The Art of Yes: Improvisation for Sustainability Leaders

By: Patricia Raun

Each of us needs to cross boundaries of all kinds and connect in meaningful ways with others. That common need is the basis for the approach to leadership communication that I bring to the Executive Master in Natural Resources (XMNR) program at Virginia Tech’s Center for Leadership in Global Sustainability (CLiGS) in Arlington, Virginia.

We must strengthen our abilities to connect with others in order to build collective impact. If civilization is to have a future at all we must engage the issues of climate change and environmental sustainability with our whole hearts, minds, and bodies  — in addition to the more expected tools of technology and intellect.

This urgent need to use all of our abilities as human beings to address the challenges of environmental sustainability is what moved me to become part of the faculty of the XMNR program. We must certainly use data and appeal to intellect — but we also need to use less quantifiable aspects of human connection and communication. And that’s where I come in. I’m an actor and I teach the tools of arts practice that help students in XMNR build muscles of empathy, inclusion, authenticity, connection, trust, awareness, flexibility, and knowledge of self and others.

I’m a firm believer in the power of play. Even the most intellectual among us learns best by experiencing. Think back to your childhood. It was a period of unequaled growth, learning, and change. It’s no accident that the way you developed was by using your imagination and body to create new capabilities and explore new approaches. I have found there is great power in using focused play throughout our lives.

At the beginning of tonight’s three-hour session called The Art of Yes: Improvisation for Sustainability Leaders, I asked the class, “Do you have any experience with improvisation?” and all of the students answered “No.” But of course it was a trick question because every moment of each of our lives is improvisational. We choose to seek out, create, and notice new experiences  — or not. We choose to say “Yes, and…” or “Maybe, but…” or “No.”

Tonight we played some focused improvisation games (thank you Viola Spolin, Keith Johnstone, Augusto Boal, Aquila Theatre) to build and refine our capacities for connection with other people through deep listening, observation, and spontaneous response. We strengthened our muscles of honesty, trust, and vulnerability. We learned something about motivating change through personal narrative, emotion, and metaphor. These tools can help sustainability leaders do their work more effectively.

Some of the very physical exercises we played elicited a great deal of laughter while helping us learn about taking risks and getting outside of our intellectual boxes. Other games provided opportunities to learn the importance of leadership through clear statements, affirming the ideas of others, and extending ideas through collaboration. Still others helped solidify the idea that we can only lead people when they have the capacity to follow and at times we have to slow down or make things clearer. We all gained more agile facility with the everyday tools of human interaction, including tone of voice, body language, and spoken words.

Part way through the evening session one student observed, “These exercises are making me think differently about networking. I feel like I see points of commonality that I didn’t expect to discover.

Another student in the program noticed that practicing these unconventional approaches lessened the discomfort she felt with spontaneous interaction. “This is all about approaches to connecting with others that I have never really thought about before. It is really invigorating.”

I, too, was invigorated by being able to provide experiences so that the XMNR ‘15 cohort could learn in new ways. It is a real gift to me to be able to interact with these sustainability professionals and to support their increasing effectiveness. On a night like this I am very grateful for students who are so willing to dive in, try something new, and to emerge with new understandings. Congratulations to XMNR Class of 15! Each individual student showed great courage tonight!