Getting Into the Flow

Be willing to do it even when you’re afraid. You can feel joy while learning. You don’t need to know all the answers. It feels good to be brave. Feel OK doing something badly.

Those were some of the takeaways from Sunday’s “un-keynote” on the ATD26 Mainstage. Freestyle+, a team of award-winning performers, called on the tenets of improv, hip-hop, and neuroscience to get the audience moving in their seats and out of their comfort zone.

The evolutionary brain was designed to run when faced with fear. Yet, for each performance, freestyle+ goes on stage under the pressure of having no idea how the performance will unfold through improv.

The quartet—Anthony, Larry, Aneesa, and Kaila—instructed on how to combat the evolutionary brain; that it’s OK to be uncomfortable and stop judging oneself. They did so through audience activities that included Boots and Cuts; beatboxing; gibberish flow, which is vocal percussion and making up nonsensical words over a beat; and vennspiration, where participants ad-libbed responses to questions about their jobs, hobby, and the similarities between the two.

Artificial intelligence is causing everything in the workplace to change so fast, began Anthony. Freestyle+ works with companies to help high-performing teams sync up their hearts, similar to a musical concert with everyone singing the same tune. It’s also what Boots and Cuts does.

Anthony introduced a BOLD mindset that enables teams to merge and move forward together, especially in these times of rapid change:

Improv allows an individual to shut down their judging brain and increases their state of flow. You can’t be judging and in a state of flow at the same time, Anthony shared.

When learning something new, we’re all on the same footing. Be willing to get it wrong. That is the key to moving forward, explained Anthony. The ad-libbing of vennspiration helps us connect disparate concepts, activate our flow state, develop storytelling capacity, and create memorable connections for our learners to visualize.

The vennspiration exercise on the Mainstage fostered strong bonds because it aided the release of the hormone oxytocin in attendees’ brains.

To bring improv and ad-libbing back to the workplace, Anthony suggested that teams take five minutes before a meeting to make noise, whether with gibberish or to tell a story. Doing so breaks the routine.

He furthered that AI adoption is not about the tool, but about the fear of getting it wrong in front of one’s colleagues. That’s another place where the tools that freestyle+ introduced can play a role.

As a leader, you don’t have to intentionally create games or improv activities or announce it, said Kaila. Rather, it’s a mindset; it’s about choosing joy, energy, celebration, and play. “Just choose it.”

Read more about ATD26 at conferencedaily.td.org.