Draft, please only cite the published version in the May 2015 edition of the International Practice Development Journal (www.fons.org) when it comes out.
Last September I presented a keynote on healthcare and culture change at a Practice Development conference in Toronto. On the day before I left I spent an entire day auditing a marathon six-hour session at Miriam Laurence’s Integrated Acting System studio.
I was grateful to experience a working studio before setting up my own, which I did in January 2015. I established the Hummingbird Actors Studio in Bangor, Northern Ireland, because I love acting, theatre, and film. Another reason is because we need to start experimenting with new ways of thinking about leadership training for long-term culture change. As I’ll explain, actor training is for me one of the best places to start reimagining what helpful training might look like.
What strikes me while watching actors in training is the emotional courage they bring to performance, their commitment to vulnerability in the cause of learning. I taught for 17 years at university level, and the height of expectation for students was always that such levels of courage and vulnerability might be a destination for them. Possibly. Occasionally. Hopefully.
For actors, it’s not a destination. It’s the starting point. Seeing actors work with such commitment to emotional awareness, even when only at the beginning of their training, is always inspirational.
In my Toronto keynote I said:
“The biggest driver of change, whether helpful or unhelpful, is the dominant quality of relationship within an environment, the dispositional quality of an environment – how it feels. … Until the cultural climate, the personality, of an organisation changes, nothing substantially changes.”
Actor training is designed for two things in particular: the cultivation of presence in high-intensity peformance environments, and of long-term dispositional change as an actor develops their craft.
Both cultivation of presence and long-term dispositional change are core training needs at an organisational level in culture-change work internationally in the high-intensity environments of healthcare, education, and business. The challenge of transforming cultural climate is the challenge of transforming the emotional awareness of the people who contribute to that climate.
Actor training is an excellent place to start in designing bespoke leadership programmes to train people for long-term dispositional culture change in organisations, institutions, and communities.
The pedagogic heart of the Hummingbird Studio is what I call ‘presence-based learning’, where learning is understood as ‘increasing or decreasing awareness of being present (here, now, near, and with)’. This is in contradistinction to what I think of as orthodox ‘resource’ approaches to learning, where learning tends to be understood as ‘increasing resources of legitimated information, skills, or knowledge’. Here, ‘legitimated’ refers to information, skills, or knowledge issuing from authorities other than oneself. What I like about presence-based learning is first, responsibility and accountability for learning rests primarily on the shoulders of the person developing awareness, and, second, the experience of learning remains pragmatically relevant to the immediate and meaningful personal and personal-social context in which each of us operates.
The distinctive approach of the Hummingbird Actors Studio, Gentle Method, is also, then, our gateway to leadership. Four elements structure this work:
Mothú [mˠɔhuː]
An Irish word meaning “to feel”, but it can also mean “to sense”. In the context of our work, mothú is understood as “Sensitive Presence”, a fully embodied experience of listening-in-context. In this work we invite people to Sensitive Presence through a deepening awareness of hereness, nowness, nearness, and withness.
Caidreamh [kadʲrʲuː]
An Irish word that is normally taken to mean ‘personal contact’, but the deeper sense of the word refers to a particular quality of relationship. For us, caidreamh speaks to an understanding of relational dynamics, emotional intensities, and the subtleties of power, whether in personal experience or professional working life. In effect, the exploration of caidreamh is the exploration of the intricacies of cultural climate.
Dáimh [d̪ˠəivʲ]
Dáimh is a term in Irish that refers to the sense of duty that is felt when a relative, however distant, is in need. In the context of this work, dáimh is taken to mean a sense of response-ability within specific relationship contexts, whether in personal life or in a working environment. To practice dáimh is to remain accountable and response-able for your own participation within your social ecology, at all times.
Garaíocht [gaɾiːɔkt]
Garaíocht means, more or less, ‘being actively responsive in an atmosphere of helpfulness’. In the context of our work, garaíocht is taken to refer to the optimal conditions for creativity, imagination, interdependence, self-care, and mutual support in personal relationships or professional working life.
With these four principles of Gentle Method we hope to support people as we all reimagine what leadership can look like in the face of the culture-change challenges ahead of us.
Anthony McCann
Director, Hummingbird Workshop CIC
@GentleMethod