Here’s a written transcript of my conversation with Robert Poynton Recorded in May of 2020.
Chris (00:09):
Welcome to this episode of learning is the new working. I hope you’re all staying healthy and strong and I really appreciate you taking some time to listen into this episode. It’s part of our season six, which we’re calling from what if to what now, where our aim is to learn from and share innovation, best practices, helpful ideas and useful resources spawned by this very abrupt shift in our lives and work practices to create a sense of community and connection in a post pandemic world. Today’s guest is Robert Poynton. Robert describes himself as a designer of learning experiences and he designs and facilitates workshops and retreats, often focused on leadership or creativity. And often at the Oxford side business school where he’s an associate fellow, he’s also a lecturer and a writer. Whilst all of this might just get him a ticket to the learning is the new working party. Uh, when I learned that he also uses ideas from improvisational theater to help people respond creatively to complex challenges and that he thinks we can learn from and even enjoy on certainty rather than dread it. I knew I absolutely wanted his point of view on the future of workplace learning and on how we can constructively approach and think about our current situation of lockdown and pandemic.
Chris (01:47):
I actually came across his book do improvise in 2018 when I was setting out to explore my post corporate existence. Another moment of ambiguity and change for me personally. The book resonated really deeply at the time, exploring themes of collaboration and communication, leadership and ambiguity. I loved how he’d explored and mined useful principles from an adjacent discipline in order to develop and evolve his own over the last two months. I’d picked out the book again to reread it since I felt a lot of the practices and ideas were very useful in this shift that we’re all experiencing now. I enjoyed it so much that I reached out to Rob, asked him to come on the podcast and talk to me a little bit about the Genesis of the ideas that he shares in the book. He very kindly agreed and I hope that you’ll find my conversation with Rob very timely and very useful.
Robert Poynton (03:00):
Hi, I’m Robert Poynton. Today is Thursday the 14th of May and I’m talking to you from Oxford.
Chris (03:08):
Great. Welcome Robert to learning is the new working. And thanks so much for uh, sharing your time and your work with us today. Um, first off, how’s everybody doing? We’re here in a lockdown land. Everybody safe and well with you?
Robert Poynton (03:23):
Yep. Everybody’s good. I’m here with all my family, my three kids and my wife. So we’re all doing very well. Yeah.
Chris (03:30):
Great. Well we usually start with a few quick questions just to sort of sketch out your work practice and get to know a little bit about what you do and your career history. So, um, with your permission we’ll just dive in. Yeah, let’s go for it. Okay. So you write about the power of place in your books. I always start my podcast asking people where in the world they are and, and why are they there?
Robert Poynton (03:52):
I split my life between two places. So Oxford, which is connected with my work at the side business school and the place I I love and have spent a lot of time in over the years. But most of the time I spent in rural Spain in a little town about two hours West of Madrid on the top of the mountain where we live off grid w.
Chris (04:11):
when you say off grid, no internet?
Robert Poynton (04:14):
Well no mains internet. So everything we have all the normal services. If you were to come to our house you wouldn’t notice the difference. So we have a, a remote, uh, actually it runs far the same. I think it runs my four G actually the internet connection. So it’s not bad. It’s workable. Got it, got it, got it. And how would you describe Robert? The work that you do?
Robert Poynton (04:33):
Depends who I’m talking to. If I’m entering the United States, talking to an immigration officer, I’ll say executive education because that sounds kind of grand and proper. If, if I’m talking more generally, I’d say that it, what I try and do I think is create and hold a space for people to learn. And to learn in lots of different ways. But broadly speaking, that would be a description if that weren’t precise enough for somebody who sounded too vague, I’d say, well, I use improv theater to help people, particularly leaders respond to change and complexity.
Chris (05:04):
A couple of really interesting things there. Space, I’m fascinated with creating space to learn. I think that’s important work for people in our discipline. I like that space idea. Let’s come back to that and we’re definitely gonna drill in on the improv stuff. I’m really interested in that, not just as a topic for people in our domain to apply to their programs, but just to learn from that discipline. I think that’s really fascinating what you’ve done. That’s what we’re going to talk about.
Chris (05:29):
What did you study, if and when you went to college and, uh, how does it really relate to the work that you’ve ended up doing in your life?
Robert Poynton (05:36):
Yeah, so I studied here actually at Oxford university at new college and I studied psychology and philosophy and I learned a lot from that, which has affected my work. Probably not in the way my tutors would have thought. So I think from psychology I learned that actually there’s a limit to how much we can explain of our experience with data and models. And from the, I would say that I learned how important it is, not just to think well, but to understand how you think and why you think the way you think. So it’s been hugely influential, not directly relevant, but how do you feel about this sort of cross-discipline thing that there, that’s two um, fields of study that don’t always go together.
Chris (06:17):
Did it teach you something about how disciplines can learn from each other?
Robert Poynton (06:21):
I think it taught me that at Oxford university. they haven’t learnt how disciplines can learn from each other because I was taught, taught as if I was just doing the one or the other. I was taught a philosophy as if I was doing politics and economics and I was taught psychology as if I were only doing experimental psychology. So in a way it taught me by its failure if you like to integrate and connect. And it set off in me a great hunger to see how different disciplines could inform each other and I could ensure even then the richness that I was missing. And I was frustrated by it. But it proved to be a very useful experience because it gave me energy and motivation for later self study. .
Chris (06:58):
I actually studied at Essex university and very, very different kind of institution. And in my first year we all did this program. If we’re in an arts or humanities discipline called The Enlightenment, you looked at philosophy and art history and literature and math and science all through this lens of one period in time. And so it was kind of like I had an opposite experience. I was kind of immediately kind of shoved into a world where it was not only considered good, but kind of essential to look sideways and learn from other disciplines.
Robert Poynton (07:31):
Well, yeah, I mean if I may, there’s a couple of things. I worked, I did a project not so long ago with the leadership team at Essex university, so I’ve kind of got to know a little bit. And I think it’s very interesting. It shows us two things. One is that, uh, that actually you can get stuck and I think Oxford in many ways is stuck.
Robert Poynton (07:45):
That’s both it’s flaw and it’s virtue in different ways. I won’t go into that in more detail, but I think it, you know, Essex is a newer, more um, imaginative university has been doing more interesting things for longer in some ways. The other thing I think is interesting, just going back to my own experience is that sometimes an experience which is not productive in the moment can turn out to be very powerful in the long run because my dissatisfaction, as I said earlier, drove a lot of learning and self study for me. So I think it reminds us to not judge things too quickly and even if the experience itself hasn’t been great, it might be some unexpected benefit to it if you’re just prepared to set it out.
Chris (08:23):
Got it, got it. Robert, what kind of organizations do you work with now? You talk about academic institutions there. Do you work with commercial operations as well?
Robert Poynton (08:31):
Yeah, I do. So through the work at Oxford, I meet people from all walks of life. So government, uh, government, uh, people, um, uh, foreign service, uh, entrepreneurs, big business. But those are normally I’m in a way I’m working with individuals. So right now I’m working with Airbus. So the, uh, the big, uh, aircraft manufacturer, very tough times for them at the moment. So I’ve been working with, uh, one of the leadership teams there and I’ve also been working the last couple of years with very interesting small family owned cosmetics business. I say small, I mean it’s not tiny. It’s a global business called Natura Bisse. Um, I’ve worked, uh, has a brilliant experiences working with the natural history unit at the BBC, so the people that make all the amazing documentaries, uh, and, and uh, Nike. I’ve worked with Nike, very influential pieces of work.
Chris (09:16):
Rob, not everybody might know the brand for name. Uh, can you, uh, explain about Said business school?
Robert Poynton (09:22):
Yeah. So the Said business school is Oxford university’s business school. It’s named after the founder who gave the bequest only 15 years ago. So it’s very recent. On the business school scene. We got the results from the, um, one of the FT surveys, which is one of the measurements in that field. We’re second in the world for open programs, which is the bit that I work in. So in the short amount of time it’s established pretty strong reputation in some parts of the field. And there’s an interesting tension in a very old university. So Oxford is about a thousand years old between what CNS are kind of up-and-coming recent subject, uh, and the sort of, you know, the ancients, uh, schools of learning of the, of the humanities and history and the classics. So it’s an interesting place to be. The, the, the tone and mood of the business school is quite different from the university at large and, you know, not without its complications I would say.
Chris (10:13):
What were your sort of major career steps? Roberts it is super cool work that you do today. Um, how did you, how did he get to this point? What, what did you do along the way?
Robert Poynton (10:22):
I started working in advertising because when I left university I was really interested in, in the mood and tone of the place I worked. I wanted to have a good time and advertising seemed like a good candidate and I did have a good time for a few years. Um, and then I was involved in a really interesting experiment in the early nineties, which to set up a virtual networked global strategic planning consultancy. So I was living in Argentina at the time and we were using the very, very early days of the internet to give brands and businesses, uh, communications and marketing advice all over the world. We were at Lucasfilm, we work with Nike at that point actually. And so some really interesting work. But through that, one of the things we did was we started to do training and development and I got really interested in that and that then led me on to, uh, kind of making that the main gig. Actually, I left the startup, got so interested in this field, and then found my way blended my way ready back into Oxford university. Um, and I’ve been working both with the university and you know, on my own with clients have a since,
Chris (11:18):
There’s lots we could talk about. There’s two of your books that I’ve read. Um, uh, Robert, um, in the do series that do forward slash improv and do forward slash pause. I’m not sure how you say that. You can, you can enlighten me, but I want to focus mainly on this concept of improvisation if we can today. Is that okay?
Robert Poynton (11:37):
Sure.
Chris (11:37):
And how do I say that? You call them, do improv in.
Robert Poynton (11:40):
In general parlance we call them ‘do improvise or ‘do pause or you know, there’s, do purpose do lead, uh, amongst ourselves, the authors and the publisher, we tend to just call them by the single word. So we talked about improvising, right? Because we know, we know they’re all do books, but yeah, you just say do improvise. Yeah.
Chris (11:54):
What’s the idea behind the series is really interesting set of titles and uh, an author is what, what, what’s, what’s the backstory on this? This book series? Y.
Robert Poynton (12:02):
The books are the child or the kind of progeny if you will, of um, of an event, an amazing event called the do lectures. So do lecture has been going on for about 12 or 15 years in West of Wales. Amazing kind of mini conference conference. Doesn’t do it justice. It’s sometimes it’s described as where, where Ted meets Burning Man in the style of Where the Wild Things Are , in a forest in Wales, you know, so really amazing event. And it Miranda West who came along to that, she’d previously worked for random house and she offered and they were looking for a publishing arm. So they set up the publishing arm, which is do books. And so do books, publishes things written by people who have spoken at the do lectures and within their work there’s a kind of, there’s a kind of one set of books which are about practical things. So literally doing things like bread, making, beekeeping, growing vegetables, things like that. And then there’s the kind of smart working series, which is where my books for which, um, there’s a whole raft of title said do purpose was written by David Hart, who’s the founder of the, uh, for do lectures. And that’s a lot about branding and communication. Uh, do lead Les McCann is threatened, um, by, you know, it was just about what it says do is about leading and organizations and improvising is really doing phrases about kind of respondent response and change and creativity. And there’s others as well. But the later one I’ve written do pause is, is really about, um, how we get more out of our time. How do we get the most out of our time, but not just in the sense of productivity, how do we actually get more out of our lives? You might say,
Chris (13:29):
Well, the focus on the improvisation book, what drew you to the practice of improv in the first place and why? Why did you see it as useful for your work?
Robert Poynton (13:39):
What drew me to it, I think was an observation about how these people are able to work. So if you think about an improv show, what you have is a group of people working together in a team. They have a paying customer or client. In this case, the customer is actually sitting there watching them work and can I in real time, and the customer can either mentally leave and check out or actually physically leave or certainly not come back. So the bar is very high and they have to work in changing and unpredictable circumstances with all manner of things coming at them, often from the audience themselves. And they’re doing this in a very extreme way. And so I realized, I think that this is a, this is a version of what we all do. If we all think about our own work in some way or other, we’re trying to produce a product or a service or in this case, a story that satisfies a bank customer. Whilst none of us work alone, even if we’re sole traders, we’re still collaborating with, with colleagues and with clients. So we’re working together to produce something and we, all of us have to deal with the unpredictable, the unexpected, the shortcomings, the difficulties. The failures that everyday life throws at us. So I saw in this playful, fun, uh, imaginative world, something that we could delve into. And the question really that’s driven it is what can we learn from those people? What do they know that enables them to do what they do in their particular circumstance that we could extract from that and apply in our own world? So that was the kind of gist of it. Yeah.
Chris (15:02):
Many people associate improv with mental dexterity. Thinking quickly on your feet, quick reactions, particularly in a sort of comedic context, but there really is a system there and it can be learned. And you sort of decoded it in the book into sort of three connected phases. Can you just walk us through, um, how you sort of decoded the practice of improv?
Robert Poynton (15:23):
Yeah, absolutely. So for me, the journey begins with a meeting in Portland, Oregon actually in the Three Lions bakery with a guy called Gary Hirsch. And I was meeting to talk to him about something else. But along the way he happened to mention he does this improv comedy stuff. And at that point I had assumed that this was a special talent that some people had. And I looked at him and to be honest, he didn’t look particularly talented. And I can say, cause this is a great friend and a business partner of mine now. But so I said to him, so how do you do that? And the very first thing he said was, it’s just a matter of practice. And this idea that some skill of that level could be just a question of practice and not question of tone was really interesting to me. So we ended up talking about that instead of the thing we were meant to talk about. And so that was the first glimpse for me. If there’s something here you can take and use because practice is, you know, in and of itself is a really useful idea. Practice is not something you do and you’re done with. It’s something you do and keep doing. So that’s at the core that that was how my journey began and understanding that the core of this method is a set of practices which you can identify and learn. Now in the theater, you had people use it for a particular purpose, which is to create comedy or stories and to entertain. But it struck me that there was a lot of parallels here with the complexity science I’d got very interested in. And that here was a simple set of ideas that could be taken a news. It took me a long while to kind of isolate them in this and this kind of very succinct way. Uh, and, and yet that they are kind of disarmingly simple. So the idea really of, you know, three interconnected practices of noticing more and what you do with your attention of, of letting go of assumptions and beliefs and, and micro agendas and opening yourself up to the possibility in the moment and of using anything and everything that comes your way without worrying about whether it’s what you expected or what you wanted. And we can go into those in more detail. But just to say the combination of those things just held lightly and iterated endlessly is extraordinarily powerful. And it’s that that is the skill that you developed by simply taking those simple rules of thumb. And applying and reapplying and asking yourself the same questions over and again in, in new contexts. And that kind of builds a muscle in a capacity that enables you to, to feel very different when you’re besieged and beleaguered by change and difficulty, it gives your mind somewhere to go other than into a spin. And it’s very anchoring. The thing is about mental debts. Stereotype improvisation is not really a mental skill. I know people think that we can talk about this later if you like, because it’s that assumption that it’s about speed of mine that led to me writing the second book. But really it’s about using what, Howaerd Garner at Harvard would call all your intelligences. So it’s about tapping into your embodied and physical intelligence. It’s about what you do, uh, with your, with your heart, as well as with your mind, if you will, and about an attitude and a way of being. So it’s not just about being clever. If it’s about being clever at all. And in improv theater world, they, they actually think of cleverness is kind of a bit of a problem. It tends to get in the way. If by clever you need that sort of clever, clever, trying to come up with a gag kind of thing, um, can be useful. But I think so. I think it’s a much more rounded, much more interesting skill than just thinking quickly.
Chris (18:48):
I like that, um, uh, phrase that I learned in the context of design thinking work, uh, where expertise is the enemy of innovation. That’s that cleverness thing. But let’s unpack each one of those if we can, cause I think they’re really useful just as principles, uh, of operating, particularly in my field here of the L&D space. Um, the, these are three nodules that I think are really important to talk. Let’s start by kind of noticing more what does, what does, what does it mean to notice more, um, in, in the context of this practice?
Robert Poynton (19:24):
Because I think the first thing you have to realize is that you have a choice about what you pay attention to. That our senses are not neutral scientific instruments, passively detecting information that comes in. So what you pay attention to, I could argue is the most important question or one of the most important questions a leader faces and people will notice what you pay attention to. So here I feel like when you were noticing that our attention itself is something we can work with and make different choices that will make a difference. So the other thing is, but it’s encouraging you to you as an improvisor would say, lean forward into your senses. We often find ourselves, imagine in a meeting or uh, uh, while you’re kind of working on stuff, it’s very easy to get lost in anxiety or expectation or hopes or assumptions or beliefs about the way things are going to happen. If somebody starts to say something in a meeting and your mind races ahead and said, Oh God, he’s going to go on about that thing about what happens in Asia Pacific. And he always does that. And actually Asia Pacific is not a problem and all that stuff. And you can, you can. So you can often find yourself not really noticing anything at all. You’re in your own head, talking to your own ghosts and phantasms. Um, and so this invitation to actually pay attention to what pay you, what you pay attention to, and to lean into your senses, to notice what’s right in front of you, to really listen to what people are saying. So listen to the mood and tone, not just the content to notice in yourself, your own responses. And this is an infinite job. You can’t notice everything that’s impossible, but you can notice more. And that brings you into presence, to actually being here right now instead of worrying about what has happened or what will happen. And actually that window of where we are right now is arguably the only thing we have to work with anyway. So if you spend half your time mentally absent to that, that’s a problem. So there’s an invitation to notice more. Very simple, but I think very powerful. Um, and it kind of leads into the next one that, uh, which it doesn’t really matter which order they go in because they’re all connected. But I tend to think of that leading to using to using everything. Because once you start paying attention, then you’re kind of, well, you’re asking yourself, well, what have I got and how can I, how can I use what I’ve got? So the second piece of practice is encouraging you to think of anything and everything that happens as, as it were, fuel for your process, fuel for your, um, for your ideas, for your creativity, for your learning. And that includes things that we might more commonly call mistakes or failures or shortcomings or shortages. So it’s very constructive attitude. Um, it’s, uh, it’s nothing new here. I mean, this is very, very old. I mean, it’s reminiscent of the Theodore Roosevelt quote about do what you can with what you have, where you are, you know, so, um, it’s just saying to you, well, when you use what, what have you got, don’t judge it or, or, or wish for something else. You know. Um, a classic illustration of this that I often use is that scene from the, uh, from the great Apollo movie. You know where they Chuck all the bits on the table and the Gene Krantz says to them, you know, you’ve got to make one of these fit in there with one of those, but essentially on a grander scale.
Robert Poynton (22:42):
That’s what this practice is encouraging you to think of all the time. And in order to do that, that leads naturally to the third one, which is about letting go. Um, and this is about letting go of many different things, but perhaps primarily letting go of the idea that things will happen the way you want them to because we’ve all live, you don’t have to live very long in this world to realize that’s not going to happen. But somehow somehow we sort of clean onto this idea that we can force the world to submit to our desires if we just try a bit harder. Um, whereas if you kind of let go of that idea and allow yourself to say, well, well, let me, let me let go of something. You’d have to let go of everything. But let me go. Let me let go of my expectation about what the man’s going to say about Asia Pacific in the meeting. Let me really listen to him. Maybe I could let go of a belief or an assumption. Sometimes I might have to let go of something a bit bigger. Probably this is happening right now for people in lockdown where people are having to let go of some of their identity. So if you’re the kind of person who fill in the blank, you know, I think of myself as a whatever, well traveler, there you go. That’s a good way you’re having to having to let, let go of that. And this one I think is the most country charities because I think in our society quite understandably where we’re brought up to think about holding onto things. So you know from a child, hold on to the hold onto mommy’s hand all the way through to hold onto that job. Hold on to that count, hold onto that business. But I think that if we’re trying to hold on to everything all the time, there’s no space for anything new. So these, these three all work together because if you kind of, if you let go of your head, your thoughts racing ahead of you, that allows you to notice more. If you notice what that, what’s happening in the room in front of you and how you’re feeling about it, you might be able to let go of your assumptions or beliefs. If you’re prepared to take and use something that might be otherwise called a failure, then you’re letting go of that judgment that it’s gone wrong and you’re asking a much more constructive question, which is, well, this has happened. How can we use it? So it’s all connected.
Chris (24:44):
It all seems to fit very much in the frame of the growth mindset principles, Carol Dweck work and this, do you have this idea of, of of curiosity, curiosity being a superpower, is it hard to do these things? Is it something that you need to learn and make deliberate choices to do? Yeah,
Robert Poynton (25:05):
I mean it takes me back to the beginning of the story. It’s about practice. So my view is that most things that are worth doing require practice and most things that don’t require practice probably aren’t worth doing. So I think that they’re there, the sense and the, and the helpfulness to that can be very quickly apparent to people. So I’ve worked with many people, hundreds of people over the years for whom this becomes the kind of moment of insight and enlightenment, but then they have to go on and practice and you have to try it out for yourself and you have to kind of get it into your repertoire and you have to get it into your body as well. I would say so. And it does require effort. What’s interesting though is that it requires a different kind of effort. It’s not a kind of pushing forceful kind of an effort. It’s more about being willing to hold and pay attention in a different way. So I’m, you know, I’ve often joked that I’m kind of lifelong obsession with laziness and, and thinking laziness gets a bad press. And I don’t mean that literally. But what I mean is sometimes I think we spend a lot of energy and effort doing things that don’t make a difference. And what this work is encouraging you to do is to pay close attention to a few small things, a few small practices and behaviors that can make an enormous difference. And it requires a different kind of effort. It requires a sort of discipline and a rigor, um, to not fall into patterns. And that does require practice. And I suppose just going back to the Carol Dweck thing, I think, you know, I think we have both those tendencies in us. I think, you know, fixed and growth mindset. I think if you look back at evolutionary history, we’re always going to need both. There’s a sort of protective and the secure, the security one and then there’s the kind of, you know, finding the agent hunting and finding the new food. And there’s a lovely quote from the improv guru, Keith Johnson. He says there are two kinds of people in this world. Those that say yes and those that say no, those that say yes are rewarded by the adventures they have. And those that say no are rewarded by the security their T. Unfortunately there are more no Sayers than yes says. And what I like about that is, is it says there is a place for both. So often people coming from the world, I, I’m sort of steeped in of improv theater. We’ll go out there and say, Oh, it’s all about saying yes. Well that’s just unrealistic and you can’t say yes to everything and you wouldn’t want to. And that doesn’t even work in the improv theater. So, so no understood through the Johnson lenses about that security. And it’s important, sometimes security is important, but if we want novelty, if we want learning, if we want to grow and develop, then the adventure of yes is really important. And we have to learn through exercise and practice that muscle.
Chris (27:42):
I don’t know whether you’re familiar with the bill Gates quote, give me a lazy man to solve a problem because I know he’s going to do it in the most efficient way. And I don’t think it’s a gender bias, but, um, I thought you might like that.
Robert Poynton (27:54):
I haven’t heard that. It’s a lovely one. Yeah, I’ll try and remember that.
Chris (27:56):
One thing that we’ve sort of learned from analyzing all the data we can get now on what people, people are interested in learning is there’s been this sort of resurgence in interest in the so called soft skills. You know, you would think naturally that everybody would want to get trained on coding in C sharp and Ruby on rails. And in fact, what people really want is these very human things like the ability to communicate and collaborate, uh, lead and so on and so forth. Do you think that’s a false dichotomy and how does your sort of world view around improv sort of play into being, being a better, being a better learner?
Robert Poynton (28:36):
Well, I suppose I’m not a fan of sharp division, so maybe I do think it’s the false dichotomy. I think everything’s contextual. So there are contexts where you need technical skills and there is no substitute for them. Um, uh, being, uh, but, but, but they run out, there are other contexts where they’re nowhere near enough. I think that perhaps over time, you know, this resurgence you talk about is a reaction to what came before. Whereas this sort of a view where the world is seen as a technical system, when in actual fact it’s a techno social system that actually everything that human beings do, we do in company and we can do very little on our own. And so if that’s the case, then the so called soft skills, which that metaphor originally soft was a pejorative. It was soft as in weak and floppy and fluffy and all those negative words. So, um, if as we’re working with other people, the what sort of warp and weft, if those relationships, the way that we relate to other people is absolutely fundamental and central to the vast majority of enterprises of any kind. And so I think that accounts for this resurgence, certainly in my own work, I think I’ve gone from being on the lunatic fringe to almost being in the mainstream actually in the last 20 years. So I think that there’s a growing recognition of the importance of these things. I think personally I’d like us to stop using that metaphor of hard and soft because I think it’s too value-laden. I think it suggests that you should take a position and you believe in one or the other. I think in many ways some of the so-called hard skills are quite, can be quite delicate as well. so if I look at people who are good at technical things, often they’re doing it in quite an interpretive, uh, kind of felt sense kind of a way. So I think it’s, I think it is a bit misleading, um, but as long as we don’t kind of take it too literally, it can be useful. And certainly for, for people in positions of leadership, which is often where I spend my time, you know, leaders actually themselves do very little. There was trying to get other people to do things. So they’re, the soft stuff as it’s called is of paramount importance.
Chris (30:40):
Can we talk a little bit about ambiguity? I think this concept that I sort of took from a, your book, I’ve been thinking about a little more broadly, um, and particularly its role in terms of innovation and creativity. You know, a lot of training and learning people, their job is to remove ambiguity, right? To get clarity. You get people super clear on a process or an approach. But ambiguity is a really interesting thing. I think it’s the heart of a lot of humor for example, and creativity. Um, how do you think about ambiguity in the context of your work around leadership? And you know, this, this sort of improv approach?
Speaker 3 (31:20):
I mean there’s many definitions of leadership, but for me the territory of leadership is by definition ambiguous. So if I distinguished in leadership and management management is solving those problems, we can identify and isolate and executing them well. And leadership is dealing with the unknown, the uncertainty, ambiguous. And that’s why we have leaders is to help us to feel comfortable enough or safe enough in those circumstances. Um, and so I think that that when, you know, what’s interesting is you’ll never eliminate ambiguity as we move forward to says novelty and change. I mean, there’s no data about the future. There’s data about what we think might be the future, but about the future. The future always holds uncertainty and change. And so if leadership is about moving into the future in one way or another, then you’ve got to be able to cope with that ambiguity and the things that have yet to happen and how you might prepare for them, um, or how you might respond to them once they do. , if you think of something as current as the pandemic. So there’s a lot of talk now about what people should have done and there’s, there’s less talk about the fact that we didn’t know that it was going to unfold like this. And we need to be careful here because there will be other pandemics and there’ll be different. And we don’t know now from this one, we have to be careful to work out what will be common and what do we have to prepare for that will be different. So that kind of, that kind of, um, challenge, which I think is an intrinsic part of leadership. I don’t see that you can eliminate ambiguity. And there’s a psychologist I worked with Oxford, John Stokes, he’s very eloquent about this and he says that leadership is a swamp, uh, and it has in it the Island of management, which is from ground where you know where you are and you need to keep doing some of that. But if you’re not in the swamp, you’re not leading. You might be doing something valuable but you’re not leading. So for him as well as, for me, that ambiguity is part of it for improv as a story unfold. So use that as an analog for a relationship or a conversation or a product. Um, there are always going to be unknowns. And so you’re working with not just solving the problems that the ambiguity presents. There’s another side to this, which is the ambiguity or the unknown holds promise so you can make something better than you could’ve imagined if you’re willing to embrace the ambiguity. If you clear tie to just doing what you knew in advance, the best you can do is what you can imagine beforehand. So example I think of we built our own house on the mountain top in rural Spain and there are many features that how some of the best features which were in the plans because we were able to deal with that kind of unfolding ambiguity as the house was made and spot opportunities to change things that actually made it better as well as solve the problems along the way that we needed to to get the structure. built.
Chris (34:02):
in this sort of pandemic and the lockdown, our ability to plan is one of the things that seems to make us so anxious. Like we, everybody wants to know what’s the date at which we can get back to work, when, when can I schedule that flight to Spain? When, when, you know, when can I get back into a world where I can plan and be organized? I mean, what are you seeing about how people are responding to, to the lack of clarity about the future? Not that there’s ever real clarity about the future, but it feels like that’s been an, um, any illusion of it has been just pulled from under us.
Robert Poynton (34:39):
Yeah, that’s a great question. I think I’ve seen far more individuals and small businesses respond in extraordinary and brilliant ways than I have, uh, governments or large companies I haven’t had much dealing with in the last, in the last few weeks. So I’m a bit blindsided by that. But if I, um, and even within different government responses I see those that are, um, the, um, more still kind of trying to command and control the problem. And I would say that the UK is response has been that. Um, and I think, I don’t want to start throwing rocks cause I don’t think that’s particularly useful. But I do think there’s been a limitation to that sort of centralized nature of it. Talking to people. I know that work in the health service about things still needing to be approved by central authorities, whereas as I understand it, and I don’t know much about it in Germany, much, much more power has been devolved to different regions with different strategies have been tried. different regimes have been tested, different processes according to the context and the judgment and the skills and the people involved. And so the aggregated learning has been much faster. Um, but the system has been, and system has been much more responsive. The results seems to be much more effective. So those would seem to be, I’d need to know more about it and understand it more. But there are some clues that if I look at my immediate environment, I, you know, talking to David high at the do lectures, the do lectures, their whole businesses events, none of which can be done now and they, within three weeks of lockdown, uh, we’re inviting people to do a do lecture online. I did the first one actually from my front room here. So we started to do that to, to just as a response and then then then kind of serving their audience that wasn’t in any way remunerated, but they were continuing to think of their audience and what might be useful and put stuff out that they thought would be valuable. And in the meantime they pulled together a course called the keyboard CEO, which they ran incredibly successfully, which is an online learning course for small business owners. And I was talking with them just yesterday and they said it’s unbelievable the response that that has caught that was created and the strength and depth of relationships amongst the people that came on that course. And they kind of invented that out of nothing as a response to the crisis within. Yeah, within a matter of weeks.
Chris (37:00):
One of the companies that I follow very closely is air B and B and their business has been completely decimated. Imagine. Yeah. And yet they’ve, they’ve spun up this new, this spun up this new business called experiences where for a really modest sum, you can connect with somebody, say in Italy we’ll teach you how to cook from the kitchen, there’s an incredible one, um, called the dogs of Chernobyl, the kind of wild dogs of Chernobyl and you can be in this guy’s home and go out with him and feed some of these dogs.
Robert Poynton (37:33):
What’s interesting about that is in a way it doesn’t surprise me because I think that in the core of Airbnb was this, this understanding of what they were offering at a different level, that they were really, their brand position was about we’re gonna, we’re gonna use hospitality to build community in relationship. So, so then they’re able to, to hold on, cause that’s one thing I’d like to make really clear to people is that this improv way of working is not a substitute. It’s not the be all and end all. It’s not the only thing you should ever do. And I think it’s sometimes people attack it for, for, for the reason that they think it, that, that people are near advocating. It is what it is, is an absolutely necessary compliment to all the other things. So if like Airbnb, you have this business that’s based on this hospitality, we have a deeper understanding what’s really about then when something like this comes, you can flex and adapt in a way that compliments the infrastructure. So they’re still using the infrastructure they’ve got. So you can watch the guy with the bear, with the dogs in Chernobyl Um, and, and that kind of a response I think is, is a beautiful illustration of, of, you know, how the stuff, can work.
Speaker 4 (38:40):
can workyeah. And at the same time you need, um, you need operational excellence as well and you need, you know, you need, you need, uh, the world health organization, uh, coordinating, uh, the, the response from scientists and so on and so forth I think is an amazing time. And I think people will study this period of time for a long time. I’ve got one of the story that you might like. Um, um, and that is a local restaurant here in Seattle, which is called Canlis and it’s, it’s a very sort of high end, um, uh, restaurant and it’s probably been around since the fifties. It’s the kind of place you go to celebrate, you know, your golden wedding anniversary, very high class flunky service family run business. They immediately, like within the first week of lockdown here in, in, in Seattle, they published a press release and they said the last thing Seattle needs right now is fine dining. So we’re going to close our restaurant and we’re going to open three restaurants that will serve breakfast, lunch and dinner to needy families. Um, we are going to set up a drive through where you can come and get a pre, you know, sort of a prepared meal for your, uh, for your family in the evening. Um, and you can pick up. And I just thought like everyone else was, everyone else was panicked. And here was a response that I think was beautifully in promo improvised again from you know, them understanding what their sort of core value was and just finding a different way to do it. Uh, I thought as a beautiful story and of course many other restaurants have sort of followed suit, but, um,
Robert Poynton (40:17):
and that’s, that shows a willingness to let go of what would normally be called their core competence. Uh, you know, the fine dining thing. And that’s such a contrast to people just issuing vacuous messages about we’re here for you and you know, we understand and in these unprecedented times. And that’s just vacuous, eh, really. Um, show me, you know,
Chris (40:39):
I want to talk about modern learning and development. I’m sure you work with lots of L and D teams and you’re in the business of professional development and leadership development. And I, I didn’t invite you on this call to encourage people to do improv in their leadership development programs, although that might be a good thing to do. I’m really interested in how we apply this practice. To the practice of learning and development, which, which needs to respond to a changing world. Do you have, do you have a point of view on that?
Robert Poynton (41:09):
Yeah, and I’m really glad you asked that actually in that way because I, I think in a way, this might sound strange thing for me to say, but I think the inclusions simply have kind of a bit of improv as the fun and games Lightner within an L and D program is the least interesting. It could be a value, but I think it’s that essential. My, my interest has always been in this area, which is how do these deeper principles inform the way we think about, uh, the way we think about the big stuff, the important stuff. So I think that if it goes down to, it kind of comes back to your idea of, of what idea of pedagogy you have readiness, how do we think about how people learn? So if you live in a stable world with identifiable problems, which are mostly technical that you want to solve, that you can predict an advance, then you can kind of plan and program your way towards good and effective solutions.
Robert Poynton (42:03):
But if so, that’s a sort of a model pedagogically that’s about transmitting knowledge and the knowledge is robust and it’s paced based on the past and it’s, you know, sort of steeped in best practice. But that all assumes that you’re going to be facing the same or similar problems, um, with similar resources and similar kind of competitive threats and challenges. And that’s not in the main, the world that we find ourselves in now. So it’s not that that’s wrong, it’s that it’s not enough. So that what we now need to be able to do is to shift towards thinking about how do we build a responsive capacity? How do we build in the capacity to gather information quickly, try out things that might succeed or fail in some measure, learn from that quickly, iterate and go back out. And again, you can apply this directly to the crisis.
Robert Poynton (42:55):
You know, the Corona virus crisis, those governments that have been able to, and those responses where they’ve been able to kind of learn the fast by trying lots of small things in the complexity jargon. These would be called catalytic probes. You don’t know what the answer is. You’d better try more than one thing because otherwise you’re putting all your eggs in one basket. So, so for L and D, I think to, to actually accept and understand that this, that we can’t know everything in advance, but we don’t need to to to understand that if you like what got me into improv in the first place was an understanding, Oh my God, there is still stuff you can learn here. There is still stuff which is useful. There’s ideas, language concepts, tools, all of which can be deployed flexibly and in a kind of a powerful way, even when you don’t know what’s coming or in fact, especially when you don’t know what’s coming. So there’s not nothing you can do and that there’s a much more intelligent response than simply trying to control everything. So I think that starts with accepting that some things that are uncontrollable and then working perhaps with people from different arenas, different skill basis, like I’ve done improvisers, but there’ll be other constituencies that can teach us about how you kind of learn and grow and responsive, flexible ways. So I think it’s a kind of philosophical shift. Uh, that’s, that’s needed. Um, not to abandon that kind of programmatic thing, but to understand its limitations and to realize that you’re putting good energy, kind of more energy off of, you know, what’s the saying? Good money after bad, you know. So anyway, you can spend more and more effort on trying to control less and less. And if you take that energy, effort and ideas and loosen up and sit and sort of step back, then there’ll be, you’ll find a whole host of things you can do that could be really effective.
Chris (44:39):
Rob, can you just briefly give us your elevator pitch for your next book in your series, which is the book do pause, which seems so, so relevant right now. We’re in this massively unplanned pause and that’s how it feels like to me anyway. What, what’s the offer that this enforced pause might represent to us? And if one of those offers is to spend some time with your book, what, what will we learn from it?
Robert Poynton (45:05):
Yeah. Um, I think the book is really about how can we create a sense of space within time, if you like. Uh, in other words, how can we make our time our own? How can we feel that we have some say in how we spend our time and how we use our time and how can we compose a life rather than just fill that we’re managing time. So it came from a kind of feeling that actually we’re at, we’re kind of ruled by varying the Canticle understanding of time where all time is the same and we’re racing against the clock. And pausing, whether it’s pausing for a second or two, whether it’s taking a sabbatical year, allows us to move into a different dimension of time. So it doesn’t it give you more minutes or hours or days, but it can give you a deeper, richer sense of time, whether it’s pausing and counting to two or three before you enter a room so that you collect your thoughts before you enter or whether it’s going off into the woods as bill Gates famously did for his think weeks to take a broader, deeper view of the strategic considerations for it for a business.
Robert Poynton (46:14):
So in that little space that you can open up, which I’m calling a pause, you might appreciate things. That’s something we can, I think we all find ourselves doing now in lockdown, appreciating in the Northern hemisphere anyway. What an amazing spring it’s been all the people that were locked down with it might allow you to reassess your priorities. You know, it’s very hard in the thick of things to ask yourself. Going back to an earlier part of the conversation, am I doing the right thing? Am I doing the right thing for me? I’m doing the right thing for my business. I’m doing the right things for my colleagues. So a pause allows you to sort of revisit those priorities. Uh, it can allow you to connect ideas, it can allow you to explore new territories, acquire new skills, and if nothing else, it allows you to refresh and replenish your kind of own internal reserves. Well, I think it’s interesting about it. It’s not about going fast or slow. You can pause even while you’re going quite fast. And one thing that really got me interested in at the first place is this very obvious, uh, aspect of pause, which is it’s not a defined period of time, so it may not belong, but it can make all the difference.
Chris (47:18):
It’s just the shift in your relationship with time is what it sounds like you’re sort of, you’re looking at just deliberately shifting.
Robert Poynton (47:24):
Yeah. And taking back agency and if you like a metaphor to put it in a nutshell, I that pausing is like yeast in bread, so you don’t need much, but it makes a great difference.
Chris (47:35):
Perhaps Rob, you can come back and talk to us some more about pausing. I think a lot of L and D, a lot of learning is about creating space and time for people. You know, it takes time to learn and to, to learn new concepts. And I think a lot of us are sort of time engineers in this business. So we, I’d love to talk more about that. I ask everyone who comes on the podcast, Robert, um, I’m interested, why did you choose to do this line of work? Was there somebody or something that inspired you? Where did you find the sense of purpose around this? I think I’ve always enjoyed connecting things, connecting things from different realms that excites me.
Robert Poynton (48:16):
Um, so I think that the meeting with Gary Hirsch that connected the world of improv to the world of complexity, science and creativity, that was definitely a kind of watershed moment for me. But I’ve been reflecting on this recently and going further back, I think, I think I’d go all the way back to my teenage years when I was preparing for the exams to come to Oxford and I worked with a very elderly gentleman, Terrance Barnes. He was called. He was actually the inspiration in many ways and the mentor to William Golden, the novelist. So he, he lived in the town I grew up in and had been the head of English at our school previously. And he was a man when I was studying with him. He’s already in his late eighties he’d been an intelligence officer in the world in the war. And he had this enthusiasm for learning that I thought was extraordinary and he would read poems aloud to us and, and, and Marvel at them.
Robert Poynton (49:09):
And I went to university study philosophy psychology, as I said earlier. And when I went back to visit him, he had decided aged 80 something to take up the study of symbolic logic. And so I think, I think for me, this idea of this man who at this point was living on his own, his wife had died and could still be learning. I think that looking back on it was a very important moment for me. And I think, I think it helps me feel alive to be learning myself. And I think the best way for me to learn is to help other people to learn.
Robert Poynton (49:41):
Robert, where can people find out more about you and your work? So, uh, my website is just my name, so it’s RobertPoynton.com that’s Poynton with a Y. Um, and within that there’s a section on the paws project, which you can always get to separately by just pause, pressure, project.space, uh, on Instagram, which is any social media I pay much attention to. I’m Rob dot Poynton again with, with a Y. So any of those places, um, and I write a newsletter about pause. If people are interested in that, they’ll find that on my website. There’s a sign up page.
Chris (50:13):
I love it. Well, um, make the most of your enforced pause. Robert, thanks for spending some of it with us and uh, I hope you and your family stay safe and well.
Robert Poynton (50:22):
Chris has been a delight. Thank you very much and I very much hope we have another conversation one day.
Chris (50:36):
Thanks as always for listening to this episode of learning is the new working. Please rate us on your favorite podcast platform. Share us with your friends and community or drop us a noteat www.learningisthenewworking.org where you can find a back catalog of all our episodes and learn more and get resources from the amazing people that we’ve been lucky enough to feature across our six thematic seasons. Please, please, please stay well, stay home, but stay connected and always stay learning. Thanks.