Drama In Business: Playing With Purpose

Beautiful, creative chaos… 250 people from a consumer electronics company taking part in a radical alternative theatre workshop. I wish I remember it so well because of the impact it had on those who took part. Sadly the truth is that this event is etched in my memory because it of its rarity.

Employee events are very much part of the corporate landscape. They come in all shapes and sizes and the industry that goes into supporting them is large and established. Leaders often use events to try and cause a shift in attitudes and behaviours. And more often than not they are disappointed with the outcome. It doesn't matter how grand or glitzy the event, how polished the presenters, how much fun the 'team building bit' is or even how high the satisfaction ratings, the shift just doesn't happen.

In this article I would like to use the story above to offer a view that there is much to be gained from employee events if leaders and organisers can have the courage to get participants playing with purpose, by which I mean combining a clear commercial objective with a more compelling, engaging intervention. From this experience, and others like it, I have pulled together five tips for turning an employee event into a purposeful playground!

Back to the radical alternative theatre workshop…

The company had been through a tough year and was facing into the prospect of further difficulties in the coming period, including re-organisation and downsizing. The temptation was to follow a traditional routine; deliver the hard messages from the stage in the morning, have some sort of fun activity in the afternoon, and a dinner in the evening. The leader though wanted something more. Even though he was prepared to stand on stage and deliver some really hard messages, deep down he knew it would not be enough to move his people from passive audience members to active participants in a change process, which was what he was looking to cause.

I had previously studied and adapted the work of drama facilitator Augusto Boal, whose radical approaches to theatre had been dubbed ‘a rehearsal for revolution’ in many of the South American communities that he had worked with. This was not an obvious fit for a corporate event in the UK! So when I found myself proposing Image Theatre in an early design meeting, I was surprised that, after an initial silence, they decided they would give it a go.

Image theatre workshops are designed to help groups transform the way they are experiencing a difficult situation. It’s a simple enough concept. A group creates an image, using themselves in tableau, of how the difficult situation feels to them. They then create an image of how they would like it to feel in the future. They practice these two images and then create a transition from one to the other. This simple act of drama creates a strong embodied experience for those taking part and a powerful visual sequence for the audience – who are also experiencing the difficult situation.

What made it harder in this case was firstly that 250 people is probably ten times the ideal number for an active drama workshop and secondly that there would be a high degree of warm-up required to get people fully immersed in the task at hand. We had to make sure the space would cope with 250 people in free-flowing, animated play and that there was enough direction to prevent anarchy without stifling creativity.

The event itself was extraordinary to experience (no surprise given I am now writing about it!). At its heart were two commitments that were designed beforehand and executed in the room:
1. People needed to engage fully with the business struggle and how they might come through it
2. Creative play would be the tool to unlocking insight

It would have been really easy for the leaders in this business to deliver the tough messages in a more traditional way and then seek to make people feel better by engaging in a ‘fun’ activity to help them feel better about their situation. They made a much tougher choice; the choice to risk spectacular failure in a quest for a truly effective learning experience for their people.

This particular company is in better shape these days. People still talk fondly of their memories of that event. Like a good documentary, playing with purpose had provided both intellectual engagement with a tough set of business messages and a highly emotional learning experience that had served them well over the following period.

I tell this story to advocate more creativity, more joy and more engagement in employee events, not as an avoidance of the business agenda but precisely the opposite, because events can connect employees to key business issues is a way that few other activities can. So if you are involved in designing and running an employee event in the near future, what might help you find the courage to play with purpose? Here are five things that you might want to bear in mind.

1. What are we trying to cause here?
The first conversation should always be about what the aim of the employee event is. This should be a no-brainer for all events, and it surprises me how many times it is not attended to clearly enough early enough. For a play-based event it is doubly important because a clearly defined goal can act as a beacon, allowing creativity to run riot in the design process.

More often than the not the leaders planning an event will be looking for an increased level of commitment to, or engagement with, a business priority or set of priorities. These are great signs for a play-based event because they encourage active participation rather than passive observation.

2. Playing is not only for kids
Perhaps the biggest barrier to overcome is a psychological one. We tend to think of the work of large organisations as being very serious, which of course it is. And we find it hard to see playing as anything other than childish. So putting the two together can seem incongruous, inappropriate an even offensive. This is especially so if, in an organisation, there is a history of sophisticated events with high production values and lots of intellectual content.

In my experience there is a playful child in all of us. It is true that it often requires time and effort to locate that child and encourage it to play - in the story I told before we had two hours of warm-up activity to get people fully immersed – but it is always worth it. And I have found the places where it is hardest to locate the inner child, prison for example, often produce the most outstanding results when the playing starts.

3. Playing is not a distraction
Even if we overcome the barrier above and accept that, in certain circumstances, there is a child willing to play in all of us, we can still fall for the misapprehension that creativity and free-play is somehow frivolous or a distraction. This is often supported by a traditional construct in employee events, where the ‘serious work’ (code for boring and stale) is followed by some ‘fun activity’, rather like medicine being followed by a spoonful of sugar. This is not a helpful point of view.

When I advocate playing with purpose I do so with my most serious face on. It is not about whimsy, entertainment or bonding; a creative active session is about creating a relationship between the business agenda and the people in the business that is compelling, credible and emotional. In my view, if a business is grappling with downsizing or a merger or a change of direction, and if the purpose of the event is to get people on board with all that, then the role of playing with purpose is right at the heart of the work, not a peripheral soothing activity.

4. Freedom within a framework
So having established that we can all play, and that the play has a purpose that is core to the business, we are now looking for that creative sweet spot between rigidity and chaos.

My interpretation of Ralph Stacey’s model, created at Relume, suggests there is a chasm of creativity between the extremes; from experience during the design of an employee session it can feel more like a razor’s edge, i.e. a really trick balancing act.

Most people understand that creativity requires freedom for spontaneity, flexibility and fluidity. An over-engineered design can stifle innovation and real breakthrough playing. This seems to be an issue at larger events in particular where each minute is accounted for in the running order, especially where a production company is involved. The event can often feel like a show, with every movement choreographed and rehearsed to within an inch of its life. Which of course leaves no room for the unexpected, the emergent or the creative.

What is less understood but equally important is that playing with purpose requires a framework in which to flourish. The idea of rule-less, wild free-play as being the optimum conditions for creativity and engagement is a myth that helps perpetuate organisers’ fears about trying more ambitious activities in events. In order to fully take part people need to feel safe and supported, particularly if they are reluctant participants with a deeply-buried inner child. So part of the work is to provide a framework for the work that can contain creativity without stifling it.

5. Engagement is engagement
Engagement is one of those over-used and under-understood words that floats around many of our large organisations. It is measured in many ways and discussed in even more. For the purposes of this article my point is very simple. Playing with purpose requires people to fully engage with whatever it is they are doing. And by being fully engaged in the process of playing with business issues that affect them the participants become more emotionally engaged in each other and their company.

To see 250 workers creating complex images representing the issues they feel strongly about, using their bodies as instruments, was to see full immersion in a process and a task. And the nature of the process, playing with purpose, combined with the topic at hand, the business agenda, combined to create a level of employee engagement that could not have been matched that day, no matter how big the budget, or how charismatic the leaders were, nor how slick the production values.

I regularly get involved in large corporate events in my work and the story I told at the start of this article is sadly still a minority one. I believe that participation, emotional engagement, creativity and fun are the key ingredients for meaningful, memorable employee events and hope to have many more stories to tell in the future.