Improvising under pressure

Improvise: verb

- To do something on the spur of the moment

- To make, invent or arrange informally

- To make or fabricate out of what is conveniently to hand

We humans like a degree of predictability in our lives.  There’s comfort in our chosen routines, even the ones we moan about.

What’s happening now has disrupted everyone’s routine, and that creates stress.  The degree of stress varies, but the shape of it is predictable.  The basic stress response is known as ‘fight, flight or freeze’.  We fight by resisting, arguing, complaining and defending our opinions.  We freeze by stopping, not being able to think, like a rabbit in the headlights. We flee, by escaping and running away – be it physically or into our imaginations. Physical flight is harder at the moment, because we can’t go anywhere, but we can and do distract ourselves, avoid difficult situations, and put things off.

It’s important to realise these are all natural, healthy reactions.  And it’s also important to remember we are more than our stress response.  Stress happens when things don’t make sense.  One way to tackle stressful situations is to make new sense of them.  To try new things.  To improvise.

The way we make sense of much of our life is through internal routines.  We have complicated and really clever autopilots that quickly scan situations and tell us what to do.  Walking, talking, breathing – lots of what we do happens on autopilot, for the good reason that it’s quick and efficient.  It’s also how we get good at our jobs –we see familiar situations and just know what to do.

But when patterns and routines disappear, it’s hard to make sense of anything.  Our autopilots make guesses, but those change with every piece of news or gossip on social media, and the constant scanning is draining.  The uncertainty creates stress.  We need ways to make new sense of it all, and that takes deliberate effort.  It’s tiring, but essential.

That’s what improvising is.  Making sense of things as we go – moving into what is unfolding and co-creating it.  

Much of the time – in our work, as adults generally, improvising is frowned upon.  We are ‘supposed’ to know what we are doing, to be professional, to have the answers.  We improvise in the gaps, when something goes wrong, but the focus is always on getting back to control again.

Situations like this are different.  Predictability and control is what we have least of.  Searching for that is natural, but we have to adapt to the uncertainty.  We have to exercise our improvisation muscles to get through to the other side, not wait for answers. And improvising, when we are allowed or let ourselves, can be great fun!

There are lots of examples of it happening already.  Food wholesalers and restaurants adapting to home delivery.  Various engineering companies adapting and collaborating to build ventilators.  

So, whether you are just tired of the lack of sense, or under pressure to create new solutions fast, or both, what are the tips that can help you improvise when it’s hard to think straight?

Pause

Notice the stress, and give yourself permission to press your pause button. Take a breath. Several in fact. Notice the thing you are responding to, and the story you have about that. And, as someone once told us, release your grip on the story. Hold it, but hold it lightly, with an open hand, not a closed fist. If you can change the story, you can change what’s possible. 

Acknowledge

Think “Yes, and ...” Stress comes both from the situation we find ourselves in, and the assumptions we make about it. If you look on news and social media just now you will see hundreds of people making assertions, based on half a fact and a lot of jumping to conclusions. To improvise productively, it helps to know what you are working with, so check facts and evidence, even if they are uncomfortable. You don’t have to like what you find, but acknowledge the reality of what exists, the good as well as the bad. Then you focus on what you can do “Yes and ...”, rather than ‘Yes but ...” 

Collide

To make new sense of things, you change the patterns in your autopilot. The basic unit of any creative process is to take an existing idea, and collide it with something new, something that doesn’t make sense, and explore that to see what else it produces. And you have to get it past your internal thought police. The part of you that says it’s a crazy thought. It’s a crazy idea to build a 4000 bed hospital in 12 days, until you do it. It was a crazy idea that everyone in a large organisation could work from home and perform, until people did it. You want to collide ideas to get to something you might be able to try, to improvise. And to do that, you listen. Really listen. Internally, you listen to your anxieties, and keep looking. Externally we listen hard to each other, about what matters, and how we might get there. When someone says something that you think is crazy, try responding “How might we make that work?” 

Experiment

The key to improvisation is trying things. All of the previous tips are to get you here. You improvise because there is an urgent need and there are no existing guaranteed solutions. Whatever you choose, you can’t know until you try, so instead of talking for ages about the one, big solution that may or may not work, you just try smaller things and learn fast. So manage risk not by committing to a big plan, which will take ages to agree and may not work anyway, but by working in small, bite size chunks, and learning and adapting fast as you go. You may even have fun – and come up with a lot of really brilliant ideas for lots of opportunities, or lots of silly ideas that have a germ of potential for thinking about later. 

That’s a lot to absorb, so here’s the summary:

• Pause, breathe, and release your grip on the current story
• Acknowledge the situation and what’s needed (“Yes and…”)
• Collide ideas with other people to break through constraints
• Experiment and adapt at speed

And allow yourself to get it wrong, and to enjoy it! With improvising, as with everything else at the moment, you won’t know for sure until you give it a go.

Let us know how your improvising goes and what comes out of it.

Alan Arnett

www.theexplorationhabit.com

Kathryn Pope

www.beechurst.com