 And welcome to the creative life, a creative collaborative production between Austin American Creativity Association and Think Tech Hawaii. So today we're going to be talking about innovation and improvisation. And in a few minutes, in a minute or so, I'll be introducing you to our guest. And we'll see what we could do today in terms of discussing creative problem solving and improvisation. And as our guests will tell us how we mash these together and move forward with great creative leadership. So our guest for today is Doug Stevenson. And Doug comes to us from Chicago, Illinois. And Doug has a very interesting background, and we're glad to have him with us today. So Doug has been have has 30 years of experience in marketing, design and working with creative teams for many companies that we're quite familiar with, including Doors. So I don't I don't know if you had samples from Doors, but it also has formal CPS training, and thousands of hours of design, facilitation and ideation. And he also has a podcast that he does with his colleague and friend, Greg Frally, and where they put together innovation and improvisation. And they coined a little cutesy term, innovation. So with that, Doug, I think we'll also share with our viewers that you also have a background in comedy. So we'll be counting on you to be quite funny. And you were part of the second city. And for our viewers that are not in the United States mainland, they may not be familiar with the second city. So perhaps you could tell us just a we could start out by just sharing a little bit of your brief experience, not your brief experience, but a brief summary of working with the second city and some of the people that you worked with. So with that, Doug Stevens and welcome to the creative life. And it is my pleasure. And I'm excited to be with you today. Thanks so much. It's great to be here. With regard to the second city, I mean, it's the still the mecca of improvisational performance. And it all began at one of Chicago's fabled institutions, the University of Chicago, where a group of kids got together and they included Mike Nichols and Elaine May and Ed Asner and Paul Sills and, you know, many others you'd recognize. And then they formed this thing called the Compass Players and that transformed into the second city, which was kind of the only show in town, the greatest show on earth for many years. And since then, there have been many imitators and offshoots of that. But second city is the is is an institution that's been around for quite some time. And it's sort of the citadel of improvisation in the world. Because I understand that you worked with a number of people that we would be familiar, at least with their name and probably have seen their performances on various media sources such as Paul Sills, who's amassing. Oh, you studied with those. But you would work to the second city with Steve Carell and Bonnie Hunt. Well, yeah. And just to be clear, while I was hanging around second city for four, five, six years, I really launched into a semi career in improvisation, because I was working at the Players Workshop of Second City with Josephine Forsberg, who was an apprentice to Viola Spolen, kind of the the grand dame of improvisation. And Joe Forsberg was one of the the second generation troop members of the compass players in second city. And she had her own school of of improvisation. And boy, I tell you what, if you listen to a tape of Viola doing her classes and Josephine Forsberg, you might not tell the difference. So she was she was key in my development. And so I what propelled me into this whole thing was I was taking classes with Joe and I on a lark did an audition for second city children's theater. And I had never been an actor before. This was my first improv class. And I never auditioned for anything. And I went there and I got the lead in this play. And and they said to me, well, Doug, we see you're not enrolled presently. And in order to be in this play, it sort of me to be enrolled. So I that's how I got more committed. And yes, I work with people like people who worked in second city. I did a number of my friends, including Bonnie and my friend, John, who was in the cast with Steve Carell, and my friends Joe List and Kevin Crowley. They all performed on the main stage of second city. So back in the day, I was older than these guys by about four or five years. So I actually had a home and a mortgage. So I couldn't I couldn't really lead the vagabond life of being on tour with second city at the paltry compensation level that they were at. But I would go on Saturday sometimes and perform with my friends in the improv set, which they did after the show after the late show on Saturday. And so yes, my last appearance at second city was with my friends, Kevin and John. And I think Joe and Steve Carell was in the cast and was very complimentary to me. I think he was just really being nice. Well, I'm pleased to have the very serious and sophisticated member of second city. And that would be you, Doug, I'm sure. So today we're going to talk a little bit about innovation and improvisation. And we'll start off by asking you to talk a little bit about your experience with creativity and innovation. And that would be for us to talk a little bit about creative problem solving. Right. I'll get to that in a second. First of all, I just think I should emphasize that creativity is vitally important at the Creative Education Foundation that hosts the SIPC, the annual conference on creativity. The philosophy is basically that creativity is as fundamental as the three Rs. And everyone, in fact, even more fundamental, that we all should learn how to solve problems more effectively. Anyway, as an early, because a young child, I had an aptitude for art. But beyond that, I didn't get much encouragement. And there are these studies that say that, oh, when you pull kindergartners, 95% of them raise their hands, right? When you say, who's creative? And by the time they're 18, about 2% of the kids raise their hand. Go ahead. I said that's very true. Which could lead me to the next observation that might get us into CPS. And that is one of the parallels I drew between creative problem solving and improvisation was that sort of the figureheads of both disciplines, Biola Spohlen and Improv and Sid Parnes in CPS had similar philosophies. And I'll share them with you. One of Biola's quotes is, born knowing everything, and then you go to school. And so that gets in line with the belief that somehow our institutions educationally could have drum our creativity out of our kids. And I had the privilege in 2006 of interviewing Sid Parnes personally. And he reminisced for two and a half hours. And one of the things he said is he delivered a summer camp for kids in creativity. And at the end of it, he got misty eyed with this. He said, one of the kids said to him, you know, I figured you out. You started out as an adult and you grew up to be a kid. It was a great moment. And I guess the point here is that we have so many blind spots going through our development in traditional society. And what we need to cultivate with respect to creativity is the same kind of open-mindedness and playfulness we had as children. Yeah. And I think when we think about creativity, we realize that you can't be creative about nothing. And one of the reasons that we turn to some of these models, and you and I have a favorite, and that's what we're here to talk about today, you have to be creative about something. And ultimately, as you're looking for that something more often than not, that something is a problem. And that's the connection for us in dealing with creative problem solving. And the reason it is called creative problem solving. So with that in mind, how did you get, let me just share, I think we both have the same feeling that we feel that the creative problem solving institute model was like changing for both of us in different ways. And many of the people, if I think back to my first experience, when people would come back from the summer institute, I would ask them what it was about. And no one could really tell me, all they could say it was if they just got an aura about them and just said, you have to experience it to know what it was. So I think for those of us who have grown in creativity and stuck with it and played around with it some more as your term talking about mashing up creative problem solving and improv, tell us a little bit about that mash. Well, I will say this though too. To kind of as a billboard, I would say to your audience, if you have any doubts or reticence or if any, or especially if you have any appetite and curiosity for this, take a course in creativity, take a take one improv class. It's been proven that if you do just one of those things, your life will change, believe me, and for the better. I think the question was about CPS and how I got there. A little bit about that, but really how the two why why you've chosen to blend them and be one of them. Oh, okay. Well, that sort of so how I got to to the SIPC and CEF and creativity is for the number of years of my life people. I was kind of a late bloomer. I didn't realize I had creative aptitude. I was at Jock and high school and I used to use my head as a blunt instrument. And I, you know, I could be funny around the edges and I could be goofy, but you know, I never really took myself seriously as a creative person. And I got involved in my career first in advertising at Leo Burnett, and then in in three dimensional design and experiences at the exhibit group, Guildsboro, which is was in the design exhibit museum event space. And everybody just kept saying, you know, I was dubbed Mr. Creativity at one of my jobs. And this was at the design firm. And we were going through some corporate turmoil at the time at one time. And I closed my door. I was always an open door kind of guy, but it seemed like nothing but bad news was coming through the door for a while there, pink memos and stuff. And when that happened, an interesting thing occurred. It seemed like every five minutes, there was a knock at my door and someone came into my office and said, Doug, we need some creative ideas, you got any? And about 10 or 15 sessions in, I thought to myself, you know, I'm in the wrong business. I should be selling creativity. And then I explored, explored, explored. I found my way to SIPC and CEF. And there I learned the fundamentals of creative problem solving. And my past caught up to me. People realized, oh, you're an improviser. And, and some of them have begun to employ improvisation in their creative problem solving practices. And they encouraged me to do the same. So then I realized that there were astonishing parallels between CPS and improvisation. Am I going in the right direction here? So, for example, you know, in creative problem solving is described two kind of distinct phases, right? A divergent phase and a convergent phase. And when you, if you look at divergence, and it's basically for the CPS model, but there's analogs in improv. And that is like CPS says the first premises defer judgment. Well, an improvisation that says, accept whatever initiation your partner gives you. So you don't judge, you just go with it. And CPS says, build on ideas. And improv says, oh, yes. And CPS says, come up with wild ideas. And in improvisation, you go, yeah, that's a great idea. Let's heighten and explore that. Let's take that to the max. And CPS says, go for quantity of ideas. And in improvisation, it's like and and and and and and that's what builds a scene to it. It's climax. So incredible parallels there. And then in the convergence of it, which is a little bit more vague, but CPS says, we'll be deliberate. So there's a deliberate aspect to that unmindfulness around process. And then even improvisation has rules that you try not to violate. You don't deny something, for example, you don't negate. You don't, you know, there are rules around improv as free and free form as it is. And in the convergence process of CPS, you're always mindful of your objectives. And in improvisation, you want to make a good coherent scene. And one of the things you do is you make sure that you make your partner or your other players look good. In CPS, you always want to improve on ideas and improvisation. You want to expand and heighten. You want to say, oh, yeah, Marsha landed on my front lawn yesterday. And oh, man, that spaceship was like amazing. And I think they had cable TV or something. Anyway, you just kind of go, you just keep going. CPS, you're affirmative. You're always talking positive pluses before. Judgment's not in the process until the very end of the conversion process. And in improv, you're always looking for agreement. And in CPS, they say, you know, considered novelty. One of my favorite exercises in CPS is the get fired idea. Because if people are having a problem getting to consider novelty, and I've done this with great results all the time, I just say, okay, think of the absolute worst ideas you can, the ones that want to get you fired. And amazing what people come up with. You go, wait a minute. If you twist that a little bit, that just might work. One thing that comes to mind is the band, The Grateful Dead, allowed people to tape their music and give it away for free. That's counterintuitive. But it built a franchise and a marketing behemoth that persists to this day. It sustained itself. I'd like to remind our viewers that so often in organizations, there are some mistakes that are made in identifying a choice for a way to proceed. And by that, I mean, I can't tell you how many times I hear, let's brainstorm. And it's assumed by the person that is in the position of authority that they're taking them through the creative process, whereas brainstorming is just one step of the creative process. And I think both of us would agree that it's important that we select a model for problem solving. And for me personally, not to put in my bias here, but I think for many people that are watching, they would agree that the magic of the creative problem solving model coming out of the fathering of Sid Parnes and some other leaders at that time and coming out from actually a business model too, is the magic is that you're constantly going from the critical to the creative. So you're always in its structure to bring you back. You're going free flowing, you're going wild. As you pointed out, you're going crazy with ideas. But then you're going to pull back with some activities that discipline you to move forward. And then it keeps going in that manner. Wouldn't you agree? Well, absolutely. And the other critical piece, for first of all, brainstorming, the way the model, the CPS model looks now is clarification, ideation, development, implementation. And brainstorming is but one aspect of it would probably be defined as the ideation stage. And this is one of the things you see in these articles that are critical of brainstorming. And you hear in common vernacular, oh, well, that was a waste of time. Yeah, we had a lot of ideas, but nothing happened. I mean, the key piece of creative problem solving is, you know, so you first you think and you and you frame the problem or the challenge. And then you have a lot of ideas around it. And then you refine the ideas. But the last step is implementation, an action plan that gets implemented. And that's the key piece is often missing and why brainstorming is often miscast as a kind of a frivolous exercise. And it's not. How do we apply what we do know about models and the models of our choice? How do we apply what we've learned via these two disciplines and the disciplines being creative problem solving and improv? Well, what we found out is that people caught up to me and they outed me and they realized I had an improvisational background and truth be known, a lot of creative facilitators had done some training and improvisation. And what was typically done in their in their sessions was in between the phases of CPS, they would do these warm up exercises featuring improvisation to get people kind of loose and bonding and all this stuff. All good. But one of the things we realized is, wait a minute, these are parallel processes. And if you fuse them, they might even become more robust and dynamic. So we created the concept of innovation, a melding of innovation and improvisation, where we would actually take improv games and CPS tools and fuse them together. So for one example is there's a game in improv where you read from a book randomly or you just read a line from a book and then you improvise off of that. What we would do is we would take a post-it note from an ideation session and introduce that as a means of continuing the dialogue or we would do this thing called story throw or direct a story where five or six players in improv would be up on stage. There'd be a director and each of the people would represent a different POV like movie genres or angry, sad, whatever. Well, the same thing can be applied to stakeholders in a corporation or organization. It could be research and development and manufacturing and marketing or whatever or it could be customers, loyal customers, customers who aren't so loyal, customers who have walked away and you could direct a story. One of the wonderful things about improvisation is that it's really CPS in flow when Alex Osborn developed his concepts that are articulated in the Platt imagination. He was seeking to find out what were the critical elements of creativity so that he could enhance the performance of his creative people but also take these same fundamental skills to people who weren't necessarily naturally in that mode, creative. In my analysis, then CPS is sort of like a outline, a diagram of what the process looks like. It's the skeletal structure. Improvisation is that same model in flow. When you meld the two, you get the discipline of the structure but you also get the fluency and the kind of intuitive discovery of improvisation. People come up with things in an improvisational mode that they never might have said that in a session. For example, if there was a management problem, they might be reluctant to say on a post-it note, there is a management problem. But if you kind of recreate the dynamics of the organization which we've done and you assign people roles like you're the boss, you're this manager, this manager, and with the facilitation of the facilitators, the guides on the side, amazing things come out of people's mouths. They kind of say the truth without the judgment around it. I think I said to you the other day, improvisation is sort of like the WD-40 of creator process. It just increases the wheels and makes it more natural and organic and leads to greater discovery faster. I can see how that could happen. I can also see how there are people, some people might be by pure nature shy or not wanting to, reluctant to participate in anything that reeks of improvisation. How do you deal with those folks? Well, here's the amazing thing. Well, first of all, for most people, let's be honest, to go into a room and do just CPS, to go through that process is a step out of their comfort zone. I'm sorry? I probably, yes. But it's amazing if you have two facilitators in the room who are giving them security and create a safe place for this. It is amazing. We've done this with novices who performed improvisation like they were pros because they were just going to a natural place of intuition and instinctive behaviors and recreating how things were without inhibition. I'm not saying that there's a magic wand here that in all cases that this happens, but it happens with surprising regularity. You mentioned something to me about agility shifting. Could you talk a little bit about that? I won't pretend to be an expert, but one of my early mentors who you should meet is a woman by the name of Pamela Meyer who's here in Chicago. I work with her at DePaul where she used it. I believe she still does teach. She's since gone on to do a PhD and her third book is coming out. Anyway, her whole approach to creativity was improvisationally based. Her PhD was in organizational improvisation. I didn't know such a thing existed. The early work on this was around, they studied jazz musicians and how they improvised in their playing and their work and then selected paradigms and structures from that and applied it to organizations. She has her PhD in that. One of the challenges of going toward organization and giving them creative skills is typically, and you probably know this, Darlene, you go in, you do a three-day session, you do a six-week project or whatever, and it's all well and good. Even people are enthusiastic about it, but after that is done and the report is written, they revert to their old behaviors. One of the wish-fors in what ways might we create cultures of creativity or innovation where people are more instinctively and organically inquisitive and improvisational. Out of that kind of grew this concept of agility. Agility really talks to, speaks to how organizations really need to react in real time, especially these days where changes are rapid. It was a cliche even in our youth, but now, I mean really it's one thing one day and one thing the other. And so organizations need to be able to react in real time to rapidly changing events. The pandemic, for example, created a huge example of this. I mean people had to restructure their entire organizations around staffing personnel, how they operated, they had to get online savvy, et cetera, et cetera. And the companies that did that best were the ones who were the most flexible. And so agility training comes out of the concept in some ways of organizational improvisation, but it brings it down to the level of, okay, so then how do we train leadership and leadership teams to work cross-functionally and work more in terms of exploration of what solutions they might find and less objectively focused from their siloed positions in the company. Well, Doug, we're winding down here and I'm really glad, it feels like we're just starting to get things rolling in the discussion and it's a very interesting discussion for me and I hope for our viewers. I would encourage our viewers to visit your website and also to listen to your podcast because they're very practical and they're very interesting and they're very easy to listen to and very pleasant. So Doug, I thank you for being with us today. My pleasure. To our viewers, we thank you for joining us and I have been, I am and continue to be Darling Boyd. I was your host today for today's show in the series of The Creative Life and stay with us and we'll be back in two weeks with another exciting, revolutionary, revealing life of someone that is living a creative life and also or also working with people to help them to promote their creativity. So until then, aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. 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