The fourth in a series of January blogs about Resilience.

The capacity to bounce back after a set back – resilience is such a hot topic across the business world.

In our last blog we drew attention to simplicity. This week, we explore improvisation.

Could it be innate magic?

Comedians are resilient people. They operate on their wits. Or seem to…

How do they operate so effortlessly in-the-moment – to use things they see, things people say – to trigger creative and amusing trains of thought? To take knocks, yet win their audiences over?

Comedians are people who notice things. Exquisitely so. They are also curious. They reflect on what they notice, and they make sense of this in surprising ways. They create and clearly communicate points of view to their audiences.

Comedians also know where they are journeying to. They hold a clear intention. And they get there based on a lot of pre-thought and rehearsal, the use of guiding themes, and the practised ability to spot and develop surprising and amusing connections in the moment, at the right moment.

That is how they survive and thrive.

Nope!

Their improvisation skills are part nature and part nurture.

So when we say they operate on their “wits” I wonder if we are failing to credit them for their many hours of hard exploration and developmental work, of rehearsal, of experimentation and live learning?

Maybe we are also exposing an almost cultural or systemic inattention to investing in the development of “soft” improvisation skills. It is as if we categorise improvisation as a “magic” possessed, innately, by only a chosen few.

It isn’t.

Maybe it is time to notice, reflect, and act on the training and development of improvisation?

Dave
Dave Stewart
Managing Director
The Fresh Air Learning Company Ltd

The third in a series of January blogs about Resilience.

The capacity to bounce back after a set back: resilience is such a hot topic across the business world.

In our last blog we drew attention to the human dimension of resilience. This week, we are giving the philosophy and practice of simplicity a mention.

Dangerous lip service…

A quick scan of books and articles about resilience suggests a handful of concepts, systems, processes, “things”, characteristics and behaviours that make up the resilience “check list”.

Surprisingly, simplicity doesn’t feature.

We seem to have constructed such a complex world for ourselves that resilience measures, where they exist, can also have a sense of complexity about them. So much so that, throughout an organisation, lip service can often be paid to them. “Why should we spend time and money doing that?”

And when we say our world is “complex” we often forget that this sense of “complexity” is in large part a mental construction. We are expert at telling ourselves the “complex world” story. It has gone viral. Everyone is telling this story to one another!

Leading simply, simply leading…

What would it be like if there was a different story being told? A simple one? One you could write or draw on a single sheet of A4? Or tell in a few moments? What would it be like to have clarity of purpose? Simplicity of practice?

How much easier could this make your day-to-day experience? More fruitful your endeavours? What could this do for your capacity to bounce back from a set back?

So, who is making your life simpler? Who is attending to your bounce-back-ability?

Who is creating and telling the “simplicity story”?

Dave
Dave Stewart
Managing Director
The Fresh Air Learning Company Ltd

The second in a series of January blogs about Resilience.

The capacity to bounce back after a set back. Resilience is such a hot topic across the business world.

But how many organisations really understand and invest deeply in the people dimension of this?

And governments across the world recognise to some extent their duty of care for the resilience of their national infrastructure. Power, transport, data, and other aspects. Organisations invest in lots of tangible things such as back up sources of power and duplicate databases. Banks and supermarkets would look sheepish if their computers and deep freezes didn’t work.

All good stuff. But not enough.

Cohesive, focussed and fired-up

How many organisations value personal and inter-personal resilience?

How effective under normal circumstances are the leaders and teams in your organisation? Dysfunctional? Just good enough? Maybe even pretty good? How do you know?

What could things look, sound and feel like under survival circumstances? Cohesive, focussed, and fired up? Or something quite different?

How much is invested? Which budget does this come from? Training, or risk, or somewhere else? It makes a huge difference. One budget is more resilient than the other!

Realistic optimism

There is a lot to unpack in the personal and inter-personal dimensions of resilience. We will explore more fully over the coming weeks.

For the moment, consider how well you think you know your thought processes. What are your patterns, your habits of thought? And what drives your actions? And what is the impact on those around you. When have you been a resilient leader? How do you know any of this? What is the nature of the relationship you have with those around you?

Are you able to fully grasp what is happening around you right now, yet still hold and drive to the clear possibility of a successful outcome? Realistic optimism, faith if you will.

More than databases and deep-freezes. More in future blogs.

Dave
Dave Stewart
Managing Director
The Fresh Air Learning Company Ltd

The first in a series of January blogs about Resilience.

Lying in bed at 3am this morning listening to the wind howling through the open bedroom window, and snuggling deeper into my winter duvet, took my mind to a place of gratitude.

I wondered how hard life might be for communities and individuals without the comforts of solid shelter, plentiful food and warm bedding.

I will probably spend most of the day inside – warm, fed and watered. And if I venture out it will be a quick dash, covered and under a hood pulled down as far as it will go…. isolated from everyone and protected from the elements. Winter.

An alien sense of reliance

Then my thoughts meandered to considering how I will withdraw from my community once business, work and socialising are done. Today. And most days. Shut in behind my doors and curtains, with my wife, isolated again, supposedly self-sufficient.

Thoughts of how this might be considered alien to some people around the world… not to have to co-operate on a daily basis to gain the basics of life. This strange notion that we are free from needing others. How easy to forget that we are group beings.

It’s not fluff, it’s stand-out stuff

This is what we do. We craft Resilience programmes which encourage connection, collaboration and community.

Nothing fluffy. Nothing beige. Our impactful work starts and finishes where it matters most for our clients – in the workplace, boardroom, sports field, or expedition.

Yet we are passionate about the power of communal living and outdoor experiences as part of the developmental journey.

Connecting, collaborating, and creating community is a forgotten part of who we all really are. And so we help groups discover common purpose, new ways of thinking and acting together, and huge untapped internal resources.

So often I hear that these experiences are the stand-out moments of people’s year, even their lives.That’s what gets me out from under my duvet.

Dom
Dominic Rudd
Director of Adventure Programmes
The Fresh Air Learning Company Ltd