Interview #14 in our Creativity in Business Thought Leader Series is with Jay Rhoderick, Founder and President of Bizprov, Inc., a unique, dynamic corporate training consulting firm that uses the core principles of improvisational theater in business. Jay has taught improvisation to hundreds of managers, executives and professionals at all levels for fifteen years. He has strengthened teams, developed public speaking and collaboration skills, and engendered new modes of creativity at many leading firms and organizations, such as Dow Jones, HSBC, Merck, Citigroup, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Pearlfisher, and the United States Olympic Committee and athletes among others. A seasoned improviser, Jay is a founder and performer with the legendary long-form improv NYC troupe, Centralia, which was recently recognized as Best Long Form group from Improvisation News.
Q: How do you apply your work with improvisation to business?
Rhoderick: Improvisation is about risk-taking and a combination of being open to new ideas and ways of doing things as well exploiting them in a meaningful, useful and connected way. In my work encouraging professionals to create instant alignment and positive “yes-based” collaboration with each other, I see clients making choices in subtle moments to avoid the traps of asking lazy questions and instead give information to make leaps together. Clients make strong intellectual and emotional offers, they actively listen to each other and heighten resonant ideas and relationships when they emerge. A decision must be made each moment: how to respond creatively to interesting ideas and offers. Improvisers are curious to figure out how, to take risks, to celebrate creative errors and audacity, because it is through this courageous curiosity and exploration that we reveal new business opportunities and values.
Q: What do you see as the New Paradigm of Work?
Rhoderick: For years, technology has connected our society and economy and revolutionized communication and creativity. Connectivity, though, is emerging in more and more complicated and adaptive modes. Only partly as a result of the fractured job market, each of us is developing a personal brand (in online profiles and networks, self-assessment, etc.) and each brand creates custom "app's" to connect outwardly. We customize our engagement styles with tasks and information in increasingly inventive ways. Feedback is 360 degrees with more sensitivity and entry points and thus ever more comprehensive. As workers and bosses see each other in a more holistic, multi-faceted way, it makes possible more moves, often in unexpected directions. The complexity grows more chaotic, but we're also getting, as Lewis Carroll said, "curiouser and curiouser". We are seeking out and discovering unexpected ways and algorithms so as to adapt our personal brands, skills and interests to custom-arrange NEW connection points. We're creating more and more hybrid projects and products, because we are becoming more curious in our connectivity and innovation. It's a recombinant cycle.
Q: What do you see the role of creativity in that paradigm?
Rhoderick: Work and commercial resources are more readily available, decentralized and sub-franchised. In this broad tendency toward connectivity, there is a spirit of improvisation--being open to finding and devising new ways forward that are adaptive rather than reactionary. Navigating connections with curiosity allows us as workers to see more possibilities and open more doors. Being creative in our curiosity helps us develop flexibility, resilience and flow as we make more and more micro-decisions on how to exploit potential connections to people, products, and ideas. We can creatively deal with customers, fearlessly experiment with new competitive strategies, and make connections we hadn’t considered before.
Q: What attitudes and behaviors do you see as essential for effectively navigating this new work paradigm?
Rhoderick: The improvisational approach means listening and reacting without pre-planning, being curious, exploring without foreclosing options, and inviting our collaborators to discover exciting and valuable things with us without prejudice or micromanagement. All of these are essential to effectively flow within the world’s matrix of connections.
Q: What is one technique that people could start applying today to bring more creativity into their work or their business organization?
Rhoderick: A great entry-point exercise for an individual (or for a group playing in a round-robin format) is Rant/Rave/Dream/Nightmare and it works on 4 poles of point-of-view, pushing them as far as possible in order to search for a clearer truth located in the middle. It's a creative form of overkill and can break us out of stale thought patterns.
To do it, you say out loud (or write, or both, but saying aloud is better) in full emotion what you really hate (rant) about something. Make it a fast, shouted brainstormed list! Then you can say what's super-great about a thing (rave), then what's utterly terrifying about it (nightmare--and let out your inner 3-year-old on this), and finally what a thing can do to make the world a wonderful place (dream).
The topic can be 1 thing for all for brainstorms, or you can switch randomly, and you shouldn't feel bound to realistic thoughts. This is overkill, and you should give yourself permission to be unreasonable in your feelings and POV. Try playing Devil's Advocate and rant about what you actually love, or have a nightmare about something truly harmless, etc. It's funny, and it breaks down compartmentalized thinking by suggesting new POV extremes.
Q: Finally, what is Creative Leadership to you?
Rhoderick: By using the core principles of improvisation-- collaboration, curiosity, humble openness and exploration – and approaching improvisation diligently and with joy, workers react more flexibly and spontaneously, and they become early adopters and change agents for their firms. They create valuable opportunities and connections for themselves and their firm. They’re leaders.
As leaders, we invite more ideas, make confident and creative decisions, defuse conflict and embody openness. Thus we discover synergies, react nimbly to surprises, and are in the moment but also forward-thinking. Creative leaders make work an intriguing journey.
You can learn more about Jay Rhoderick at the Bizprov website or contact him at [email protected].
The Creativity in Business Thought Leader Interview Series is developed and conducted by business creativity catalyst, Michelle James, CEO of The Center for Creative Emergence and founder of Quantum Leap Business Improv.
Q: How do you apply your work with improvisation to business?
Rhoderick: Improvisation is about risk-taking and a combination of being open to new ideas and ways of doing things as well exploiting them in a meaningful, useful and connected way. In my work encouraging professionals to create instant alignment and positive “yes-based” collaboration with each other, I see clients making choices in subtle moments to avoid the traps of asking lazy questions and instead give information to make leaps together. Clients make strong intellectual and emotional offers, they actively listen to each other and heighten resonant ideas and relationships when they emerge. A decision must be made each moment: how to respond creatively to interesting ideas and offers. Improvisers are curious to figure out how, to take risks, to celebrate creative errors and audacity, because it is through this courageous curiosity and exploration that we reveal new business opportunities and values.
Q: What do you see as the New Paradigm of Work?
Rhoderick: For years, technology has connected our society and economy and revolutionized communication and creativity. Connectivity, though, is emerging in more and more complicated and adaptive modes. Only partly as a result of the fractured job market, each of us is developing a personal brand (in online profiles and networks, self-assessment, etc.) and each brand creates custom "app's" to connect outwardly. We customize our engagement styles with tasks and information in increasingly inventive ways. Feedback is 360 degrees with more sensitivity and entry points and thus ever more comprehensive. As workers and bosses see each other in a more holistic, multi-faceted way, it makes possible more moves, often in unexpected directions. The complexity grows more chaotic, but we're also getting, as Lewis Carroll said, "curiouser and curiouser". We are seeking out and discovering unexpected ways and algorithms so as to adapt our personal brands, skills and interests to custom-arrange NEW connection points. We're creating more and more hybrid projects and products, because we are becoming more curious in our connectivity and innovation. It's a recombinant cycle.
Q: What do you see the role of creativity in that paradigm?
Rhoderick: Work and commercial resources are more readily available, decentralized and sub-franchised. In this broad tendency toward connectivity, there is a spirit of improvisation--being open to finding and devising new ways forward that are adaptive rather than reactionary. Navigating connections with curiosity allows us as workers to see more possibilities and open more doors. Being creative in our curiosity helps us develop flexibility, resilience and flow as we make more and more micro-decisions on how to exploit potential connections to people, products, and ideas. We can creatively deal with customers, fearlessly experiment with new competitive strategies, and make connections we hadn’t considered before.
Q: What attitudes and behaviors do you see as essential for effectively navigating this new work paradigm?
Rhoderick: The improvisational approach means listening and reacting without pre-planning, being curious, exploring without foreclosing options, and inviting our collaborators to discover exciting and valuable things with us without prejudice or micromanagement. All of these are essential to effectively flow within the world’s matrix of connections.
Q: What is one technique that people could start applying today to bring more creativity into their work or their business organization?
Rhoderick: A great entry-point exercise for an individual (or for a group playing in a round-robin format) is Rant/Rave/Dream/Nightmare and it works on 4 poles of point-of-view, pushing them as far as possible in order to search for a clearer truth located in the middle. It's a creative form of overkill and can break us out of stale thought patterns.
To do it, you say out loud (or write, or both, but saying aloud is better) in full emotion what you really hate (rant) about something. Make it a fast, shouted brainstormed list! Then you can say what's super-great about a thing (rave), then what's utterly terrifying about it (nightmare--and let out your inner 3-year-old on this), and finally what a thing can do to make the world a wonderful place (dream).
The topic can be 1 thing for all for brainstorms, or you can switch randomly, and you shouldn't feel bound to realistic thoughts. This is overkill, and you should give yourself permission to be unreasonable in your feelings and POV. Try playing Devil's Advocate and rant about what you actually love, or have a nightmare about something truly harmless, etc. It's funny, and it breaks down compartmentalized thinking by suggesting new POV extremes.
Q: Finally, what is Creative Leadership to you?
Rhoderick: By using the core principles of improvisation-- collaboration, curiosity, humble openness and exploration – and approaching improvisation diligently and with joy, workers react more flexibly and spontaneously, and they become early adopters and change agents for their firms. They create valuable opportunities and connections for themselves and their firm. They’re leaders.
As leaders, we invite more ideas, make confident and creative decisions, defuse conflict and embody openness. Thus we discover synergies, react nimbly to surprises, and are in the moment but also forward-thinking. Creative leaders make work an intriguing journey.
You can learn more about Jay Rhoderick at the Bizprov website or contact him at [email protected].
The Creativity in Business Thought Leader Interview Series is developed and conducted by business creativity catalyst, Michelle James, CEO of The Center for Creative Emergence and founder of Quantum Leap Business Improv.
Great interview.
I think most people recognize the value of positive collaboration, building relationships, active listening, flexibly, etc., in business, which are all skills that are wonderfully integral to improvisation. The problem comes in the implementation. I believe that no one (or almost no one) will having their thinking or behavior changed in any appreciable way by one 3-hour workshop, or even an all-day workshop. And it is the rare company that will invest in a weekly class for, say, 3 months, for its employees. So, in general, improvisational training in business becomes a special event for some segment of the workforce that introduces them to a new way of working but doesn't really reinforce it enough through practice to make any lasting difference. It's like going to the gym twice a year and thinking that gets you in shape.
I grow weary of all the different business consultants talking to each other about how important their particular take on management development is, everyone nods seriously and then goes to deliver yet another disposable 3-hour workshop or Powerpoint presentation. I think we need to change the discussion from why and how improv is useful, to how do we really use it to affect lasting change. I don't think one weekend retreat is going to do that.
Oh, and regarding your answer to the 2nd question: I'm not sure I've ever sought out or discovered an algorithm in my life. Do I need a Vorpal Sword for that?
Posted by: michael | March 31, 2010 at 12:04 PM
Thanks for the comment, Michael! I completely agree with you that implementation is the key and the main challenge is sustainability. Certainly few of us make permanent changes after only 3 hours. One point I tried to make in the interview is that the individual is more and more responsible for his own self-invention and growth as a one-person business. It is indeed easy for consultants to go on presenting themselves as the "light and the way". But it's actually an ongoing personal investment for the improvisation participant to decide to make for their own brand. The HR person hiring the consultant can’t force it, for sure.
I think we true-believers need to even more aggressively preach the "how and why improv works" message to the “civilian” business world, while at the SAME TIME push for introducing and implementing it in a sustainable and authentic way in individuals' practices.
Recently I worked with a group that had department managers improvising with custodians, sales associates, and IT folks all together. It revealed, of course, many differences and disconnects. But it also gave the participants the opportunity to differentiate themselves each as experts with distinctive POV's and specific routines and methods of doing things (yes, algorithms) which added up to the firm's efficiency and value.
Sustainability is tricky. But when each workshop participant truly feels what it's like to be a self-directed and uniquely-qualified contributor to the game everyone is playing, that generates potential personal buy-in. You're right, it's just like going to the gym--when it's once every 3 months with no follow-through, nothing happens. But when the workshop asks people to try something new, to show up as they haven't shown up (or been asked to show up) at work, that's when I challenge them to make improv best practices part of their personal brand, as useful applications on a daily basis. It's follow-through for the sake of their own growth (however they define that growth) and thus for their company's health. They powerfully revise their own work style.
Touché on “algorithm”! A nice Carroll-esque riposte with the Vorpal Sword! The Algorithm's a thick-skinned beastie which eludes attacks (like a good improviser).
I much appreciate the chance to expand on my thoughts in the interview. Thanks Michael!
Posted by: Jay Rhoderick | March 31, 2010 at 05:23 PM
So, it sounds like you're saying that if someone has a personal trainer come in now and then to give them a great workout, it'll inspire them to keep going to the gym on their own. Yeah, I guess. Sometimes. I guess I'm saying that it would be even better if more folks could commit to and afford a personal trainer every week for, you know, a while. That hasn't been my experience with soft skills training in the corporate environment.
Posted by: michael | March 31, 2010 at 07:02 PM
Hi Michael. Thanks for your comments and questions. I agree with Jay, and to "yes and" him, I would add that improv-based training great for the reason he outlined, and I have found that significant transformation can occur within the workshop itself. What is makes improvisational specificially especially powerful as a training tool - and as a way of being in life and all relationships - is that is has a specific set of principles, "rules of engagement" that set the stege for creativity to emerge, and lasting change to happen (and are almost the opposite of the operating priciples in most organizations).
And, yes, like all muslces, paradoxically, one has to practice improv to be more "natural" in it. It is the principles, as much the practices, that enable change to happen quite quickly. I have used them for over with organization for a variety of purposes, not the least of which is to become a more sustainably innovative work culture. Applying the principles in the business envoronemnt allows the improv training to last long after the workshop is over. Mastering the practices, while adhering to the principles when it is easier to fall back into our habitual, comfortable, or planned responses, takes practice.
If you took a 3 hour workshop, and then did nothing else but take even the most basic principles with you and consciously apply them to your relationships, workplace, collaborative projects, etc - and stayed committed to the principles even when the going got tough - you could experience change quite quickly and dramatically. It would not be without discomfort, but the more you do it, the easier it gets :-)
Posted by: Michelle | March 31, 2010 at 07:47 PM
The principles are deliberately simple, and with a few moments of reflection each day, you can start to see changes in your interactions with people. The practices can show up in unplanned watercooler conversations, as well as in engagements with customers, colleagues, and supervisors.
Posted by: Jay Rhoderick | April 01, 2010 at 10:03 AM
Yes! :-)
Posted by: Michelle | April 01, 2010 at 11:12 AM