2004 AIN Global Conference:
Leaping into Chaos (San Francisco, USA)
These were the sessions from our 2004 conference:
Michael Berg
Move Your Body , Move Your Mind (Physical tools and techniques to enhance your improv)
This session is designed to enhance and add to the physical tools and physical vocabulary you use during improv. These skills can also be easily taught to your clients to increase their improv communication skills and fun. Following warm-ups, the focus will be on techniques derived from mime, comedy movement theatre, animal studies, exercise psychology, martial arts, Commedia Del Arte / European Clowning, sports, yoga and dance.
Paul Cicco
Team Rhythm
Just as every individual needs a body, a heart, a mind and a spirit, every team needs commitment, trust, intelligence and inspiration. Team Rhythm allows people to explore these dimensions of team synergy experientially. Participants can literally "shake loose" from their conceptual and interpersonal barriers to achieve higher levels of performance. Read more (pdf file)
Joyce Dattner
The Coach as Performance Director
This workshop will present an innovative, group-focused approach to coaching. Life Performance Coaching relates to people as the creators and the performers of their lives and development. This coaching approach to growth and change is not problem oriented. It is rooted in the understanding that we are who we are -- and at the same time, we are who we are becoming. In long term coaching groups, participants learn how to create new performances of their personal and professional lives, as they participate in the improvisational and challenging activity of continuously building the coaching group as a forum in which this kind of development can take place.
Karen Dawson
Emotional Intelligence: The EQ Edge
Have you ever worked with someone who was smart as a whip and a true expert in their field but had the emotional management skills of a concrete slab? This dynamic and interactive session explores EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE. What is EI? It is the ability to recognize our own emotions and the emotions of others, to understand why those emotions are unfolding, and to use the resulting insights to handle the situation more effectively.
Terrill Fischer, Cynthia Oelkers
You Are Your Best Advertising
Effective communication is essential for business success. We are evaluated by the way we communicate every day. Memorable and powerful business communication is an art form that requires we get heard above the roar of the communication flood. Dont get drowned out! The experiential workshop, You Are Your Best Advertising, is designed to give you new, dynamic strategies that will immediately enhance your communication skills so you can be heard above the noise.
Carrie Gallant, Sharon Sutherland
Thats Right! Using Improv and Forum Theatre techniques to mediate and resolve workplace conflict
The skills cultivated in improvisation are akin to those cultivated in mediation and conflict resolution training. Conflict often causes people to become stuck in their positions, emotional states, or their high/low status states or roles. Who hasnt seen a conflict escalate, while those involved remained entrenched and embattled, never coming to satisfactory resolution? Sound like a bad improv scene? Entrenched conflict costs businesses money loss of clients, valuable employees, lowered productivity, and so on. In todays workplace, managers are increasingly expected tomanage and resolve any conflicts among and between their employees; teams are expected to resolve their own issues and conflicts, and come up with creative solutions. This session will explore how managers and team members can use improv techniques to help others get out of their stuckness, and to resolve conflict creatively.
Izzy Gesell
Insightful Group Facilitation Through Improv
In any training or group session, there are moments of opportunity when participants are able to look beneath their surface behavior and into the underlying beliefs that spark that behavior. Improv theater activities make these instructional moments very evident because the way people play these games is very much like the way they respond to real-life situations with similar emotional content. By staying present you are aware when these opportunities show themselves as emotional responses. Then you are able, without judgment or correction, to invite the participant to pause, observe the beliefs that spark the emotion, andbring them to consciousness for dialogue and discussion. This approach forces you, the facilitator, to remain focused, authentic and as involved as you ask your participants to be.
Gary Hirsch, Brad Robertson, Julie Huffaker
The Wheel of Application! (Read with Game Show/Monster Truck announcer voice!)
For the first time at AIN......For the first time ever in public....... (or in private for that matter), its......THE WHEEL OF APPLICATION! Come see a range of client issues and the attempts to solve them revealed! Witness masterful mistakes! Hear real-life horror stories of late night, last minute design! Marvel at the courage and bravery of clients who put real money down to gain new ideas and learning--then actually use whattheyve learned! Come and spin the WHEEL to learn (more than you probably ever wanted to know) about how we deal with client issues such as: Organization change, New ideas and action, Values, strategy and future casting, Engaging audience, And yes, TEAMBUILDING And more!
Paul Z Jackson
Winning More Work: The art of wrapping improv in consultancy
How can you win more work as a supplier of improv? What is improv offering thats of real value to an organization and how can we make that even more compelling? Find out from experienced organizational consultant and business improviser Paul Z Jackson, who shows how you can enhance your business by wrapping improv in consultancy.
Kat Koppett
Interactive Storytelling: Building Connection, Creating Meaning
Storytelling is one of the oldest, most fundamental means of communication. It is also the latest hot business tool. Whether used for knowledge-management, visioning, values definition, coaching, inspiring followers or enhancing learning storytelling is a profound and compelling process. And the improviser has a plethora of riches to contribute.. In this highly interactive session, participants will explore collaborative storytelling techniques and their application to the workplace.
Warren Lyons, John Scaringi
Introduction to Joy of Singing!TM Leadership Training and Team-Building Events
SESSION DESCRIPTION: The Joy of Singing!TM Leadership Training, now in its 28th year, has nothing to do with how to sing. It provides easy-to-use tools and techniques in group and individual exercises that turn fear, embarrassment, and self-criticism into improved communication, increased power, spontaneity, and expanded ability to risk in the workplace. The session is 100% participatory. Think you cant sing? Are you sure you cant? DONT THINK, SING!
Joseph Mancini, Liz Berney
Who's in Charge Anyway?: Exploring Influence and Power in Organizations.
In this workshop, we use the lens of improvisation to investigate, dramatically and playfully, the perception of power in organizations; how power dynamics paralyze groups, how status positions can be exchanged, enhanced or diminished, and how improv can foster the cooperative use of competition. We focus, in part, on how the two most basic rules of improv enhance simultaneously the power of each individual and that of the group
Pamela Meyer, Tiffany von Emmel
Valuing the Improvising Organization: Or We get it, Why Dont They?
For the past several years, practitioners of improvisation in organizational learning have been asking scholars to help them demonstrate the value of their work to their clients. In this lively session, scholar-practitioners Tiffany von Emmel and Pamela Meyer will first share with you their own and otherscurrent research in organizational improvisation. Then as a group, we will explore how this research is meaningful to your own practice. You will develop new frameworks and conversations for demonstrating the value of organizational improvisation.
Dan Moshavi, Sally Baack, Laura Black, Katherine Lawrence
Putting Research Into Practice: Linking Improvisation to Emerging Management Issues
This session explores the relationship between improvisation and emerging management trends. Drawing on academic research, a panel of management experts will facilitate a discussion about the role that improvisation can play in enhancing individual, team, and organizational effectiveness. Panelists will focus the discussion on management issues that are less often the focus of improvisational consulting interventions: service quality, high reliability organizations, negotiation, and entrepreneurship. Participants can support their consulting goals by discovering new ways to position and pitch their business.
Lizzie Palmer, Mame Pelletier
Improvising a Long Distance Relationship: How to stay present when the person you're talking to, isn't. Literally!
In todays chaotic world of e-mail, cell phones, and long distance negotiations, its increasingly difficult to create a state of flow with your clients and co-workers. All too often tone can be misconstrued, ideas can be blocked, and things you hoped would happen, somehow didnt. This session will interactively explore ways to ensure flow when your clients, co-workers, and even loved ones are away. We will discuss recognizing the offers and overcoming the blocks.
Alain Rostain, Cathy Salit
Improvisation, Performance and Growth: Have we uncovered a new method for creating change?!
In this experiential session, Alain Rostain and Cathy Salit will share some of their work that combines the principles and tools of both improvisation and performance. Together, this combination can be a powerful methodology for change, development and learning - both in the business environment and beyond. To push the envelope on this, we'll aim towork with real challenges that are occurring (for you!) in the conference (interpersonal or personal) to explore this approach together. We'll discuss whether and how the interplay of performance and improvisation can create deeper learning and change as well as serve our community of practitioners.
Kay Scorah, Lizzie Palmer
Learn to Pause, or nothing will ever catch up with you with thanks to Daniel Kim
Our thought processes get stuck on the same old tracks, but they can be freed up by getting our bodies to move differently, or not at all. Movement, or the lack of it, can also be used to change the mood of a meeting to wake up a dull session or calm down a fractious one. In this session, the audience will be invited to observe their physical shadow stories, and accept physical offers. Well experiment with changing the way we think, what we notice and the atmosphere in the room by changing the way we move.
Rebecca Stockley
Let Your Partner Change You
The placement of focus on attention and connection can be liberating. To let go of control, and to allow your partner to change you is to practice flexibility. From basic exercises and games to dynamic interactions, this workshop will emphasize building on the diverse ideas and perspectives of your teammates and letting your partner change you. This focus on connection and collaboration will spur your team to new heights of collaboration and innovation. Throughout the workshop, tie-backs to communications and flexibility will be transparent.
Thiagi
PRECONFERENCE: OVERCOMING OBJECTIONS TO IMPROV AND PARADOX IN BUSINESS
This pre-conference workshop has three parts:
The first part deals with Thiagi's experiences with corporate training and performance improvement. Based on rave reviews and sarcastic denigrations from corporate types Thiagi has identified three major "but"s. The second part of this workshop is a crash course on Thiagi's approach to faster, cheaper, and better training design and delivery. The third part of the workshop? Thiagi has no clue about what's going to happen. More details...
Business Is All About Paradoxes (No, It Is NOT)
Effective business leaders don't solve problems; they reconcile paradoxes.
They are rigid and flexible. An entrepreneur focuses on both long term and short term results. A trainer uses both passive and active approaches. A facilitator encourages both competition and cooperation. A planner is both impulsive and reflective. A customer rep is both compassionate and mercenary. A team leader is both controlling andempowering. A researcher is both playful and serious. In this interactive session, learn how to become an oxymoron for fun or profit. Figure out why the opposite of every profound truth is also a truth and how to induce your own multiple personality syndrome. This session will not answer all your questions but rather question all your answers.
Sue Walden, Talia Shafir, Gail Heidenhain
Accelerated Learning meets Improvisation: Alchemical Symmetry in Action
... a hands-on exploration of the relationship between accelerated learning and improvisation training, with Sue Walden and Talia Shafir from our community and with Gail Heidenhain from the International Alliance for Learning
Matt Weinstein
Inventing Games, Playfair Style
For the past thirty years, the Playfair organization has created noncompetitive games for thousands of community building events. Each fall Playfair delivers its playful icebreaking events to New Student Orientation programs at more than 250 colleges and universities across North America. The rest of the year the Playfair staff presents improvisational team building programs to numerous corporate and association audiences. In this hands-on session, participants will get to experience some of Playfairs signature games and learning experiences, and will examine ways to make the learning environment safe for play. We will learn how to invent and change games to adapt to the changing needs of our clients. And well have some serious fun!
Applying Improvisation in Business and in Life: Where do you want to leap?
Open Space facilitated by
Nan Crawford, Gary Muszynski, David Matthew Prior, Yael Schy, Andrew Welch
On the final day of the conference, you are invited to join all attendees in exploring how we can put our conference insights into action. Using Open Space Technology*, this special session will allow you to engage with others and further the improvisation ideas you really want to explore.
Open Space Technology is an emerging trend in meeting design that empowers the participants. The operating principles of Open Space are in wonderful alignment with the world of improvisation:
... No advance agenda
... If it isn't fun, it isn't working
... Be present and let go
Bring your passion for applying improvisation in business and in life, as we each address the question "Where do I want to leap?" Join us in making 2004 a true leap year.
Nan Crawford & Pacific Playback Theatre
"Reflections & Insights"
Nan Crawford and Pacific Playback Theatre will close the conference with a dynamic performance to reflect our collective experience.
Nan Crawford will elicit feelings and experiences from the conference, and Pacific Playback Theatre will enact the audience's stories. Using improvisation and intuition, humor and compassion the performance will celebrate event highlights, integrate conference themes, and help transform insight into action. Rather than seeking closure, we will look to create openings as we go forth with a deepened understanding. More on Pacific Playback
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