I recently read Keith Johnston's book Improvisation and Theater . A delightful book about improvisational theater and, most importantly, how to teach it .
The book inspired me to several analogies between an improvising actor and a consultant, so I wrote a series of four articles, here is the first of them:
Chapter 1. An office is a theater of work . The central problem is considered in the article - the act of the “presentation” of work, performance, and how important it is for modern intellectual work, especially for a consultant. Several ideas are suggested on how to think on the go without slipping into bullshit (bullshit, BS).
Chapter 2. Optimism as an operating system . An article on the critical thinking template that sees everything as a problem. We will rethink this pattern and consider the benefits of positive thinking - especially in the long run.
Chapter 3. Generative strategy . Here we introduce clients as blocked actors and apply the exercise “Yes! And ... ”in order to unlock them, generate new strategies and practice creative thinking in communicating with customers.
Chapter 4. Switching the status . Finally, we examine the concept of high and low statuses and show how a consultant can master the “status switching” skill in order to achieve success within the client’s organization.
The first chapter is before you, the rest will come out in the next week or so ...
Office is a theater of work
Familiar situations?
Prepare a detailed presentation, from which only five slides will be watched at the meeting.
Ritually appear in the workplace at the right time to demonstrate that we are working.
Attend status meetings weekly to show the appearance of progress.
Brainstorming to create the illusion of universal involvement in creativity.
Workshops with scripted games, exercises, and sticky notes for everyone to have a good time.
Envy of colleagues who create the appearance of a job well done.
People who talk about their work advance faster than those who are silent.
A significant part of modern office work is related to the presentation of this work ... In fact:
An office is a theater, and work is a story unfolding on a stage.
Many people at work strive for "silent success" - to do work that "speaks for itself." Unfortunately, this is the wrong move in the modern theater of labor. Instead, the opposite is true - for the office information officer, presenting work is work .
Because, in truth, it could not be otherwise.
No matter how much we want to represent organizations as rational machines, the reality is that companies are social organizations where people interact with people. This is the way decisions are made and the work done.
And in this theater of human work, it is very important to speak loudly. Such a performance is not at all a waste of time, but quite the opposite.
Without representation, the work is pushed to the background, ignored, or worse:
Among more than 120 interviewed project managers and performance appraisal managers in private foundations in the USA and Canada, more than three quarters had difficulty in conducting evaluations to come to meaningful conclusions for the region, grantees, or the fund itself, and 70% found it difficult to include the results of the evaluation in future work . A survey of more than 1,600 civil servants in Pakistan and India showed that “simply presenting evidence to management does not necessarily affect the decision-making process,” while respondents indicated that “they had to make decisions too quickly to verify the evidence, and if they did, they didn’t receive returns , ”from the article “ Why Nobody Sees Your Hard Work and What to Do About It ” .
Here is an excellent tweet from industrial designer Maxim Leizerovich, how important it is to take care of a competent presentation and context of the work: “No one will ever choose a third, strange direction of design . ”
What does the presentation of work mean in this sense?
It is about the following:
- Presentations
- Conversations in the hallway
- One-on-one conversations for fine tuning
- Creating a wrapper and positioning work
- Change the language of your work to match others
- Inclusion of broader organization, industry, and market contexts
- Reformatting the presentation in accordance with the strategies of other teams
- and much more…
In an office theater, the performance of a work is closely related to the work itself.
But many employees try to hide or ignore the presentation of work and the organization’s policies. They imagine that the public sphere of discussion and political games is a wasted effort, and corporate politics is unfair. Yes, the internal policy of the company is really unfair, but we will not discuss how to change it within the framework of this article ...
Be public, be present and cast a vote
If we present the office as a theater of work, then the only significant way forward lies through politics and performance. Venkatesh Rao of Ribbonfarm outlines in his article How to Make History :
You will not receive recognition through work, not to mention making history. Labor people are interchangeable as individuals, they have only indirect influence in their masses (whether it be the egalitarian working class, the non-egalitarian patriarchy or the ethno-nationalist group tied by nepotism). [...]
If the job is to intervene in the processes of nature, interrupt and slow them down to create a sustainable, lasting peace, then action is the free behavior that makes history.
The ideas of “being public” and “casting a voice” are quite specifically formulated in Hannah Arendt’s book “The Situation of a Man” (in the Russian translation: “About active life” - approx. Trans.). If you have not read it, then the 22 first slides of this presentation are almost enough for our article.
Here are two examples that help explain why speak out publicly and communicate your opinion:
Example No. 1. Choosing a position that puts you in the company’s world. A great example is Steve Yegge's rant about the Google platform . Pay attention to how carefully he fits himself into the narrative - this is not just observing the market, but also taking a position in the world in which Google, Amazon and Steve operate. This may sound complicated, but ask yourself, when was the last time you appeared on Slack to get your point across? To say something about the organization ...
Example No. 2. Ask questions in public forums. Here, the leaders offer to speak: they ask people to take a certain position and outline their opinion.
Of course, there are an infinite number of other ways to voice and show publicity. Let's not go into this. Although I think it is useful to study the theory of speech acts here ... but it seems to me that most employees would prefer to evade these acts rather than accept them as part of the work.
The organization of representations of one’s work is the key to increasing one’s influence and significance.
Getting out of the wings: consultant
So far, all of the above is the everyday life of office employees. Now let's see how to arrange a consultant on the stage of this theater.
The luxury that regular employees get is the ability to write scripts and rehearse their performances - that is, plan ahead. The consultant is like an improvising actor who was invited to the stage in the middle of the play. All the time, while on stage, he is forced to look for ways to fit in, go with the flow and control the production.
For example, full-time employees can afford the luxury of planning action for 2020. A consultant is the result of these actions , he comes in the middle of work to correct the course.
If the consultant tries to stop the job, it causes pain and is unlikely to last long. But if the consultant understands and accepts his nature as an improvising actor, then he thrives and integrates into the organization’s great performance.
The theater of labor is a theater of improvisation
An advisor’s attempt to write a clear script and design a job will inevitably lead to missing deadlines, missing context or unaccounted for reviews.
Missed deadlines . Often, a consultant works with a client less than five days a week. So he is slower than full-time employees. This means that you can not slow down to sharpen clear actions, because you can skip the window of opportunity. Thus, one should learn to prototype and improvise with imperfect offers in real time in order to keep up with the company.
Missing context . Since the consultant is not a full-time employee (even if he works five days a week), he may not be included in general mailings, announcements, etc., and therefore he always needs to make great efforts to get the full context. A clear and detailed script leaves no room for new contexts to appear during execution . On the contrary, the scenario should provide a place for the emergence of a new context and its integration in real time.
Missed feedback . Often, the consultant is the most experienced PowerPoint user in the organization (or at least in his department). This has its advantages, but also undesirable consequences: all of his proposals look like “finished” presentations and, thus, receive completely different feedback from people than raw ideas and thoughts. Therefore, sometimes it’s important not to present the work as raw, unfinished, to invite people to the stage for a joint performance - this way you guarantee that you will receive appropriate feedback.
Good consultants perceive the performance more as a series of related improvisations.
At the leadership level, many organizations already function as close improvisational groups, responding to implicit and explicit requests and playing with each other to make real-time decisions.
The consultant directs his actions to this improvisational group of leaders, since real decisions are made there. This is the essence of why Venkatesh’s idea of “sparring” with a client is so attractive: it provides for verbal, impromptu decision making that everyone recognizes.
So, how will this idea of improvisation affect our actions? Some obvious ideas:
- To attend. If the presentation of the work is the work, we cannot leave the presentation and the story about the work to others.
- To study people in the same way as organization. When you react to work in the middle of a presentation, half of what you react to is a strategy, and half is a set of attitudes and prejudices of the people present.
And another non-obvious idea:
Lack of informal communication and improvisation
A typical mistake of employees is to work only in official channels, wait for a meeting to talk about a strategy, wait for a general mailing list, etc. This desire to make work “official” means that many do not want to discuss work on the way for lunch or in the corridor between meetings.
But it is precisely in such free communication sessions that leaders lose their vigilance and open up, so that it becomes possible to act in a limited space between contexts.
And the most important thing in these "spontaneous" sessions of improvisation - they are most useful for bookmarking ideas. Good ideas are not accepted instantly. If you want leaders to pay attention to them, you must first bring this idea to them several times. Therefore, first drop it in the corridor before you formally formulate it at the meeting.
Of course, I say “spontaneously”, because in fact people are surprisingly predictable, and it is often trivial to organize these “random” conversations in the corridor. And you have to do it.
Remember: if you work as a consultant in the client’s office two days a week, you work in conditions of lack of informal communication. You just have less chance of meeting people. So you have to cheat.
One of the consultant friends put forward the idea of entering the office early in order to run into the director at the door until he entered a concentrated working mode. To do this, a small improvisation session is created. The first seeds of ideas are laid.
How to think on the go avoiding idle chatter
First of all, you need to master the level of “thinking on the go” - this is important for the work of a consultant and is a consequence of its improvisational nature.
It is about balance: what decisions to postpone for further analysis, and when to give an immediate answer.
Example. One of the typical situations: the first day or the first week with a new client. Leaders love to study you with “difficult” questions - it is very important to learn how to give an answer that you believe in, but which leaves room for further review. The real game being played here is not to be right or wrong. Here, the leader actually asks two questions at once: firstly, “how much do you know?”, And secondly, “can you improvise?” To understand your usefulness in the theater of work.
Unfortunately, in the theater of labor there is a thin line between thinking on the go and idle chatter ...
Who was in the meeting and disgusted with people who spit out speeches that are half true, made up, or disguised as the real truth?
There is a thin line between the reaction to the situation and the empty generation of beautiful words.
This is especially difficult for a consultant to avoid. We are constantly caught between industries, companies and markets. Several times a year I am forced to learn something new from scratch. This makes us work in places where we are often the worst at a particular business (even if we are experts in the industry ... and sometimes we are experts in the discipline, but are not knowledgeable about the business or industry ).
So, here is a little guide on how to not bullshit (BS):
- Immerse yourself in the mechanics of the main business, you should be able to draw a diagram showing the function of income and profits of the main business well enough. The more abstraction, the more you risk losing your fundamental understanding and diving into BS.
- Become a language chameleon - learn and adopt the language, abbreviations and buzzwords of the client’s business. If they call it “learned marketing,” you should too. If their CMS is called PinkCloud, also call it that. Specificity avoids confusion and helps distinguish client CMS from others (for example).
- Speak clearly and within your means. Ask for clarification on items that at first glance make little sense. Do not pretend. Don't take the language, abbreviations and buzzwords of business too fast! (hah, see how hard it is?)
- Ask stupid questions about the history of the company, about alternative approaches, about previous bad ideas. Just because company employees prefer not to talk about obvious things does not mean that you should not do this.
- Protect ideas, but not arguments. Be prepared to defend your ideas, even if some positions are challenged. Very often, a figure or statistic will turn out to be erroneous, but a broader idea is still valid. Do not give up the idea, but do not insist on the numbers - accept that they are wrong, but continue to insist on the idea in order to assess your position.
- When you are challenged, file a counterargument. When someone claims that your data is incorrect, challenge them by offering to prove the opposite.
- Keep track of the outcome of a particular case, not the result of intellectual debate. Leaders love to theorize and discuss abstract ideas - you can play this game a little, but try to be the one who brings the conversation back to the point.
- Read a lot. Analogy is the core of knowledge. Do not be afraid to receive information from different industries. Such cross-industry knowledge is difficult for customers to obtain internally.
All these are ways to not be nonsense. Unfortunately, there is one easy way to look smart - criticism.
It is very easy to slip into criticism, take a negative position and give arguments why the idea cannot work. That's just ... it's wrong.
Being positive and optimistic is much more difficult, but it is more effective.