136 50 TOPEXECUTIVECOACHES
coach executives to understand that learning organizations need to be f lexi-
ble, inclusive, innovative, and quick in dealing with an unpredictable future.
Yet rarely do we give executives the new behavioral capabilities we say they
need to deal effectively and spontaneously with rapid change.
Unfortunately, the words of even the most brilliant lectures, while defi-
nitely increasing leaders’ understanding of turbulent environments, often
fail to improve those same leaders’ actual capability to lead when con-
fronted by chaotic, rapidly changing situations. By contrast, improvisational
theater techniques demonstrably increase executives’ capabilities to lead in
such twenty-first-century environments.^4 To excel as an improv actor, you
must respond instantly to what’s going on around you; you can’t rely on pre-
planned strategies or lines. When I introduce managers working in interna-
tional joint ventures, for example, to improvisational theater techniques, it
immediately shifts their understanding of how leadership, teamwork, coop-
eration, and f lexibility really work.
In one classic improv exercise, the managers tell a story by having each in-
dividual rapidly add one word to the narrative in turn. Typically, the first at-
tempt at building a story is painfully dry, nonsensical, and completely lacking
in leaps of creativity or surges of energy. The reason is simple: between
turns, each person is focusing on deciding which word to add, rather than
listening to their colleagues. By the time the narrative reaches them, their
carefully chosen word no longer fits.
Only by letting go of preplanned strategies and focusing on the f low of the
unfolding story can each manager become able to contribute to the story in a
way that brings it to life. As the story becomes more coherent, surprising, en-
ergized, and fun, the executives viscerally understand what they need to do
differently. Being successful in a spontaneous, chaotic, interdependent, team-
or iented environment requires observational, listening, and input skills, much
more than our traditional talking, doing, and more output-oriented skills.
Leading effectively in turbulent environments requires a mode of teamwork
that cannot be learned except through direct experience.
Leaders are most intensely out of their comfort zone and into a learning
zone when areas of leadership are explored that draw heavily on artistic and
creative processes, ref lection and the symbolic aspects of leadership. Po-
etry can hold ambiguity and paradox in ways that our dehydrated business
vocabulary cannot. David Whyte, often referred to as the poet of the cor-
porate world, reminds us that: “Poetry is the art of overhearing ourselves
say things from which it is impossible to retreat.”^5 Similarly, with music,
Benjamin Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic, teaches us: “A
symphony is about getting all of the voices sounding together, which is what
leadership is really about. It is not about winning or losing—but about