 So welcome everyone to the AIN Big Topic webinar called the Jackson and we started these webinars in 2015 and the first person to present was Steve Label and he's back. You've got a better memory than I have. But I know I've done a couple of these before. You have done a couple of these for always very entertaining and informative so I'm going to hand over to you for the next hour or so. Steve, thanks very much. Okay, I'm going to share some slides but before I do that, I'm anticipating talking for 30, 35 minutes, maybe a bit longer. I'm happy for you to either post questions in the chat box or, you know, just, you know, butt in as we go along if you have any questions, but I am going to leave time for questions at the end as well. Okay, so hopefully you can see those slides now. That's always a good sign. I'm going to make you guys a bit bigger and open the chat box and then we'll start going. You've already started the video, Paul. Okay, great. Okay, so thank you for coming. First of all, I've been a member of the applied improvisation network for probably 10 years. As Paul said, I've done a couple of these before. And I actually come at improvisation from a different perspective to many of you. I work at Boston University. I work in a business school, which means that I actually look at improvisation from an organizational perspective, rather from an individual and small group perspective which I suspect many of you do. I'm, I lecture I research, and I write about project management, innovation and change. And my interest in organizational improvisation came out of my PhD, which I completed in 2002, I think. I've been looking at improvisation and particularly the brick a large aspect of organizational improvisation for the last 20 years, and I was a project manager in the finance sector before I became an academic so therefore my research around improvisation tends to be done around projects and how project managers use this. But, you know, this is fairly common, I mean, say common to all, to all managers but you know all managers can use this it doesn't have to be just project managers. So, I usually start off with this quote, which a makes me feel that I have an affinity with Albert Einstein and be you can see obviously at the moment we're going to the same hairdresser. But this, this quote is really about rationality versus intuition. I'm glad I'm not the only one Jim Bob. When we look at organizations we tend to think in terms of process and structure and, you know, doing things by the book, whereas in actual fact intuition which is a major part of organizational improvisation is a really key thing. So the way I see it, you know, the intuitive mind and looking at situations and reacting to them and deciding what to do, almost simultaneously with starting to do them. And I'll come to that in a minute is a really big part of what what I'm interested in. So, I suspect that you all know about improvising from a personal and a small group point of view, you know, for most of you, that's what you do, you know that many of you who who are linked with the AI and our consultants or trainers or people who are trying to raise awareness of the organizational techniques within individuals and small groups, admittedly, you know within organizations but you tend to come at this from the individual and small group level whereas I tend to look at it from the organizational level and historically within project management. I also tried to justify why project managers should improvise and the traditional view of project management at least is plan and then execute the contents of that plan with the minimum of deviation, which to be fair, you know doesn't sound very improvisational. But one of the things we've that we understand those of us who research in in the in the domain is that actually projects are not like that. And they've not been like that for 25 years I mean I started as a project manager in the early 90s. And at that point, all the books and all the instructions were plan then execute, but we didn't actually do that. And we started to execute and then things started to change and we improvised in order to get things done. So, you know, the plan then execute thing just doesn't happen anymore. And just quickly, I wanted to go through three stages of where I see project management coming from because that's, you know, my background. And in project management, it was a sort of project management 1.0, if you want to call it that, which was focused on process, following the plan tools and techniques, gantt charts, work breakdown structures, following an agreed plan with the minimum of deviation. That was what project management seemed to be about in the 90s and indeed before that. There was then a significant shift through certainly the late 90s and the first decade of the of this millennium, where there was a real shift towards behavior towards a focus on the fact that people deliver project tasks and activities. You can have the best gantt chart the best work down work breakdown structure on the planet, but they don't actually deliver anything. Projects are delivered by people carrying out project tasks and activities in either individually or in small groups. And that means that to my mind projects are team based, they're socially constructed entities, they're as good as the people who work within them, within them. And things like motivation, commitment, building trust, emotional intelligence, effective leadership, communication, all these things are really important, because we have to deal with people and people deliver projects. We're now shifting into what I call an emerging 3.0 model with a focus on ambiguity on the fact that people start to deliver projects, but no, or certainly expect that projects are going to change as you move forward, that stuff is going to emerge, and that we weren't expecting that external environments are going to change. And the project that you deliver probably won't be the project that you started off thinking about. And that means there's a shift away from structure, we have to understand things about emerging requirements, how to deal with uncertainty and complexity, and we have to actually modify the project as we move forward. So that's the way that I see project management having evolved over the last probably three decades. And one of the things about the emerging model that we're dealing with at the moment is that we need creativity and innovation. And we need to understand that we need to be creative, and we need to do things differently in order to deliver projects that are ambiguous and uncertain. That makes sense so far. Excuse me a minute. So, creativity and innovation are particularly important. And one of the good things about creativity and innovation is they can't be automated. You know, at the moment, I've been looking at some stuff recently around artificial intelligence and the automation of processes and the automation of repetitive work. The thing with computers is that they just can't do that sort of stuff, you know. And this is relevant to all management, not just a project management. So I found this cartoon a couple of days ago and I thought that this actually really summed it up, because what we need to focus on is the stuff that systems can't do. This role requires a high level of soft skills. Can you persuade influence, empathize, inspire, build rapport, manage emotions and behaviors and maintain a sense of humor under pressure? Well, systems can't do that. People do that. And people who have improvisational and creative mindsets, arguably, can do that better than people who don't. So, organizations are starting to accept the fact that we need to build skills in our people that maybe, you know, are skills that we didn't really look for when we interviewed them, but which are becoming more and more necessary. And if you want to keep your job in a situation where more and more jobs are being automated, then you need to be good at the soft stuff. And improvisational work depends on that, you know, empathy and inspiration and influence and all that stuff. I feel that we're moving into a situation where as artificial intelligence becomes better, and it is becoming better, I mean, the improvement in artificial intelligence in the last three or four years has been dramatic. And in the next five will be, you know, a quantum leap forward again. And so, we need to build skills that artificial intelligence can't build, you know, computers are not very good at being empathetic and inspiring and, you know, and building rapport they just do as they're told. And they do as they're told very well and, you know, smart systems are getting better at improving how they do things, but they can't do the stuff that we can do. And, you know, for organizations and particularly for senior executives in organizations, this is becoming a really important deal. People, everybody here is trying to make sense of the future. What's it going to look like? What are we going to do? How are we going to cope? What skills do we need to survive and thrive and, you know, and hopefully dominate in some cases. I mean, look at, look at, you know, the way that Amazon has, you know, risen to the challenge of, you know, of the way that we need to achieve stuff in a pandemic. And so there are all these things out there, you know, artificial intelligence, design thinking, innovation, culture, agile, digital transformation, stuff like that. People have to make sense of that. Machines can't. And that means that change is really important. We have to embrace change. And the trouble is that everybody agrees that change is necessary, but nobody really likes change. It's, we build a sort of comfort bubble around ourselves where we're comfortable with what we're doing and how it's happening and without our level of skills to deal with it. And when things start to change, people start to chip away at that bubble of comfort, and you start to feel exposed, you know, what if things change and then I can't cope, you know, that's a really important issue. And one of the things that came out of my PhD, by the way, was about equipping people to cope with change. It was a really important part of the outcomes of the study that I did. You have to be proactive with people about how change is going to affect them and what the benefits are to them. So, you know, there are ways to manage change. And a lot of this is about communication, empathy, inspiration, all the things that we've already talked about. So, the question comes, how can we be creative? And how can we innovate? And how can we improvise successfully within a discipline, and here I'm talking about project management, that's generally thought of as structured in control, where if you pick up a project management book, even now, you pick up a project management textbook, it will say, this is the way that you do projects. You plan, then you execute the contents of the plan with the minimum of deviation. And if stuff starts to change, you stop and you replan. And realistically, in modern organizations, you can't do that, because you don't have time to do that. What actually happens in modern organizations is the person who's your boss, your project sponsor, whatever you want to call them, actually says, Hey, Steve, you know, you're managing this project and, you know, you're delivering this by May. Well, actually, we don't need that anymore, we need this instead, and we could do with it by March. And we don't really care how you get there. But that's what we need. And, you know, that's sort of the antithesis of controlled project processes and procedures, if you want to call them that. So what happens is that project managers improvised and improvisations everywhere, we all do it. The best you can do is to try and control it. If we think about it, conversation is improvised, because I can't respond until I've heard what you're saying. So if you think about a normal conversation or any sort of conversation, it's an improvised event, because Paul can ask me a question and I don't know what that question is until I've heard it. And then I have a few milliseconds or seconds if I buy myself some time by repeating the question to give myself some thinking time. To respond to that, but I can't respond to it until I know, you know, what I'm being asked. So conversation, even at the banal level of, hey, you know, do you want to drink? You know, what would you like? Would you like a gin and tonic or would you like a vodka and, you know, that's still improvised because you don't you can't respond until you've heard the question and then, you know, you get an improvised response back and conversation is improvised. Improvisation is everywhere. It's just we don't think about it that way. The best you can do in organizations because improvisation will happen is to try to control it and to understand it and to recognize it and to allow it to happen in a managed way. Because if you try to stop people from improvising, you just going to drive improvisation underground. People will still improvise. They'll just hide it. They'll be surreptitious about it. And that's really dangerous, because you want this stuff to be visible from a number of reasons. Firstly, because you want to know what's going on. And secondly, because if somebody successfully, you know, improvises successfully, a successful improvisational intervention or whatever you want to call it, then we want to learn from that. So let's talk about that in a minute. So I do my research in the project domain, but improvisation happens and is needed everywhere in the organization. It's not limited to just project managers, managers generally, we all improvise stuff happens, we have to react quickly, we have to decide what to do and then simultaneously pretty much start doing it. What is improvisation in the organizational sense? From a practical point of view, it's getting stuff done in a way that doesn't necessarily align with the original plan or process. Doing what is necessary to move forward, where the plan or process has been superseded, or which is outdated, or doesn't cover the requirements of the current situation, whatever you want to describe it. But academically, there is a set of theory that supports the shift towards improvisational work in areas where the original plan or process doesn't anticipate emerging requirements or issues. In other words, there are people out there who've looked at organizational improvisation, they've unpicked it, they've looked at the component parts, and they've written about why this works or why it works more often than not. And that's really useful because if you're going to step away from an agreed and jointly developed plan, and that's one of the bonuses of a plan, of course, is you tend not to plan as a solo entity. You tend to sit down in a group or team to plan how you're going to do things. Shared planning means shared responsibility for outcomes. So if you follow a plan, and it goes slightly awry, or maybe it goes completely wrong, then it's not entirely your fault. Shared responsibility for that. Whereas improvisation, and certainly improvisation at the individual level, is down to you. And if it works, you'll be the hero, and if it doesn't, then you need to ensure that you're doing this within a culture and a space where failure is tolerated, and indeed encouraged. As an academic, okay. I see understanding what doesn't work as being just as important as understanding what works. Okay, you still learn something. But managers don't see it like that. Managers are only interested in what works. They're not interested in what doesn't work. They're only interested in success, because that's what they're being paid to produce. So we have a different mindset, you know. But understanding a little bit of academic theory that underpins what you're doing is quite handy, because if you're going to step away from the plan. And you're going to improvise, then it might be useful to have a little bit of theory up your sleeve to explain why this is okay and why ought to work. Does that make sense? Good. I like it when people nod. It means that ideally, well, first thing is it means you haven't gone to sleep. You know, this is actually a very intimate, you know, setup. I mean, I've done these with 160 people on them. And that's weird because the, you know, the pictures are, you know, the size of your little fingernail. So there is some theory out there. And the initial theory really came from some work that was published in 1998 by a couple of women from the University of Wisconsin called Christine Mormon and Ann Minor. I think you're still at Wisconsin. Christine Mormon works at Duke now. And I know her quite well. But they were involved in an organizational improvisation special interest group that presented at the 1995 Academy of Management Conference. And there's a whole issue of I think it's Decision Science Journal that documents all the papers that went into that. If anybody wants any of this stuff, by the way, email me and let me know I've got, obviously I've got all the sources and bibliography and stuff like that. But they were looking at stuff that Carl Weich, who is like a legend in organizational behavior and organizational theory. Carl Weich did this stuff in the late 80s and early 90s around organizational sense making. And the people who started looking at organizational improvisation, guy called Frank Barrett from the Naval post grad school in San Diego, Christine Mormon and Ann Minor, people like that. They started to pull this into, into a set of constructs or components and said, okay, let's deconstruct organizational improvisation and see what it consists of. So they decided initially they published two papers in 1998, one in Journal of Marketing, I think, and one somewhere else. One was about improvisation in new product development. And the other one was about how you learn from successful improvisation and I can let people have the references to this. And they said that the initial three constructs, the three components that you need in order to improvise is you need creativity, which is really they defined as new ideas about how to achieve things. They rely on a certain amount of intuition about what is possible within the structure and resources and capability of the organization. And a lot of that comes from experience by the way, you know, we talk about experienced project managers who've been around the tracks a few times. We build up this intuitive gut feel for what's possible within the structure and resources and capability of the organization, because there's no point in thinking about stuff that's outside of the structure and resources and capability of the organization because that's going to fail. So you need to bound this with something. And the third element that they talked about was something called that they call brick a large, which is about making the best of whatever resources you have to hand in a particular set of circumstances. And when we talk about resources, we're talking about human resources, we're talking about physical resources, we're talking about financial resources. Okay, so that was the starting point. And they defined improvisation as the degree to within to which composition and execution converging time. In other words, you decide what to do and then you immediately start to do it. You're improvising. So that was the starting point. And then about three years later, and minor and Christine Mormon and another woman called Paula Bassoff wrote another paper, which is a challenge to read to be fair. It's in a journal called administrative science quarterly, which is one of those journals that insists on you, you know, sort of making your paper at least 60 pages long, even though you could probably say it in 10. And it likes big words. So I wouldn't necessarily recommend anybody plowing through this, but in that paper they said, Okay, we're still here with creativity, intuition and brick a large, but we think there's more. Adaptation, as in adaptation of existing routines. In other words, I've done this before somewhere or I have a problem. It's a bit like something I came across 18 months ago. Then I did this. So maybe if I pull out that sort of what I did last time out of my internal sort of tacit memory store and adapt it a little bit to the new set of circumstances, then maybe that will work and a, I'm not taking as much risk because it's been done before. And be, you know, I'm halfway there with it already so it's easier. I think adaptation is a really important thing. Compression, as in much improvisation is around compression of timescales and shortening and simplifying steps in in a process in order to deliver more quickly. Innovation, as in deviation from existing practices and knowledge. And that all leads to learning and the learning thing is really important. I sort of see that as I say that I think that the adaptation thing I think is really important because experienced managers, they rely on that adaptation of stuff they've done before to respond quickly and to take less risk. So, to me, we have these three inputs, creativity, intuition and brick a large intuition being, you know, a gut feel for what will work creativity being new ideas and brick a large being the resources that you have to have. We then apply some process by adapting stuff that we've done before or compressing steps steps in the process or innovating in some way. And then, ultimately, hopefully we have a successful improvisational intervention, which we learn from. And then we feed that learning back into the next improvisation that we do. And over the last couple of years what I've realized is actually, we could also call adaptation an input, it could be an input as well as a process, because it depends on stuff that we already have up here, you know, tacit knowledge. So, this sort of explains why improvisation ought to work. There is some solid theoretical theory, sorry, empirical and you know sort of, you know, tested theory around how these various elements work, the explain why improvisation ought to be successful. And it also builds confidence. And all managers need the confidence to try new things, based on a creative idea and the intuition based on experience that it will be effective. And I sort of started to think about, okay, this is where those people out there, you guys who run workshops in improvisation for individuals and small groups, maybe this is where you come in. There are problems with improvisation. It's not straightforward. I mean, you know, there's this whole thing about managing risk. Audit and compliance people are very wary of stepping away from plans and process. When you start off improvising, you know, you have to set a framework for people to improvise within and relax that improvise that framework as people get more competent at improvising. And the learning thing I think is very important because if you learn from a successful improvisational intervention, then what you're really doing is you're developing what I call emerging best practice, a new and better way of doing things within the organization. So all these things have to be resolved by organizations, but it helps if people have the skills to at least, you know, understand how to start doing that. And there's a lot of talk about agility these days. And one of the things, one of the problems I have in working in project management is that everything these days is shifting to this agile project management model. And people who love agile project management say, oh, all projects should be agile. You know, you, you're, you're, you know, you're being dynamic and you're lots of short iterations and learning as you go along. And, yeah, for some projects, that's great for software development projects and stuff like that. That's fine. I don't want people to be using agile project management if they're decommissioning a nuclear power station, for example, you know, I'd want them to be following the processes and procedures there, especially if I live near there. You know, when I was lived in the UK, I used to live near a naval dockyard four or five miles away, where they decommissioned nuclear submarines and refueled them, you know, with radioactive fuel rods. And I was an overlooking the dockyard and the submarine pens was a house in a state. And I thought, I would not buy a house on that house in a state for all the money in the world. No way I would I want to live that near. Yes, Paul. You want them to do if they came across something unexpected that a panel was not where it said it was going to be in the design or more liquid came out of something than there was. Well, that's an interesting point because you hope that that will never happen. But it does. And yes, it does. I mean, look, look at Chernobyl and look at, you know, stuff like that. And, and to be fair, I mean, I'm not sure that improvisation can cope with stuff like that. I mean, look at, look at the Gulf oil spill. You know, the, what five or six years ago in the Gulf of Mexico, the, the BP oil rig that started pumping oil out into the Gulf. They had a disaster plan. It's just that they'd never tested it. And when they did test it, it didn't work. And so yeah, they, they improvised like crazy to try and mend it, but he took them six weeks to stop the flow. So I wonder if that's to do with being in a mindset of things will go according to plan. So they're not in a state of readiness to improvise. They're improvising in those senses. There are certainly, there are certainly, there are certainly organizational domains that are extremely uncomfortable with stepping away from, from, you know, agreed and tested process. But stuff does go wrong. You know, there's no doubt about that. But organizations these days, they need agility. They need organizational nimbleness. They need the ability to quickly pivot to exploit new opportunities. They need to adjust to new realities caused by turbulent organizational environments. You know, stuff's changing fast out there and certainly has been in the last year. So all that requires creativity and innovation, different thinking, confidence, the ability to step away from the normal and maybe improvisation and improvisation of skills will help here. You know, organizations need help with this. And improvisation tends to be an individual or small group action. Okay. People within organizations have to have the confidence to try different things to know how to encourage experimentation to trust the organization to allow them to do that. You know, that culture thing to understand that this is a learning experience. And I think that the trusting the organization to allow them to do this is a really important thing. Yes, all this comes down to a supportive culture and a supportive organizational climate to allow people to try new and different things. And I suspect that many of you as consultants and as trainers and as small group facilitators, you know, you're involved in changing culture and changing organizational mindsets. And what you see as your role, I would say, yes. Is that right? Yeah, I hope so. So, you know, there is a link, because I'm coming at this from the organizational end and saying, it's okay for organizations to do this and this some theory. And you're coming it from the coming at it from the other end and saying, Hey, you know, I'm, if you want to thrive and you know survive and thrive. In this turbulent environment, you need people who can do this stuff, and you need a culture that allows them the space to try that. So, you know, you're preparing people as Paul has just said in the chat, you're preparing people to to improvise, you know, to and chat, you're preparing people with the skills to be able to function in this new world. And, and it will be a new world. I mean, you know, we're living in pandemic times at the moment and it's very scary. But we will get back to normal. It's just that the normal will be a new normal. It won't be the normal that we were used to. It'll be a new normal. And everybody will have to adjust to that. And organizations will have to adjust to that in order to survive. And they'll need people who have certain skills in order to be able to do that. So, I've carried out most of my work in the project domain, but most areas within organizations have to step away from process and use an intuition and improvisational skill set at times. So we're talking about the same thing. We're just approaching it from different directions. I'm approaching it from the at the organizational level, and you're approaching it at the individual and small group level, at least I suspect you are most of you. You're being able to explain that there's solid empirical theory behind organizational improvisation might actually make it easier to sell to the people that you're trying to sell your services to, you know, if you're trying to sell your training your facilitation, your, you know, your expertise in building new skill sets in employees. It might be useful to say, by the way, we're not just making this up. You know, there is solid empirical academic theory that demonstrates why and how this works. And if anybody wants me to expand on that, by the way, I'm very happy to do that. You know, outside of this, you know, I'll give you my email address I have all the literature I have all the papers, etc. Yes, Paul. There's no intention that being able to explain that there's solid empirical theory behind organizational improvisation might make it easy to sell. You've set out a framework for that. If you took a wider perspective. Is it still true that there's actually not very much solid empirical theory about this that it's a highly neglected area of exploration. But it still lacks the respectability and centrality that we might like it to have. I think that there's more than they used to be. Okay, when we started off, I mean when you look at stuff around the, the turn of the millennium. And a lot of the stuff out there about improvisation was about comparing it with jazz musicianship and with improvisation or theater and stuff like that. And that's, you know, that's not really a, well, not really a big, it's not empirical. But there is the people are starting to become interested in this. And I'm going to be stepping away from this, you know, because I'm, I'm going to be retiring soon. And I probably won't continue to do this. But there are people who are coming up who are doing this. You know, I would, I, I examined a PhD, not that long ago from Australia. I was looking at this from a guy called Chris Beesenthal, who was looking at this and did some very interesting empirical research. There are other people who are doing this stuff as well. And there's a guy called Stuart Clegg who is an extremely well respected and highly, highly, you know, respected academic professor, and he's getting into this stuff now. And so there are people who are real names in the field, who are starting to look at this in a much more rigorous way. We're probably not there yet, but we're a lot further ahead than we were, say, five years ago. So it's coming. And there is stuff out there, you know, where that you can point to and say, look, you know, this paper, I don't want you to read the whole 40 pages, but this paper basically says that they've done all this empirical work and they've talked to, you know, 700 managers and the, and, and these are the results and etc. So there is more of it. There probably isn't enough. But it is becoming more respected. And of course, most of my stuff was done in project management. But there are people doing this elsewhere as well. There's no doubt there's no improvement. There's no doubt. And, you know, being able to point to some of that and say, look, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to equip your people to be able to work in this environment and to contribute towards this. I think that, you know, that's very valuable. And, you know, it must be difficult to sell, you know, your work and particularly in today's, you know, difficult challenging times. Yes, Kate. Thank you. Could you please put in the chat box the names Chris Bees and Tal and the second person you mentioned, could you please type them into the chat box. Yeah, sure. Thanks. I can let you see some of this stuff. While you're doing that. One of the things that I'm setting up at the moment is think tank for applied improvisation as an AI and project where we'll look at where is applied improvisation going. And it would be really interesting to get yours and everyone who's on the call that your ideas about how we might formulate that who we might bring into it. I'm sure it's going to benefit from having some of the academic perspectives in there. Research going on. Yeah, I'm always happy to do that. Yeah, no problem. Yeah, being able to explain the solid empirical theory, you know, might actually help you to sell this stuff. There's lots of other stuff as well. I mean, the stuff about creativity and creative use of resources. I developed a matrix along with a colleague of mine to assist in deciding when this when improvised work works best at different types of businesses and domains and work. There are links with innovation and change or links with organizational agility. There's all sorts of stuff out there. Okay. My email address is here. Please feel free to shoot me an email if you want to know more about this or if you want some of the sources or you want me to send you, you know, some of the papers some of the papers I have in PDF format. So I can, I can fire those off. Some of my papers I think some of my earlier ones are in the aim repository I think already. Maybe I ought to update that and put some more stuff in. This is my personal publications web page. There are 20 odd publications there. And if you click on the title of the paper. That's a PDF link, which will jump up a PDF copy of the paper. So you can download those or just shoot me an email and let and let me know. But there's quite a bit of stuff there. There are also lists of conference papers. They're not necessarily available, you know, for download but if people if anybody wants them then I have them obviously and and I'm happy to let people have them. I'm just frantically writing this down if you have you got it now because I want to switch slides. So, that's basically what I was going to say. And obviously, I'm very open to any sort of questions I'm happy to stay here pretty much as long as you like. I mean if we get past one o'clock in. If we get past one o'clock then I might reserve the right to go and get a glass of wine but you know it's it's only opposite. It's only 10 to 12 here at the moment so that's good. I try not to start drinking before 12 in lockdown. It's funny because I was to, I was in. I was in the Caribbean a couple of years ago we bought a bought an apartment there and then we sold it because we were really boring there was nothing to do. All the expats in the Caribbean only do is drink all day. And I'm sure that's common to expats in many places, but I was talking to this guy and I said well how do you cope you know he said well of course I never drink before midday. And I went okay yeah yeah. And his wife's looking at him. I'm going, really? Obviously beer doesn't count. You know beer is just rehydration and I don't drink rum before midday and I thought the guy was smashed at four o'clock in the afternoon every day you know and I thought this is not for me. But you know I do like a glass of wine with my lunch. I have a thing on my wall in the kitchen that says if a meal doesn't include wine it must be breakfast. Anyway, any questions, please far away. I have a question. Yes, yes, Chen. Actually, I have like two questions one is like you're saying that the project manager really can't take chance to improvise in the process. And I think it might the purpose might be achieve us the goals in different ways so they can have new tools to be added on in the future. So, am I right or what do you think about this like improvise to have new tools month or new process to be built up. Another question is that if we take a take a like a further steps that if improvisation is put on a subject, or main subject to for the college study, what this subject could be involved like neuroscience or like a behavior or drama theater so what kind of major could that belong to those two questions. Okay, well the first question is around sort of tools and techniques versus, you know, can you just get some new techniques or new tools and I'm not a tools and techniques guy. I am a behavioral theorist really. That's where I came to academia from I'm obviously I understand some project, you know project management tools but but I'm, I'm a people person. I'm much more interested in innovation and creativity and and communication and empathy and commitment and that sort of stuff leadership. And so, it's a bit difficult does, you know, the, but certainly new routines come out of improvisation, you know, if you improvise successfully, and you learn from that. I mentioned this, what what I call emerging best practice. Now obviously in good organizations where they're receptive to this emerging best practice should be captured and rolled into the next round of processes and procedures, because if you find a better way to do things. It's, you know, you might as well, what you should be adopting it for the future. So, but some organizations are better at that than others, you know, I'm that there's a difference between tacit and explicit knowledge and I'm sure you're all aware of the difference between tacit and explicit knowledge. But you know when you learn something sometimes it stays in here. And sometimes you know you write it down, you know sometimes it ends up in a in something like this, you know so you can share it. But in good organizations that there should be routines to share new knowledge, so that it can be embedded into future activity. I would agree that there's a huge area of learning that gets missed in organizations because of their perspective on this. So from trying something different, something working. You'd think there was application to be had for it in improving the routines. But more often than not there isn't. But more often it's missed because people aren't looking for the rest of the organizations don't don't capture this. What they do is they get very interested in something that goes wrong. Have a big inquiry into it and blame and sack people. And there's very little to learn from that other than don't do that thing again. Switch of emphasis needed an improvisation can lend itself. Obviously it's better if you have some sort of formal process, but you don't have to have a formal process I mean when I was a project manager, we used to have knowledge sharing sessions. There were six project managers in the organization, and we used to have project sharing, you know knowledge sharing sessions which were basically called going to the pub on Friday after work. You know we would go down to the bar underneath our building on Friday at 530, and we would sit around and we'd chat for an hour or sometimes longer about how the week had gone and what we'd learned and what had gone well and what had gone less well. I mean that was very informal but it worked for us. I mean I think that most organizations these days would want something a little more formal than that, but it's so sad how often organizations don't take the opportunity to gather and collect and and and share new knowledge. I mean the waterfall model of project management, you know you execute execution is the third phase. The fourth phase is the post implementation review and learning, but a lot of organizations don't even do that. You know they, they deliver the project, they dismantle the project team everybody goes off to do new stuff because there's always too much stuff to do with and not enough resource, and nobody ever goes back and says, did we get what we thought we were going to get. Other benefits flowing through to the bottom line or to the efficiencies we expected or whatever. And what did we learn from doing this that we can reuse, you know, that seems to me to be common sense but lots of organizations still do that. Sarah's question where interpreting this but the issue is that these structures and the personnel are not supportive of the people within the organization so they have to improvise to get around things. A lot of improvisation is sort of triggered by trying to get around things. You know, one of the problems is that organizations, you know they call them organizations because things are supposed to be organized, you know, a set of processes that you just to follow to, to, you know, to reach an end, an end result, which hopefully is products and services out of the door and profit, you know, but things change. You know, we live in extremely turbulent times at the moment. Organizations are operating in extremely competitive environments. You know, you could, you could be, you know, developing a new product or service and suddenly one of your competitors comes out with something that renders that completely obsolete. There's no point in carrying on, because you're going to end up developing something that nobody wants. I mean, look at the iPod, I use the iPod as an example in my class, you know, we all had CD Walkmans, those of us who were old enough, and that was the way we listened to music. And you carried around, you know, a thing on your, a bag of CDs and the Walkman and, you know, you went jogging and the CD used to skip all the time because you were jogging or whatever. But the Sony's and Samsung's of this world were making hundreds of millions of dollars a year out of selling this stuff. I'm sure that in the year 2000, you know, Sony had a five year plan for implementing and improving and dominating the market in mobile music using portable CD players. In late 2001, early 2002, MP3 players came out. The iPod came out, it was an order of magnitude, many orders of magnitude better than a CD player. And within literally a few months, nobody wanted CD players, everybody wanted MP3 players and the vast majority of people wanted iPods because they were really cool. You know, Sony's income stream and planning was immediately obsolete. The income stream disappeared, the plan was obsolete, and there was no point in carrying on with that plan. They had to go, they had what, what one of my colleagues calls an oh shit moment. What are we going to do now? You know, and what they did obviously is they started to develop MP3 players, but they were there were two years behind the curve. And by the time they got an MP3 player out into the marketplace, Apple had 80% of the market. You know, things change. And there's no point in carrying on as if they hadn't, because that's the way to failure. You know, there are, there are probably very few companies out there now making horse drawn carriages, because we don't use horse drawn carriages anymore. The only person who uses the whole horse drawn carriage that I know, and I don't know her permanently is the Queen, you know, and she uses it twice a year. You know, there's not a lot of market anymore. You know, things change, and things are changing quickly and with artificial intelligence, and, you know, and all that stuff that's coming along stuff is changing even more quickly. You know, in five years time you'll be able to buy a car that doesn't have a steering wheel and you can sit in the back. That's a little frightening, I admit, but it's coming. I'm sorry you were going to say something Richard. Thanks. Thanks for the talk today and it's a lot resonated. And you'd be you talked a lot about individuals being able to improvise individual project managers being able to enterprise I should work quite a bit with projects, but more at the upfront end of it. And in creating an improvisational, almost improvisational plan, alongside the other alongside the more traditional plan and that kind of setting for me that kind of the improvisation is around a freedom within the structure. So those kind of things about, you know, being upfront about what is it that we're all trying to do getting the whole team, not just a single manager understanding what is it we're trying to achieve and what are the things that are going to impact us and what capabilities if we go and how would we respond to things in the future, and kind of setting up an expectation that things are going to change up front. And then I don't know how many organizations really do that and I was wondering whether you have. I've never heard of that and I think it's brilliant. You know, I think every organization should do that but you know that's, that's a very forward thinking, you know, way of looking at projects and, you know, anticipating the improvisation will happen. You know, let's try and at least put some boundaries around it and talk about how it's going to work. I think Ferris usually wants to have got stuck. How do we move forward. There's not research in that in that area on kind of creating a framework or a structure that enables that to happen then. Yeah, most of it's agility but actually setting up to be agile rather than just telling people to me. Most of the the improvisational stuff is around people it's not around, you know, let's build this in, let's build improvisation into the plan. It's a bit it's really about when the plan falls on its face, you know, then this is what we do but we tend to do it informally, rather than more formally and it would be useful to have people, you know, around who have the skills to be able to do this. So I think that planning for future improvisation is actually quite cool. This is something that the applied improvisation network has always done we've been an improvisational organization from the outset, so is built into how we evolve and develop. And I think there are some voluntary organizations that are more like that than some traditional organizations. I like your phrase, no I like your phrase freedom within structure I like that. I've been using that for well for 20 years so we're only getting out there. We obviously don't talk enough. I talked to Frank Barrett, 25 years ago, and the jazz guy, very interesting. Yeah, they're not looking at organizations he's saying he can see some similarity jazz organization. Frank's a nice guy is a very nice guys very shrewd observation and yeah I think he might have retired now or certainly you must be getting close. I wrote a book about about improvisational leadership. Yes to the mess which is actually a really good read. Can we ask Jim Bob say something about theater people having an edge that's improvising project managers. Thank you. A lot of exciting ideas here because my background is I was an engineer for 35 years work with project managers within a multinational corporation and we had one way of doing thing, but I also worked a lot in wastewater treatment plant upsets and chemical process emergencies. So I got, maybe I got a chance to improvise more than I would have had. Okay, when I retired and I got involved with community theater and improv got the feeling that this is very familiar. Okay, because a problem comes up. You have to decide on a course of action. And what I really loved about today's. Today's talk is now got a vocabulary to try to explain why things seem to work better. For example, the local community theater. Trying to balance the overriding principles the show must go on. We have a project to do. And I've seen some amazing things happen when, you know, people got sick when, you know, materials weren't delivered on time. And the, and the, the director of the theater, just amazing. He just kind of said yes and and worked up solution and it ranged everything from, you know, you know, changing special effect, you know, what a special effect didn't work. So developing something that substituted and was equally effective and, you know, just little things that they could do with line guests orbiting the giant hairball. Just writing that down orbiting the giant handle. Yeah, he worked for a hallmark. And the hallmark was mostly greeting cards. And he was very creative guy and he realized that, you know, things have changed and maybe hallmark should be involved in other things. And so, and he brought in the idea of selling Novelties and America Brack videos, etc. to hallmark and if you go to the hallmark store today. Cards are all the way in the back, take up less than 10% of the source base if there's a store. And hallmark makes a lot of money from with the ornament some decorative stuff there, but he recognized that he was too innovative. The giant hairball and that gravity to keep him from working on useless ideas and give him structure. So I think there's a lot more stuff out there now about Improvisational working practices. I mean, I was I was looking at stuff on on effectuation, for example, which is about sort of the way that people improvise within entrepreneurship. I was looking at stuff about holacracy. Which, which again has some links. And there's another one I can't remember. Hang on a minute. The paper here the other day. And be dexterity. And the other one I was looking for. One of the things about being in your office, at least I've got all the stuff lying around. Yeah, holacracy. And the others are reinventing organizations by Frederick la Lou. Yeah, so that, you know, there's a lot more out there now about stepping away from structure about equipping people to step away from structure and about allowing people the space to try, you know, different things in different styles. But nobody's really pulled it all together. That's the trouble. You know, that could be the role of this think tank. So, yeah, okay. To do that. Yeah, effectuation holacracy and the dexterity. Yeah, that's right. And yeah, la Lou. I probably pronounced it wrongly but Paul's obviously got all this stuff stacked up in his office on all these bookshops. It's a lot of it here. Well, most of mine is in the office because I have a relatively, I have a relatively small apartment so you know, most of my stuff's in the office which means I don't really see it so much now. So if you're thinking beyond individuals or small groups improvising, then Caesar's got this idea of China as a country that's improvising, maybe India as well. There's so much rapid development going on that they're all that they're improvising in ways again but probably not recognizing it as such. I think that's right because certainly in the, if you go back to the 1980s which you mentioned then, you know, only the elite had a man had any sort of higher education. So, as they relaxed communism and encouraged people to start their own businesses. People didn't know how to do that. You know, they, they were literally making it up as they went along. There's a really interesting book called Jugaad innovation, J U G A A D innovation, which talks about innovating in particularly in India, but in cultures where there is no real wealth, and you have to try and build something with minimal resources. Really interesting book is probably written about seven or eight years ago now. Can't remember the author. But, you know, in areas in places, cultures where there is no infrastructure to educate people about how to start businesses and about, you know, then you have to just get stuck in and have a go. And so yeah, I can absolutely see that in China and possibly more so in India. I don't know. Is there a sense in which, once you see things as being complex and not complicated, that actually improvisation is by definition, what happens all the time. You know, because if it's, you know, that this idea, complicated as things that they might be really difficult to work out but there's a, there's a solution and if you work your way through it, you can get to the end. And the complex being you throw something at it, but you don't really know how it's going to respond so you've got a sense how it responds and then react. There's no doubt that certainly, you know, projects are more complex than we originally thought or thought, you know, like 30 years ago when I became a project manager, it was, okay, well you decide what to do and then you put it in a plan and then you do it. You know, the, the interlinking, you know, connections, I mean complexity is about connections. It's about the number of different links you have to different other bits of stuff that can affect what you're doing. So as soon as you've got people in it, which is what your very first point was Steve that the that simplicity of project management works for certain things but when people are involved you bring complexity into it. It's all unique. I mean I talk, I talk about, you know, the fact that we all see things differently. You know, we can all look at the same issue and we'll all see something slightly different in terms of the problem, and we'll all see something slightly in terms of the solution, because we have different knowledge bases and different experience bases and, you know, all that stuff, you know, so the social construction of reality is what they is what research academics call it. And what we're all doing all of the time is we're looking at a particular circumstance set of circumstances, and we're constructing our own view of how we see that our own view of the reality of the situation. And my view of the of the reality of what we're looking at will not necessarily, you know, coincide with case view or Paul's view or Collins view because we have different thought processes we have different educational bases we have different knowledge bases. We've been brought up maybe in different cultures. You know, so we construct all that. And that means that dealing with people is challenging to say the least. Yeah, Sarah knows the same thing. Yes. Thank you Steve. Are there any other questions or comments that people would like to make before we close. I seem to recall you said at some point during your talk you mentioned the idea of that we need to sell this idea using the empirical evidence to sell the idea of improvising. And that I find that can sometimes be challenging because when someone hires me to present an applied improvisation workshop. I'm not necessarily communicating or dealing with the top bosses the top manager of the company I might be dealing with someone in the HR department for example. But they don't have the budget. Right. Yeah. And, like, last year, I, I was hired to present some workshops for a mate for the Asia Pacific region. Some staff members came to Hong Kong for a big conference from a big global management consulting firm. And it was all for the women and the company the HR manager wanted a workshop for them to learn more about how to be more confident in stepping up and expressing an opinion. And that was great. We did the workshop. They were very happy with it. But the bosses, the managers were not there. So these women went back to a workplace where the improvisational mindset was not part of the corporate culture. Yeah, because it's not supported from above. Yeah. And yeah, and that's problematic. I mean, I don't have any answers about how you how you sell this stuff to get work. It's just that it might be useful if you're in front of the right person to say, look, you know, this is not like pie in the sky stuff. There is empirical theory that, you know, that actually explains why this is successful and why, you know, in a turbulent organizational environment. The skills are useful. But how you get to the person who makes the decision to tell them that I'm not quite sure, you know, and I say I appreciate that that's the problem. You know, you're selling, you're selling your services to people who don't have the ultimate decision making authority, and you don't know how strongly the people that you've pitched to were going to push, what what what you're trying to sell. Yeah, so to the routine through looking at companies like Netflix, which explicitly adopt improvisational practice have blown away the competition might be another persuasive angle. Any other questions comments. I just add one. Been having this conversation or, you know, having been a PM for 20 odd years as well Steve, and then bumped into theater and improv in the last six or seven and hence what's led me to. So, very similar without without the academic slant that you have. And but I think it's just listening to the conversation. There's, there's a couple of things there's one, trying to link into Cape case point I think trying to build a conversation that has meaning for the put for people who do this every day, because the academic thing will work in talking on an MSc about project management in a business school. But most people what I do. So, for that audience who have paid money to go and get better qualifications. Absolutely. I think it's then what about the 95% to just do on a daily basis, do some stuff are working within the constraints of the organization that talks about and so basically it's trying to, I think put it in a language that will make meaning to them to say, why, why do you need to do something differently in the words connects with the kind of, you know, how do, how do they change what the benefits of that almost having the language for that is interesting. And I think that's what one part, and I second just another quick thought, believing is, I think, having been starting in projects, as I probably mid 90s starting in technology and then organizational change and moving through. You and I have a similar background. And so therefore, I think it's an interesting one that we haven't probably talked about today which is the label of projects has just simply over that kind of time been applied to more and more places. Yeah, because obviously civil engineering has been doing projects for lots and lots of years that's kind of where it all started. Technology then in the 90s was fast moving then adopted a project principles, and then business have done it. Now we're kind of software dev is trying to do agility then someone suddenly the rest of the organization thinks it needs to be agile. And to your points of sometimes that's useful and sometimes it's not. So all this kind of thing but I think the having them the being doing agile projects and having an and building in agility almost a daily, daily agility are two different things. And so therefore I personally I think our work is to do the latter. So how do you how do you create an agile mindset, which is the great thing about our world is, we have the tools to be able to do it. In other words, the practical things. And that's what many other places don't have. They talk about it, but we have things that can help you change on a daily basis, the practical, how you flex your muscles and basically put it into your system. So I think that's, that's, you know, the conversations I've been having over the last few years. And so do you how do you get that almost I call it collaborative yoga, because you're working on the mind and the body. And so therefore you actually kind of help people think in different ways, which then moves into the projects for you. Well, you're certainly right about, you know, projects becoming a generic term for stuff that's not really a project. Actually, that your second point, sort of a stimulated an idea about, I don't know probably getting on for 20 years ago now, when the agile software development thing started. They, a bunch of people got together and they wrote something called the agile manifesto. Yeah. Okay. And the agile manifesto became the basis for, you know, this is what we're about and this is the mindset we have and this is what we're trying to achieve. And would there be any mileage in trying to write a sort of an improvisation manifesto that AI and sponsors and not not sponsors in the financial term because I don't think he needs that, but which AI and the collective expertise within AI comes together to develop, which can then be used as a, as a starting point of framework for, you know, rippling that out. Two thoughts on that. One is that the project as a, as a field in which to do improvisation might be very fruitful as compared to the organization being improvisational, or the individuals being improvisational. The individuals already being well covered, I think, by a lot of current practice, but improvisational projects could show a lot of success, particularly with project having become this more generic term because it's not got to be there forever by the organization. Well, the whole idea of projects is the, you know, it's a unique, you know, a unique thing with a recognized and given deliverable. That's very suited to an improvisational approach, which is a lot of what we've been talking about in in today's session. And I really like the idea of an improvisation manifesto. It would read remarkably similar to the agile manifesto. If you look at the agile manifesto, it's virtually a definition of improvisation. Yeah, I've not looked at it for some time, but yes, when I did look at it, I thought, well, there's nothing new here. I'm doing this all, you know, but, but you know why not. Very catchy. Yeah, but, you know, the improvisation or improvisation manifesto, improvisational manifesto, whatever you want to call it, you know, and I'd be very happy to, you know, to jump in and be part of trying to develop that. I'll be calling a gathering soon. I had a feeling you might. Steve, thank you so much. No problem at all. Any time recording.