Sometimes you need to hang upside down for awhile
by Sarah B.Over the last year at the Institute of Design, I have been researching the tools, methods, and processes that highly successful organizations use to continuously produce high quality work. I spent some time with the Neo-Futurists, a Chicago-based theater best known for their long-running production “Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind.” Each week for the last sixteen years, the Neos write, direct, and perform 30 plays in 60 minutes (yup, that’s about 2 minutes each). According to the tenets of Neo-futurism, Writer/Performers must draw from direct experience. The result is a kind of living newspaper, filled with funny, political, intensely personal, even gross-me-out outrageous performances.
The Neos sell-out their weekly shows regularly (and buy pizza for the lucky audience if a sell-out occurs). They have die-hard fans that return year after year, gaggles of friends in tow. Since the Neos develop 2-12 new plays per week, you could conceivably attend the show once a month and never see the same play twice.
What’s interesting to me about the Neos is that members have internalized a highly efficient system that both supports wild creativity and forces ideas to be tested. Within this system, the Neos can play and explore. They have methods for evaluating the viability of a play, for facilitating collective decision-making (what plays stay in, for instance). They even use a volunteer system to share the less desirable tasks like running meetings. Finally, they deal with territorialism by giving Writer/Performers complete control (with input from other members) over their own plays.
I see a great deal of frustration and lament about existing design processes. As the web grows up, it seems we are wrestling with our own legacy issues. Many very smart people have developed all kinds of ways to support collaboration. Sometimes processes work really well. And sometimes they just get in the way.
When I was a kid, I spent hours climbing trees and hanging upside down from the branches. I could see my house from above, from different angles, and upside-down. Seeing the world in a different way helped me understand the place I lived. Sometimes you can illuminate a difficult problem by coming at it from a totally different direction. Working with the Neos has helped me see the systems I work in in a new way.
This summer I’m shining a bright light on practice development at Adaptive Path. Peter and I are looking closely at the way Adaptive Path does its work. Since Adaptive Path tailors its methods to a consulting engagements particular needs, the challenge here is to find ways that Adaptive Path can develop great ideas without being bound by a rigid process.
If you want to read more about the Neos, you can download my paper “A Platform for Sustainable Creativity Lessons from the Neo-Futurists.” You can also download the presentation slides I gave at a recent Adaptive Path brownbag.
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on Monday, June 26th, 2006 at 12:54 pm and is filed under Creativity, Idealism (Uncensored), Management.
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