 And please welcome Lucas Zeng with stories of improvisation. It starts to be an interesting story here. When I was a kid, I used to travel with my parents and my brother a lot. So once we went to Mexico and my father always planned the trips in advance, so he started a year before to read traveling books and to organize the whole trip. And that was great because we had the benefit of seeing beautiful places and felt safe because we saw everything that we wanted to see. But when I started to travel, I did it very differently. So for example, I went to Mumbai, India with some friends. And the only thing we did is to buy a ticket and fly there without having any plan. Now when we arrived there, the airlines told us that they lost our baggage. So we found ourselves strolling through the streets in Mumbai and I felt the freedom to decide every moment what to do next. So I loved it so much. And the Indian people came to us and showed us some hotels and so we co-created the traveling process on the way. And that was very different, as you can imagine, like my father did the planning. But even he couldn't plan everything. So when he was 41, the same age I am now, he came to our kitchen and told us that he was just diagnosed with cancer. And he told us that the doctors told him that they have to remove his leg in the next days. And as a 10-year-old boy, I was just shocked. And like, where do you have to cut it off? The next week, they removed his leg and he survived. There was nothing good about that. It was unexpected and the whole family struggled a lot. But even in these situations, sometimes you find situations in which you have a bit of fun. So my father was courageous enough to go to the next carnival as a pirate. And he dressed as the best pirate ever without having hair and just having one leg. Now people asked him, how do you do that? How do you hide your legs so well? And when he said, well, I had cancer, you can imagine they were a bit shocked. So as a kid, I experienced what it means to feel the security of having a plan, the excitement of exploring the world, but also to deal with negative life events. So when I started to improvise in theatre, it was due to the fact that I just cannot remember text, so I couldn't be an actor in movies or in classical theatre. But here I felt the same freedom like in Mumbai because we could co-create a story out of nothing and decide every moment what comes next. And then I realized over the 15 years of performing, that here I apply improvisation in theatre. But I also applied improvisation in travelling and applied improvisation when I played music because I didn't want to play music from the sheet. Why should I play something that already existed? That didn't make any sense to me to just play it. And when I started to lecture at university, in the beginning I planned everything, every minute what to do just to feel secure. But over the years I applied improvisation in lecturing. Nowadays I often ask students what is the topic you want to discuss about? And so I understood that you can apply improvisation in different domains because improvisation means, from the word, improvisers, unforeseeable. So we deal with unforeseeable events. And if you distinguish that from planning, that means that if you plan you design something, a script and a gender, and then you execute it. Because we're improvising, we're designing and executing ads at the same time. So improvisation as a human action means like a novel action undertaking in a short amount of time. And when I understood that, we started in a research team let's investigate the phenomenon on improvisation as a human action. And we started to conduct interviews with very many different people all over the world from different domains to ask about their stories on improvisation. For example, Amy Adminzen, who developed psychological safety, that means in a nutshell, that you feel safe in a team to take interpersonal risk. And she connects psychological safety with improvisation. So now you perhaps can hear her, I don't yet. I look at the technician if they can change that. So this was the music played. And as you can see, she's a professional dancer as well. So while the technician has stressed and tried to figure out what is happening, you can now hear her real voice. So safety is profound and very real. In fact, I have thought about improvisation for years as one of the core types of learning in organizations, you know, collective collaborative learning where one is continuous improvement, one is innovation, and the third is improvisation. And improvisation, just as you say, is that sort of problem solving on the fly almost necessarily collaborative because we each have a piece of the puzzle. And because it's collaborative and because it involves uncertainty and experimenting and having things sometimes work but sometimes not work, that means it necessarily brings an element of risk, an interpersonal risk or interpersonal fear. So in order to do it well, I've got to get over myself. I can't be worried about how do I look. I have to worry about what are we trying to get done and what do I bring and what do you bring. And then we've got to be absolutely candid and clear and brave, and that takes psychological safety. So thank you for your improvised episode right now. And now I try to go to the next slide. Oh, here we go. So you can also apply improvisation entrepreneurship. So I conducted an interview with Alex Osterwalder who developed, for example, the business model canvas. And he said, as an entrepreneur, you have to improvise all the time. As an entrepreneur, you have problems every day, every hour, every minute, and they always come from the unexpected. You need to do something and you often need to improvise, but you only get better at it over time. So today, I'm better at improvising not because I got a lot smarter but I got a lot more experienced. So I think we take improvisation for, oh, that's a talent. It's not just a talent. It's the skill that you learn over time. And now we're already trained with all the technician and light and stuff. So I also interviewed Patricia Maitzen, who lectured for more than 30 years at Stanford University in improvisation. And she applied improvisation in life. Such as that odd rule of go along with it. It's not about agreeing, but it's about opening yourself to opening yourself to the idea of the offer that's there and respecting the person that gave it. We've lost respect in some ways for one another and have pulled into ourselves and are taking care of ourselves. So improv reminds us that we have to shift the attention from ourselves onto our partners and the reality and whatever is going on in room. Yeah, we're respecting the others. But there are sometimes even emergency situations. So I conducted an interview with the police task force and he said, of course you had a lot of basic training but sometimes that routine kills. And he meant that because you just think it always be this way and then something different happens. So during the interview I thought I would test that. So I clapped into my hands during the interview and said, now imagine somebody just shot us. What do you do now? And he's calm and that was amazing. And he said, Lucas, you just pointed there. There's no building and I haven't heard any helicopter. But okay, let's assume there was somebody shooting at us. Well, you don't have a weapon and I don't have a weapon. So I pull you below there because there's a wall two meter thick and then we just wait because we're now at the police department and in a minute my colleagues will come and rescue us. So I understood that he really had already the mindset to improvise. Now all of these stories are amazing and very different but we had the sense there's some patterns behind that. So we started to analyze them. So four researchers of us started to analyze every bit and piece of these interviews trying to understand the patterns behind that. And one of the main factors that we called real-time doing and one person said, when you're really improvising you're living in a place where you seriously don't know what's happening going to come next and you're writing, directing and acting really in the moment. Now this factor consists of many sub-factors that you perhaps already know by heart. You have to deal with uncertainty to adapt to changes to prepare yourself if possible. You apply experiences, experience and creating new ideas you have to accept offers and if possible make use of processes. So this is a pretty complex phenomenon that we found and then we found that there are even more factors coming out of the interviews and that we call learning and training. So improvisation is not magic, it's not just pure talent. It's actually experiences. So the more experience you have the better you'll get at improvisation. So guess what? There are improv classes. Why? Because you can get better at it. And again we found some sub-factors explaining what that means. So first you have to learn the basic skills as a researcher, entrepreneur or actor-actress. But then you need the muscles to improvise. You learn from role models. You understand and playing the patterns in this domain and you have to deal with mistakes for example if the slides doesn't work as you expected that and reflect on experiences. But then we got one more step because we found out it's really a complex phenomenon and if you think of what I'm doing there are a lot of emotions, like positive emotions if you explore things and it's exciting but sometimes you're also frustrating and get over that and survive on stage for example. And learning and training helps you to be better at that so you create a mindful awareness, being aware of yourself, of the other person and the situation that is changing all the time and to create a mindset that is open and that helps you to improvise in that very moment. And while learning something in the field you also have outside effects that mean that if you can improvise in theatre you learn also to improvise in live or different domains. And based on that it's collaboration. A radical way of collaborating on stage or being a police force that you even feel like an entity that is bigger than your ego. And it's surrounded by embedded environments like here, a community that supports each other and has a specific culture or a team that has or has not psychological safety so that we can take interpersonal risks. But this is not the end of the research it's rather the start for us to do research because it's just one more puzzle piece. And so right now we're trying to find out how the improvisational mindset influences the creative process. So we'll invite you later on to go on this website and do a 10-minute test to explore the creativity and improvisation. And my two colleagues are here, Günther and Nicole and they will also help you if you have any questions on that test. And we can apply that also for learning and training at universities. So the last four years we developed a one-week course on business improvisation in which from Monday to Friday every day from 9 to 5 students and managers learn to improvise with different trainers and they change every year. To understand and to learn to experiment improvisation because I think this is a skill that is very helpful in the world we're living right now. But there's nothing like improvisation is only good or bad. As planning it's not just good or bad it depends on the situation when it is better to improvise and when it is more appropriate to plan. So last month I went on vacation with my family and I have two little kids and my wife is also an improviser. But we just planned to come to Spain, have a hotel and a restaurant and a pool because everyone who has kids know you improvise all the time and I do understand my parents much better now that sometimes it's great to just have a plan. However, I offered my son 20, 30 when he's 15 and I'm 50 I offered him to go somewhere in the world and to travel around the world in an improvised way and I think this is a great plan. But based on all these stories and experiences that had in my life I know part that life is not okay. Thank you.