⬅️ Books ⬅️ Read one book a week by Frank J Barrett
Improviser’s toolkit
- Approach leadership tasks as experiments
- how can you encourage people to see leadership as a set of learning experiments
- how can you make it safe to for people to take thoughtful risks?
- Boost information processing in the midst of action
- how can you create spaces for people to tell stories about what they are doing in their work, a chance to share learning experiences and insights?
- Prepare for serendipity by deliberately breaking a routine
- what routines do you notice that need to be deliberately disrupted so as to open the possibility of new thinking and the search for innovative solutions?
- Expand the vocabulary of yes to overcome the glamour of no
- how can you deliberately highlight the positive potential in nascent ideas that have yet to to achieve fruition
- where have you or others seen an obstacle and turned it into an opportunity?
- Take advantage of the clunkers
- how can you further the belief that both success and failure generate useful data that stimulates learning?
- when have you learned from a failure yet failed to let others know about it?
- Ensure that everyone has a chance to solo from time to time
- how can you assure that it is safe to articulate diverse views and that they are taken seriously by others?
- when have you last seen people support one another, help each other to think out loud, to experiment, to take a risk with an unproven idea?
- Celebrate comping to create a culture of noble followership
- how can you reward people for helping others be successful rather than simply rewarding their individual achievements?
- when have you last actively acknowledged that you rely on others’ input to improve or complete your thinking?
- Create minimal structures to maximize autonomy
- what are the core minimal values and vision that are non-negotiable, to which all must adhere so that all are free to embellish, branch out, respond, and innovate?
- Encourage serious play. Too much control inhibits flow.
- what can you do to lessen anxiety to support ongoing learning and collaboration in your organization?
- Jam.
- where in your organization are the open times or casual places that allow for happy accidents, serendipitous exchanges, fruitful conversations, and curious questions?
- Cultivate provocative competence: create expansive promises as occasions for stretching out into unfamiliar territory
- how are people in our organization playing it safe by repeating what has worked in the past?
- can you imagine an incremental disruption that might dislodge peoples’ habits and demand that they respond in new ways?