Refreshing Rehearsal Days

My team has a day blocked out every 6 weeks or so for what would traditionally be called an away day. We call them Rehearsal Days and the aim is to be creative, innovative, to generate new ideas, to provoke. We’ve been doing this for a few years now, and as often happens with novel ideas they become impacted by entropy. They slide back into lazy habits, everyday business and easy stuff!

We attempted a refresh a while back which I dubbed Rehearsal Day 2.0. It sort of worked, but it wasn’t a complete refresh. In the last couple of months, in the midst of Coronavirus Lockdown, we’ve been hankering for something to shake up what we do. So… cue Rehearsal Day 3.0.

On Wednesday of this week, I led a day using some of the techniques from before – but with the added dimension that the whole thing happened on Zoom. That gave a completely different feel to the day. In physical space together we would typically spend about 6 hours together. Working online is much more exhausting and intense, so we opted instead for 3 one hour sessions. During the day we adapted it to a one hour session and a two hour session to help flex around other pressures on the day.

In advance, I had spent some time thinking about a theme. I had a chat with my coach, Ian Pettigrew, to explore ideas for themes. I talked a bit about a sense of being stuck, and we both were reminded of Michael Bungay Stanier’s first book “Get Unstuck and Get Going”. That gave itself as a great title for the day. I continued over the next week or so to plan and have ideas for how to use the day, but couldn’t pull together the outline and format. Ironically I was stuck on the actual format of the day itself!

Late on Tuesday night I was looking at the notes that I had made again. I was reminded that a key way into these kind of events is to step back, not be too controlling, recognise that it is important to trust the people and the process. In that thought, the stuckness unlocked. I pulled together a short email to share with the team.

I had three short videos, one for each session, which I wanted to share – and I wanted these to be provocations for a conversation. Two of them were from a year-long programme being run by Michael Bungay Stanier this year – 52 short weekly videos with content from 52 different people. I chose one with Asheesh Advani that looked at Optimism and one by Austin Kleon about Attention. These were the sandwich for the central video which was a TED Talk by Priya Parker based on her book “The Art of Gathering”. I’m reading this book at the moment. It’s really good!

The first video gave me the opportunity to ask each team member for three things that they were grateful for that day. This opened us into a positive space from which to explore broader issues about the future direction of our work in the light of the COVID crisis.

As the day progressed, I drew on ideas, books and stories to inspire the team – pushed us into some tricky conversations – and also worked from an improvisational perspective.

Towards the end of the first session, I paused and waited. The silence grew into a prolonged pause. In the moment, it struck me that playing with this silence would be helpful. We are quite a noisy team sometimes, and I wanted to see how silence would shift our dynamic. I hadn’t planned this – and it became something that I want to explore more.

Being home based at the moment, and using Zoom to support the day, did mean that I had all my books around me and the opportunity to dip into videos and screen share them along with web pages. It was so much richer than sitting in an empty room.

We’ve refreshed our Rehearsal Day approach and opened up so many other ways in which we can work with this new format. Breakout rooms, for example, could be a good way into some of the emergent ideas – and we could also bring in other apps to enhance what we are doing.

I began the day with some trepidation and discomfort. Experience tells me that often this means that we are getting into a space that will be productive. I ended the day, following the After Action Review, with a feeling of exhaustion and elation. As a team, we had achieved something of great value, looked at how we lift our game and do more great work, and above all we had found a productive way to sustain our Rehearsal Day approach.

The process of refresh is so key when we want to sustain things, otherwise we should make them time limited.