This is an estuary. It is the place where a river goes to die. Everything the river has ever been and everything it has carried within it, is deposited at it’s mouth where the flow slows down and the water merges with the ocean. These are places of incredible calm and richness, but they lack the exciting flow of the torrents and waterfalls and cascades of the upper river system.
Yesterday I was speaking with a client who worried that an initiative we had begun together was heading towards the estuary of action – a long term visioning processes where lots of things are said and very little is done. “We’ve done that before,” she said. Nobody likes that. I wracked my brain to see where it was that I had led this group to believe that this is what we were doing. We had done a World Cafe to check into some possibilities for the organization and we had done a short Open Space to initiatie some experimental actions. We had learned a little about the organization from these two gatherings, and we were, at least in my mind, fully entered into a participatory action learning cycle, working with emergent ideas, within several well established constraints. I was surprised to hear the fear spoken that what we were doing was “visioning.”
Then I realized that what we were dealing with was an entrained pattern. People within this organization associated dialogue with visioning, and the results of dialogue with a mass of post-it notes and flip charts that never get typed up, and action that never comes of it. Likewise, it turns out that the associated planning with a process that begins with a vision, and then costs out a plan and takes that plan to a decision making body which then rules on whether the project can proceed, by allocating resources. Both of these views are old thinking, rigid patterns that lock participants in a linear view of action that looks like this:
The truth is that I had been viewing the process as an action learning cycle:


So now that we are a little clearer on this, there was a distinct relaxation among the group. We are heading into some uncharted territory and it is too early to nail down concrete plans about what to do and likewise simply visioning doesn’t take us anywhere either. Instead, we are harvesting some of the rich sense of community that exists, opening some space for a little leadership, inviting passion and responsibility and making small starts, The small starts are confirming some of what we suspected about how the organization works, which is good news, because we are developing a pattern of action together that will help us all as we move forward to do bigger things with more extensive resource implications. This is the proper role of vision and planning in emergent and participatory processes – gentle, developmental, reflective and active.
I am probably never going to write a book. I learn too fast for that, and my learning is so rapid that a blog has become the best possible platform for that learning.
For a while thought, I have kept a set of writings apart from this blog, titled “A Collection of Life’s Lessons.” I’ve just spent the morning updating that list, and if you’d like to read the book that I’ll never write, go on over to that page and start reading about everything I’ve learned in 43 years, and all the best stuff I have documented in 10 years of blogging.
This fall I have been really lucky to study and work alongside Alissa Schwartz in New York and Wendy Morris in Minneapolis. Both of these women are actors and performance artists, and in my working with them I have become cracked wide open to the reality of leadership and ACTION as performance, best trained through understanding the relationship of the inner body to the outer, the presence of the individual in relation to the collective and relational field.
Since connecting with the Applied Improvisational Network and working with colleagues Viv McWaters, Johnnie Moore and Geoff Brown, I have been learning more and more about the kind of play that goes on in leadership. And I have recently been touched by the work of David Diamond at Headlines Theatre in a number of ways. This inquiry has led me into a much more embodied practice.
So I’m now thinking about everything I know about leadership, and have concluded that the traditional distinction between leadership and management is less about doing vs. being and more about technique vs. improv. On the technical side, management is about deploying resources and structuring relations using tools and processes. But on the improvisational side, leadership is about making and accepting offers, responding to context resourcefully, exploring the ligature of relationship and supporting engagement.
Is there anything about leadership that cannot be taught with a little theatre training? Actor training is not about creating a character that is not you. It is rather about connecting with your deepest self, and your lived experience to be the authentic character that you need to be. Improv is about relaxing everything you thought you knew about what is going on and being open to new sources of resilience and resourcefulness.
So how is that for a provocative proposition? It is a big learning edge for me and will be for my clients as well, but I can’t think of a better way to learn about and discover our inherent leadership capacities and the edges of our own learning and development, especially in a world where certainty is at a premium, and power constrains action with pre-determined process at every turn.
Improvise, respond, concretize, perform.
A great insight from Johnnie Moore on learning facilitation:
I’ve done quite a bit of facilitation training this year, loads of it with Viv. We’ve pushed to get the sponsors to accept less emphasis on learning lots of techniques and tips in favour of lots of activities where participants try stuff out. One area where we play around a lot is the “difficult people” situation.
We resist offering standard tricks for this. So we don’t offer formulaic models for managing difficult people, however comprehensively researched. Instead, we ask people to recall or imagine their encounters with the inevitable impossible participant and then recreate it as an improv scene, and ask them to play it out. And then we play around, asking them to try and play it in different ways. Or we introduce “tagging” where other participants step into the scene to try different responses.
If anyone in the audience comes up with a clever analysis, we tend to stop them and say, great, go play that idea out. Funnily, their first response is mild panic – as they realise it’s one thing to do the theory and another to do the the practice.
What this play encourages, I believe, is a growing willingness to try stuff and realise nothing is written.
via Johnnie Moore’s Weblog: Holding uncertainty, living forwards.
I have great clients. Most of the people who end up working with me do so because they want to work in radically more participatory ways, opening up processes to more voices, more leadership. In conference settings this means scheduling much more dialogue or running the whole thing using Open Space Technology and dispensing with pre-loading content.
But there persists, especially in the corporate and government sectors, a underlying nervousness in doing this. common objections to making things more participatory include:
- It’s too risky
- We’re not ready for it
- I’m worried it won’t work
- There won’t be enough structure
- People need content
- We need to know what the outcomes will be.
It is worth exploring these issues in a compassionate and direct manner. What these issues are really about are trust and control and a sense that the responsibility for the experience lies with the organizers and not the participants.
This is not always the easiest thing to say to people, especially those that have hired you to deliver a conference or a conversation. But it is important to confront these issues face on, because no matter how well you run a participatory process, without confronting the edges of control and trust, you are going to get anywhere ultimately.
These setiments originate in a couple of assumptions that are worth challenging:
- The responsibility for the experience rests with the organizers, not the participants. This is to some extent true although it does a great disservice to most conference design. Assuming that you as a planning committee have to deliver a great experience for everyone is neither possible nor productive. You are never going to make everyone happy, so leave that idea behind. And you aren’t going to get all the content right. The best traditional conferences meet some of the expectations of participants most of the time, meaning that there are large blocks of time that don’t meet people’s expectations. And so the default setting for most participants is to spend thousands of dollars on a passive experience, taking some interest in workshops or speeches and spending the rest of the time self-organizing dinners, coffee breaks and other chances to connect with friends old and new. Another word for a conference that takes thousands of your dollars and leaves you finding your own way is “a racket.”
- People need content and structure. Of course we do, but not in the way most conference organizers deliver it. On the content side, most conference planning consists of spending a year guessing what people want to learn about, or worse, putting out RFPs for workshops, which results in conferences becoming big commercials for people’s pet processes, or ideas, without any consideration for what folks want to learn. The conference is then marketed on the backs of these offerings. That isn’t to say that there can’t be value, but it does constrain learning. Similarly, with structure, conference organizers will often say to me that things like Open Space don’t have enough structure. Open Space has plenty of structure, but it is free of content until the gathering itself populates the agenda with the questions that are top of mind. I have worked at countless conferences where “structure” is everything. And what this typically means is that the conference runs behind schedule and people are herded here and there, shortshrifting almost every aspect of their experience, to the point where folks just plain don’t return from coffee breaks.
- People learn by passive listening. There is no question that a stirring keynote or a dynamic and powerful presentation can have the effect of galvanizing ideas and making people hungry for learning. But too often the passive experience of listing to experts is built into conferences such that a key note is followed by a panel, is followed by lecture-workshops, is followed by another keynote and so on. Participation is minimal.
What I have discovered over the years is that people want to be in a conference setting that has a variety of experience. If there is a keynote, it is important to have that person act more as a provocateur, to set up questions that folks can dialogue around rather than proclaiming the truth from on high. Also building a conference in part or in whole around Open Space means that people can bring their own questions and expertise to the gathering, create a marketplace to exchange ideas and perhaps even create new ways of being together. I don’t think every conference needs to end in “action,” but I do think that many conferences could build in more explicit opportunities to start something.
the bottom line for people in understanding that giving up control is important. A conference planning committee should focus on building a container into which participants can pour their ideas. Creative, engaging, participatory conferences and gatherings have substantial participation undertaken by the participants themselves. They look at how passive a conference is and break open opportunities for people to connect, to go on a learning journey together, to create something new, or simply to sit in good conversation with each other catching up and sharing their work.
Trust your participants and invite them well. Invite them to come prepared to make contributions. Put responsibility for their experience solidly in their laps. Let them know that if they are taking to time and money to come to the gathering, they should also take the chance to create and contribute content to the gathering. Bring your questions, bring your stories, look for others and see what you can create. Challenge participants to show up to a co-creative gathering rich in conversations, connections and inspiration. Invite them, provide a good container with tools for them to do their work, and turn it over to them.
Fearless conference planning, accompanied by excellent invitation and skilful hosting for productive self-organization and emergence creates memorable experiences.