Improvised Performance: Nurturing Natural Leadership

Abstract

Leadership requires creativity and demands responsiveness, flexibility, and risk taking. Contemporary business operations acknowledge the need for this leadership capacity at all levels of the organisation. This article reports on an action research project conducted over four years in Brisbane, Australia in which improvisation was applied to training agendas in which the developmental goals included enhancing emerging leaders’ capacities in uncertainty throughout change processes. It gives account of the way in which technical aspects of improvised theatre practice have been applied to develop capacities such as self-confidence, autonomy, trust, and resilience, and responsiveness in collaborative and competitive environments. The improvisation method drew on highly structured physical theatre languages to facilitate participants’ emerging awareness of leadership capacities and competencies through the interrogation of their own habitual positions in relation to listening, leading and following, collaboration, and problem identification.

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