 I'm Paulse Jackson. I'm the current co-president of the invited foundation network. I don't know if you can tell from the accent, I'm from England. And the British ambassador from Moscow returned the Prime Minister called him in for a briefing and said, Can you tell me in a word how things are going in Moscow? And the ambassador said, Good. And the Prime Minister said, In more than one moment, how are things going? He said, Not good. So we've got a very short eight minutes to share something and join with Bob to convey something about the AIM. And it's very difficult to compress 20 years of history into that. So I hope it will be more good than not good. So when I learned about theatre, I assumed that for the best results you needed a script, a director and a rehearsal. And the same very sensible way of going about things, the brilliant playwright who put the words down on the page, a really cool director who would know how to interpret that and put it onto the stage. And the actors would prepare and practice to make perfect to put on the show. And then my brother asked me to go and see an improvisation comedy show in London. And I was very reluctant to do that because I thought this is clearly going to be rubbish. He insisted and I was really surprised. It was a great show, really contemporary, very funny, exciting, and it was improvised. So how did they do that? What was going on? They seemed to be breaking all these ideas that I was holding dear. So in improvisation, instead of the script, rehearsers, the performers, the improvisers are recognizing and embracing uncertainty, possibilities that that brings. And instead of a director telling everybody what to do, the leadership is shared in the moment between the performance and it can switch back and forth who's leading and who's following according to the needs of the moment. Anyone can be doing that. A central, heroic leader or director isn't part of that model. And instead of rehearsing, I'm sure all the decisions have been made and everything is completely perfect and the stations of surprises are eliminated. They go on stage as improvisers allowing for spontaneity and for creativity to occur on spot. And that might be, as it turned out, what just as exciting and just as valuable. And that's probably true in organizations and society as well, that things don't have to be scripted, directed and rehearsed and we don't need to see them in those terms to have value. Not everything that happens though on the stage is true of everything that happens off the stage. So while we can take these lessons from spontaneity and emergence and uncertainty and distributed leadership, there are other things that we learn in theater practice that don't convey so well when we come to the world of applied improvisation. And an example of that is our attitude that we often have to mistakes, for example. Beginner improvisers are very enthusiastic about mistakes often and they will say, encourage mistakes, celebrate mistakes, woohoo. And that's fine if you're trying to create relaxation and environment in which people can have a go in a game because in games the mistakes are very low cost, they're trivial. If you go to somewhere in real life, then mistakes might be, if you're, for example, putting in Wi-Fi passwords, mistakes will be frustrating if you get the Wi-Fi code wrong. If your dentist makes a mistake it might be painful and if you make a mistake with a child crossing a road it can be faithful. So we don't really want to encourage mistakes most of the time and we want to find ways to encourage people to have a go and get the right language for how we apply our improvisation. Many of the most successful companies are saturated with improvisation, particularly with the hipsters here in Southern California. You have Silicon Valley. In England we don't want to be left behind, we have Silicon Roundabout. The leaders in these organizations know that things are emergent, chaotic, messy, and they pivot, they adapt, they experiment to find out what works so that they can abandon their low cost mistakes and failures and learn from the successes and do more of those. So the skills the world needs now are improvisational skills. Skills of listening, collaborating, more playful, having a go at things, adapting, and making better use of limited resources for sustainability. And you here, the AIN members, are probably the best teachers of these skills in the world. So we have a responsibility to do that well as pioneers. And as an organization we're also pioneers. We're an improvisational organization. We consist of the interactions of our members. What we do is the organization. And we've only just really started, I think, as a movement or as a profession in our applications of doing this. So not everything needs to be scripted, directed, and rehearsed to be good. A great improv show is one example of something that doesn't need to be those things. And the task of us as applied improvisers is to discover what the other examples are and will be. Bob, how are we going to do that in our traditions that we come from? We have a number of traditions that draw us together. We'll run through a few of those together. Hello. I'm Barbara Tind. I am also a co-president. That was the co-presidential hug. And anytime you see us you have to do that. So our work is founded upon some traditions. And some of us come from those traditions and some of them entered them later. So we have the tradition of Keith Johnstone and the work that he's given us. And a lot of my work is deeply based on his offerings. And Viola Spolen, who is the mother and grandmother of us all. And Gary, I know, is dear to her as well. We have Augusto Boal, who, like Johnstone and Spolen, created many activities and games, which we still use. And Boal also had a really significant political dimension. His background was politics and protest and standing up for people's rights. And that feeds into what we do now with our humanitarian and other parts of our work. We also have Del Close, who was not up there, but Del, also a very important person in our tradition. Yeah. So improvisation obviously isn't just about theater. It's about many things. And jazz, music, the ways in which people work together without a script, it can happen in any environment. And jazz is one of them, music. And play is a huge thing. Playing games, the games industry, the video games industry is the largest industry in the world now. And there's a lot, I think, that we as improvisers can learn from what they now know about games and how people play. And maybe there's some things we can share with them as well. I haven't got a picture for the next one. Oh, we don't have a picture for the next one. So we're going to talk about other means where sort of psychology and therapeutic processes are very much informed by improvisational practice. And I think we should remember too that improvisation is a word that is in everybody's language, if they're English speakers. Improvisation is a natural language term and people already have an understanding, a non-technical understanding of it. And somebody mentioned yesterday that sometimes it's useful to talk about improvisation rather than, for example, improv, which is more narrowly thought of as the performance strand of things. So we're applied improvisers and improvisation has rich and varied range of traditions and many possible applications as we are discovering. But you're going to tell us something about AHA and its resources. These are some pictures from last year and the year before. Oh, so is it my turn now? Your turn now on your own. This is the retiring president retiring. Paul said, Jackson! There are lots of things to say to and about Paul and maybe we'll do some of those later. More play. I want to talk about some of this later. We have website, we have social media. We'll get to that. Facebook group. Humanitarian work. Lots of things and people. This is a picture of our transition meeting. I was a little reluctant for him to go, but go he wanted to do. So here I am. Oh my God, this hasn't happened before, right? So every year we have a presidential address and here I am. And I was a little freaked out after this moment of our transition meeting and then I thought, wait a minute, we have already done something that many people in this room have wanted this year. And that is a female president. I had to do it. I'm sorry, I had to do that. You know, we're working at our pain in all kinds of ways and those of you from afar who didn't come to the United States for this conference were with you in spirit. So here we are. And so Paul was sharing a lot of where we've been and I want to share a little bit of where we might go. So what's next? We don't know because of course we haven't been there yet and we're stepping into uncertainty. But I do have one fundamental presidential goal. It's a small but lofty goal and it seems important that we are needed in our world right now. So we very much need each other and we need to use our craft. So we're going to go through a little bit of who we are and how we're going to do that. So who we are or who do we want to be? This is the future. This is who we want to be. In my opinion, we want to be everywhere. We want to be in every country. We want to be on every continent. We want every country and every continent represented here when we come together. Whether we can't have that happen literally then at least virtually. So that's one of our goals is to spread our virus far and wide. What? Okay, this is some of what we do in Sylvain Messika. Where are you? There you are. This is Sylvain's beautiful graphic by her husband but the content is Sylvain's and she's thought it would be lovely to send to us and I thought it would be lovely to use it. So it shows some of the ways we use our craft. Oh, do you want it back? You want me to do something technological? I need an assistant for that. Okay, I'm sure we can do that. I'm sure we can do that. So those are many of the ways, not all the ways, but many of the ways we use our craft and more to come. Where do we want to do this? So we're already doing this in lots of places but my fantasy, not that AIN is the center of the world but it could be, but more that we are connected to all of these other organizations that were connected to think tanks, were connected to other conferences. Teresa, Dudek and Joel put on a beautiful conference in May right here, GII and Let's Be Connected. Media, other forms of individual and group consultancies, NGOs, non-governmental organizations. Many of us are working in those worlds, humanitarian worlds, humanitarian efforts, businesses and organizations, foundations. Foundations who like to support things. Political arenas, right? They need us. And educational institutions, that I say think tanks, think tanks. So there are lots of places where our work can be used, is already being used and let's think bigger, let's think further. Yes? All right. When are we going to do this? Exactly. We are doing it right now by being here. We don't have time. We don't have time. We don't have time to waste. We don't have time to waste anything. You know, those of us who are a little further along in years know that more deeply and the world is forcing us to recognize that even further. So we want to do everything we can now to actually use our craft to make this world a better place. How? So we've talked about some of these things already, but how? We have a rock and board. We have a rock and board, new board, that if you want to come at 7.30 Sunday morning to our incoming board meeting, we will be meeting 16 people who are really ready to take on projects and tasks. And they will be absolutely happy to have your help. We have regional groups. We have regional and global conferences. One of our fantasies is that we begin to have global conferences in places other than North America and the United States. How many of you would go to Asia for a conference? Woo! How many of you would go to Africa for a conference? Woo! How many of you would go to South America for a conference? Woo! All right, I see who you are and I'm taking your names. Okay. And some of our thinking is that we will have regional events in some other places to kind of cultivate that. Roadshows. So roadshows are sort of a group of some of the AIN members going to those places and demonstrating some of what we do. Again, to cultivate interest, cultivate participation, collaborations with all of those little bubbles I shared with you, research and publication. The world actually is learning about who we are. Teresa Duda, Caitlin McClure, just in the works right now, there's a book being published on case studies of applied improvisation. Right? The world is actually understanding and learning about who we are and what we do and it's really important that we keep doing that. Fundraising. We don't like to talk about that and a lot of us don't actually like to do that but if we actually want to do some of these things we have to think about where we can get support. So if you want to donate call 5-5-5, 5-5-5, 5-5-5-5. And in real time we are going to start taking things like donations for scholarships and contributions but we're also going to think about actually where we can do some fundraising. Whether it's foundations, whether it's grant awarding bodies because actually I believe that what we're doing warrants support and all of us do this except for Angelina, our administrator on a volunteer basis. We don't need to get paid but we want the projects that we're doing to make the world a better place to have legs and support. And fundamentally the best we can do is to show our stuff. The best thing we can do to forward this work and to forward who we are is to show our stuff and to show it well. To go out there and show who you are, be who you are. And when people say wow, what was that? You say, well, as a matter of fact I have a little bit of an organization and a practice to tell you about. Okay. But the fundamental question that I think we always have to reach to is why? Why do we do this work? Is it for us? Is it for the world? Is it for organizations? So asking why is critical. Okay, I know I have about a minute left. Paul, did you ever put on devil horns during a presidential talk? Yeah. Okay, so really quickly I went on the quest the other day and if you haven't done the quest with Jeannie Lamb and do it and I was sent out to find things silver and fire. So there they are. And many things emerge when you do the quest and one of the things that happened when I found these shoes is that they were too big. I thought, I can't buy shoes that are too big. Oh, but yes, I'm actually stepping into shoes that are big. And then I thought, well, what helps shoes that are too big? Socks. So you are all my socks. Which means socks can be beautiful. Socks can be warm. Socks can serve a purpose. Socks can protect you. There are lots of ways you can serve as a sock. You can be any kind of sock you want but just be a sock. And fire. Light of fire. So my presidential message to you is be a sock, light of spark.