DRAMATIC TECHNIQUES for DRAMATIC RESULTS

Collaboration and Teamwork

A one-day workshop presented by Amy Feinberg and Gregory Selvin, Friday November 4th, 2011 at the Toronto Board of Trade.

Workshop Summary

Make play a serious business by stealing the best-kept secrets of the theatre. Theatre has made teambuilding into an art. The teams are called ensembles and they consistently deliver projects on schedule and have done so for  thousands of years. Amy Feinberg and Greg Selvin (a theatre director/producer and a Product/Development Manager), will teach proven, practical methods from the Theatre that you can take back to the office to help you be more effective team members, leaders, and practitioners.

  • A Culture of Innovation
    When iterative 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
    In a culture of innovation, 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.

  • Manageability
    An ensemble’s work methods routinely accept and meet budgets and deadlines. An ensemble’s sense of identity gives it a group ego strong enough to accept and exploit direction, and to communicate upward effectively.

  • Team and Corporate Agility
    As ensembles learn to adapt to the emerging results of their collaboration, the firm learns to adapt to the increasing speed of change in markets and work conditions.

Workshop Objectives

Prepare the Individual for Teamwork
  • Learn the skill of Trust
  • Learn to release Tension and Inhibitions
  • Learn Active Listening
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 achieve 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

Workshop Content Description

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.

Teamwork as Methodology

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.

In the field of software development, Agile replaces traditional Waterfall methods with an iterative process focused on building high-performing teams.

THE ELEPHANT WITHOUT EARS:
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 element; the ways people work together to form team-based consensus, trust and active listening, cannot be ignored. Any methodology will fail by not taking the human element into account. It is an elephant in the room; a collaborative skill set that has often gone missing and unnoticed.


Dramatic Techniques for Dramatic Results

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 entity 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 Dramatic Techniques workshop, team collaboration and communication will be the focus, as Amy Feinberg and Greg Selvin 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.

Workshop Process

The workshop will be a combination of hands-on exercises and circle discussions between the group and the leaders. Amy will guide the group through collaborative exercises and Greg will help relate the work to the Agile process directly. Each member will be asked to discuss what he or she experienced during each exercise and its
relationship to work-related, team-related issues. As the day goes on, the correlations of the exercises to the team dynamic and Agile process will crystallize.

PART I: Preparing the Individual for Teamwork

9:00-9:30 Introductions and Goals of this Work
9:30-10:30 Warm Up and Release Exercises
10:30-10:40 Break
10:40-11:30 Trust and Safety
  • Exercises for Trust and Inhibition Release
  • Discussion of Trust and the importance of a “Safe” environment for Teams to be able to achieve true collaboration and creativity
11:30-12:00 Introduction to Listening

12:00-1:00 Lunch

PART II: Collaboration for Managers & Team Members by Amy Feinberg

1:00-2:30 ACTIVE LISTENING
  • Achieve connection between team members
2:30-2:40 BREAK
2:40-4:00 SPECIFICITY AND TEAM COLLABORATION
  • Meaning and Effective Communication
  • Objectives and Actions
4:00-5:00 Management vs. Directing led by Greg Selvin
  • Group discussion

Speaker Biographies:

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 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, his roles have included Project Management, Product Management,
Management Consulting, Operations, Support, Engineering, Pre-Sales, Client and Vendor Relations.

Intended Audience

All levels. Great for team members and managers.


Price

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