Art of Management & Organization Conference 2018 University of Brighton

Improvisation, Dance N Leadership A workshop about heartfull awareness, teamspirit and creative performance

Helle Winther, Associate professor Ph.D. University of Copenhagen. Denmark

Dance and movement has the ability to open our senses and give us possibilities to explore improvisation, flow and heartfull awareness as basis for both teamspirit and creative leadership performance. This workshop will be a moving journey. We will explore how simple and joyful elements from dance can intensify and train our heartfull awareness, momentary presence, contactability and performance possibilities. We will let music and easy communicative movements teach us how to create an improvising, rhythmic and open atmosphere.

In recent years, there has been a heightened awareness on the connection between embodiment and leadership. We cannot stop moving. The body is always in movement – always communicating. Thus, the language of the body also of great importance for heartfull awareness, authenticity, empathy, presence and creative performance in leadership practice.

This workshop builds on the practice-interventions, the methods and the results from several research projects about The Language of the Body in Leadership and Professional Practice. These examined how movement, sensual awareness, creative movement and performative practises may be used when training embodied leadership competences. The projects have a wholeness oriented movement psychological and phenomenological approach and have been carried out in various educational settings in Copenhagen e.g. in leadership courses, teacher education, university education, nurse education and various postgraduate contexts with different types of professionals.

Everybody can participate. You can wear your normal clothes.

Keywords: Dance, leadership, heartfull awareness, the language of the body, improvisation, creative performance

Playing with Communication: Improv Theatre with a Purpose!

Rosa Leventhal

As employees, leaders and people who deal with the public, you have to be communication experts! Through the lens of improv theatre you will begin to learn the subtleties of verbal and non-verbal communication, practice listening on many levels and learn to incorporate this into your boardroom, office space or customer communications. Why make it boring? Lets have some fun and learn some skills along the way!

Cultivating Presence for Inspired Leadership

Catharine Bachy

Leadership as Performance Art represents an ideal of artful inspiration. How do we show up as leaders in challenging situations where our abilities to improvise are most needed? Learn new practices based in neuroscience that support your internal ability to center and to respond as the inspiring and creative leader you strive to be.

Background Leadership as Performance Art speaks to improv, spontaneity, and cultivating our own charisma. Those are high functioning ways of being, and often the day to day world of leadership is not conducive to showing up in artful ways. While we may not have a lot of control over the external environment, we can cultivate our own internal capacity to access the inspiring, artful leadership presence that is part of who we are. We can learn to manage our own responses and show up as our best self in pressure-filled situations. The ability to embody leadership presence is a practice that involves the whole self. Stress in the workplace is a common experience for leaders and teams. Stress activates short term survival patterns that diminish the brain’s access to higher functioning capacities that are key attributes of inspired leadership. The practice of Leadership Embodiment restores the capacity for higher functions of the brain under pressure.

Description This workshop offers tools to recognize our own patterns under pressure, and practices to shift to a centered response as leaders. The work comes from two disciplines: Mindfulness and the martial art of Aikido. Mindfulness teaches us deeper self-awareness. When we are on the mat in Aikido, we are invited to show up artfully and with our bigger presence in order to meet resistance and challenge. The combined tools from these disciplines help us all to develop the skill of showing up in the best way we are able to in the moment.

Participants receive an introduction to Leadership Embodiment techniques through gentle movement and low impact stress simulation. This is a highly participatory session and is designed for a business casual attire atmosphere.

Learning Objectives:

• 
  Develop awareness of your body’s reactions under pressure and how to recover your center.
  
• 
  Learn to listen and respond to criticism.
  
• 
  Leave with practices to further support skillful and inspired leadership.
  
• 
  Reflect on how to integrate Leadership Embodiment practices to meet your leadership challenges.
  

Personal Agency and the Organisational Body

Dr Natalie McDonagh and Dr Karen Vella

[e-mail]

[e-mail]

Scene: Brighton University, on the south coast of England. It is late summer, early autumn in 2018. A group of delegates at the Art of Management and Organisation Conference is gathering to attend a session. These individuals are attracted to the somewhat unusual form and format: I wait to be admitted. I am advised terms and conditions. I sign a simple agreement, to perform. I cross the physical threshold of the space. Once inside with others, I become part of a collective body – an organ/isation. We are subject to certain rules; some made explicit, some to be subtly discerned. We perform to a supplied script, directed by an embodied voice. We are subject to a disembodied, authorizing voice, shaping the movement of collective mind and body. We respond to seen/unseen influences and instruction. We navigate a collective space in flux. We move in uncertain terrain, awareness drawn to our individual/collective agency. How do I hold my own (being) in this dynamic performance? How is my agency informed, from moment to moment, in making my obligatory contribution to the organizational body? How is my being when I leave this space of collective performance? How is body/mind once relieved of my commitment to perform with these others, at this time, at this place?

This presentation invites you to become an agent in its staging, to actively participate in a performance. Together we perform, we experience, we reflect, we consider what is revealed about our capacity to hold our own human agency when subjected to un/seen influences of voices that authorize an organisation’s environment and culture.