OUR PHILOSOPHY

We're all performers.

As human beings, every one of us could get up on a stage and belt out our national anthem or deliver Hamlet's "To Be or Not To Be" soliloquy. Leave aside for the moment whether we'd be "good at it"; all humans have the capacity to do it. Similarly (and probably much closer to home) we're also capable of "setting the stage" for an important client meeting; we can "rehearse" our parts, and present ourselves "in character."

We all have the ability to improvise too, and we use it every day — we create conversations without a script and deal spontaneously with what happens next, without knowing where it will lead. Human beings are performers.

But most of us think Performing (with a capital "P") is for kids and professional actors, and that improvising is what you do only when you've lost your notes or get caught off guard. Some of us have forgotten (or never even knew) that we can perform or improvise, so it never occurs to us that we could get better at it!

Smart business leaders understand what human development experts have discovered: that improvisational performance is the key to adult creativity. And that reawakening and fine-tuning adult creativity in themselves and their employees is crucial to growing their companies.

To get outside the box, get on the stage.

Performance and improvisation help us discover more about ourselves, our co-workers and our organizations. Creating (and recreating) the "scenes" of life (both real and imagined) gives us permission to work on (and play with) the familiar roles of the everyday, to take some risks, and to create ideas and relationships we'd never dream of in "real life." And far from being "phony" or "inauthentic," performing allows us to respond to the challenges of everyday life as fuller and more creative (that is, more authentic) versions of who we are and who we are becoming.

Improvisational performance is an activity of collaboration, transformation, and discovery. Improvisation teaches some very important skills — how to:

  • break out of the well-rehearsed patterns of behavior that hold us back
  • professionally, socially or personally attend to the "how" and not just the "what" of life and work
  • embrace the unexpected and take risks
  • work with everyone and everything available in a continuous, creative process
  • communicate more effectively, collaborate more fully, and to listen, respond, and build with others

A bit of cultural analysis...

In today's world, we tend to experience everything as a product. We see things and objects, or people and events as is — as they exist at one moment in time. What we miss is process. We don't see how things and objects were created, we're unaware of the ongoing life of people and events.

Leaders cannot afford to be blind to process in this way. Leaders in all fields are called upon to see "the big picture." If we really want to know how to "work the world," we need to learn how things in the world work. That includes learning to see how things came to be — to see process. And as we become better able to see and experience process, we can begin to experience ourselves as the creators of the "products" of our lives (ideas, emotions, thoughts, conversations, relationships, careers). New possibilities emerge. Things are no longer only what they appear to be at the moment; they are also what they were and what they can become.

The POAL approach rests on a new understanding of personal, professional and organizational development. We believe that people are the creators of development, not the products of it. Development happens when people engage in the process of growing, transforming and creating new options for how to be and how to relate to the world. And a key component of ongoing development in adults is improvisation.

People create their own growth and development.

For proof that improvisational performance fosters ongoing adult development, we need look no further (perhaps paradoxically) than the activity of very young children. They perform all the time, they improvise without a stage and without fear of making a mistake. Children develop so quickly and learn so well because, in the words of psychologist Lev Vygotsky, they "perform a head taller than they are"; that is, they do things before they know how to do them. They play with words and sounds before they know the language, they read to their stuffed animals, they dance and sing along with the TV, and on and on.

Much of what many human development and learning specialists have learned from children has important implications for adults. They've discovered, for instance, that development doesn't end because we've reached some kind of age limit, but rather because we've stopped performing! At some point in our growing up, most of us stop doing the kind of "performatory" life activities that allow us to be "a head taller." In most of the environments we find ourselves in as adults, we're expected to do only what we already know how to do. Or we're told to do what we don't know how to do, but we're not given permission to take the risks (maybe of failure!) required to learn it. Either way, we're unlikely to perform as other than who we (think we) are. So we go ahead and repeat our well-learned behavior patterns, and passively play out the roles we've already learned.

The good news is that as adults, we have the capacity to reshape our environments, and even to create new ones. We might not want to perform Shakespeare's monologues, but the Bard was definitely onto something when he wrote that "all the world's a stage..." We can create new performances, on all the stages of our lives and work. At Performance of a Lifetime, we're dedicated to helping organizations and the people in them learn to create the kind of environments that support improvisational performance — environments that consequently generate developmental learning and continuous growth.

Read on.

The philosophical and methodological underpinnings of Performance of a Lifetime's approach are discussed in numerous books and journals, including Vygotsky at Work and Play: New York/London: Routledge (forthcoming, 2008), Unscripted Learning: Using Improv in the K-8 Classroom: Teacher's College Press (2007), The Social Construction of Organization: CBS Press (2006), Journal of Constructivist Psychology (1999), Performing Psychology: New York/London: Routledge (1999), Performance of a Lifetime: New York: Castillo International (1996).