 Hi Johanna, how are you? Good, come and play, let's step in. No, no, I thought we'd do the work we did yesterday. The exercises, the way we set everything out. Well, let's just dive into them. No, no, no, we've got that structure and framework. We can work with that. Well, we know it. Let's just dive in and play with it. No, no, no, no, no, I don't want to waste it. No, it's not a waste to dive in and play. No, no, no, no, Johanna, no. Hello, my name's Johanna DeRoto. I come from Sydney, Australia. And I've been working with improvisation and theatre practices for about 30 years now. The last 27 years, a bulk of my practice has been with playback theatre. And in the last 10 years or so, I'm more and more interested in becoming aware of the system and how us as individuals interact with the system. And I'm really seeking to find my way into the system to understand how it operates and how to impact change. Good morning, everybody. My name's Jules Livingstone. I'm also from Sydney. And I'm a change manager. I specialise in organisational change and strategy for large-scale transformation. And I've become frustrated that the focus... there's too much focus on change, so I've created a new model for change, learn, change, adapt. But I found myself wanting to support people in the adapt space but lacking a way of really doing that. So I was hungry to find a way to help people adapt more. So we're here to present about a collaboration Jules and I embarked on, where we merged my improv practices and his change. And what we want to do today is show you a little bit about what we did and then explore how we think the collaboration worked and what made it successful. So I first met Jules at an improvised... an applied improvisation session in Sydney by some of you may know Raymond from the Netherlands. And Raymond was facilitating an exercise, a yes-and-exercise, challenging people to come up with different ways to say yes and more confronting offers. And he turned to Jules and he said, Jules, I'd like to take your credit card. Yes, well you better write down the pin. And I said, who is that guy? And from there, Jules invited me to his place and on the coffee table was a business proposal. And I looked at it and I said, this is how it reads to me. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We're happy to respond to your request for tender regarding change maturity across the legislative reform program. This proposal suggests to pilot and working in three phases. Really? Really, Johanna, yes. I first had the opportunity to see Johanna in action in an afternoon workshop that she invited me to for creative and social change people looking at how to build and collaborate and build your business. And she was conducting an exercise called the autobiography that many of you may know. And I was doing it myself, but as it happened I was struck at how quickly and how deeply it not only showed personal bias but also gave a pathway to create understanding and to connect towards other people. And I said to Johanna, this is amazing. I can't believe how good it is. There's so many applications for it. I'm really, really excited. I actually hadn't framed it like that. So it was fascinating to hear. I thought about it a little bit more and then as we were walking to the station I said to Johanna, aha, I've got it. This improvisation thing is so good. Yes! I know that Raymond calls it applied improvisation but I think what we can do, I can just deploy improvisation. I can just insert it into particular parts of the program, get somebody like you. I don't need to get my hands wet. Somebody like you can come in and just make it happen. No! What do you think? No, Jules, you've got to get in. So on the strength of his resistance and questions I offered, I threw over an offer for Jules to attend a nine day retreat with some colleagues of mine who are running a voice and improv workshop. Yes. I didn't even have a look at the website. I ran off to do this workshop built around improvisation and it opened my imagination and it helped me reconnect with my creativity and it really was transformative. And I was so moved by it that I said to the facilitators at the end of it, look, I know you've been running this program and working together for 27 years and you're struggling around moving into a new space and changing in a new business model and new identity, I'd really like to help. Can I offer to help you? They said yes. And then I thought to myself, well, this could be the opportunity to collaborate with Johanna. So I put together a program, one of my programs, around meeting their needs for change and I called Johanna and said, are you interested? Yes. And I flicked it to her. And I got it and it was very structured and ordered and it all made sense. But it was kind of missing a little bit of playfulness and emotion and story. And so I worked out some ideas to fit in with the structure and I said, how do you feel about this? And I said, wow. Yes. Okay. Let's do it. So I led the process of a river of life reflection and the participants went on a really emotionally dynamic reflective journey sharing about their relationships, going back for 27 years. It was very touching and soon emotion started to emerge. And I looked across and Jules is writing. Well, of course I'm writing it down. This is fantastic information. This is exactly what we need. I didn't get this in the interviews. I've got to capture it. But Jules, you've got to be in this process with us. One person's crying. One person's holding their hand. You're holding the space. I've got to get the information. Yes. And we'll talk about it later. That process took a little bit longer than we had anticipated. And I realized also in terms of the agenda, it actually, it had managed to move us through quite a bit of the agenda. So I said to Jules, I think we need to shift and move to this point. How do you feel about that? How do I feel about leapfrogging a whole portion of the program? Yeah. But the previous section had been so rich. So I said yes. And we did. We invited the participants to go off and swim in the beautiful ocean that we were working nearby. And we then planned to take them up from the shallow grass, lovely grassy area, up to a higher vantage point along a veranda overlooking the ocean, because we're going to invite them into their imaginations to source some ideas about their vision that's hanging around in their unconscious. So in that process, I became a professional PR media interviewer. This time, I realized I still had to capture all of the information, but we couldn't hold the imaginative exercise with me outside as an observer. So I became the starry-eyed little intern. I then went on to ask very specific questions to elicit what steps they see themselves taking toward their ideal and most successful future. And patterns started to be illuminated. And it was in these patterns and it was in these gaps added to all the information that we had before that we were really able to analyze what was needed and what would work as concrete steps for our recommendations and way forward. Toward the future. In stepping in and collaborating with Jules, it's really helped ground many of my improvisational practices. It's enabled me to step in to the system more and to highly value all the insights that are emerging in the patterns to once be in the process and to start observing it and to start structuring those findings for myself and for clients. For me, the collaboration with Johanna has been about having an incredible amount of freedom within structure, which was liberating, but also gave me, as I collected emotions, fears, stories, blocks, desires, dreams, a real ability to understand the system, locate people in the system and make those very concrete steps and recommendations about what to do. And when I think about our collaboration and what it was that actually helped that to happen, the first thing is understanding. And some of the practices we bought to that relationship was a real curiosity about each other and wanting to learn more about each other's world. The second one was trust. And that was letting go of judgment and also at the same time trusting my own instinct. And finally, respect. Respecting my own expertise and knowledge and also Jules. And so when I think about where I started at the beginning with my deployment plan, what I realized that improvisation is everything. It's the foundational mindset for collaborating. It's something which informs the design of the program and what it is that you're doing. And it also gives you the material and the content for the exercises and activities. And to conclude, we're going to finish with a very common core practice we all know and love. Yes, and. Thank you very much.