I’ve been given the great opportunity to work in a theatre again, eighteen years after I last stepped foot in one as a creative participant rather than an audience member. It has been wonderful.

On one level, the project was a teambuilding one. Richard Jacobs of Yes asked me to help him out with a client who wanted to explore their corporate values, and in so doing, develop the work-related skills of collaboration and innovation. No big news there. Companies come together on off-sites every week of the year with such intentions. They could have abseiled down a cliff together, or built a raft out of twigs and lemon peel and sailed across a river. But Richard persuaded them that they could just as well generate some healthy anxiety by coming together on Day 1, knowing that 28 hours later, by the end of Day 2, they would be performing - having devised it, written it and (for those who did not want to ‘act’) learnt the complementary skills of stage management, lighting design and so on - a complete one hour play for a specially invited audience of friends and family. And all this in a real theatre, the Unicorn.

On another, personal, level, this has been a journey for me. I came into the business world from theatre, and, here I am, about to take a sabbatical from business, apparently coming full circle. Back to the stage. Back to the magical place.

When I was writing How to Make Work Fun! I went to the States to talk with a man who had written a similar book over there. It transpired that as well as being a ‘fun consultant’ CW Metcalf also had begun in the theatre (and along the way played Bozo the clown in Happy Days - a character I cannot recall but who almost certainly was the spitting image of Crusty the Clown from The Simpsons). Anyhow, CW told me that he thought all business people should have some experience working in the theatre, for two reasons:

(i) that, without any exhortation or theory or coaching to be that way, theatre is inherently a team activity. The guy on stage doing a soliloquy from Hamlet knows that he is no more important or necessary than the guy hidden away in the darkness at the back of the theatre with his hand on the lighting controls.

(ii) that there is nothing in business that - despite its bluster and macho will-power and long-hours-work-hard-get-the-job-done effort - is akin to the extraordinary energy or spirit that kicks in in the final days before curtain up, and transforms a rag bag of doubting actors and suddenly new props and gaffer-taped scenery into The Performance.

This energy is known and has passed into the collective consciousness as the cliché It Will Be All Right On The Night, but I assure you, the phrase doesn’t do the experience justice. And as I stand here in the darkness of the wings at the Unicorn Theatre, I am remembering its power. It is like being held, and lifted…

My belief is that the great untapped potential of Organisational Development is how people talk to each other: what they say, what they don’t say, and how the nature and quality of their conversations creates the ‘field’ which they then say they ‘experience’. The challenge is that this field is a result of the talking, rather than the instinctive understanding we tend to hold that our talking simply describes the field and the experiences therein. The clearest demonstration of this is when I ask you to tell me about your company, or its culture, or the problems it is facing: you can’t do that without including some stuff, and leaving other stuff out. And in this natural, often unconscious, editing of ‘reality’, you have your company be as you want it to be, for whatever reason you have for doing that. So you tell me about the problems, and you describe and justify those problems with data - and of course I do that too when I want you to know how unique and special my own personal problems are -  and what we all end up with is the story of a problem-saturated company.

It may even be ‘true’ that your company faces these problems, but even if it’s true, it’s not especially helpful or empowering to talk about them in this way. On the contrary, it probably results in us both being agreed that there’s an awful lot of intractable problems in your company, and dismayed that we’ll ever be able to do anything about them.

The work therefore becomes exploring what is left unsaid, what is being edited out. And that’s where the potential comes alive again.

So a good question to ask is: “Tell me - what’s working around here?”

On the verge of our move, and in the midst of what might be seen as my second mid-life crisis, I am in the wondrous, glorious, precious position of being able to stand where I am and look back at my life to date as an OD consultant and reflect on what, above all else, has made any difference at all. From those reflections, I have compiled this one page.

I heartily recommend anyone reading this to carry out the same process, whatever your field of practice: what really worked for you, and what, in the end, turned out to be so much puffery?

A necessary side effect of such an exercise, perhaps, is the realisation that so much sound and fury has apparently been wasted on stuff that didn’t actually work at all. Ah well…I wish I’d have had access to this single page of text when I started…

what-works

…all sorts of stuff, really