Facilitating Creativity: Part 2 – Ensemble, Exchange, Collaboration

Do you facilitate or lead groups? This article is for you, outlining the crucial steps and skills to facilitate creative thinking. It’s the third in my series of reads about creativity that end with practical exercises and activities you can adapt to your work.?

My first article ‘Creativity; what actually is it?’ outlined the foundations of creativity, defining it as ‘as a way seeing and being, enabling the novel and useful to emerge’.

My second article Facilitating Creativity: Part 1 outlined the first two key creative aptitudes, or dispositions, you need to master if you want to facilitate creative thinking. These are 1. Listening, and 2. Rupture.?

This article unpacks aptitude 3. Ensemble, exchange, and collaboration.?

On the first day of almost every creativity course I deliver, someone with an equal mix of earnestness and anxiety approaches me to say:?

“I am looking forward to participating, but I just have to tell you that I am not creative”.?

They are always wrong. By virtue of being human you are creative – it is our defining characteristic. Everyone has the ability make connections between disparate ideas or to focus their imagination on a specific task. What they mean, when they say “they aren’t creative”, is that they are not confident making art.?

Like any skill, creativity can be learnt and improved with practice. What I focus on in the courses I deliver, and these articles, is identifying the key aptitudes, or mindsets, and strengthening them with short exercises. Think of it as creativity brain training!

The key aptitudes of creativity are:

• Listening, looking, empathy, noticing, becoming attuned?
• Rupture, de-ritualising, breaking patterns
• Ensemble, exchange, collaboration
• Play, make believe, immersion
• Ambiguity, unknowns
• Questions, revelations, maieutics?
• Making
• Showing
• Reflecting

Aptitude 3: Ensemble, exchange, collaboration

Some people’s creative brains fire best when they are in a group. Creating together has an amplifying effect. Sparking off each other can explode an idea into unexpected realms to manifest something truly extraordinary. The fluidity and speed of group creativity is exciting for some, while for others it can be painful as all the extroverts step up and relish in the hub bub.?

Collaboration is an art. To get to that place where everyone is brimming with ideas and lifting each other up, several fundamentals need to be in place. The group doesn’t just become highly functional. As a facilitator of creative practice, you only get to these free-flowing expressive environments with a highly structured process that takes time to master.?

Collaboration is the interaction of individuals focussed on a shared purpose. It can happen in short bursts, like a group forming for a quick project, or over years with a team in a company. But what is the creative component of collaborating? There are many theories about groups, leadership, and teamwork. Let’s zero-in on how to cultivate creativity within group work process.?

One of the fastest ways to bring out a group’s creativity is the use of playful exercises that force the group to say, “yes and...”.?

This simple act of unconditionally accepting a suggestion without criticism, and then extending it, can set an idea free. Even if you do not agree initially, the act of saying “yes” and owning it through extending it, can transform the idea into something new that you may learn to love.?

There are two distinct components to this technique.?

“Yes” is first part of that equation. Saying “yes” signals your agreement to the premise and the details.?

The “…and…” allows the idea to become more, to be extended or morphed it into something new. Saying “yes and..’ ?– is a simple but highly effective technique to connect ideas, combine concepts and explore novel reconfigurations. As influential neuro-psychologist Donald Hebb puts it “neurons that fire together, wire together”.?

The next ingredient or concept in facilitating creativity in groups is an audience. A new idea can benefit from an audience (or listener) to take shape inside someone’s mind. Having someone actively listening can greatly assist in the construction of an unformed idea so that it can then be articulated. The presence of an active listener (be it one person or ten) can force you to rapidly synthesise unconnected ideas in that instant and articulate them. The need to communicate clearly to the audience can be the pressure that galvanises the unfused concepts. When the receiver then likewise agrees and extends this idea (saying “yes and...”), turning it into something new again, the amplifying effect can be intoxicating.?

Facilitating creativity within groups can happen quickly or be drawn out over phases. As the facilitator or group leader you need to set the preconditions so that people are getting the best out of themselves and each other.

Collaboration is about turning a rag-tag group of individuals into a connected team, that have a shared identity and language. It's about developing codes and shortcuts that are particular and specific to the group. In the world of theatre, the term ‘ensemble’ is used to describe that beautiful thing that happens when a team is firing. It literally means ‘together’ in French. As a facilitator of the creative process building an ensemble is your key objective. Like all things creative, this process benefits from careful cultivation. As a facilitator, I try to move through the below stages, even when the session is as short as 45 minutes:?

Listening: Flick the switch on the group’s abilities to deeply listen to and really see each other by involving as many senses as possible. See my article about becoming attentive and attuned.

Rupture: Bring them into the present moment and disrupt existing norms. Break from rigid patterns of seeing or thinking that the group already holds. Shed the baggage by de-ritualising spaces, language, and modes of being together. This is also covered in the last article.

Joy: The atmosphere should be joyful and funny, even when the subject is not. Laughter loosens people up and can shake out some instinctual deviance to push things past polite or sector-speak (jargon).

Take risks: Nothing brings a group together more than achieving a successful project with real outcomes and real consequence. Groups are often finally together at the point when they break apart at the end of a project. Facilitating creative activities that involve performance can place people under pressure in a safe environment and lead to moments of humour. This can be as simple as mock presentation to invited guests. These moments of shared risk and reward codify as group memories and stories that the group can draw on again and again.?

SAY YES: This is the magic (and the number one rule). This needs to be mandatory and reinforced by all members through training and discussion. The more you work this muscle the better the group will become. Some people will find it extremely challenging to suspend rationality to allow a nonsensical idea to circulate in the conversation – tell them to release their grip on reality. The recipe of “yes and…” cultivates ideas that can really lift and fly away.?

Shared language and signals: Forming humorous (or serious) sayings, movements, or acronyms that describe the content, people or quirks, unifies the team into an ensemble. Creating shared group culture where they can be playful with their shorthand builds cohesion and understanding. It leads to the deeper goal of building knowledge about what everyone in the group needs to contribute and perform. A well-connected group can communicate with imperceptible signals. Think about when an improv music band suddenly changes key or when a sports team makes magic happen on the pitch. It may not have been visible to the spectators, but numerous tiny (conscious and unconscious) signals would have been flying around for the split-second group decision to occur.?(But, be wary of getting pinned by this schtick and balance the in-jokes with disruption of group norms.)

Ensemble Exercise

Name: Memory Relay

Objective: Develop group short cut language and cohesion

Origins: This is another one of mine, that builds off a favourite called Graffiti Relay, that I learnt through the work of Brazilian Theatre Director Augusto Boal

Instructions:?

• The group form two queues in front of a white board.?
• They are instructed to write on the board the names (as best as they can remember) of key components from the project. For example, it could be to encapsulate the research interviews, or to recall the different learning strategies covered in the course. So long as there are more than 10 things to recall. The more the better.?
• The first person in the queue runs to the white board and writes as quickly and succinctly as they can one of these ‘things’ you have instructed them to recall. Instruct them that it doesn’t matter if they can’t remember the right name – speed is most important.?
• Then they dash back to the queue and hand the marker to the next person who does the same.?
• The two teams compete to write and remember as much as they can.
• Encourage them to avoid top to bottom list-making and to write anywhere on their side of the board.

Facilitator tip: Encourage and prioritise speed and volume – not accuracy. The speed aspect will give them permission to come up with funny/zany words to fill in the blanks in their memory.?

The result is that the project has a whole list of idiosyncratic shorthand. This exercise does two things: It helps people refresh and recall the subject which is good practice. But for the sake of ensemble building, it develops shared language and cohesion as the group reads the funny ways people recall the subject matter. More creative and fun activities can flow on from this board full of names/descriptors if the group then explores unexpected connections.?

Facilitator tip: You have to weave the language from this list throughout the work going forward. You need to use these names or paraphrases authentically. The more they can sit at the centre of how you talk and laugh as a group, the more you have created shared language and codes.?

The next article is about play. Please reply with any comments and share any exercises you’ve found help build ensemble.