 Please welcome again the miraculous the one and only Chris Parsa Muchas gracias Reina. Thank you everyone So I have the honor and privilege of introducing our speaker for the morning we go way back we met about 30 minutes ago It's been a lovely journey this relationship So with that I have written some thoughts Our speaker today is Robert point and Rob's work in essence has been a lifelong improvisation He left London to work in Madrid only to then move to Argentina where he worked virtually For a company in Scotland and know that wasn't 2022 that was in 1994 There was a chance meeting with Gary Hirsch who some of you may know which led to an improv base Consultancy consultancy called on your feet based out of Portland, Oregon And that is still thriving today Another unplanned twist led to 20 years of work at Oxford University Said business school where he is an associate fellow in essence Rob designs and facilitates learning experiences his improv journey began in 1997 which has been really about studying improvisation without the games all of which has been grounded in the belief of playing around with things and people Rather than trying to control things and people You may know him from one of his three books everything's an offer where we find let go notice more and use everything do improvise which you now all should own a copy of and Do pause which is tangentially related to applied improvisation, but there are certainly connections to be made He lives here in Spain just 80 kilometers away from Avila So not very far from where we are in an off-the-grid house in arenas de San Pedro But even that itself is an emergent process without any further ado. I welcome and introduce Rob There's something we all have in common if you're here There was some point in your life Where you came across this thing called improv theater in some form or other in some place or other And there was something about the way you came across it or something about it that drew your attention enough to make you want to do something with it or do some more with it and I'd invite you through this morning session to just think about what your story of that has been and We've been talking this week and the title of this conference is about our story But I would suggest that we've each got an individual story, which is probably very different and very diverse and Very interesting So I'm gonna do to take some prompt you to think about that is I'm gonna tell you my story Chris alluded to some elements of it just now and I've titled this the accidental improviser because it kind of all happened as it would seem by accident and yet Are things just chance or are there things that we do that make them more likely and For me, there's something here about actually quite deeply the way the world works, which hopefully will kind of unfold as I go on It's early in the morning. It's the third day of the conference depending when you arrive. Maybe fourth You may have been up late last night So I'm gonna invite you to do something else which is to as you listen to this if your mind wanders in The spirit that Chris just mentioned don't try and control that don't try and be diligent and be a good Audience member and bring your attention back to me Actually, I invite you to explore the wandering and to notice Where your mind wanders off because it may be that your unconscious is working and there was something there that happened or that was Triggered by something I said that is of more interest and significance than what I'm about to go on to say So allow yourself that that luxury So the origin of this begins with a t-shirt not any old t-shirt And not a t-shirt like this But this actual t-shirt which I bought at the Burnside Market in Portland, Oregon on a cold wet November Saturday in 1996 now This is a Gary Hirsch t-shirt as many of you know occasionally I get recognized wearing it because people say that's a Gary Hirsch t-shirt Which is nice for Gary not so nice for me But it moved me to get in touch with Gary We met to talk about the design for a t-shirt I wanted to do a t-shirt for a client at this point. I wasn't doing improv at all But I had just given a speech at Nike's design camp Which was also a piece of improv because I was only invited to do that because the kind of cool important guy They had lined up to do the speech dropped out so I've done this speech and it was a horrible brief because it was it was Like being asked to give something with a substance of a university lecture and the humor value of a best man's speech All-in-one whilst being told that the Nike designers were the coolest audience on the planet and they were very hard to impress and oh, you'd better be funny And there's another little riff and there's like yeah last year's guy was from Harvard and he wore He talked about the grateful dead and made everybody cry whilst talking about his experiences in a concentration camp So a hard act to follow so I did the only sensible thing that you could do Which is take some things that I knew to be funny rather than try to be funny myself And that included some little bits of film some clips of whose lines are anyway So I'd been primed by that experience. That was what taking me to Portland That's where I was in the place where I could buy this t-shirt So then I meet Gary Hirsch to talk about him designing a t-shirt for our clients And I was in branding and communications at the time and so as we're just introducing Ourselves he says oh, yeah as well as the public art staff and the t-shirts I do this in Pro Theater and I think because it had been in my mind. I said to him God, how do you do that? And he said oh, it's easy. It's just practice Because when I said to him how do you do that? I was thinking this must require some special talent and you don't look very talented Which I can say because I say it all the time in front of Gary, so he doesn't mind And then he went on and he says it's just a matter of practice And as he talked more about what that practice was or how he understood it I recognized a lot of ideas that I'd been exploring quite separately in a completely different universe called complex adaptive science so the science of complexity if you like is the scientific of understanding that scientific understanding of how Messy things happen in the real world not idealized neat clean things in the lab and I tried that as a workshop technique to work with People from a company I formally worked for and it ended up with them saying to me why does this sound like a new religion? Now that didn't seem like very promising grounds. That was another part of my priming. And so when I said to Gary You know just offhand off the cuff So could you do a workshop with a whole bunch of ad agency folks because I've got this brief for a thing down in Tempe, Arizona it was to do some big leadership retreat with Leo Burnett it was and and he just went. Oh, yeah, sure, you know, I later discovered he was kind of going Ah, you know, but he said yes as improvisers do and Almost then and there we decided to work together and I was leaving Oregon the next day And so anyway, I won't go into the whole detail of the story But that that's how it all began and it's an extremely kind of unlikely story and it seems a bit random But you'll all be noticing as I'm talking the things that both Gary and I are doing in that which are already embodying improv practice So we meet to talk about one thing that we're willing to listen to each other to explore our interest To get curious about what the other one's doing and to let that agenda go and then to explore and to build and yes And on each other's interests and observations in order to then immediately move into a space of doing something together And pretty soon afterwards actually starting a business but all of that I was kind of unaware of at the time and And I was unfunded of saying you couldn't have planned it You couldn't have planned it and they saw it for me somebody asked me yesterday about my passions in my interest I think this for me isn't an absolute passion, which is the most interesting and powerful things in my life I couldn't possibly have planned I couldn't probably even have imagined them So you take me back to university aged 18 or 19 in some kind of career planning session I couldn't possibly have articulated what I now do because it didn't exist and so It seems to me that a kind of hallmark of the most important interesting stimulating Alive things in my life anyway is That they couldn't possibly have been planned the human brain and rational analysis is a powerful tool, but It's hasn't kind of hold a candle to the nature of a complex adaptive messy generative Interconnected, you know a live living system Which is of course what we all are individually and what we we all inhabit so that was kind of how it began and Extremely unlikely and if I told you the story in full you'd think it was implausible and I was really just kind of making out or losing the plot Then if I fast forward a few years About a week after 9 11 So this time I'm already working with improv and working with mostly agencies and creative applications of improv And I got a phone call from a friend of mine In a big corporate in the UK and here's what I hear him say in that call I hear him say the world has changed Cast your mind back we're all old enough to remember that we remember where you were when you those events unfolded If you think of the week after we now don't know how the world is going to be This is what I heard him say the world is now going to be different. We don't know what's going on I want to bring together a diverse group of people to explore that that sounds like a good idea I thought you said I can't pay you but I'll pay you to come over from Spain And I'll put you up in a hotel and there'll be lots of other interesting people So that's what I'd understood and I arrived to find a boardroom table full of people in suits Looking very proper and very suited and booted and I'm dressed not unlike how I'm dressed now So I'm obviously already labeled as the clown by implication And I only got my first experience clowning yesterday with Jessica So I wouldn't feel particularly well prepared and this scene unfolds But she's probably all been in where somebody starts to do an introduction We kind of had it here actually and it goes through a series of introductions And what quite often happens is the first person says something about their job Something about their academic qualifications perhaps The next person says both of those and then add something about their family and then something about their extra Curricular interest and so by the time you get to the end it's taking three or four minutes for each person to introduce himself I'm sort of quietly dying going. Oh, this is horrible. This is not what I thought And it gets to me and I say I'm second to last there's 26 people there and I'm second to last I'm sitting there looking like a prune and So I say is anybody seeing who's lines are anyway, and they were kind of slightly puzzled go. Yes, I Said well, I do that with business people At which point the most senior person in the room who I think was also getting bored with proceedings Said that sounds much more interesting than what Nick's got us here to do Can we do that and I'm dying at this point because although on the one hand that sounds attractive in those circumstances I promise you I didn't want to stand up and do an impromptu workshop So I said desperate to get off stage as it were so it passed to the last person next to me Guy called Keith Ruddle. He at that time was from Templeton College, Oxford and before he introduced himself. He said I work in Oxford and actually we do some of that improv stuff as it turns out with Neil Malachi Who some of you may know or have come across And so later in the night in the evening at night I followed up with him in the bar and that led to a series of introductions Where I started working in executive education at Oxford University So it's not academic stuff and I effectively began doing an icebreaker session for a leadership program And that was 20 years ago and I stopped doing it about six months ago and What happened there was extraordinary for me was because what started off as something in a kind of fairly Necessary but fairly perfunctory fairly functional space, which is to bring people who are nervous At the beginning of a program or course together So this program is an open program since people from all over the world and people from different walks of life So it started kind of as an icebreaker or warm-up Which the academics called learning readiness by the way So if you want to sort of big up warm up you can talk about creating learning readiness that makes it sound grander But it began as that and over time as I kind of got over my imposter syndrome and learned something about leadership I realized this sort of took me back in in my own story back to that Accusation of it being like a new religion that actually in the world of leadership and executive development lo and behold What are they dealing with? complex uncertain Unpredictable uncontrollable interconnected changing circumstances and people there is no executive in the world Who can claim unless they're insane, which by way many of them are and Or if they're not their organizations are you know that most business organizations these days technically qualify as being psychotic According to the diagnostic and statistical manual of the American psychiatric associations, which is worth thinking about for a moment It's quite a serious point, but anyway There's none of them in the world that if they've got half a brain cell awake will Not acknowledge that there are many many things that are beyond their control And so in order to engage them in a conversation all you have to be able to say is to say well So what do you do when things can't you can't control things? Do you just work harder to try and control them? Do you just gather more data run faster put in more hours? Or do you do something else and here's something else that you can do So over the last 20 years that piece of work which started as a warm-up has morphed into a session on Navigating complex adaptive systems And I've been lucky enough to work alongside lots of the eminent thinkers in this field who bring the scientific Understanding this is kind of piece of re-incorporation From my own interest way back when to sit alongside the playful light intelligible Simple straightforward common day every day way of working that Inforizational theater in its language and its tools brings now Sometimes during that period We were busy building a house The house is kind of over there about 80 kilometers as Chris said and this is it and it's a house built in stone and Despite my enthusiasm for this emergent flexible adaptive way of working at this point I assumed That that that body of work would have nothing to do with the building of the house building the house a Solid project literally a piece of structure built in this case out of stone With legal requirements with building regulations with all sorts of constraints and controls and It wasn't natural even to me to think of improvising in that context But what's interesting and this is you know, I worked on it quite closely in a very Rudimentary way. I'm not a skilled craftsman at all, but I would help out with the builders So I would spend time and pay attention to what was actually going on and what I started to to realize and understand later was that Even or perhaps especially in a concrete project of building a piece of structure You need the capacity to creatively adapt or the project will flounder There will be materials That you can't get or that are wrong Errors will be made Opportunities exist that you might not have been able to see when you were drawing the plans and As this project went on it took about two years Realized that two things were happening. One is we were using What I call in this context creative adaptation, but is essentially improvisation To solve problems so for example and the winter we were building most of the house It rained incessantly which seems strange given the weather now But it does do that here occasionally and you can't work with stone in the wet It's really dangerous up scaffolding and so the builders started to dig initially the trenches for the services for the pipes and for the Cables that needed to go under the house, but it kept raining so they kept digging it rained more so they dug more and before you knew it we had a cellar which wasn't on the plans and What was interesting here was the reason they did that wasn't just kind of It wasn't just filling the time so they could collect their wage slip It was because we had built a relationship with those people of confidence and trust that they felt that we were part of their team And they were part of our team and they knew local knowledge that this house had been designed by somebody from the city My brother-in-law why because it didn't have a cellar and if you live in the countryside Especially off-grid. Where are you going to put the compressor or the chainsaw or the three mountain bikes or the summer stuff Or the things for the pool you've got to have some extra space So they weren't just doing it willfully they were doing it they were doing it intentionally But beyond and outside of the plan in the context of a relationship that had trust and confidence So that's the kind of on the you know opportunity side Sometimes opportunities would emerge out of problems So there's one day when Basilio and was up the scaffolding was on the top of a stone wall and stone wall's 57 centimeters thick as And so he was worried that when we had the when put this little roof over the top a little piece of roof that water Was going to get in if it came diagonally in and that was going to weaken the wall So he he suggested that we extend the roof and basically through a series of steps We ended up building a whole shaded porch, which also wasn't on the plans And so what I began to realize that even in this sort of very structured process This ability to improvise to flex to respond to adapt Was solving problems on the one hand and creating new opportunities on the other And I talked to my brother in law a lot about this about the limitations of computer aided design in architecture Which is very abstract where the hand is? Absent the mind is present. So it's this embodied nature of doing the actual work. There's one beautiful moment Never forget this one turning up on the house on the building site from Madrid with my brother-in-law and the builder suddenly perking up And go I'm glad you've come today And slightly defensively call my brother-in-law says, why's that then he says well because the way that you've sketched out this roof The body of the the body of the body of that part of the house is not a rectangle. It's a rhombus I'll spare you the details, but anyway, he's basically he said the roof is not going to meet the walls Bit of a problem maybe You see and that's what happens with the mind and with the computer you can miss that But if you're the hand and you're going roof beam here brick there excuse me so Jose Luis had a solution and he said so you can do one of three things you could incline the roof beam You could change the pitch of the roof or you could make the walls pinch And I suggest we do a collection of the first two or immediate one. Yeah, that's great Fantastic, you know and I'm reading a book at the moment actually that embodied intelligence That is a great example of it that there's so much more intelligence in the embodiment than we realize There's a lovely quote from Richard Rauti who says if the body had been more simple nobody would have thought we had a mind So that's brilliant So on my journey through this world of improvisation what I'm finding here is oh look even where I didn't expect to find it as an Enthusiast as a practitioner, you know steeped now in working in corporates in working in the university and working with leaders Working with corporate teams working with all sorts of groups of people Seeing that it's always there and it led me to this conclusion as you can't do anything only with improvisation If we just improvise this conference, we wouldn't be here You know all the work that that's been done to get a group of us here in this place with all the things We need that needs to be planned So you you can't organize anything or build anything only with improvisation, but you can't build or organize anything Without it without an element of it. There is no plan in the world that is comprehensive enough to anticipate Everything that could happen and that's framed in a kind of negative way Whereas I like to think of it in a positive way that the world is so much more rich There's so much more abundance that you know plans are a great start point and they get you going But actually doing the simple things that improv encourages us to do pay attention notice use what you've got is Absolutely vital and much simpler and easier and a lighter gentler way of being So is this work progress progress is I'm getting a bit closer now because this photograph was taken six kilometers away So my wife's family have a property where she farms literally down the road where I've been staying and When I was a university student, I used to go on reading weekends and I thought it would be a good idea to catch up on my reading again after all this time So I started to organize reading weekends reading retreats, but kind of with a twist So this very different from a book club so It was the idea of reading different things and kind of cross-verbalizing ideas And actually as I was developing this idea for the first time I'd invited a group of people to come to this amazing place And they weren't paying very much attention and I still hadn't worked out how I was going to choose the books And so I thought okay Give the work back to the people So give the work back back to the people which is a very kind of improv It's very sympathetic to the improv way of thinking actually comes from the work of Ronald Huyvitz at Harvard in adaptive leadership So he talks about not trying to solve the problem as a leader but give the work back to the people They're the people the best place to do it So in this case what I did was asked people to suggest books and that had two effects One was it saved me the labor of having to choose the books and secondly It got them interested and paying attention and sharing the responsibility So if when they turned up there were no books at least they'd feel partially responsible And as a byproduct it meant you got a list of books that by definition No one individual would have chosen so fabulous diversity and contrast without any effort So the way that the reading weekend is done unfolded The first one I did I thought well these will all be interesting people and what happens if on the first morning Over breakfast they just get into a conversation and they don't want to read what do I do then got this issue of control again How do I control them? How do I make them do what I want to do is the sort of the mad woman in the head that Eduardo gave us yesterday for which many things not heard that before and So what I decided to do was Was we put all the books out on a table and The thing I'd not noticed was that people came with great hunger to read and also I'd set up these two rules So one was you can only have one book at any one time You can have it for a shorter time as you want or as long a time But if you take it for five minutes to skip through it decide you don't like it needs to go back on the table And the other rule was the more interesting one was a simple piece of kind of you know guidance which was Read between meals talk over meals So we have this tradition here in Spain of last over a message a long conversations over meals And and that was kind of what gave me that idea and of course I needn't have bothered because it's I needn't have worried about whether people would read or not partly because people had come To a reading weekend. They were desperate to read the idea of being left alone in company with a book was heavenly for many of these people but also as Soon as I'd set that up read between meals talk over meals You can imagine what started to happen people started to think all these other people are smart. I'm stupid, of course I'm just an imposter. I shouldn't really be here But all these other people are smart and he said we're gonna have to say something over lunch So I'd better have something to say so I'd better go read so Only after I've been doing this for a number of iterations. Did I realize this is improv? This is a 72 hour experience organized with no controlling structures With a container that's held with a few prompts and inputs and invitations to people because the conversations over the lunch are truly improvised and Free-flowing and open and not necessarily about the books in fact the whole weekend is not about the books at all The books are just a star point just a first offer And there are a lot of other events that I've designed that I've realized only belatedly Improved without the games So kind of takes me to where I am now. So when the pandemic began I was in Oxford actually and ended up kind of locked down there and Like probably many of you here I had a huge aversion to working online I had no interest in it. I was deeply skeptical of it. I thought it couldn't possibly be my thing I just had a visceral reaction. I did not want to go that And what I saw was my Not quite employer, but my Alma Mater if you like the Said Business School at Oxford University, which is literally a mile away from where I was sticking out videos of talking heads What's called chalk and talk in the trade? Clever people offering expertise and I just thought this was rubbish. I thought this was really stupid That was the last thing that we needed and I'd be skeptical of its value in the General way of things but in the pandemic. I thought it was just awful. So once I'd got over my carping Kind of shard and Freud look how rubbish they are. I kind of went okay smart ass What would you do then and There were a couple of clues So one was I'd put a few little videos as you know We're all experimenting with online at this point up on LinkedIn of just talking about some of the practices that I write about in Everything's an offer and do improvise and they've got quite a lot of traction by my standards. I'm a very Amateur social media person and so I thought it's interesting and it reminded me of how in those sessions at Oxford's after You know, I must have done hundreds of them Always working on them always improving them. They're never the same But you know, I had a body of experience and I'd realized that actually the kind of set of ideas that I had to offer to somebody Could be kind of transmitted in about 20 minutes. And so what if I did that online? What if I took the 20 minutes of my take on this body of work and the simple set of practices? And so that became this thing called the everyday improviser Going away from kind of corporate applications and thinking more about improv in everyday life and of course everybody is improvising nobody has a script for their life and Just putting it into a playful gentle kind of format borrowing actually follow enough another very Improving to do borrowing from a completely different world during a lockdown like many of us I'd been entertaining myself with various physical activities and I'd taken up a thing that I ended up calling torture yoga More probably called Lucas Rockwood's 21 Popening yoga, which I would highly recommend But he had he he was somebody who seemed very well versed in this format So I borrowed the idea in the way that Gary and I because we do this together Gary Hirsch and I run the everyday improviser is 20 minutes a day for a week Spare her through a working week An introduction a practice a day and then a conclusion so five sessions and then an optional Q&A and all of its video And you can if you pay to come which is not very expensive. You can watch it at any time So if you like what I was doing there was a kind of taking everything I've learned How can I make it super simple and super accessible and then the other was more of a response to the side business school thing and The programs I've been involved with have been designed very skillfully and used many artistic and creative Methodologies including in product but not limited to it But they still have the semblance of structure What one of my colleagues there calls the fig leaf of the program? And cause fig leafs traditionally in paintings protect your important part So, you know, maybe the fig leafs important, but but what the other thing I started to explore is what would happen What would what do people really need and what would happen if you allowed a program a learning? Endeavour to be truly emergent What if you had no curriculum? What if all you paid attention to was the container and you thought carefully about the stimulus that you put into it So that has become the thing that I'm now mostly occupied with which is called yellow And we're about two and a half years in now And what we do is we bring together tiny tiny groups my partner Alex caribis and Berlin and I we do all of this online Initially, and we add events to it But what we do is we put together small groups of six people which are facilitated by us and there's two levels of improvisation going on So on the macro level, there is no curriculum We have no idea where each individual group is going to end up they meet for two hours once a fortnight over six months So very slow very long and we still have no idea where we're going at that macro level It's very very inefficient because it means that every single session is designed specifically for that group But since what I like is designed that's great for me And we've run over 153 Different individually designed sessions. So that's what's going on in the big art and Interestingly more and more people still a significant minority tiny minority probably come to us wanting that They've got their structured learning elsewhere They want a place as one of them described it a counter space To be able to learn what it is they need to learn or to be able to uncover. What is their question? And as an aside, we've learned along the way an awful lot about what you can do on zoom So in those sessions we do bodywork. We've done dance. We've done tons of improv We've made constellations on the tabletop. We've eaten things We've you know, we there's a lot more that you can do at the level of scale Tiny level of scale with what I call a non-porous boundary So when you know who's in the room and you get to know and trust those people and establish psychological safety There's an awful lot you can do. So that's the kind of the macro Improvisation in yellow, but the micro improvisation is with each session. Yes, we have a start point So we know to give you an example a question that arisen in one session, which is what brings me alive and We thought that's a really interesting question It's a question that actually in yellow keeps coming back, which is also interesting So what brings me alive? And so we invited a regenerative olive oil farmer who I'd met a conference guy called Will Rolf Who runs a beautiful olive oil business called to Phil Zach Ross with his brother And we invited him to come and talk about their practice of regenerative agriculture How do you keep an olive tree alive? And what does it mean to to? To create a fertile system in all of its facets social as well as ecological organic and We use that as stimulus to talk with them about that question what brings you alive But we didn't have an hours lecture on olive farming. We had maybe will talking for 10 or 15 minutes telling a few stories But the micro improvisation is we might do something like that or we might start with a question and not Know where it's going to go at all or completely abandon The plan such as we had had all together so in the chit chat and the arrival It might become apparent that something is really going on for somebody. So on one occasion One of the people in the group who was a banker It turned out that while we were meeting people were being fired. He knew he wasn't going to be fired But that was going on in the background of his organization. So that Session game about that. So we let go of the agenda. We attended to the emotional room and It might seem that we were perhaps Kind of pandering to that one guy but but not really because that was there and that was real and it was alive for everybody So that can happen or sometimes a marginal comment early on might send us off on a tangent altogether So just to end off then where this kind of brings me to is for me improv has always been this it's not the answer It's not even an answer, but I'm not interested in answers. Anyway, it's always seemed to me like an incredibly light playful simple intelligible legible language for understanding something really important about the way life is and I don't just mean Human life. I don't mean life in organizations. I mean life the big stuff organic life everywhere of which we are just an example so for me that that's kind of been its delight and it continues to kind of yield understanding and insight for me and Recently I've come across the work of Margaret Heffernan who used to work at the BBC She's now a professor of practice at Bath University in the UK and has written a lot about kind of uncertainty and complexity And she has this lovely lovely idea, which is kind of enthralling me at the moment So she says, you know, maybe you can do this for you now Imagine I could give you the script of your life Imagine I could tell you what the experience that you're gonna have for the rest of today will be and tomorrow and the next day I can tell you what you're gonna have look for lunch six years on Tuesday I can tell you when you're gonna die who you're gonna meet I can lay all that out in front of you How attractive is that? Not is it not attractive? I would argue that's not living Margaret says that's turns life into a process of waiting for the train And I think when I started with improv what I did was I presented it in the corporate world as a kind of You know this terribly awkward or complex changing thing that you can't like this improv stuff will help you with that And implicit in the promise I was making unconscious was a kind of I can get you to the promised land Via this improv stuff. I can get you to a place of certainty and understanding and security And I think now I don't think like that I wasn't trying to think like that by then but I back then but I think it may have come across like that What Margaret says now is that uncertainty gets a bad press But if you think about it much as most of us will say we don't like uncertainty Politicians will certainly say that business people will say that uncertainty the not knowing is Where almost everything we care about lives It's where we have agency. It's where who we are and what we do makes a difference It's where our creativity lives or comes from or ends up. It's How we create and craft our own identities So for me the shift over these last 25 years has been really from if you like a coping With uncertainty and complexity to almost a celebration of it And the ideas and experiences I've gleaned from improvisation along the way and I continue to use a kind of what have guided me and supported me Scaffolding the scaffolding that's kind of brought me through that journey And I grew up next to Salisbury Cathedral and when I was a schoolboy looking up at the cathedral, which is 135 meters high. I often used to think I wonder what kind of scaffolding they had So I'll stop there. Thanks very much for your attention