 is when finance met improv, with the subtitle of how finance executives are like these. What we're going to be talking about is what's going on with finance executives and in particular charity finance executives in terms of the environment and why improvisation skills are absolutely brilliant to help them with what they need now. Because we do things for love and not for money. Absolutely. So we're calling on a program that we co-created with Paul Z. Jackson called Prepare for Change. So a little bit about me, my name is Belina Rafi and I have an MBA and I used to work for a big bank and now I have the pleasure of teaching improvisation skills to business people to help them be more adaptive, more joyful and more thrive-able. And I love this quote. I got this quote from Bernie de Koveyne's site actually and it's the opposite of play isn't work, it's depression by Dr. Brian Sutton-Smith. Now my name is Karen Bradshaw and I'm the CEO of a charity called Charity Finance Group and I've had the pleasure and I do mean pleasure of working nearly 20 years with accountants who as you know are well known for their depression. So I have a business accountant and his name is David and every time he sees me calling on caller ID he picks up the phone and he says no. And he does this for two reasons. The first one is it makes me laugh every single time. And the second reason is he's kind of stealing himself because he knows I'm going to ask him something for which he's never been trained or asked before. Now David's not alone for most of the accountants that I've come across in my working career they're all trained down this side of the screen, down the left. They plan, they are used to working with figures and data and then they consider the things on this side of the screen as the things they do when the plan doesn't work. They don't see adaption and collaborative and spontaneity as being things that they are rewarded and recognised for. So when I started trying to articulate what the challenge is to Belina naturally I'm being a lady who thinks in pictures started talking about bees. There is a reason for bees. So when she said you know finance executives are like bees. Okay, so I can see that bees go out into the environment and they gather pollen and financial executives go out and they gather information. And they use that pollen, that information as good stuff, as nutrients for the organisation and they're both really cute. I don't know. And having had a conversation with Belina already I said yes and what I was really guessing at was the structure that bees operate in. My brother keeps bees and what he was telling me is that keeping them in the boxes is all very good for us and it helps us, it's scalable, it's a nice rigid predictable structure. It enables us to extract honey but it has a lot of other negative sides to it. It's short term, it's not resilient, it's very prone to disease and to parasites whereas in natural state there's a lot less, there's much more resilience and a lot less problems arising from particularly parasites. So we wanted to look at these sides of things and how these could interact for accountants and in very many ways you put accountants in boxes, you stereotype them and so do the people that they work with. So what we wanted to do was get to the position where this plan B isn't about improvising but that is a natural state that helps accountants to be collaborative because the environment's changing and they're being asked to collaborate, to dazzle, to be innovative yet their natural state is to plan, to analyse, to have structure. So there's great scope for what we do, the improvisation as being freedom within structure to help financial executives to loosen a bit of some of the too much structure of the one year budgeting plans and actually say if we build both sets of skills we have choice which is really important. What we don't want to do particularly in charities is be so efficient that we're not effective, that we lose our soul, our values, our purposes. So what we've been doing is a one day program that we co-collaborated with Paul Ze Jackson on and we focus on the following three skills. We focus on being resourceful and collaborating and leading. And obviously the feedback you've been talking about results is the most important thing and from our initial courses we've had the most important lesson from the day is the notion that you can set direction but you cannot plan for each step of the journey and you have to be prepared to improvise as you go. I'd call that a result for an accountant. Thank you. If you want to find out more come to our session tomorrow. Thank you guys very much.