How to Rehearse

Real rehearsal is not simple. It has its own rules and techniques.

Holding a meeting and asking people to come up with new ideas is not a rehearsal. Presenting an idea and asking people for their comments is not a rehearsal. The suggestion box or its electronic equivalent is not rehearsal.

Running through a major presentation by yourself in a darkened room is not rehearsal – it’s practice. Running through a presentation in front of a few colleagues and inviting their feedback and input still isn’t rehearsal – especially if someone in the room is more senior than others, because then their opinion will probably prevail.

A real ‘presentation rehearsal’ would be a collaborative effort. Ideas would be bounced around. Things would be suggested and tried out. Different opinions would have to be reconciled.

Rehearsal is about creative collaboration. It’s about getting the crazy ideas out there and seeing if we can make them fly.

There are several things that organizations do that are seen as being like a rehearsal, but they are not.

‘Brainstorming’ is a good example. Brainstorming is, or ought to be, a genuine attempt to surface a lot of new ideas, including truly wacky ideas. Unfortunately, there are two problems.

The first is the usual organizational problem: in a brainstorming session (as in rehearsal), everyone’s ideas should have equal value, but in practice one or more people in the session will be more senior than the others, which means both that their ideas will be seen as more valuable, and that any apparent disapproval by them, even if unconsciously expressed (a slight frown, for example, or a look of impatience) will kill new ideas stone dead.

The second problem is that brainstorming, even at its best, is only the first stage of a genuine rehearsal. We’re getting the ideas out there, but we’re not playing with them to try to make them work.

It’s just possible that what are seen as ‘the best’ ideas from a brainstorming session will be passed on to a team that is then asked to model the idea and see where it takes them. In that scenario, the dual process of ideas generation plus active, collaborative modelling would approach a form of rehearsal. But it’s more common for someone senior to pass on ‘a good idea’ to someone else and ask them to write a report on it. Goodbye, creative collaboration.

Even in the rare cases where ideas are genuinely modelled in a creative, collaborative way, we will never learn where the really weird ideas, that were not deemed to be ‘the best’ ideas, would have taken us, because we didn’t get to play with them as a group. Rehearsal also involves selection – some ideas go forward, some are dropped – but everything gets played with and tried out first.

We saw that rehearsal requires ensemble behaviour. The good news is that the process of rehearsal helps the formation of true ensembles.

The first requirement of rehearsal is equality before the task. We talked about this in Principle 2: Build Connected Ensembles.

This is more easily said than done. Bring any group of people together and little status games will immediately be played out. Bring together a group of colleagues in a moderate-to-large organization and the status aspect takes on a whole new dimension.

To create genuine ensembles that are capable of creative rehearsal, we have to work hard to take status out of the equation.

As we’ve said, ensembles need a creative director, who is in charge but not in control. Other than the creative director – who is outside the ensemble, guiding, observing and selecting which bits of its output are most promising – ensemble members don’t tell each other what to do. They make a suggestion; they give a little demonstration of what they’re thinking. Then the ensemble can take that idea and play with it, seeing where it takes them. If it’s not collaborative, there can’t be any collective intelligence and emergence. Leadership must be shared, allowed and passed around. Everyone’s ideas must have equal value.

ENSEMBLE

No Status/Hierarchy

TRUST REHEARSAL

Playing

The key ingredient of rehearsal – what drives the process of getting ourselves out of our comfortable, familiar, ‘System 1’ ruts – is the generation of new ideas.

We all have good, creative ideas, but we tend to suppress them. Or, rather, we are educated to repress them because we become terrified of making mistakes, or of looking foolish.

The educationalist Sir Kenneth Robinson argues that we are born ‘creative’ but progressively lose our creativity as our education systems – and most working environments – make us frightened of ‘having a go’ and possibly making mistakes.

In his book The Element: How finding your passion changes everything, Robinson tells two wonderful anecdotes that illustrate perfectly how children are both free from the preconceptions that tend to inhibit most adults’ creativity (“That’s not the right way to paint/sing/act/do business”) and also how they are willing to take a chance – to ‘have a go’ – because they haven’t yet acquired an adult obsession with not making mistakes or appearing foolish.

The first anecdote appears at the very beginning of Robinson’s The Element.

A few years, I heard a wonderful story, which I’m very fond of telling. An elementary school teacher was giving a drawing class to a group of six-year-old children. At the back of the classroom sat a little girl who normally didn’t pay much attention in school. In the drawing class she did. For more than twenty minutes, the girl sat with her arms curled around her paper, totally absorbed in what she was doing. The teacher found this fascinating. Eventually, she asked the girl what she was drawing. Without looking up, the girl said, “I’m drawing a picture of God.” Surprised, the teacher said, “But nobody knows what God looks like.” The girl said, “They will

in a minute.”

Robinson’s second story involves his four-year-old son’s school nativity play.

All children start their school careers with sparkling imaginations, fertile minds, and a willingness to take risks with what they think. When my son was four, his preschool put on a production of the Nativity story. During the show, there was a wonderful moment when three little boys came onstage as the Three Wise Men, carrying their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. I think the second boy lost his nerve a little and went out of sequence. The third boy had to improvise a line he hadn’t learned, or paid much attention to during rehearsals, given that he was only four. The first boy said, “I bring you gold.” The

second boy said, “I bring you myrrh.”

The third boy said, “Frank sent this.” […]

What I loved about this was that it illustrated that, when they are very young, kids aren’t particularly worried about being wrong. If they aren’t sure what to do in a particular situation, they’ll just have a go at it and see how things turn out. This is not to suggest that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. Sometimes being wrong is just being wrong. What is true is that if you’re not prepared to be

wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.⁴¹

Kenneth Robinson, The Element

To be genuinely creative, we need to be prepared to allow ‘dangerous’ new ideas out into the open. We have to break out of our comfort zone and entertain ideas that conflict with ‘the way we do things around here’. Otherwise, there will be no innovation.

The rules of rehearsal provide a way of dealing with new and scary ideas: welcoming them and working with them to see where they can take us. This needs a spirit of genuine collaboration – the formation of real ensembles – and a ‘safe space’ where it is OK to make mistakes.

Real innovation is, by definition, scary. It takes us into areas that are currently ‘off limits’. We often persuade ourselves that we are ‘innovating’ when, in fact, we are simply tweaking or improving our existing processes, rather than creating anything truly new and disruptive.

Wolfgang Grulke, the author with Gus Silber of Lessons in Radical Innovation, distinguishes between three different types of innovation: Evolutionary, Disruptive and Radical innovation.

Grulke put it this way:

1. Evolutionary innovation is the kind we are all comfortable with. It enhances the way we approach our existing market and the technologies we are familiar with. (For Grulke, ‘technology’ is what we do with ‘tools’. The personal computer is a tool; what we do with it creates life-changing new technologies.) 2. Disruptive innovation doesn’t enhance markets and technologies, it damages them. Existing routes to market and technologies are indeed ‘disrupted’. 3. Radical innovation, finally, is not simply disruptive, it is destructive. It creates new technologies and routes to market that put existing companies out of business.⁴²

Radical innovation is scary, but it’s also very rewarding for the people who get it right. James Dyson, by way of example, brought radical innovation to the vacuum cleaner industry and got rich in the process.

Very few organizations have the nerve to ‘radically innovate’ themselves out of their current existence. It’s too uncomfortable.

There’s an interesting exercise that we like to run as part of our leadership development sessions.

Lego is useful stuff because everyone can create something with the little interlocking blocks without needing any art skills – you don’t have to be able to paint or draw or model to work with Lego.

The session works like this: We give each of four or five small teams a Lego model kit. It doesn’t matter what the kit is intended to model – let’s say it’s a boat – and the first exercise is to follow the instructions and make the boat. Simple.

Then we introduce an element of competition. We ask the teams to make the boat again as quickly as possible, involving the whole team. The only rule is that each member of the team has to lay a minimum number of pieces, depending on the size of the kit. (Otherwise, one person could make the model with everyone else feeding them the right bricks in the best order.) It is allowable to organize the bricks before the clock starts, to sort them out into some ideal arrangement, for example.

So, the task is to get a system going, a process – typically with people handing pieces to the modeller in the most efficient order, and then swapping roles for someone else to lay their pieces, and so on.

And this always goes swimmingly. Everyone gets it; everyone gets very competitive and the winning team is very happy.

The third part of the exercise is to build the most creative model from the same kit – the funniest, or the wackiest, or the scariest boat. It’s up to the team to decide what they do, but it has to be different. Above all, it has to be creative.

The debrief following the ‘creative’ session is the point of the exercise, because this session is harder. Someone will get really upset that no one would listen to their brilliant idea. Someone will dominate the session and take over and just do it their way. Some teams have major ‘creative disagreements’. Some teams never get to finish a model because they spent too long trying to work out ‘who does what’ – they never managed to create an ensemble. Others get on like a house on fire, have a lot of fun and really get some ‘flow’ going.

The point is that the first exercise, involving process, is easy and reassuring. This is what we’re used to. Someone will assume a leadership role and the rest will happily follow because that’s the most efficient way to operate … and because they want to win. And we feel that we’re being innovative because we’ve devised a new process, but it’s not really innovation, it’s just efficiency. We haven’t tried to break out of our comfort zone in any way.

And when we want to be creative, we get disagreement, and we have to find a way to cope with that. We need to be an ensemble. We need to be happy to contribute our bit to the overall effort and take pride in the team result, rather than wanting to take over.

It’s an exercise that really drives home the difficulties of being creative as a team – as an ensemble. But it also leads to a discussion about how ensembles work together in creative rehearsal to manage this process: to generate ideas and create tensions, but to bring a creative resolution out of that process.

In rehearsal, two or more performers come together to find the best way to deliver a performance. They rehearse their parts and discover what effect their performance has on the other performer. And because the other performer has their own ideas about the performance and brings their own experience and individuality to their part, their reaction is entirely unpredictable. Something new is being created in the moment.

I bring my saxophone, you bring your guitar. Who knows how that will sound, even if we are playing a familiar piece, because of our two unique approaches that we are now combining for the first time.

Rehearsal brings together highly complex systems – people – and emergence results: something is created that is ‘more than the sum of its parts’. Or, to put it in more philosophical terms, something emerges that is different from the individual inputs that led to the emergence and cannot be reduced to those things nor deduced from them.

The process of rehearsal allows people to work together – to co-create.

Successful rehearsal depends on encouraging new ideas – on getting as many contributions as possible and allowing the collective intelligence to get to work on these in the search for a new, ‘emergent’ solution.

This means that teams of people – ensembles – need to be good at ‘accepting’ new ideas.

This doesn’t mean saying, in effect: ‘You’re absolutely right and we’re going to go with that 100%.’ It means saying, ‘OK, that’s interesting – let’s play with that and see where it takes us. What can I add to that to take it forward?’

Keith Johnstone was a pioneer in the field of improvisational theatre who taught at the Royal Court Theatre Studio in Chelsea, London, in the 1960s. He was a great believer in freeing up the imagination; in not thinking too much about things and avoiding trying to be ‘clever’. Left to themselves, he suggested, our imaginations will supply all of the creativity we could possibly want, without our conscious selves editing and censoring the material.

In exploring improvisation, Johnstone talked about ‘blocking’ and ‘acceptance’. Many of us, he argued, are unthinking ‘naysayers’. Our first, protective instinct is to say ‘no’ to anything unexpected, threatening and disturbing, so we ‘block’ the challenging new ideas that our fellow improvisers throw at us.

But it is the unexpected, threatening and disturbing that makes good drama (and good innovation). Successful improvisers (and good innovators) ‘accept’ unexpected contributions and run with them to see where they lead.

This is what Johnstone had to say about ‘blocking and accepting’ in his classic book, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre, first published in 1979:

Each actor tends to resist the invention of the other actor, playing for time until he can think up a ‘good’ idea, and then he’ll try to make his partner follow it. The motto of scared improvisers is ‘When in

doubt, say NO’.

We use this in life as a way of blocking action. Then we go to the theatre, and at all points where we would say ‘no’ in life, we want to see the actors yield and say ‘yes’. Then the action we would suppress if it happened in life begins to develop on the stage.

If […] you think of something you wouldn’t want to happen to you or to someone you love, then you’ll have thought of something

worth filming or staging.

We don’t want to walk into a restaurant and be hit in the face by a custard pie, and we don’t want to suddenly glimpse Granny’s wheelchair racing towards the edge of the cliff, but we’ll pay money to attend enactments of such events. In life most of us are highskilled at suppressing action. All the improvisation teacher has to do is reverse this skill and he creates very ‘gifted’ improvisers. Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good

improvisers develop action.⁴³

Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

In his book, Johnstone gives examples of how actors might block or accept during improvisation in short sketches: