I recently read the book Impro - Improvisation and the Theatre by Keith Johnstone1. Itâs a delightful book all about improvisational theatre and importantly how to teach improvisational theatre.
The book inspired me to draw many analogies between the improv actor and the consultant and I have written a five part series. They loosely flow in order but each can be read in any order:
Chapter 1 - The Office is a Theatre for Work. This post looks at the central problem of âperformingâ work and how important it is for modern knowledge work - especially for the consultant. We end with some ideas around how to think on your feet without bullshitting.
Chapter 2 - Optimism as an Operating System. This post highlights the tendency for consultants to be critical and to see everything as a problem. Weâll reframe this by showing the power of being positive - especially for long-term retainers.
Chapter 3 - Blocking & Unblocking Clients. Here we think of clients as blocked actors and we take inspiration from the âYes! andâŚâ exercise to see how we can unblock clients to generate new strategies and creative thinking with clients.
Chapter 4 - Navigating Power & Status. How to get things done inside organizations by understanding power potholes and status switching. We explore the concept of high status and low status and show how the consultant has to become adept at a new skill of âstatus switchingâ in order to be successful inside client organizations.
Chapter 5 - The Contrary Consultant. Embracing the fool & the power of not fitting in. We explore the identity of outsider and how to reconcile this with working inside client organizations.
Which of these do you recognize?
Working on a detailed presentation only for the meeting to get derailed 5 slides in.
Ritually showing our face at our desks at the appropriate time to signal that weâre working.
Attending weekly status meetings to create the performance of keeping things moving.
Brainstorm sessions to create the illusion of inclusive creativity.
Workshops with scripted games and exercises and sticky notes to ensure everyone has a good time.
Jealousy of colleagues who donât do good work but excel at presenting their work.
People who talk about their work getting promoted more than those that donât.
Much of modern knowledge work is performance⌠In fact:
The office is a theatre, and work is an unfolding narrative on the stage.
Many people aspire to âsilent successâ at work - to do work that âspeaks for itselfâ. Unfortunately this is the wrong move in the theatre of work. Instead we should aspire to the opposite - for knowledge work, the performance of the work is the work.
Because in truth - how else could it function?
Much as we might like to think of organizations as rational machines - the reality is that companies are social organizations and people interacting with people is the way decisions are made and how work gets done.
And in this theatre of human work itâs crucial to speak up. Spending time on the performance is not wasted - in fact quite the opposite.
Without performance work gets sidelined, ignored or worse:
Among more than 120 evaluation and program executives surveyed at private foundations the US and Canada, more than three-quarters had difficulty commissioning evaluations that result in meaningful insights for the field, their grantees, or the foundation itself, and 70% have found it challenging to incorporate evaluation results into the foundationâs future work. A survey of over 1600 civil servants in Pakistan and India found that âsimply presenting evidence to policymakers doesnât necessarily improve their decision-making,â with respondents indicating âthat they had to make decisions too quickly to consult evidence and that they werenât rewarded when they did.â - why your hard work sits on the shelf and what to do about it
And in fact this excellent Twitter thread from Maxim shows the value in caring deeply about the presentation and context of the work:
Nobody ever picks the third, wacky, design direction.
— Maxim Leyzerovich (@round) August 1, 2017
What does the âperformanceâ of work look like?
Things like:
In the theatre of work the performance of work is intimately tied to the work itself.
But many employees attempt to hide or ignore the performance of work and the politics of the organization. They imagine that this public sphere of voice and politics is wasted energy or somehow âunfairâ2.
If we think of the office as a theatre for work the only meaningful way forward is through this sphere of politics and voice. As Venkatesh Rao from Ribbonfarm outlines in his post how to make history:
You do not appear in public through labor, let alone make history. Laboring humans are fungible as individuals, and only consequential actors with a political voice en masse (whether organized in egalitarian ways as a working class or non-egalitarian ways as a patriarchy, or ethno-nationalist clientelistic identity group). [âŚ]
If labor is about blending into the processes of nature, and making about interrupting and slowing it to create a durable world, action is about free behaviors that make history.
This ideas of âbeing publicâ and âexercising voiceâ both have relatively specific meanings in the Hannah Arendt sense and Iâd encourage you to spend time reading here if youâre not familiar3.
Here are two examples that might help explain opportunities for being public and having voice:
Example #1: choosing to take a position on something that situates you in the companyâs world. A great example of this is Steve Yeggeâs platform rant. Note how closely Steve is situated in the narrative here - itâs not simply an observation of the market but of taking a position on the world that situates Google, Amazon and Steve. This can feel daunting but ask yourself the last time you showed up in Slack to post something that has voice? To say something about the organizationâŚ
Example #2: asking questions in public forums (all-hands, quarterly business updates etc). These are opportunities where executives are inviting public voice - theyâre asking for people to take positions and have opinions.
Of course there are an infinite number of other situations where voice and being public are possible4⌠but most employees would rather shy away from these instead of embracing them as part of the work.
Orchestrating performances for your work is the key to more influence and more impact.
Ah, but so far what weâre describing is the reality of the working world. Now letâs situate the consultant in the theatre of work.
The luxury that full time employees gain is the ability to script and rehearse their performances - to plan ahead. The consultant is like an improv actor thrust into a play mid-performance, forced to find ways to fit in, go with the flow and steer the performance all while on stage.
For example - full time employees get the luxury of being involved in 2020 planning. Consultants are an outcome of 2020 planning and so get brought in mid-performance to course correct.
Consultants that attempt to halt the performance cause pain and typically donât stick around. Instead consultants that accept and embrace their nature as improv actors thrive and become integrated into the great performance of the organization.
As a consultant, attempting to tightly script and design the performance of the work will inevitably lead to missed timings, missed context or missed feedback.
Missed timings - As a consultant youâre often working less than 5-days a week with a client. So youâre slower than full-time employees. This means if you try and slow down to polish the performance of your work you can miss the window of opportunity. So the improv consultant must learn to un-polish, prototype and improvise in real-time just to keep up with the clientâs organization.
Missed context - Because youâre not a full-time employee (even if youâre working 5 days a week) you may not be included on all-hands emails, announcements and so on and so you always have to work hard to gain the full context of a client. Tightly scripting a performance doesnât leave room for new contexts to emerge during the performance. Instead there should always be room for new context to emerge and get integrated into the performance in real-time.
Missed feedback - Itâs not uncommon as a consultant to be the most proficient powerpoint user in the org (or at least your portion of the org). This has benefits but it also has the unintended consequence of making everything you touch look âfinishedâ. And finished work gets very different feedback from people than raw materials and thinking. So sometimes itâs important to un-design and un-polish your work, to invite people onto the stage to co-create the performance - this way you ensure that you get the appropriate feedback.
Good consultants think of performances more like an unfolding series of improv sessions.
Many organizations at the executive level already function like tight improv groups - reacting to implicit and explicit cues and playing off each other to make in-the-moment decisions.
As a consultant - this executive level improv troupe is where the real work gets done and where youâre aiming for. Itâs the essence of why Venkateshâs idea of client âsparringâ5 is so appealing - because it embraces this verbal improv decision making that everyone recognizes.
So how does this idea of improv begin to shape our thinking? Some obvious ideas:
And one non-obvious idea:
A failure mode for employees is striving for work to happen in the official channels - to wait for the meeting to talk about the strategy, to wait for the email chain to pitch in. This desire to make work âofficialâ means many employees are uncomfortable talking about their work on the way to the coffee shop or in the hallway between meetings.
But itâs exactly these free-form sessions when executives drop their guard, open up and the possibility to operate in a liminal space between contexts is possible.
And the most important thing to understand about these âspontaneousâ improv sessions is that they are most useful for laying the first seed of an idea. Good ideas donât instantly make an impact and if you want executives to pay attention you have to make sure they hear the idea several times. So drop it first in the hallway before formalizing it in a meeting.
Of course I say âspontaneousâ because actually humans are remarkably predictable and itâs often trivial to engineer these serendipitous hallway conversations. And you should be manufacturing them.
Remember - if youâre a consultant in a clientâs office two days a week youâre operating at a serendipity-deficit. You simply have less surface area to bump into people. So you have to cheat.
A fellow consultant friend brought up the idea of getting into the office early to deliberately catch the CEO on the way in the door before they settled into focus mode. To intercept them intentionally to create a small improv session. To lay the first seeds for ideas.
Above all else however, you need to embrace a level of âthinking on your feetâ - itâs essential to the consultantâs work and a consequence of being brought in mid-performance.
This âthinking on your feetâ is about the balance between deflecting decisions for further analysis and providing the answer there and then.
Example: one of the most visible ways this manifests is the first day or week with a new client. Executives love to probe you with âdifficultâ questions - learning to provide an answer that you believe in but leaves room for revision later is key. The real game thatâs being played here is not one of being right or wrong - itâs the executive asking two questions at once - firstly âhow much do you know?â and secondly âcan you improv?â to understand how useful youâre going to be in the theatre of work.
Unfortunately - in the theatre of work thereâs a fine line between thinking on your feet and bullshittingâŚ
Whoâs been in a meeting and been disgusted with people spouting things that are half-true, made-up or masks over the real truth?
Thereâs a fine line between reacting to a situation in the room and bullshitting.
As a consultant this is especially hard to avoid. Your default mode of operating is the liminal space between industries, businesses and markets. A few times a year Iâm forced to learn something new from scratch. This forces us to work in spaces where weâre often the least knowledgeable about a specific business (even if we are experts in the industry⌠And sometimes weâre experts at a discipline but neither knowledgeable about the business or the industry).
So hereâs a little guide to avoiding bullshit:
These are all ways to avoid bullshitting - but unfortunately thereâs one simple way to avoid bullshit - by being critical.
Itâs far easier to retreat to the critical, negative position and say why things wonât or canât work. Except⌠this is a mistake.
Being positive and optimistic is far harder but more effective. And weâre going to talk about that in the next postâŚ. Optimism as an Operating System.
I loved the book and as Venkatesh said âit is a textbook that teaches you how to see the world differently.â so consider it recommended. 
 ↩
Yes actually internal company politics and performance are unfair but changing that is not the scope of this postâŚÂ ↩
Handily Venkatesh has a more formal summary of Hannah Arendtâs work here - the first 22 slides are most of what you need for this post. ↩
Iâve not delved into it but I think there are insights to be had from studying speech act theory here. ↩
