Stakeholders are part of the work team too

Behind the scenes, just as in other theatre experiences, goes a lot of work that leads to the success of a performance or workshop.  Although our Playback team has an artistic Director, we all collaborate and work out what will best suit the audience and the "playbackers" who will be on show. Many work teams fail to include their stakeholders views when planning activities or services and until recently we tended to hold a similar position. Sure we had a good customer consultation process to find out what the school or organisation was looking for  by booking Playback Theatre. However, once we had the information we decided the questions to be asked, and the outline of the workshop to meet our needs.

Playback performances invite the audience to participate by asking questions around a theme or topic as agreed by the client. Previously, question section has been a task left up to the conductor with occasionally the actors chipping in their ideas.

At the last open rehearsal we choose a theme around "leadership and service" to prepare for a  gig coming up at the end of November. We asked our guests to comment on service in any way and then write questions that we could  choose from to rehearse.  This provided some rich material and impact questions. It also took away the demand on our playback conductor  to always be finding the questions themselves.

Now where ever possible we invite potential clients to come along and see Playback rehearsing in action. This builds confidence that a Playback performance or workshop they have booked actually wants to meet their needs and they can influence our actors,conductor or musician  to generate a better production on the day. 

So ask yourself , if you could engage more with your customers or process stakeholders - would you? and what about? What would it take to relinquish the need to control everything and go with the flow to have like us an enriched engaging experience with our stakeholders.