New Approaches to Collaboration & Communication with DramaTech
Trainers: Lee Devin, Amy Feinberg and Greg Selvin
In the DramaTech workshop participants learn how to innovate and collaborate using methods from the theatre. Teams that utilize these time-tested techniques work together to reach their potential. Companies who value their people and their potential use DramaTech to achieve great results: creativity, work satisfaction and business agility.
Dramatic Problems
You don’t have to read Dilbert to understand that knowledge workers often feel they have no opportunity to become fully productive before being asked to move on to the next assignment. This commonly creates frustration, dissatisfaction, and even distrust of management. The entire organization feels this pain as it bubbles up from individuals and teams, impacting productivity, retention, and the ability to innovate in hyper-competitive markets. Organizational structures have evolved without addressing the human element.
In 21st century corporate America, people have skills that easily transfer across departments, companies and even industries. Worker transience profoundly affects businesses as people shift roles continuously and traditional organizational units mean less and less, org charts become obsolete as they leave the printer.
DramaTech teaches new ways to work and to manage team work, in these conditions, bringing together people with different skills, backgrounds, and personalities better in a matter of weeks, not years.
Teamwork as Methodology
With software development, Agile replaces traditional Waterfall methods with an iterative process focused on building high-performing teams.
There are multiple, well-conceived mainstream methodologies dominating today's landscape. Behavioral and organizational psychology, design-driven management, and team sports-influenced methodologies all contain well-elaborated approaches to people grouping, but typically only address one angle of the team dynamic. Wouldn't it be nice to have a proven framework to incorporate all of these in a humanistic way? An intuitive means of assembling a team of individual people and achieving consistently great results?
Agile Scrum can achieve spectacular results when optimal conditions exist in terms of team compositions and corporate culture. Many organizations have already tried and failed to be more "agile" in executing their project-based work. It has become abundantly clear that the groundwork must be properly laid to reach success. The human psyche; the ways people work together to form team-based consensus, cannot be ignored. Any methodology will fail by not taking this into account.
Dramatic Techniques
Meeting the Need
For thousands of years men and women of diverse skills, ideas, and backgrounds have assembled to make and sell a brand new product, a product that is inseparable from the process of making it; they contract to meet a deadline and a budget. No matter what, 99% of the time they deliver on-time and within budget to the satisfaction of their customers. The firm that does this is a theatre; the emergent product, a play; the immovable deadline, opening night.
Theatre production methods are iterative, collaborative, and innovative. They result in a special kind of team, called an ensemble, that comes together in a very short time to make a workplace in which individual creativity can develop and thrive: a group for which collaboration is the norm; a group in which everyone understands that success is the success of the group, not of any one member.
In the DramaTech workshop, team collaboration and communication will be the focus, as Lee Devin and Amy Feinberg lead you through a series of exercises, games, and discussions that address the individual, the relationships between team members, and the best approach to guiding and directing the team to success, as it occurs on a daily basis in theatre rehearsals.
Preparing the Individual for Teamwork
- Learn the skill of Trust
- Learn to release Tension and Inhibitions
- Learn Concentration and Deep/Active Listening
- Learn to work on your Edge
Collaboration for Managers and Team Members
- Learn to cast the project
- Learn how to achieve connection between team members
- Learn to identify value and meaning
- Effective Communication and Process
- Learn to identify individual and team objectives
- Learn to identify actions to acheive objectives
- Learn to characterize the approach by identifying “the how”
- Effective Management: “Control Through Release”
- Learn to stimulate creativity
- Learn to unleash and cultivate results from a group dynamic
Dramatic Results
The methods and skills by which theatres accomplish these enviable results map to the Agile Manifesto and Scrum methodology with uncanny similarity. They have immediate and long-term benefits for business. These include, but are not limited to . . .
A Culture of Creativity
When effective, people-based collaboration becomes the standard work method, everyone learns, either by doing or by osmosis, the value of innovative thinking: the box no longer beckons.
Satisfaction and Loyalty
In a culture of creativity, teams and team members take ownership of their work. Iterative collaboration rewards individual initiative and creativity while bonding teams into intensely supportive groups, loyal to each other, the project, and the firm.
Team and Corporate Agility
Teams that become ensembles learn to adapt to the emerging results of their collaboration and the firm learns to adapt to the increasing speed of change in markets and work conditions.
Our Team
Lee Devin
Lee Devin is the co-author of ARTFUL MAKING: WHAT MANAGERS NEED TO KNOW ABOUT HOW ARTISTS WORK, Certified Scrum Master, and Consultant for the Cutter Consortium. Professor Emeritus at Swarthmore College and dramaturg for the Peopleʼs Light and Theatre Company. Lee has more than 30 years of
experience in the theater. He has won prizes and grants for playscripts, librettos, and translations that have been published or performed worldwide. As an Equity actor, his roles have ranged from Malvolio in TwelfthNight to Mitch in A Streetcar Named Desire. He has been a visiting consultant or artist in residence at Columbia University, the Folger Library, Ball State University, the Banff School of the Arts, University of California San Diego, Bucknell University, and the Minnesota Opera. Dr. Devin holds a Ph.D. from Indiana University.
Amy Feinberg
Amy Feinberg is an Associate Professor, Head of Directing Playwriting and Production at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Producing Artistic Director of The Hypothetical Theatre Company, Inc. in New York City, professional freelance director and developer of new plays nationwide. She has been at the helm of several World and NY Premiere productions in NY and around the country. Amy enjoys teaching professionals and theatre students in classrooms, at conferences, professional workshops, and beyond. All the world is, indeed, a stage.
Greg Selvin
Greg Selvin is a senior, CSM and PMP-certified Technical Product and Program Manager who combines business experience, deep technical knowledge, strong interpersonal skills, and creative intelligence. With 20 years of experience working across many areas in the financial services and software industry, his roles have included Project Management, Product Management, Management Consulting, Operations, Support, Engineering, Pre-Sales, Client and Vendor Relations.
Testimonials
"The workshop was nothing short of amazing. Lee Devin took a group of us through a 5 hour deep-dive into the key skills used by actors to create and collaborate. What Lee calls Artful Making (see book for more). This is 100% applicable for Agile teams and this has immediately become part of my toolkit for fostering creativity and much more." - Michael Sahota Blog post
"Lee Devin's artful Making workshop is certainly one of the most innovative sessions I have seen." - Siraj Sirajuddin Blog post
