able to see people’s potential, disrupt their habits, and demand that they pay attention in new ways.”

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What makes people more creative on some days and not others…

7 Aug

The million, okay, billion-dollar question: How do you create a culture of creativity, and make it last?

Harvard University Professor Teresa Amabile wanted to find out.

Discussing her research into the topic with Bloomberg Television, Amabile and her team compiled over 12,000 individual daily diaries over 5 months, from professionals who were working on creative projects within their company.

What she found, “People do their most creative work on days when they’re feeling most positive emotions, most pleasant thoughts about their organization and their co-workers and strongest intrinsic motivation in their work”.

To put it simply: inner-work life drives performance, and allows teams and individuals to come up with better, creative ideas.

Every area in business requires coming up with creative solutions – and to foster that kind of creative thinking takes more than waving a magic wand:

  1. create an atmosphere of trust and collaboration
  2. tap into those favorite intrinsic motivators of autonomy, purpose, and mastery
  3. Remember that “small wins”, making progress on meaningful work (Amabile’s Progress Principle) matters.

For more: http://www.bloomberg.com/video/what-inspires-creativity-in-the-workplace-xLy2z9V~TGKtienzTsGryQ.html

 

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A new way to think of change

26 Jul

In an Improv scene, a movie, a story, or a great presentation we find resolution by completing this sentence,

 “and ever since that day”…

What changed?

This change is brought about by what we call a tilt. Something a character says, does, expresses, and admits to, etc in a scene.

It is our goal in an Improv scene to be open to change and to actively seek it. This change then answers the question, “what was different about this day”.

As innovators, creative problem-solvers, leadership coaches, managers, trainers, and facilitators we push positive change.

“And ever since that day”….

The tilt, the catalyst for change, comes from being hyper-aware to what offers and ideas have already been expressed. What is around us that we can use? What are our characters feeling, expressing, and wanting and what honest reactions and desires can we pull from to help our characters organically grow and evolve?

We can think of it this way:

Once there was…
And every day…
Until one day…
And because of that…
And because of that…
And because of that…
Until finally…
And ever since that day…

Improvisers want to be changed. The static scene and character that stays the same from beginning to end is not our friend.

To embrace change is to ask… “and ever since that day”… and to see the world of possibilities that appear when we making even one small tilt pushes us in a direction we couldn’t have predicted.

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This just in… emotions are contagious – via The Energy Project

11 Jul

Emotional contagion spreads quickly and fills the air of your environment. Can you put out the fire?

Take this warning (story) from Energy Project CEO, Tony Schwartz, and his lessons learned…

Emotional Contagion Can Take Down Your Whole Team – The Energy Project.

 

  1. The emotions people bring to work are as important as their cognitive skills, and especially so for leaders.

  2. Because it’s not possible to check our emotions at the door when we get to work — even when that’s expected — it pays to be aware of what we’re feeling in any given moment. You can’t change what you don’t notice.

  3. Negative emotions spread fast and they’re highly toxic. The problem with the executive we let go was not that he was critical, but rather that he was so singularly focused on what was wrong that he lost sight of the bigger picture, including his own negative impact on others.

  4. Authenticity matters because you can’t fake positivity for long. It is possible to put on a “game face” — to say you’re feeling one way when you’re actually feeling another — but the truth will ultimately reveal itself in your facial, vocal, and postural cues. We must learn to monitor and manage our moods.

  5. The key to balancing realism and optimism is to embrace the paradox of realistic optimism. Practically, that means having the faith to tell the most hopeful and empowering story possible in any given situation, but also the willingness to confront difficult facts as they arise and deal with them directly.

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