Don't Agree with Me - Support Me!

Several times in the Daily Improviser blog, I’ve referred to the ExploreFlexSupport model as the foundation for effective action by both the performance improviser and the Daily Improviser. Today I’d like to focus on the third part of the model: Support.

On the improv stage, Support means: Say “Yes And” to your fellow players by building positively upon their lines and actions (i.e., their “offers”). If both partners provide this kind of mutual support, they can collaboratively create a rewarding scene.

By contrast, an obvious action that undermines support is saying “No” to a scene offer. In his book Truth in Comedy, Kim “Howard” Johnson cites a scene in which a female player tells her onstage partner that she wants a divorce. The partner replies, “But what about the children?” to which the first player responds, “But we don’t have any children!” As Johnson says: “Naturally, she got a huge laugh. Naturally, she had completely destroyed the scene” – because the laugh was at the expense of the scene and her partner’s offer.

This Support model sounds a lot like the positivity-based And Stance I’ve described as a guide for the Daily Improviser as he engages with others in a joint search for truth. But as I’ve been saying in my past few articles, I’m starting to wonder about the possible limits of the And Stance, with its emphasis on finding points of agreement and common ground. By focusing so much on agreement (and being agreeable), are we perhaps discounting the energy and complacency-busting power that can accompany throwing a bit of creative abrasion into the mix? In the name of smoothing over our interactions, do we run the risk of holding back how we really feel?

In fact, Mick Napier has raised the same type of questions about the Support model even as it applies to the improv stage. Napier has confronted head-on the Conventional Wisdom of the “Support Your Partner” model with the Uncommon Sense notion “Take Care of Yourself First.” As Napier writes in his book Improvise: Scene from the Inside Out:

"If you want to support your partner in an improv scene, give them the gift of your choice. I only feel supported by my partners if they make a move, if they do something. If they just stand there and look at me thinking about supporting me, I am absolutely unsupported. The more powerful a choice they make, the more I am supported." [Emphasis added}

Napier thus recognizes another aspect of the Support model that often gets lost: Support doesn’t just mean accepting and building on your partner’s offer. It also means giving your partner something solid to work with in return. 

To illustrate: Partner #1 says “Look at those giant blue manhole covers raining down from the sky!” Partner #2 responds, “Yes! I wonder what they’re coming from?” In this situation, Partner #2 would be totally in agreement with the reality established by Partner #1. Partner #2 would also be totally non-supportive of Partner #1. Why? Because rather than making a strong choice of his own that can carry the scene to the next level, Partner #2 has essentially punted the verbal ball back to Partner #1 and said, “Here, you figure out how to run with your reality.”

Napier’s observation nicely (if I can use that term) resolves the apparent contradiction between the Conventional Wisdom and Uncommon Sense I described above by basically saying: I can best support my partners by giving them the best of myself and my thinking! Or, to state it as a formula: Agreement does not equal Support!

I think this formula can also apply to the Daily Improviser as she encounters others on the journey to truth.  If we equate “support” with “being agreeable,” then we run the risk of holding back our best ideas and discounting the validity of our own perspectives. If a group of us do this, then we run the risk of generating Groupthink, that implicit (and sometimes explicit) peer pressure we apply to team members to stay within the bounds of “approved” thinking, even if it leads us to march collectively over a figurative cliff. Again, as Wilbur Wright said, we don’t want to be too quick to give up our own hold on the truth in the rush to accept our partner’s sense of truth.

And yet … I wouldn’t want to go too far down the path of saying that, for the Daily Improviser, truth is best served by a knock-down-drag-out encounter between two different views and perspectives, with each contender going to the mat to try to prevail over the other’s position. First, as I’ve also observed elsewhere, adopting this attitude often means that the “victory” goes to the best arguer, not to the most valid argument. Second, humans are not purely rational, argument-processing, truth-sifting machines that can put aside their emotions during a struggle for the truth. We can win the rhetorical battle but lose the relationship war, at a cost of bad feeling and lingering resentment. As was the case with the Wright Brothers, at some point we need to quit contending and start looking for common ground.

I'll continue this topic next time by further exploring the meaning of "Support" for Daily Improvising leaders.

The "Clash of Ideas": A Negative Approach to the Search for the Truth?

My previous article about the Wright Brothers and their contentious verbal altercations reminded me of a term I encountered a few years ago – “creative abrasion” – which reflects the notion that innovation can only be realized by the clash of conflicting ideas – especially by rubbing the status quo against new, provocative ways of looking at things.

In their book Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath refer to a similar concept in the context of influence and persuasion. If we want to influence somebody, say the Heaths, we need to confront that person’s Conventional Wisdom on the topic (which keeps him grounded in the status quo) with the Uncommon Sense of our message. And rather than just telling him why our message makes counterintuitive sense, we need to first shake his hold on his Conventional thinking by such concrete devices as demonstrations, illustrations, and stories. These communication vehicles themselves represent examples of “creative abrasion.” Once the listener has “unlearned” at least parts of his previously received wisdom (so the idea goes), he can then be more open to our contrasting message.

These examples represent everyday applications of one of the foundations of performance improv: The presenting of the players with incongruous situations (e.g., “a Sumo wrestler performing Swan Lake”) that they then must spontaneously and collaboratively resolve in their scene. Many improv workshop games focus on the deliberate creation (and resolution) of improbably coexisting situations and characters. In the Train Wreck game, for example, one character improvises a lengthy line of dialogue on any topic of his choosing (e.g., the proper care and feeding of sunflowers), which his partner interrupts with a wildly inapt response (e.g., “I’m not your real father.”). The players must then make the intrusive line work within the context of the opening speech.

Shake-ups … collisions … the shifting and rubbing of conceptual (rather than tectonic) plates … each of these represents the types of “creative abrasion” necessary for innovation. Yet I somehow feel the concept of creative abrasion itself scraping against a body of thought I’ve been developing in The Daily Improviser: The idea of using a positive, “Yes And” approach to collaborating with others in a joint search for truth.

It seems to me that each of the examples I cited above (as well as the Wright Brothers examples in my previous article) represents a blatant NO response to an existing concept or direction of thought. But haven’t I been advocating the improv-derived Positivity approach as an alternative to the usual lying-on-the-tracks mindset that typifies so much verbal wrangling? How can the throwing down of such conceptual gauntlets square with the idea of conducting a cooperative approach for an agreed-upon truth?

These questions pave the way for an inquiry into an even larger question. As I previously noted in my article on Barbara Fredrickson’s research into what makes people happy, for the most part Negativity is stronger than Positivity. As Fredrickson says, it takes three positive thoughts to counteract a single negative thought. If Positivity is the better way to interact with others, why should this No-to-Yes ratio be so skewed in No’s favor?

Naturally, I have some thoughts on all of the questions I’ve raised above. For once, though - having just created my own version of a Train Wreck - I’m going to leave an article with some loose ends dangling. I’ll revisit these questions later – and in the meantime, I invite readers to offer their own creative ideas (abrasive or otherwise).

Speaking of Winging It ...

"They argued for sport, their voices rising, relishing the debate as they might have relished a tennis match, whacking assertions and evidence back and forth."

Two aggressive disputants crossing swords in a typical business meeting? A dysfunctional couple on the road to a messy split?

Well, no. Actually, the two verbal combatants described above were none other than Wilbur and Orville Wright.

As James Tobin describes them in his book To Conquer the Air, the Wright Brothers did not always (or even typically) engage in calm, collegial discussions in their collaborative efforts that led to the first manned flying machine. “To outsiders,” writes Tobin, “the brothers’ way of thinking looked less like cooperation than combustion.” Tobin goes on to observe:

“From the fracas, ideas emerged. They enjoyed the fight. But the fight was also a method, and the tougher the fight, the better the results. Will [Wilbur] once analyzed it for a friend:

“’No truth is without some mixture of error, and no error is so false but that it possesses some element of truth. If a man is in too big a hurry to give up an error he is liable to give up some truth with it, and in accepting the arguments of the other man he is sure to get some error with it. Honest argument is merely a process of mutually picking the beams and motes out of each others eyes so both can see clearly. Men become wise just as they become rich, more by what they save than by what they receive. After I get hold of a truth, I hate to lose it again, and I like to sift all the truth out before I give up an error.”

As I read that, I immediately was struck by an apparently contradictory “truth’ of my own that I had asserted in an earlier blog article. The proposition I put forth can be summed up in the article's title: Want to Defeat the Truth? Then Start Arguing!

Well, like Wilbur, I also prefer to sift all the truth out of an assertion before I give up any erroneous elements it contains. And I would immediately observe that Wilbur’s statement actually echoes a concept I’ve also described: The And Stance.

The And Stance is an attitude between conflicting parties that, instead of saying “I’m right and you’re wrong,” puts forth the proposition that “I’m right AND you’re right” – that is, each of us has a piece of the truth in our possession. The process of searching for truth then involves “sifting” through the contents of our respective positions and agreeing on the truths we can jointly adopt.

Clearly, Wilbur’s statement recognizes that the process of argument doesn’t consist of beating the other party into submission with the brilliance of our points. Instead, argument – honest argument, as he called it – is a mutual process of testing each party’s ideas and having each party be willing to modify (or even give up) those that don’t hold water. In this way, the “honest arguer” is like the champion athlete who simultaneously convinces himself of his strength to prepare him for competition while also being open to the gaps in his game so he can improve. As I wrote in my Want to Defeat the Truth? article:

The typical arguer commonly fails to [recognize] that he could actually be wrong. By ignoring the holes in his own position, an arguer becomes like the athlete who convinces himself of his indomitability but overlooks the often glaring evidence that tells him where he's falling short. When both verbal combatants fail to acknowledge their own fallibility, the typical argument becomes … "less about seeking the truth than about overcoming opposing views" - or, to use another combat analogy, an attempt to batter the other with one's position until he submits. Whichever party "wins" such a battle, the truth is usually the real loser.

Obviously, the Wright Brothers’ methods for seeking the truth were successful – because they didn’t get married to positions that they held onto until the bitter end. As proof, Tobin cites this anecdote related by the Wrights’ niece:

One of them would make a statement about something very important, and then there would be a long pause. Then the other would say, ‘That’s not so.’ ‘Tis too.’ ‘T’isn’t either.’” And “at the end … Wilbur would say, ‘Well, I think you were right. You certainly were right about that.’ And [Orville] would say, ‘No, I think you were right.’”

When’s the last time you participated in a business meeting where the “combatants” ended up saying something like that?

Leadership: You Don't Have to Just Wing It!

In my previous articles, I’ve been discussing how leaders can take the “book smarts” they acquire in the classroom and turn them into “street smarts” – that is, convert learned skills into applied skills. By such strategies as stealth learning (learning while doing other things), unlearning of old habits, targeted practice, and visualization, they can integrate new ways of leading and interacting into their daily behavior.  And – returning now to “Route 66” (see my previous article) – they can also use another mechanism, one that we can derive by analogy from the world of flight instruction.

First, a pop quiz: How do pilots best learn to fly?  Is it better for them to (A) Take classes in flying, or (B) Jump into a plane and learn from their mistakes?

Few people, I think, would select Option B – because the (literal) impact of making mistakes far outweighs the hands-on experience they would acquire.

But other people might also point out the downside of Option A, observing that you wouldn’t want to get into a plane with a pilot fresh out of the classroom with no hands-on experience at all.

But, aha, you would then say – I’m setting up a false dichotomy. The real answer (you would continue) is (A) and (B), since a pilot requires both book learning and practical experience to pilot a plane successfully.

Well, you’re way ahead of me – except for the fact that we’re all leaving out a third option that fits between A and B (call it Option A.5): A flight simulator.

A simulator is a necessary transitional step between the ground and the air. In a simulator, a student pilot can take his book learning and practice applying it to real-life situations in a safe environment. To mix metaphors, we can say that a simulator provides an alternative to the “sink or swim” approach, as a way to bridge the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it.

Yet let’s consider now the way we commonly train leaders. Don’t we often just:

Use only Option B – i.e., don’t provide them any training and leave them to try to learn leadership through (often painful) experience?

OR:

Use both Option A and Option B – i.e., send them to class and then throw them into the leadership arena, expecting them to immediately apply their classroom learning to in-the-moment situations?

But if we don't just rely on Option A and B for pilots, why do we rely on only those two options when we're training leaders?  Why can’t we also use an Option A.5 to help leaders apply their newly learned skills to unexpected situations in a safe environment?

Well, in fact there is an Option A.5 for leaders: Improvisation workshops.

You can think of improvisation workshops as a “flight simulator” for new leaders. Through learning and practicing the basic skills of improv – collaborating with others, listening, being flexible, acting supportively, maintaining a positive attitude, and (yes) having fun – leaders can discover how to translate their classroom learnings about leadership to actual concrete behaviors. (And I would note that these “translations” between improv concepts and leadership behaviors comprise the major focus of The Daily Improviser blog.)

After teaching the improv behaviors, improv workshops can (like flight simulators) be structured to confront participants with “curveball situations” that they’re likely to face in their daily environment. As in a flight simulator, participants can then test out their new behaviors on these lifelike situations in a safe environment, where the potential damage resulting from using less-than-optimal behaviors is held to a minimum. And while they’re trying on new ways of acting, they can make note of their reflexive responses that serve to block the behavioral changes they’re trying to implement – another good opportunity to bring their natural style into awareness so they can see what kinds of behaviors they need to “unlearn.”

Improv workshops can thus play a role along with other transitional methods (such as mentors, coaches, and action learning projects) to keep new leaders from having to merely wing it when they emerge into the glare of the organizational spotlight after they leave their formal training.

Get Your Kicks on Route 66

The other day, while improvisationally surfing through my local cable channels via remote, I ran across a classic tv drama from the 60s called Route 66. The show – inspired no doubt by the Jack Kerouac novel On the Road – involved two young drifters named Todd and Buz who tooled aimlessly across the USA in their Chevrolet (Corvette, that is).

In their inevitable satire (titled Route 67), Mad magazine riffed on one of the show’s improbabilities by having Buz look at a map and ask “Hey, Todd, how do we get back to Route 67 from here?”- to which Todd replied “What difference does it make? We haven’t been near Route 67 in weeks!”

(This is, I admit, a re-creation of the dialogue from my memory, but hopefully you get the point.)

Well, I suppose Mad would have a field day with The Daily Improviser blog as well. Aside from the fact that it isn’t a “daily” blog (intentionally so – the “daily” part modifies “improviser,” not “blog”), many of my articles can seem to cruise as far away from The Daily Improviser’s titular mainline as Todd and Buz's Corvette.

But actually the detours aren’t really so far afield. As I’ve said before, improv is all about making connections – especially between concepts and topics that at first blush might be wholly incompatible. And just as a long-form improv performance can take a while to tie together all of its many threads, ultimately all of the topical routes through which I meander in The Daily Improviser encounter some common milestones along the way.

Since “getting there is half the fun,” I’m still building these common improvisation-based leadership concepts as I journey along, and I’ll make a rest stop soon to pull together some of the common concepts I’ve gathered. Next time, though, I actually will return to my own Route 66 and show some direct connections between improvisation and a topic I’ve been building in my recent articles: How leaders learn to lead.

Visualizing Success: The Daily Improviser Learns to Lead

In my previous two articles, I’ve described strategies that leaders can adopt to transfer their classroom learning to reflexive application of that learning to live situations. Last time I described the stealth learning strategy (“learning while doing other things”) put forth by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee in their book Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence. In this article, I’ll describe a couple of additional strategies.

Goleman et al. mention another strategy that once again takes a page from the champion athlete’s playbook: The use of visualization.

As Matthew Syed describes in his book Bounce, top-level athletes are masters of manipulating their beliefs to envision the inevitability of success in critical situations. Similarly, Goleman et al. cite studies that demonstrate the power of mental rehearsal in helping Olympic athletes prepare for key events. They go on to say:

“Leadership success depends on your ability to clearly picture yourself achieving your ideal state, and then maintaining that focus…. If you first visualize some likely situations at work or at home, you’ll feel less awkward when you actually put the new skills into practice.”

Using visualization has some definite advantages for the developing leader:

• It can be done anywhere, anytime;

• It provides a safe way to experiment with new behaviors before actually trying to apply them in live situations;

• It reinforces a positive, motivating approach to development by encouraging the leader to develop a vivid picture of what success will look like.

Next time I’ll cover one more recommended strategy the Daily Improviser leader can use to transfer his “book learning” to a live environment – a strategy that relates directly to the application of improvisational skills to the practice of leadership.

Oops! I Think I Learned Something

“Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” – John Lennon

I concluded last time by observing that, in order to change a long-held habit of behavior, the Daily Improviser leader first needs to unlearn the old habit before the new habit can take root. Once he has jolted himself out of his former reflexive behaviors, the leader can then start to implement strategies to put new ways of acting into effect.

Leaders often mistakenly think that they can learn the new behaviors by merely attending training and developing a general awareness of how they might need to change. However, as Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee observe in their book Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence:

“A teacher can’t instruct your brain circuits that carry old habits of leadership to relearn new habits. What’s needed is practice: The more often a behavioral sequence repeats, the stronger the underlying brain circuits become. People literally rewire their brains.”

Clearly, developing a more emotionally intelligent approach to leading requires consistent, targeted on-the-job application of the new skills. Yet, in the rush of time during the typical workday, a leader commonly finds herself backsliding in her commitment to changing her behaviors. It’s easier just to do it the old way.

To overcome this tendency, a leader might consider some strategies that Goleman et al. recommend. First, they suggest that leaders use a “stealth learning” approach, i.e., experimenting with the new behaviors in naturally occurring situations both on and off the job. “The trick,” they say, “is to learn while doing other things.”

By way of example, the authors describe a study of IT leaders. As is common for people in these roles, the leaders had first gained career success through their proficiency at solving problems in relative isolation, but then needed to learn interaction skills to become more effective in their leadership roles. To do this, they engaged in such learning strategies as:

• Taking leadership roles in volunteer organizations;

• Planning conferences for professional associations;

• Practicing team building in settings such as community or church organizations.

Goleman et al. cite one IT leader who developed stronger emotional intelligence skills through his service on a church group:

“My church group easily lent itself to people expressing feelings and opinions. Where, as an engineer, I usually felt the need to always have a logical flow, in the group I became more accepting of less structure. Over time, that acceptance worked its way into how I acted as a leader – less concerned with flow and content and more attuned to group process.”

Almost by definition, stealth learning lets the leader develop mastery of new behaviors below the level of conscious awarness. To paraphrase John Lennon, skills are happening while the leader is busy doing other things.

(I'll continue next time with some additional strategies for making the leap from novice to master.)

If You Want to Learn Something, Forget What You Know

The title of this article sounds like something that Yogi Berra might have said but didn't. And I think the slanted Yogi-like logic captures a basic truth regarding what it takes to learn about improvisation - and leadership.

In my previous article, I described Gary Klein’s research into the way that people make seemingly intuitive decisions – not by means of magic or ESP but by rapid (and largely unconscious) processing of various signals that point the way to the best course of action.

The signals and the processing can be incorporated into training materials to instruct novice practitioners. But how does a person proceed from conscious (and often tentative) processing of these signals to the type of instant intuitive calculation we saw in Gary Klein’s fire chief?

Well, in the words of the New York City jazz musician who was asked by a tourist how to get to Carnegie Hall: “Practice, man, practice.”

As simple as that sounds, though, many recent leadership experts have broken down the “practice” advice into more specific strategies.

First, to be most effective, practice needs to be more than just general immersion in the domain in which the person wants to gain skills. As Matthew Syed points out in his book Bounce, championship athletes don’t merely play lots of rounds of golf or engage in lengthy shoot-around sessions on the basketball court in hopes of improving their overall game. Instead, they first pinpoint the specific skills requiring development and then relentlessly target their practice sessions toward repeating and honing those skills.

A person wanting to develop intuitive command of leadership skills can take a page from the championship athlete’s playbook. As Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee write in their book Primal Leadership:

“It’s possible to improve if you do three things: Bring bad habits into awareness, consciously practice a better way, and rehearse new behavior at every opportunity until it becomes automatic – that is, until mastery has occurred at the level of implicit learning.”

Leaders thus need to focus on identifying specific behaviors that require enhancement, by such means as competency models and self-reflection. Once the few high-impact areas of development opportunities are identified, the person can then create strategies (e.g., special projects, mentoring, job enrichment) to get targeted practice and feedback on their progress.

But as the quote from Goleman et al. above makes clear, before they can start focusing on the new ways of acting, leaders must often first unlearn bad habits that may have become embedded in their natural behavior. Goleman et al. go on to say:

“This suggests a learning strategy that at first focuses a bit more on overcoming the impulsive leadership habits you are trying to undo – before giving full attention to the new habits with which you want to replace the old.”

There is a direct connection here to the development of performance-improvising skills, since much of the trick of learning improvisation involves overcoming inhibitions and internal constraints that get in the way of one’s natural improvisational abilities. As Keith Sawyer’s research so vividly demonstrates, children are natural improvisers – but as they get older, their native creativity and flexibility often become casualties of their socialization into the adult world. Improv workshop games can act as a spark to jar them out of their self-censoring habits.

In the context of leadership development, “unlearning” can start with 360 feedback that serves to jolt the leader into awareness of how he is being perceived – followed by reflection, training, and coaching that guide the leader to acknowledge the drawbacks of his bad habits. At that point, the stage is set for new habits to begin settling into place – through practice, man, practice!

(I'll wrap up next time with some further thoughts about strategies to help engrain new leadership behaviors "in the bones.")

Why We Can't - and Shouldn't - Turn Off the Mind

“There’s something happening here / What it is ain’t exactly clear.” Stephen Stills

Awhile back I was conducting a leadership class in which I showed a video of a school principal who was a pioneer in the area of early education intervention for at-risk children. The video depicted a day in the life of the principal (whom I’ll call Kate) as she interacted with different groups – students, parents, administrators, corporate executives – and attempted to influence their participation in and funding of early education programs.

At the conclusion of the video, I asked my standard debriefing question: “What factors do you think governed Kate’s influencing approach to each of these different groups?”

By asking the question, I intended (and expected) the class participants to point out Kate’s use of certain approaches (rewards, sanctions, personal charisma) to influence students’ behavior, and her use of other approaches (her expertise in the field, her track record of success) to sway her corporate audiences.

I primarily wanted the class to acknowledge a key aspect of leadership: The ability to adapt one’s style to motivate different people based on a reading of the audience and the situation.

So I was intrigued when one of the participants gave me a somewhat unexpected response: “I don’t think she consciously considered any factors. I think she just acted intuitively.”

The response provided me a golden opportunity to refer to a situation described by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Blink. In Blink, Gladwell cites the work of a researcher named Gary Klein (whose company happens to be located two miles from my house – a connection I can’t resist offering up here, for what it’s worth). Klein’s company conducts detailed research into the ways that people make decisions – especially split-second ones in emergency situations.

Gladwell describes one of Klein’s research subjects, a fire department commander who once responded to a house fire that seemed to resist all of his squad’s efforts to extinguish it. As he and his squad stood in the living room trying to figure out their next move, the commander suddenly got a sense that something was just “not right” about the situation. He immediately ordered everyone out of the house – just before the living room floor collapsed into the basement.

Klein interviewed the commander about the factors that led to his decision to vacate and discovered:

“He didn’t know why he had ordered everyone out. He believed it was ESP. He was serious. He thought he had ESP, and he felt that because of that ESP, he’d been protected throughout his career.”

Most people would have chalked this up to “intuitive” decision-making born of years of experience. But not Klein, whose entire research is based on delving into how the mind arrives at such decisions, especially in the heat of the moment. As he pressed the commander to describe exactly what cues caught his attention as he moved through the house, Klein pieced together the thought processes that led to his urgent command to vacate. As Gladwell relates it:

“The fire didn’t respond to being sprayed in the kitchen because it wasn’t centered in the kitchen. It was quiet because it was muffled by the floor. The living room was hot because the fire was underneath the living room, and heat rises. At the time, though, the lieutenant made none of those connections consciously. All of his thinking was going on behind the locked door of his unconscious.” [emphasis added]

Similarly, in the situation of Kate, the school principal: She may not have been consciously aware of the signs she was picking up from her audience that governed her influencing behavior. However, under the surface, her mental computer was rapidly processing the cues and guiding her in-the-moment choices of behavior. (In this sense, she was very much operating in the same manner as a performance improviser – but more on that in a later article.)

Certainly, neither Kate nor the fire commander came into this world with their intuitive capabilities fully formed. Like anyone else, they first had to consciously learn the rudiments of effective action and proceed from a state of “conscious competence” to one of “unconscious competence.”

The good news, then, in these two examples – the fire commander and Kate – is that intuitive action can be taught, as long as we can isolate the inputs and processes that lead one to act effectively. Gary Klein is living proof that we can in fact identify the underlying dynamics of improvisational action in emergency situations. Similarly, through the creation of competency models and other behavioral descriptions, we can identify (and teach) what the best leaders do when they’re acting “in the heat of the moment.”

Of course, teaching intuitive action requires much more than just isolating key factors and presenting them on a Powerpoint slide. In my next article, I’ll describe strategies that can be employed to ingrain effective leadership behaviors (as my improv colleague Gary Schwartz says) “in the bones.”

You Don't Have to Be Creative to Lead Creatively

I recently read an online article by Bryn Meredith of Bluepoint Leadership Development titled Leadership Characteristics: A Shift in Requirements? In the article, Meredith touches on an important point about Creative Leadership that I dealt with in one of my earlier articles in the Daily Improviser.


Meredith first cites the research by James Kouzes & Barry Posner (The Leadership Challenge). Over a 20-year period starting in the late 80s, Kouzes and Posner asked thousands of people to name the four most admired qualities of leaders. More than half of the respondents to their survey mentioned the following qualities in their Top 7: Honest, Forward-Looking, Competent, and Inspiring.

Meredith contrasts this Most Admired list with more recent research conducted by IBM in which respondents were asked to list the three most important leadership characteristics needed in the new economic environment. One characteristic was Integrity – similar to the “Honest” characteristic found by Kouzes and Posner. The other two – Global Thinking and Creativity – reflected new imperatives for businesses in the fierce new world of global competition. As Meredith notes:

"Creativity and global thinking represent a significant shift in the way we see the needs of effective leadership today. In fact, creativity didn’t even feature as one of the top 20 most desired characteristics in the Kouzes and Posner data, and yet in the IBM study, creativity received 60% of the votes as the most important characteristic leaders need to have today."

So what does “Creative Leadership” mean? Do leaders need to be fluent out-of-the-box thinkers, grand visionaries, boardroom improvisers? Not at all, says Meredith:

"It is not a case of leaders being more creative themselves. It is more a need for them to recognize how to create a culture of innovation within their teams whereby creativity is encouraged to thrive and grow into real time ideas that can be put into practice."

This immediately reminded me of my article about that notable Daily Improviser, the comedian Jack Benny. As I pointed out, Benny’s creative gift was not so much his skill as a natural funnyman as it was his ability to attract, nurture, and retain a team of talented writers who could play to his own strengths as a master of timing and characterization. As I mentioned in my earlier article:

"Like Jack Benny, you don’t have to be a quick-witted, off-the-cuff 'performer' in order to be a Daily Improviser. You just need the improv attitudes – listen, appreciate others’ strengths, support your team, have fun – and let your team explore and flex their way to success for everyone!"