Going Off Script

by Catherine McGregor

It’s strange that the longer I have been working in the legal profession, the more the people focused skills that I concentrated on in studying, performing and teaching drama come to the fore. It’s also interesting that these are also the skills now seen as fundamental to creating effective organisations. These will increase in importance as workplaces become more digital and virtual. It’s our human skills which differentiate us, as will the capacity to experiment and also being willing to know what we don’t know. Continuous learning for everyone is going to be the order of the day. When work is changing faster than ever before, experimentation, rapid-cycle feedback, and the ability to adapt are competitive imperatives. 

General counsel, I know and work with, state the importance of empathy and communication and increasingly the ability to think creatively. But many of these qualities involve taking a personal risk and admitting you don’t have all the answers, this often doesn’t sit well with lawyers’ training.  Making the leap from a system which privileges knowledge and perfection to a way of looking at the world via a lens of trying different ideas and iterations can be quite a leap.  It means that we have to characterise ourselves not as experts but as learners – that’s both the team and, crucially, the leader. But taking a leap and experimenting with how we do things also opens us up to creating new ideas and connections between different ideas. It’s going off the script that we have become comfortable with.

When I used to direct or perform in plays, an early part of the rehearsal process might often be workshopping and getting up on your feet to try things out, with or without the script. This process aims to inspire and bring ideas and connections outside of the given parameters of what you are working with. In some cases, this might fundamentally change your approach or find its way into what actually ended up in the performance. What would often be the most electric moments were when your idea or experimentation connected or clashed with someone else’s to create something very different and often unexpected. Reading from the script on the page is distinct to ‘getting something up on its feet’ in theatre. And in theatre, unlike film, it’s a constant iteration and a constant process where each performance is just a version and you never really reach the definitive version.

There’s a symmetry here with the business of law in the ways in which many legal teams, law firms and law companies experiment with thinking about how things are done not just what is being done, the finished product.   Thinking about the problem in a variety of different ways is key to finding a solution, or a series of solutions, which will be better than just trying to focus on one perfect solution or one person’s view of the issue. Experimenting with both how things are done and how we think about how things are done draws on our ability to be able to play around the edges and understand the much broader context of what a particular process or job is taking place in.

With the use of design thinking in legal innovation we can clearly see this in action. The classic design thinking set up forces you to (in pre-virtual days) get up on your feet and post ideas on a whiteboard. In many sessions I have taken part in or have run, you have to stand and move around rather than being seated; you will configure your space differently; you may play music to help the brainstorming process. The analogy of getting up on your feet from performance also draws synergies with the way which processes like design thinking, when used correctly, should give us the courage to try something out and see if it will work. It should also allow us to be focused on the fact it may be an iteration rather than the finished product – in other words, a prototype. We won’t know all the answers: we’re trying it out and learning as we go.

To use the rehearsal analogy again, the workshopping and games at the beginning are a way to get into the script and really understand it and make it your own as a performer. Some of these games will resonate differently with different performers than others because they are different people. It also ensures that the responsibility for the vision of the performance is not entirely the director’s but the whole ensemble or company.

In the same way in an organisation, it’s essential as a leader to be able to share ideas and empathise with others’ ideas not just give orders. As a teacher some of my best moments were when students came up with ideas themselves; ideas which I would have never thought of. But by allowing them space and giving them a catalyst through games and exercises, it set them off to explore ideas which they could use in their own unique ways. In designing opportunities for your team to experiment and play, trying different things out will be the order of the day. It’s seeing what resonates with different team members. This may be design thinking; it might be an adaptation of a drama game; Lego serious play; improvisation, a drawing exercise or even something more cerebral like a brain dump of ideas and word association on an empty page.

It can feel scary to start to experiment or play in this way if you’re not used to it. But using a design thinking workshop or a creativity game can be a starting point to get people thinking differently. Even amongst my drama students there were those who didn’t always appreciate this and just wanted to get down to reading the script and making a ‘proper’ play. But having a mindset where you get on your feet literally or metaphorically or both can be transformative as to how you approach an issue.

I create and run workshops around creativity in the workplace if you want to discuss an idea or find out more email me at [email protected].