Improvisational Photography: Just Letting the World Happen

For my first job out of college, I worked for two years as an editor for a book publishing company.  Every day when I walked into my cubicle, I had to pinch myself as a reminder that, yes, I was actually getting paid for reading books! (And even though the salary wasn’t that substantial, I have to say in retrospect that my psychological paycheck was huge.)

Since those editorial days, my career path has taken a long and winding road to my current point on the journey. I’ve loved some of my way stations (such as my current one) and regarded others as nothing more than a (hard) learning experience. Yet, through it all, that first job has always called out to me, waving from the distant starting line.

Prompted by my ever-present nostalgic streak, I recently took a detour from a planned trip and traveled back to the site of that first job – a place I hadn’t visited since I punched out for the last time many years before. I had brought along my good camera so that I could snap a picture of the part of the building where my cube was located. As I drove down the street that bordered the building, I intended to stop my car by the roadside, adjust my camera, carefully frame the shot, and capture the view for posterity.

But as I approached the building, I realized that there was no good place to pull over. Feeling pressed by the traffic bearing down on me from behind, at the last minute I grabbed my cell phone, stuck it out the driver’s side window with my left hand, and (keeping my eyes fixed on the road ahead) took a Hail Mary shot that I hoped would capture at least some of the building.

Given my schedule, I knew that I couldn’t double back to try again. So I headed back to the main highway, kicking myself for blowing my only chance and preparing myself to see a fuzzy picture of a ditch by the side of the road.

So imagine my surprise the next day when I saw the following image in my phone:

There it was: A perfectly centered, in-focus shot – with the sun forming a halo effect directly over the part of the building where my cube used to be located.

I can’t say that I found any cosmic significance in the image that resulted from my point-and-click moment. No, the message for me was a bit more down-to-earth: That sometimes just letting things take their course can result in even more amazing outcomes than we could bring forth if we tried to plan and control everything in advance.

Hmm, on second thought, maybe that is a pretty cosmic message.

REFLECTIONS FOR THE YES! LEADER

One of the hallmarks of an effective improviser is the ability to give up the need to plan and control what happens next in a performance. This requires improvisers to trust their fellow performers and to trust that great things will emerge from the collaborative process.

Here are some questions to consider in your own practice of YES! Leadership:

·         To what extent do you try to control every outcome – including the actions of the people who might generate those outcomes?

·         What would happen if you just “let go” and lived with some discomfort for a bit while things (and people) took their natural course?

·         When things don’t go according to plan, do you anticipate the worst? Or do you keep yourself open to the possibility that things might work out even better than you could have planned?