THERE’S A MOMENT in Brecht’s Mother Courage where everything the play is about crystallises into a single scene. A Young Soldier storms in, furious, ready to demand justice from his captain. Mother Courage talks him out of it. Not through argument - through a song. The Grand Song of Capitulation. She sings about how she too once believed in standing up for what’s right, in refusing to march in step. And then she learned better.

The soldier leaves, defeated. Courage, having talked him out of his complaint, realises she’s also talked herself out of her own. Eight scenes later she’s lost both sons and her daughter. But she’ll eat tomorrow.

It’s almost always played for bitter irony. But if we only see Courage as stupid - if the audience response is “well obviously you shouldn’t capitulate” - then the scene has nothing to teach us. We’re just watching someone be thick.

And that’s a problem that goes well beyond Brecht. Every rehearsal room, every workshop, every facilitated conversation eventually hits a moment where someone holds a position that seems obviously self-defeating. A character who throws away their second chance. A participant who defends something that’s clearly hurting them. A leader who knows the moral case and chooses pragmatism anyway. The temptation is always the same: they’re just stupid. And once you’ve decided that, you’ve stopped thinking. Which is a problem, because they haven’t stopped doing.

Whose drama?

I had a student at drama school once - enthusiastic, committed, loved drama. We were deep into a production, well past the point where everyone else had shifted into thinking about the audience’s experience. During notes, while the rest of us were working out how to make the play better, he asked if his parents would be able to see him in the curtain call.

Now, if a thirteen-year-old in a drama club asked that, you’d think nothing of it. But this was vocational training. He’d chosen this as a career. The rest of the company was working in service of the play, and he was still in a place where drama was his - the thing that made him special, the thing his family came to see.

I didn’t feel sympathetic. It was a type of vanity. But recognising the dissonance meant I could name it: this shift you’re struggling with is real. It’s going to feel like a kind of mourning. The professional values that replace what you’re letting go of will more than compensate - but right now it feels like loss.¹ That’s not sympathy. It’s diagnosis. And diagnosis gives you something to work with.

Frozen Chickens Don’t Care

If “stupid” is a dead end, you need another way of reading what’s going on. One that assumes the thinking is coherent, even when the outcome isn’t. There’s a framework from moral psychology - Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory - that I’ve found genuinely useful in the rehearsal room. Haidt’s research suggests we make moral judgements drawing on six foundations:

• Care / Harm - sensitivity to suffering, the impulse to protect

• Fairness / Cheating - justice, reciprocity, playing by the rules

• Loyalty / Betrayal - commitment to the group, solidarity, ‘us’

• Authority / Subversion - respect for hierarchy, tradition, legitimate order

• Sanctity / Degradation - purity, disgust, the sacred

• Liberty / Oppression - resistance to domination, autonomy

We all draw on most of these. But we weight them very differently, and the weightings often only become visible when they collide - or when someone transgresses a value that matters to us but can’t easily be justified in terms of harm.

Haidt’s most provocative examples work precisely because no one is hurt. A family eats their dog after it’s killed by a car. Someone uses a national flag to clean a toilet. A person has sex with a frozen chicken and then cooks and eats it. Most people react with immediate disgust, then struggle to explain why it’s wrong - because the wrongness isn’t located in harm. It’s located in Sanctity, or Loyalty, or some foundation that doesn’t need a victim to be activated.

This is what makes values collisions so difficult to navigate - in a rehearsal room, in a workshop, in a staffroom, anywhere. The person isn’t being irrational. They’re processing the situation through moral architecture that weighs differently to yours. And until you can see the architecture, all you’ve got is: they’re just stupid.

“She’s Just Stupid”

A few years ago I was directing a TIE production and we hit the same wall from the other side. The character was Corey, a young woman who’d been offered a genuine fresh start. New family, new crowd, a way out. And what does she do? Goes straight back to shoplifting.

The cast couldn’t get past it. “She’s just stupid,” someone said, and rehearsals stalled. Nobody could find a justification that didn’t boil down to pathology or innate badness. And you can’t play pathology. The audience checks out because that’s not them.

I didn’t have an answer either. What I did have was a roll of wallpaper and some markers. I rolled it out on the floor and asked the cast to write down the most absurd, ridiculous reasons Corey might start stealing again. The sillier the better. The mood shifted. People were laughing, bouncing off each other.

Then we went through them looking for seeds of logic.

The actor playing Corey had written: “Corey is stealing to save up for cosmetic surgery.” Why? “Her friends are good-looking, and she isn’t.” Five minutes later the whole thing had cracked open. The shoplifting involved skin care, hair products, perfume, make-up. Previously, theft had been a way of bonding with a boyfriend from the wrong side of town. Now it was the means by which she could fit in with the crowd from the right side of town. Corey wasn’t a loner. She was consumed by the need for belonging.

In Haidt’s terms, the cast (and her family) had been reading Corey through Care and Fairness - someone gives you a chance, you take it. Corey wasn’t choosing irrationally. She was prioritising Loyalty – belonging – over long-term self-interest. Same intelligence. Different architecture. Still heading for trouble. But now we had something to play.2

This Time Next Year...

So what’s Courage actually doing? She values her family - that sounds straightforward until you notice the form it takes. Her Care is real, but it’s inextricably tangled with short-term material survival: feed the children today, keep the wagon moving, do the deal in front of you. And her Loyalty isn’t to a community or a cause - it’s to her own way of doing things. She is the provider. Her way of surviving is the only way she recognises.

The Grand Song of Capitulation is the moment this becomes explicit. Courage’s position is essentially: survival requires you to strangle your Liberty and your sense of Fairness. Don’t stand up. Don’t demand justice. Stifle the itch. The Young Soldier keeps his life; she keeps her permit. In the short term, it works. Strategic cowardice as fireproofing.

I directed a professional tour of Mother Courage in 2008. The phrase that the cast and I kept coming back to was “this time next year.”3 It really opened up the play for us. Courage is always trading away the present for a future that never arrives. Don’t tear up the officer’s shirts for bandages - we might need them. Don’t refuse the deal - something better is coming. She has the courage to march into a war zone but lacks the courage to simply decide: we will not be involved.

Because Courage believes she is a partner to the war - that if she respects its Authority and follows its rules of trade, it will respect her back. Brecht shows us that the war is not a partner. It’s a predator. By stifling Liberty she loses the ability to change her situation. She becomes a passenger. And to keep the wagon rolling - to keep her version of Care operational - she repeatedly sacrifices the very people that Care was supposed to protect. She isn’t just marching in step to survive. She is marching her children to their graves.

The Noise That Matters

This is where Kattrin comes in. Courage’s mute daughter is the direct counter-argument to the Grand Capitulation. Where Courage spends the play stifling her moral impulses to eat tomorrow, Kattrin does the opposite. She climbs onto a roof and beats a drum to warn a sleeping city of an attack, knowing it will kill her.

During rehearsals we ran an exercise where Kattrin could speak - the idea was simply to make her internal dialogue explicit. What jumped out was something we hadn’t expected. Courage couldn’t hear her. Not ignoring her - couldn’t hear her. She had suppressed those values so completely that the voice articulating them had become inaudible. Kattrin’s silence isn’t only a psychological response to trauma. It’s a resonant metaphor for what happens to Care when it has no seat at the table.

And when Kattrin does finally find her voice - not through words but by banging a drum on a rooftop - it’s no coincidence that Courage isn’t present in the scene. The one moment in the play where Care acts decisively, Courage is somewhere else entirely.

Courage survives but loses everything. Kattrin dies but saves thousands. Brecht doesn’t sentimentalise Kattrin. That’s not the point. Kattrin is the one character whose values and actions are aligned. Her Care is not tangled up with trade-offs and short-term calculations. It costs her everything, and she pays it.

By the final scene, Courage’s strategy has won in the most hollow way possible. She has successfully avoided the stupidity of standing up for justice. She has successfully navigated the Authority of both sides. And she is alone, her children are dead, and she is still pulling the wagon, singing the same song.

Still Pulling The Wagon

None of this is a plea for relativism. Understanding someone’s moral architecture doesn’t oblige you to agree with them - it means you know what you’re actually disagreeing about. That’s a different skill from empathy and a more useful one. It’s what lets a director crack open a character the cast has written off. It’s what lets a facilitator work with a group that’s stuck on “they’re just idiots.” It’s what lets a citizen watch a press conference and ask not “why are they so stupid?” but “what are they protecting, and what is it costing them?”

Because I keep seeing the Grand Capitulation performed - not on stage but in press conferences and summits and carefully worded statements of concern. Leaders who understand the moral case, can see what’s happening, and still stifle the itch. Their Care is real - but it’s tangled with economic survival and a respect for an old Authority that no longer respects them back. This time next year, they tell themselves. The relationship will pay off. The trade deal will hold. The shirts will be needed.

Brecht’s question was never “why is Courage stupid?” It was “what happens when intelligent people are so afraid of tomorrow that they betray their values today?” It’s a good question for a rehearsal room. It might be an essential one right now.

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Sources:
Brecht, B., 1939. Mother Courage and Her Children.
Haidt, J., 2012. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. London: Allen Lane.

Around thirty years ago, the UK government introduced a specialist college programme. Secondary schools could apply for designation – and the funding that came with it – as centres of excellence in particular subjects: technology, languages, arts, sport. In principle a good idea. In practice, a complex one.

Performing arts facilities had historically been underfunded, and many departments had been working in spaces that were never designed for theatre in the first place. The new investment solved some long-standing problems.

I was director of a company touring into schools during much of this period. This meant spending long days in their performance spaces: fit up, performance and workshop, strike. In between, you catch things. A class coming in to rehearse during lunch. Drama club setting up after the last bell. Fragments of other people’s working days glimpsed from the corner of the room.

The before/after transformation in the specialist arts colleges we visited was impressive: new performance spaces, upgraded lighting rigs, professional-grade PA systems, tiered seating – the kind of staging that would have been remarkable ten years earlier. In several cases we were even met at the door by a dedicated performing arts technician.1

Something started to bother me. What I began to notice, in these newly equipped spaces, was a particular kind of work: note-for-note, move-for-move reproductions of the dominant West End and Broadway musicals of the moment, performed with considerable technical polish. The singing was often excellent. The choreography had clearly been worked on. The investment had plainly found a purpose.

For a while I wasn’t sure what to do with the observation and the disquiet I felt. It wasn’t musical theatre versus drama prejudice.2 Or scripted versus devised work. Neither was it a puritanical aversion to the use of technology – I’m an enthusiastic early adopter. More importantly, the new kit had opened a range of non-performance roles that had previously been impossible.

The disquiet was somehow to do with creativity, or more precisely, its absence. Not a creativity deficit that could simply be cured by switching to devised work, but an absence of ownership: the sense that the decisions shaping the work actually belonged to the people making it. Without that, performing – particularly for a non-professional – can easily become a consumer activity: passive reproduction of someone else’s experience.

A shop is where you make things

The distinction between making something new and reproducing something existing turns out to be encoded in a pair of words that British English has done its best to blur into synonyms.

Shop comes from the Old English scoppa – a stall, a booth, a small structure attached to a larger one. Related to scypen, meaning a cowshed. The Germanic cousins include Schuppen (still used in German for a garden shed) and the Old High German scopf, meaning a porch or outbuilding. The family resemblance is consistent: a shop is a place where something happens. Where things are made, worked, practised, assembled.

Store has a different lineage and a different logic. From the Old French estorer, meaning to furnish or supply, from the Latin instaurare – to set up, to establish stock. A store is a place where things already made are kept and distributed. The distinction is between production and provision. Between the smithy and the warehouse.

In American English the difference is still audible: you go to the hardware store to buy what someone else manufactured; you go to the workshop to make something yourself. In British English the two have blurred – but the underlying meanings haven’t gone anywhere.

And there it is. Workshop. A compound of work and shop – work, from the Proto-Indo-European werg-, simply meaning “to do,” and shop, meaning the place where the doing happens. The word has carried this meaning since the sixteenth century. A workshop is, etymologically, a place where something is made.

Are we running workshops or workstores?

The specialist arts schools had invested heavily in their capacity to store and distribute existing work. Better staging makes it easier to reproduce a professional production. Better audio equipment closes the gap between the West End cast recording and the school hall.3 These are genuine improvements to a school’s ability to provide access to what already exists in the repertoire.

What they had invested in rather less was the capacity to make something that hadn’t existed before the students walked into the room – whatever form that making might take.

More precisely: the capacity for participants to experience themselves as the makers. Not consumers of someone else’s decisions but the people whose presence in the room actually shaped the work.

The conditions that shape creative agency can’t be found at a theatre tech expo. Time matters: longer sessions, smaller groups, and enough staff to work with them. Some specialist schools achieved parts of this. Many did not.

I don’t raise this to be uncharitable about what those schools achieved. And I’m aware the pressures on arts departments – to justify the funding, to demonstrate outcomes, keep numbers up, and produce something impressive on the night – are real and considerable. Choosing a big musical is a rational response to those pressures.

The specialist schools programme that produced those well-equipped theatres no longer exists.4 The pressures have not disappeared, though – they have simply taken different forms. One current version appears in examined drama work. Students are often required to demonstrate the influence of recognised practitioners: Frantic Assembly, Katie Mitchell, Berkoff and others. The intention is entirely sensible. Exam boards need ways of recognising and assessing creative work, and named traditions offer a shared vocabulary for doing that. But occasionally the sequence runs in reverse.

I recently overheard a drama teacher asking colleagues which practitioner might reasonably be said to influence a piece their students had already devised. The work existed; the label had yet to be chosen.

There is no criticism implied here. The teacher had no choice but to respond as the system required. But the moment is revealing. The practitioner becomes less a source of methods than a category the work can be placed inside – a way of identifying what has been emulated so it can be assessed. The pressures look different, but the underlying dynamic is recognisable.

The promise in the word

It’s worth being precise about what these examples are doing here. The students running a musical number are rehearsing. The exam class working through a practitioner module are in a lesson. Neither context is the target. Both are examples of something that can happen anywhere: the making space collapsing into a distributing space. I use them because the dynamic is visible – a school production makes it easy to see the difference between a room where something is being made and a room where something is being delivered.

But the distinction I’m drawing is not between lessons, rehearsals and workshops as formats. Workshops contain learning. They often involve rehearsal. A lesson can open into genuine making; a rehearsal can produce something no one planned. The question is not what the timetable calls the session, or even who chose the material. It’s whether the people in the room are contributing to and changed by what emerges – or simply processing what was decided before they arrived.

The word workshop carries a promise. It says: something will be made here. Not retrieved from a catalogue, not reproduced from a recording, not stored on a shelf until the appropriate occasion. Made – from the materials in the room, by the people in the room, for whatever purposes bring them here.

That promise is harder to keep than it sounds. And worth keeping track of – because the pressures that turned those school productions into workstores don’t only apply to secondary arts departments.

They apply to anyone who calls what they do a workshop.

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Sources:

Harper, D., 2001–2025. Online Etymology Dictionary. Available at: https://www.etymonline.com Onions, C.T. ed., 1996. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

THE PARTCIPANTS ARRIVED UNFOCUSED AND CHATTY. There was a core group who clearly knew each other well and a few who seemed less confident. Perhaps this was their first time. I sat in a corner trying to be as unobtrusive as possible. The facilitator was a student on placement, I was observing - a week into a new job - unfamiliar with either the group or the student. They began with a game of Ninja.

Participants take turns striking stylised martial arts poses and making attacks across the circle. There are rules - quite a few of them - and if you are hit, you are out and the circle becomes small. An odd choice as an opener I thought, but then again, it wasn’t a game I had really come across before. The group clearly had, and loved it. Within seconds, the room snapped into focus. Bodies sharpened, attention locked in, laughter and competitive energy surged. I remember thinking, very clearly, perhaps this is a good warm-up choice after all.

Forty minutes later, the last two players began the final round.

Elimination

The first person had been out in under a minute. By any reckoning, that participant spent roughly two thirds of the workshop sitting at the side of the room, watching. The same was true, to varying degrees, for a growing number of others. The game had worked exactly as designed. It had also quietly undone the stated purpose of the session. The actual workshop was squeezed into the last twenty minutes.

This moment has stayed with me because it captures the central problem I have with elimination games in workshop contexts. Not competition - competition is often useful. Elimination is something else.

Splat, Wink Murder, Night in the Museum, Ninja - these games are popular for good reasons. They are clear, playful, and generate instant focus. The sense of being tested - by others, by timing, by the rules themselves - can be energising and concentrating. Roger Caillois calls this agon, the pleasure of structured contest.1 It’s not the problem.

Elimination introduces a second mechanism that is often treated as incidental rather than structural. It removes people from the field of play altogether.

In very short games this may not matter. But as group size increases, or as games run longer, elimination scales badly. The facilitator cedes control of timing to the game’s internal logic - it ends when it ends, not when the room needs it to end. The better the game “works”, the more participants it excludes. If the purpose of a warm-up is to prepare the group physically, mentally, and attentively for the main work, then a structure that steadily cools the bodies and minds of the majority works directly against that aim.

Facilitators know this. Adaptations are common. Those who are out become judges, callers of mistakes, timekeepers. These gestures are often framed as inclusion.

But they are compensations, not participation.

Watching is not the same as doing. Calling is not the same as risking. Unless an exercise has been designed so that observation is the learning, those sitting out are no longer warming their bodies or sharing the uncertainty that gives the game its charge.

According to James Carse:

Elimination games are, by definition, finite. Their success condition is that most players stop playing. Workshops are not. Their purpose is to sustain engagement long enough for something else to happen - learning, discovery, trust, skill, insight. A workshop that systematically removes participants is a finite game pretending to be an infinite one.2

This does not mean elimination games should never be used. Some eliminate so quickly that being out lasts only seconds. Others allow mistakes to accrue without removal from play. In some exercises, exclusion from action is deliberate because the learning resides in watching. The problem arises when elimination is treated as neutral simply because the game is familiar.

Stranded

Elimination removes people from play entirely. But there’s another way games can fail participants: by leaving them stranded within play. Clive Barker identified what he called victim games - exercises designed to place an individual under sustained pressure as part of theatre training. Games like Piggy in the Middle, or Breakout, where exposure is the point.

Other games - Duck, Duck, Goose, for example - are not victim games in themselves. But they can all too easily become victim games if conditions allow. A participant who is slower, less confident, or subtly targeted can end up stranded as “it” far longer than intended. The design is neutral. The social dynamics are not.

In my own practice I adopted a simple rule: avoid these exercises where alternatives exist, and where they are used, build in escape hatches so no one is left stranded. Generalising this as advice to facilitators in training I instinctively turned to Barker’s categories - “Victim games have their uses, but are best avoided until you have more experience - be particularly mindful of games structures that can inadvertently become such”

For a long time, this felt like sound advice. It probably was. When you’re learning facilitation, bright lines are useful. Don’t leave people exposed. Don’t let games drift into cruelty. Watch the room.

But as I kept working, the neatness of that distinction began to trouble me. The fear of creating a ‘victim’ - and the weight carried by that word - was narrowing what participants encountered. They rarely experienced being ‘it’ in a held context. Public missteps, when they occurred, were quickly smoothed over. Discomfort was treated as a problem to be solved rather than a threshold to be crossed with support.

This matters because workshops are not the world. If the first time someone experiences being singled out, losing publicly, or struggling visibly is when the stakes are real - when there’s no facilitator present, no warm frame, no one actively holding the room - then we haven’t prepared them. We’ve withheld something.

At this point, it became clear that the term “victim game” was doing two different kinds of work. Barker used it to identify games like Breakout - exercises structurally designed to place someone in sustained exposure. But I had extended it to include any game with victim potential - games that could accidentally drift into stranding someone through bad luck or group dynamics. One is a design feature. The other is a facilitation hazard.

That distinction matters. Because what I began to realise was that my blanket avoidance wasn’t just preventing the drift. It was also ruling out the deliberate, carefully held use of uneven focus altogether.

Victim games are volatile. Left unchecked, they can absolutely become corrosive. But that volatility is precisely why they require judgement rather than prohibition.

The problem is not illumination. The problem is abandonment.

When handled with care, tight spots can offer something important: a chance to be ‘it’ without becoming an it. A chance to be the focus without being defined by it. A moment of slowness or loss that is comic rather than cruel, temporary rather than terminal, and held by a facilitator who is attentive but not prematurely rescuing.

Seen this way, the key distinction is not between good and bad games, or safe and unsafe ones, but between structures that eject people from participation and those that deepen it. Elimination that removes players from the room is usually poor design. Exposure that keeps everyone in relation, even unevenly for a moment, can be transformational.

My position now is narrower and more demanding than it once was. Elimination games should be used sparingly, redesigned where possible, and timed ruthlessly. Victim games, in the Barker sense of the term, have a place (though I refer to them as ‘tight spots’ to avoid unnecessary baggage). They certainly should never be casual. But sustained, uneven focus should not be taboo. Carefully framed, clearly bounded, and understood as structural rather than personal, it can teach something difficult to learn elsewhere: how to remain in the game when held in the spotlight.

For facilitators, this shifts the question. Not “Is this exercise safe?” but “What kind of light does this cast, for how long, and to what end?” Who is held. Who is seen. Who is allowed to recover without being rescued.

In the end, this is less about games than about judgement. About recognising when a structure builds capacity, and when it quietly erodes it. About remembering that participation is not the absence of exposure, but the ability to stay in relation when exposure arrives. Not all intensity excludes. But some structures do.

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Sources:

Barker, C., 1978. Theatre games: a new approach to drama training. London: Methuen.
Caillois, R. and Barash, M., 1958. Man, play, and games. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Carse, J.P., 1986. Finite and infinite games: a vision of life as play and possibility. first Free Press paperback edition edn. New York London Toronto Sydney New Delhi: Free Press.

HAVE YOU EVER NOTICED that come late January, a particular mood sets in. And not just the slow countdown to payday.

The big resets have quietly failed. Not in any dramatic way. Nothing has collapsed. But the sense that this term, this return, this new structure was going to fix things has ebbed away.

The sessions aren’t disasters.
They’re not magical either.
They’re just… fine.

And for many facilitators, this is the moment when an ache sets in. Not because the work is going badly, but because it no longer feels like development. The strain that was meant to signal progress has faded into soreness, or into caution. We pull back. We lower ambition. We tell ourselves we’re regrouping.

What we’re often responding to here is not failure, but a mistaken expectation about what development is supposed to feel like.

I want to call this error The Groin Strain Fallacy.

Two kinds of session we remember

I think most of us tend to carry two kinds of workshop very clearly in memory.

The first are the catastrophes.
The session that went off the rails. The activity that generated tumbleweed, hostility, or refusal. The discussion that turned sharp and never recovered. These moments burn themselves in. The causes are often obvious in hindsight. I misjudged the group. I ignored a warning sign. I rushed a transition. We tell ourselves, with some confidence, I won’t do that again.

The second are the magical sessions.
The ones where everything aligned. Where a reluctant participant suddenly spoke. Where the group created something none of us could have predicted. Where time slipped and people left changed. These sessions glow in memory, but they are strangely unhelpful. Too many invisible factors were in play. Try to recreate them and they evaporate.

Between these two poles sits the overwhelming majority of our work.

• Stuff that mostly worked.

• Times when some things landed and others didn’t.

• Sessions where the energy dipped and recovered.

• Days where nothing went wrong, but nothing quite lifted either.

And these are the bits we rarely look at properly.

The error in thinking

The Groin Strain Fallacy is the assumption that development lives in bridging the extremes.

That disasters are where we learn what not to do and great successes are where we prove what we are capable of. The ordinary sessions in between are largely uninformative. They are what happens while we are planning better things.

Hans Rosling describes what he calls the gap instinct: our tendency to divide the world into opposing categories and imagine a wide gulf between them. Rich and poor. Developed and undeveloped. Success and failure.1

The problem with the gap instinct is not just that it misrepresents reality. It produces helplessness. When we see only extremes, movement feels impossible. Progress appears to require a leap.

Facilitators often reproduce the same distortion in how we think about our own practice.

The cost of ignoring the middle

If development is assumed to live at the extremes, the middle of practice quietly drops out of view.

We finish the session. It was fine. There’s nothing to hold onto, no clear lesson, so it fades. Next week, another session. Also fine. Also fading.

Each one asks something slightly different, so we improvise, and move on.

What remains are the extremes.

Clear failures become warning signs. Rare successes become templates. Development shrinks to steering away from the former and reaching for the latter.

Risk narrows, because avoiding failure becomes more important than extending capacity. Ambition becomes episodic - occasional leaps rather than sustained preparation. Ordinary, competent sessions are quietly discounted because they didn’t feel like progress.

Most damagingly, learning becomes reactive. We attend to what went wrong there or right then, rather than to what is repeatedly being asked of our practice as a whole.

The irony is that the middle is where we spend most of our time.

Where learning actually comes from

The ordinary session teaches differently. Not the blunt lesson of disaster, not the unreproducible magic of everything aligning. Something quieter.

The moments that matter are small and unremarkable.

• The question you answered instead of opening.

• The transition you rushed.

• The activity that worked better than expected.

• The participant whose attention drifted, then returned.

None of these announce themselves. None feel like development at the time. But they recur. They can be noticed. They can be adjusted.

This is where generalisable knowledge forms - not in the post-mortem of a crisis, but in the slight adjustments available to us most weeks, if we knew where to look.

From one-offs to practice

Rosling’s corrective to the gap instinct is not to search for better examples, but to change where we look. To attend to the majority.

For facilitators, the majority is not a type of session. It is the conditions under which we work most of the time. The repeated negotiations with energy, attention, timing. The decisions that don’t announce themselves as decisions.

When reflection stays at the level of one-off events, each situation appears irreducibly unique. Learning has nowhere to settle, hence the attraction of the extremes.

Conceptualising practice changes this - not by simplifying the work, but by giving learning a stable place to accumulate that isn’t tied to the specifics of a single session.

Seen this way, most facilitation can be understood through a small number of recurring demands. Not techniques, not styles, but capacities exercised in almost every session.

Managing group dynamics and expectations
How authority, boundaries, and uncertainty are held so participants know what kind of engagement is being invited.

Making decisions in real time
How plans meet reality—adapting to circumstances as they arise, and helping groups move toward decision and completion when they’re ready.

Working beyond the surface
How curiosity is sustained beyond first responses, habitual positions, or performative answers.

Creating conditions for creativity
How play, permission, and productive uncertainty are held so others can generate freely rather than cautiously.

These concepts are deliberately broad. Their purpose is not to explain any single session, but to make visible what your practice is doing most of the time.

What this looks like in practice

Imagine two sessions a week apart.

In one, a discussion stalls because participants keep offering safe, predictable answers. You respond by adding another stimulus, hoping to shake something loose. No bites.

In the other, a practical task runs long. Energy drops. You push on anyway, reluctant to interrupt something that might be about to work. It doesn’t.

On the surface, these are different problems. One looks like a lack of depth. The other looks like a timing issue.

But viewed at the level of practice, they point to the same underlying question: how are decisions being made about when to intervene, and on what basis? This is the capacity I’ve called making decisions in real time - and now it has a name, it can be watched for.

Not solved. Watched for. Across next week’s session and the one after that. The question stops being “what went wrong there” and becomes “what is this demand asking of me, repeatedly?”

That’s what stops it fading. Not a fix, but a thread to follow.

This is the shift the Groin Strain Fallacy obscures.

Always an error?

No.

There are times when reflecting on extremes is useful. A genuine disaster may require careful examination. A great success may remind us what is possible.

The problem arises when extremes become the primary reference point for development.

Most of our work is neither heroic nor catastrophic. It is ordinary, contingent, responsive, and slightly unfinished.

Which is to say: it is exactly where learning lives.

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Sources:

Rosling, H., Rosling, O. and Rosling Rönnlund, A., 2018. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. New York: Flatiron Books.

Many drama groups, youth theatres and classes are starting back this week.

They are doing so after a fortnight that has felt, for many, quietly destabilising. Headlines have arrived thick and fast – raids, killings, territorial threats, abrupt policy shifts – delivered with a performative confidence that leaves little room for explanation or pause. Even for those of us living far from the United States, something has shifted. Not necessarily in what people know, but in what they feel is possible.

Most engagement with these events is at headline level. Few participants will arrive ready to debate detail or policy. But atmospheres travel. Certainty, bravado, fear, cynicism. These things seep into sessions long before anyone names them.

Anyone working with groups will recognise this subtle dynamic. Participants aren’t looking for answers. They’re looking for cues:

• How are others responding?

• Is this something to joke about, to ignore, to be anxious about?

• Is cynicism the safest stance, or is earnestness still allowed?

Over the break, like many, I spent a lot of time with children - too young to follow world affairs closely, but old enough to pick up that something was going on. They weren't repeating news stories; they were reading adult reactions.

Trying to navigate between different families' approaches to what children should or should not know, I ended up in conversations about power itself: why do people follow leaders others think are 'bad'? How does lying actually work as a tactic? Why does confidence persuade even when someone might be wrong?

None of this required political expertise. It required an ability to recognise how power is being performed.

Learning to read power

For many drama practitioners, Keith Johnstone’s status work from Impro feels familiar – almost too familiar. We think we know it. And because of that, we often stop really seeing it. Out come the playing cards held to the forehead. A quick pass of the duchess and the tramp on the street. The exercise is done.

Returning to Johnstone with more experience under your belt can be quietly unsettling, because it reveals how much gets flattened or misremembered.

Status work does not ask whether a character deserves power, or whether a leader is legitimate. It asks something simpler and more unsettling: what is happening, moment by moment, that makes others defer, comply, resist or laugh?

Status, in this sense, is not a fixed attribute. It is a live transaction. It rises and falls through pace, stillness, interruption, reaction - through who names the situation, and who waits to see how it will be named.

My favourite example are three teachers:

• The compulsive high-status player. Every infraction is taken as a personal challenge. They shout, threaten, escalate. Pupils are often amused rather than cowed. These teachers frequently burn out early, sometimes literally – stress, heart problems, early retirement.

• The compulsive low-status player. Keen to be liked, to be ‘down with the kids’, they offer warmth without structure. Lines blur. Boundaries dissolve. These teachers often leave under a cloud – not because they lacked care, but because they lacked authority.

• The status expert - my old English teacher, Mr Callum. He never announced his authority, and never relinquished it either. He shifted status constantly – up, down, sideways – often without us noticing. He was warmly humorous, but there was a line you did not cross. He never needed to raise his voice; we were acutely aware that he could. His power came precisely from not having to play it.

Johnstone’s point was never that one should ‘play high status’. Quite the opposite. Power comes from recognising which status a situation calls for. Often, the status achieved is inverse to the status performed.

These patterns are not confined to classrooms. They are the same moves being performed at scale right now – compulsive high-status playing that looks like authority but is actually fragile and reactive, endlessly triggered by the slightest question or doubt.

The relief of the middle

Status work helps us read individual transactions. In a room, face to face, compulsive high-status playing is brittle. Teacher One can be derailed by anyone who learns which buttons to push.

But amplified through media, the same pattern becomes effective in ways that moment-to-moment transaction analysis cannot fully explain. This is where classical rhetoric becomes useful.

Aristotle identified three modes of persuasion: through logic (logos), through emotional appeal (pathos), and through the speaker’s credibility (ethos). That third mode does complementary work to status analysis. It helps explain how authority is constructed with audiences at scale, beyond the immediate room.

According to Aristotle, persuasive ethos requires three qualities. The first is aretē – often translated as ‘virtue’, but more accurately meaning the values your audience admires. As Jay Heinrichs makes explicit, this is not about universal moral goodness. It is about appearing aligned with what this audience sees as excellent.

This is crucial. Aggressive certainty, rule-breaking, ‘telling it like it is’ – these can function as rhetorical virtue if they match what an audience values.

Brecht’s Arturo Ui understands this perfectly. He does not present himself to the cauliflower traders as morally upright in any universal sense. He presents himself as someone who shares their values – protection, profit, getting things done when legitimate means fail.

The second quality is phronesis – practical wisdom. This is not obedience to rules. It is judgement about when rules need breaking.

Richard III demonstrates this ruthlessly. He knows exactly which conventions to violate, and when. To audiences who experience existing power structures as weak or corrupt, someone who violates those norms can appear to know what to do in this specific situation. What might otherwise read as recklessness registers as competence.

Heinrichs describes a rhetorical tactic that should feel familiar to anyone who has taught status: threaten the extreme, then occupy the centre.

Arturo Ui is a master of this. He manufactures threats – fires, violence, chaos – then presents himself as the reasonable solution. Protection rackets operate on exactly this principle: create fear of the extreme, then offer the ‘moderate’ alternative of paying for safety. What is actually extortion appears as sensible self-preservation by comparison to the threatened violence.

Watch almost any press conference this week and you will see the same mechanisms at work.

Johnstone was right that there is no middle status in the moment-to-moment transaction. You are playing high or low. But rhetoric helps us recognise that what appears to be a moderate position – the relief of stepping back from the most extreme threat – can be deeply persuasive at population scale, even when the ‘moderate’ position is itself extreme.

This is where status work and rhetorical analysis work together. Status helps us read the fragility of compulsive high-status playing in the room. Rhetoric helps us understand why that same pattern, amplified through media, can be effective with audiences who are reading a different performance.

Characters who show us how it works

Drama has been anatomising this for a very long time.

Richard III’s power lies less in brute force than in his control of narrative and timing. Julius Caesar falls not because he lacks authority, but because others understand how to appear authoritative in his shadow. Even characters we meet early in our teaching lives – the gang dynamics of Blood Brothers, the shifting hierarchies of DNA – show how quickly groups settle into patterns of dominance and deference once fear or scarcity enters the room.

Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is perhaps the most explicit example, not because Ui is a stand-in for any single contemporary figure, but because the play tracks how inevitability is manufactured. Threats are exaggerated. Fear narrows the field of acceptable responses. What once seemed unthinkable comes to feel like order.

The play’s final warning matters here. Ui may be defeated, but the womb he crawled from is still going strong.1 Not because history repeats itself mechanically, but because the conditions that make such performances effective – fear, fatigue, the longing for certainty – are easily recreated.

Drama does not show us villains. It shows us mechanisms.

Why this matters now

Participants returning to workshops this week are not arriving as analysts of world politics. They are arriving as sensitive readers of atmosphere. They are picking up cues about how seriously to take things, how much danger is in the air, whether mockery or compliance is the safer response.

What feels urgent, then, is not to supply conclusions, but to refresh our own fluency in recognising power play, so that it does not remain invisible or mystical.

What status work offers is not political analysis. It is perceptual training. When you teach someone to read status transactions through character work, you are building their capacity to recognise these same tactics elsewhere – on screens, in headlines, in performative certainty designed to shut down questions.

Johnstone’s status work and Aristotle’s ethos are not specialised political tools. They are simple adjuncts to how we already analyse scenes, characters and relationships. Used well, they do not tell anyone what to think. They make it easier to see what is being done – and how quickly ‘must’ can be made to feel natural.

The line “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” is often quoted as though it describes an unchangeable law.2

But that’s frequently part of the performance itself - making force appear absolute when it isn’t. Getting people to accept the frame before testing whether it’s actually true.

Drama suggests otherwise. Not because recognising status play gives us the power to stop force – it doesn’t – but because it helps us refuse the claim that force is natural, inevitable, or as absolute as it presents itself to be.

The weak suffer what they must only once the frame has been accepted - and once the performance of inevitability goes unexamined.

Recognising the anatomy of power has always been part of our craft. Not as a consolation, but as a fundamental capacity.

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I write the newsletter from various coffee shops, imagining I’m chatting with my subscribers over a cappuccino. So if you ever find an issue particularly helpful or thought-provoking, you can now literally buy me the coffee that will fuel the next one. This approach keeps the newsletter free and accessible for everyone while still allowing you to support the work when it resonates with you.

Sources:

Brecht, B., 1981. The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. London: Methuen Drama.
Heinrichs, J., 2010. Winning Arguments: From Aristotle to Obama - Everything You Need to Know About the Art of Persuasion. London: Penguin Books.
Johnstone, K., 2007. Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War (1989) The Complete Hobbes Translation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

I WOULD LOVE TO BELIEVE that logging in to The Philosophical Theatre Facilitator archive is as much a part of your morning routine as meditation, working out, and forest bathing. But like those other aspirational habits, it probably isn't. The newsletter comes out fortnightly, which means most people engage with the ideas one at a time, as they arrive in your inbox. But those individual posts connect into larger frameworks - conceptual systems for thinking about facilitation, workshop design, and the democratic function of theatre.

This roundup gathers some of this year’s posts into four visual maps: practical tools for designing purposeful encounters, principles for navigating difficult discourse, an argument for why this work matters beyond individual transformation, and a field guide to common thinking traps. Consider these reference materials for 2025.

1. Some Principles for Purposeful Workshop Design

Workshop design often defaults to selecting activities rather than clarifying purpose. This framework argues for starting with what transformation needs to happen, then working backward to create the conditions for emergence. Whether you’re planning drama workshops, deliberative forums, or applied theatre projects, these principles help ensure your design serves participant needs rather than facilitator habits.

Designing From the Heart of What Matters / The Power of Moments / Why Your Next Great Workshop Exercise Might Be One You've Used Before

2. Stopping It All Kicking Off!

Handling controversial topics requires more than good intentions - it demands strategic preparation and reactive techniques. This framework consolidates the year’s work on discourse facilitation into one navigable system: foundational principles for laying groundwork before controversy emerges, and anti-inflammatory techniques for managing flare-ups when they occur. The strategic euphemism method offers a specific three-step approach for keeping conversations productive when inflammatory language threatens to derail them.

Who Disagrees With Jo / When the 'Shoulds' Don't Match / Did Someone Explain The Rules / I'm sorry but...

3. The Storytelling Animal in Crisis

Humans are uniquely able to coordinate at massive scale through shared stories - but that capacity is under threat. This framework argues that storytelling isn’t just creative expression or market commodity; it’s fundamental democratic infrastructure. The three modes of artistic contribution - Commercial Art, Expressive Art, and Citizen Art - represent different relationships between artists and society. Only Citizen Art maintains storytelling as a collective capacity rather than individual consumption. This framework clarifies what’s at stake when our ability to create shared meaning atrophies.

Stop Apologising For Drama / Stop Selling Stories- It’s Breathing, Not Intervention

4. Common Facilitation Fallacies

Throughout the year, we’ve examined thinking traps that undermine facilitation effectiveness - patterns that appear logical in the moment but ultimately derail sessions or planning. From holding on too tightly (The Monkey Trap) to mistaking participant relief for success (Survivor’s Joy), these eight fallacies represent the most common ways facilitators unknowingly compromise their work. Recognising these patterns is the first step to avoiding them.

When Santa Brings You The Wrong Project / Do be do be do… / The Monkey Trap / The Fast Food Seagull / The Train Drivers Dinner

And that’s it for 2025

Stick these on your wall if they're useful. The newsletter returns to its fortnightly rhythm in January, picking up where we left off with the discourse series. All the best for the new year and thanks, as ever, for subscribing.

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I write the newsletter from various coffee shops, imagining I’m chatting with my subscribers over a cappuccino. So if you ever find an issue particularly helpful or thought-provoking, you can now literally buy me the coffee that will fuel the next one. This approach keeps the newsletter free and accessible for everyone while still allowing you to support the work when it resonates with you.

YOU KNOW THE MOMENT. Festive dinner, family gathering, someone’s aunt making polite conversation.

And suddenly you’re fumbling through an explanation that sounds either too vague or too complicated or somehow both at once.

“I run drama workshops.” (Underwhelming)

“I facilitate participatory theatre with young people.” (Jargon.)

“I use theatre to build democratic capacity in communities.” (Now they think you’re running for office.)

If you're looking for a killer answer to that question you're in the wrong place. I gave up trying years ago. Most relatives just want to know you’re employed and not joining a cult.

But here’s what’s interesting: the question peeves us. It gets under our skin in a way that feels disproportionate to the aunt’s mild curiosity. We don’t usually stop to ask why.

Here’s a possible reason.

You’re a third of the way through the season/artistic/teaching year. September to July. Three terms. We’re at the end of the first term.

And if you’re honest, you’ve stopped thinking about the horizon. You’re focused on meeting Thursday’s funding deadline. Getting through next week’s difficult group. Finishing the reports before the holidays.

You’re delivering sessions, running workshops, teaching classes. But somewhere in the grind of transactions, you’ve lost sight of why you’re doing any of this. You can recite the official reasons for line managers and funders. The real reasons – the ones that got you into this work in the first place – are missing in action.

That’s why you stumble. The difficulty isn’t explaining theatre facilitation to ‘civilians’. The difficulty is that you don’t remember yourself.

The “So That...” Test

If you’re reading this newsletter, you run workshops, teach classes, or direct rehearsals. None of which captures what matters until you ask yourself:

So that...?

Take a typical statement about your work:

“I use improvisation games to build confidence.”

Now ask: So that...?

“So participants feel better about themselves.”

So that...?

“So participants can take ownership of their lives.”

Suddenly we’ve moved from activity (improvisation games), through immediate effect (confidence), to something that sounds like it matters: helping people take ownership of their lives.

That last bit is starting to articulate a purpose your work serves. Not “I run improv workshops” but “my work serves the purpose of helping people rehearse courage so they can take ownership of their lives.”

This is what you’ve lost sight of in the transactional fog. The activities are right there in your plans. What’s missing is clarity about what those activities are in service to.

Mid-Year Recalibration

December might feel like an odd moment for existential questioning. Surely this is resolution territory?

But for most people in our field, the calendar year and the working year are completely out of sync. Whilst everyone else is winding down for a fresh start in January, you’re already a third of the way through your actual working year.

This isn’t the time for resolutions about who you’ll become. It’s time for mid-year recalibration about what you’re actually serving.

A chance to ask: what purpose does my work serve? Am I actually serving it? And how might I use the remaining two-thirds of this year to serve it more fully?

This is where the concept of Professional Purpose becomes useful – not as something to achieve, but as a point of orientation. A way of lifting your head above the transactions and finding the horizon again.

From Finite Target to Evergreen Purpose

The word “purpose” itself offers a clue about how we might usefully think about it. It derives from the Old French purposer – literally, “to put forth” or “to propose.” To propose, rather than to achieve, complete, or arrive at.

This shifts Professional Purpose from a static destination into an ongoing offer. Instead of “This is what I am here to achieve”, it becomes “This is the offer my work makes to the world” or even “This is the world my work is proposing to make.”

Purposes, understood this way, are evergreen. They cannot realistically be completed. They provide a direction of orientation rather than a measurement of achievement. Purpose is a bearing, not an arrival.

This matters because it protects us from what’s often called the Arrival Fallacy – the persistent belief that we’ll finally feel satisfied, fulfilled, or successful once we reach that particular goal. Get the funding. Run the perfect workshop. Build the reputation. Then we’ll have made it.

Except we never quite do. The arrival keeps receding.

But if the purpose your work serves is a direction rather than a destination, you can be serving it right now. You can be purpose-ful – letting the purpose inform this moment’s practice – rather than purpose-led, waiting for ideal conditions. You don’t need the perfect group or the big grant. You can be contributing to the purpose in today’s difficult workshop with the undersized budget and the participant who won’t stop disrupting.

The purpose remains constant even when circumstances don’t cooperate. It’s visible above funding cycles, difficult stakeholders, and hitting session numbers. Finite goals still matter – but they become waypoints in service of the purpose rather than substitutes for it.

The Work of Articulation

If purpose matters this much, it’s worth taking time to articulate it carefully. This is real work, not something to dash off between tasks. The words you choose matter because they determine whether this can actually orient your practice.

It’s tempting to reach for something grand and vague: “To change the world through theatre.” But what does that actually mean? Which world? How? And is that what your work is really serving, or what you wish it were serving?

Better to be specific about what your work is proposing. Some practitioners prefer academic phrasing; others are more comfortable with direct, conversational language. There’s no single correct style. What matters is whether it genuinely names the purpose your work serves.

Here are some examples showing the range:

More mainstream performing arts framing:

• “To create rehearsal processes where performers can take creative risks without being punished for uncertainty.”

More academic phrasing:

• “To challenge deficit narratives about young people by treating their lived experience as legitimate knowledge.”

• “To develop democratic capacity through sustained practice in collective decision-making.”

Direct with belief statement:

• “To establish uncertainty as legitimate pedagogy, based on the belief that perfectionism is killing creativity in education.”

The test isn’t whether it sounds impressive. The test is whether it helps you recognise what your work is actually serving – and whether that clarity helps you make better decisions.

Write It Down

This isn’t optional. If the purpose your work serves isn’t written down and referred back to, it remains a vague aspiration rather than a working tool.

That doesn’t mean it’s set in stone. The purpose you articulate is provisional, subject to revision as your thinking and practice develop. But it needs to exist in writing so you can test it, refer to it, refine it.

Write it down. Say it out loud. Does it sound like you? Does it actually name what your work is serving? Does it help you make decisions?

This isn’t about crafting a personal brand statement or a clever elevator pitch. It’s about identifying what your practice is in service to, so you have something to orient toward when you’re lost in the transactions.

Purpose as North Star

Once articulated, the purpose your work serves becomes remarkably useful for practical decision-making. Not every opportunity will serve it equally well. Some will be tangential. Some will pull you away from it.

This doesn’t mean you turn everything down that doesn’t align perfectly. We all take on work to pay the bills. The question isn’t “does this perfectly express my purpose?” but “how does this relate to it, and am I choosing consciously?”

A clear sense of purpose helps you:

• Recognise opportunities that genuinely advance the purpose

• Make conscious trade-offs when you need bill-paying work

• Identify partnerships that share the purpose, even if practices differ

• Plan strategically for the remaining two-thirds of this academic year

It’s a north star for decision-making. Not rigid – you can and should revisit it – but stable enough to orient you when choices feel overwhelming.

So what about the aunt’s question?

I can’t give you a satisfying answer for her. And you don’t need one. Her question is social lubrication, mild curiosity. It doesn’t require a manifesto.

But perhaps you’re less bothered by it now. Because you know what your work serves. The activities change term by term, project by project. The purpose those activities are in service to remains constant.

That’s the difference between stumbling through “I run workshops, sort of, with young people, using theatre, to build… things…” and simply saying “I run workshops” and meaning it – because you know exactly what that is in service of.

The purpose isn’t for the aunt. It’s for you. For those moments mid-year when you’re drowning in transactions and can’t remember why you’re doing this. For planning sessions when you’re choosing between competing priorities. For conversations with potential partners when you need to articulate what you’re actually after.

And if you’re a third of the way through this academic year already, what better time to ask: what does my work serve? Am I actually serving it? And how might I serve it more fully in the remaining two terms?

Lift your head. Find the north star. Get your bearing.

Then get back to the transactions – this time with the horizon in sight.

Next in this series: I’ll explore how the purpose your work serves relates to practice, process, and the other elements that make up sustainable professional work.

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I write the newsletter from various coffee shops, imagining I’m chatting with my subscribers over a cappuccino. So if you ever find an issue particularly helpful or thought-provoking, you can now literally buy me the coffee that will fuel the next one. This approach keeps the newsletter free and accessible for everyone while still allowing you to support the work when it resonates with you.

EXPERIENCE TEACHES PATTERN RECOGNITION. In the split second between inviting the participant to speak and their first word we realise where they are heading, how it will be received, and that it’s too late to stop them saying those three telltale words:

“I’m sorry but...”

By now the rest of the room has caught on and awaits the inevitable:

…people who deny climate change are basically murderers.
…if you’re poor it’s your own fault - anyone can succeed with effort
…anyone still eating meat doesn’t care about their grandchildren.
…this generation is too soft - they need to toughen up.
…if you don’t like diversity, leave - this is a multicultural country now.
…parents who vaccinate haven’t done their research
…free speech’ is just code for ‘I want to be offensive without consequences’.
…smacking worked for generations - now kids are out of control.1

No crystal ball needed. Unless you do something this is going to go one of three ways:

Condemnation & Revenge. “You can’t say that!!!” “Yes they can!!!” Discussion fragments into camps. The original concern disappears entirely.

Ridicule. The participant feels mocked, retreats into silence or doubles down. The group learns: don’t say anything that sounds silly.

Isolation. Uncomfortable silence, averted eyes. The participant senses they don’t belong. The workshop becomes careful performance.

What has actually just happened?

The participant made an ‘inflammatory’ comment. A remark that will inflame, or ‘set fire’ to, the discourse. If you’ve been following this series you’ll also notice that all the examples above fall foul of at least one of the first three principles, they variously personalise issues, collapse complex value tensions into simple moral pronouncements, or approach topics that require deliberation/ critical discussion as if they’re settled debates to be won.

Why did they say it?

“I’m sorry but...” - those words signal awareness. They know what’s coming might not be welcome, that they are possibly transgressing expectation. So why say it?

Sometimes they genuinely believe it. Corporal punishment IS acceptable to them. They’re not testing the waters - they’re stating their view.

Sometimes they lack better language. The concern is real but the only framing available comes from talk radio, social media, their uncle at Christmas. “This generation is too soft” is the template they have for “I don’t know why I keep upsetting people.”2

Sometimes they’re testing whether they belong here. “Will this group let me speak about what I actually worry about, or must I perform acceptable opinions?”

Sometimes it’s proving a point. “I’ll say it provocatively so when you reject it, I can confirm: ‘See? You can’t say anything anymore.’”

Whatever the motive, we need a way to address the inflammatory framing without sinking the discussion - we need something ‘anti-inflammatory’.

Reframing

As ever, I’m playing with words here. ‘Causing anger’ is only one meaning of inflammatory. The other, probably more familiar, is medical: inflammation is the immune system’s response to a perceived threat. Seen this way, the comment unsettles the group’s equilibrium and provokes an inflammatory response.

When someone says, “if you’re poor it’s your own fault” the issue isn’t the argument itself,3 but what the phrasing triggers: ridicule, distancing, condemnation. These are immune responses - the group detecting a threat and mobilising to protect itself. But inflammation, even when justified, can sometimes obscure what’s underneath. In the body, too much inflammation can make it hard to see the underlying injury; in groups, a heated response can make it harder to notice whether there’s a valid point buried in the remark, even if it’s tangled up with something that understandably sets people off.

The facilitator’s job, then, is to help the group target its response appropriately. Yes, something needs addressing - the aggressive phrasing, the absolute language, the provocative solution. But there’s also something worth preserving: participation IN the discussion rather than casting participants OUT. An anti-inflammatory approach is subtler than pouring a bucket of water over a fire - it calms without extinguishing.

Strategic euphemism

One way of accepting an inflammatory or extreme statement whilst reframing it into something the group can explore together is strategic euphemism.

Participant:
I’m sorry but smacking worked for generations - now kids are out of control.

Facilitator:
Accepts/validates - Thank you.
Depersonalises - Let’s look into this.
Reframes euphemistically - Punishments, disincentives
Opens to rest of the group - Hands up if you think there should be some sort of consequence for bad behaviour.

You didn’t correct the participant. You didn’t explain why hitting children is wrong. You didn’t praise or criticise. You took the contribution, identified a legitimate concern beneath the provocative expression, and offered it back to the group in a form that invites building rather than battling.

The technique has three moves:

Validate the contribution. Acknowledge that something real has been expressed. Not necessarily that the specific claim is valid, but a member of the group has offered something.4

Reframe through euphemism. Transform the inflammatory specific into an explorable general. “Smacking worked” becomes “there should be some sort of consequence” The provocative solution drops away; the genuine concern about boundaries and self-control remains.

Open to the group. Invite others to add to this reframed concern. You’re not settling the question - you’re creating space for multiple perspectives to emerge (which will no doubt include consideration of the limits of ‘consequences’).

Let’s look at another:

Participant:
I’m sorry but... anyone still eating meat doesn’t care about their grandchildren.

Facilitator:
Accepts/validates - Ok, here’s an aspect we haven’t thought about.
Reframes euphemistically - What we do now may adversely affect our descendants in the future
Opens to rest of the group - Who thinks this is a factor we should be considering?

The character assassination (”doesn’t care”) is removed. The absolutism (”anyone still eating meat”) becomes “what we do now” and “adverse effect” The discussion can now explore the actual tension - between knowing something matters and being able to change behaviour - without defending or attacking individuals.

When to use it

This isn’t about treating all views as equally valid, or avoiding moral judgment. Some positions are wrong.5 When someone denies another person’s humanity, you intervene directly - that’s not negotiable. But for inflammatory statements that fall short of that line, your job in workshop settings isn’t to deliver judgment on contested positions - it’s to create conditions where genuine exploration can happen.

And you’re not immune to the inflammatory response either. Sometimes the strongest reaction comes from the facilitator themselves - the urge to correct, to educate, to shut it down. That’s understandable. But when you respond inflammatorily, you model that disagreement = attack, that the room isn’t safe for genuine exploration, that performance is safer than honesty.

If someone needs to be removed for safety reasons, remove them.6 But if they’re testing whether difficult things can be explored here, the euphemistic reframe gives them - and you - a way to stay in dialogue rather than descend into quarrel.

They might genuinely believe corporal punishment is acceptable. The rest of the group might find that view abhorrent. That’s a real disagreement. But if the discussion becomes a referendum on a single contentious position, someone leaves - physically or emotionally - and the conversation ends.

The euphemism gives them a way to stay in the room. Not by avoiding the disagreement, but by redirecting it to shared territory: how do we actually help young people develop self-control? Now everyone can contribute. The disagreement about methods remains, but it’s explorable rather than tribal.

Strategic euphemism requires judgement. You’re looking for the legitimate concern beneath inflammatory expression. Sometimes there isn’t one - the statement really is just an attack. But more often, particularly in workshop settings where people have chosen to be present, there’s genuine worry or frustration underneath clumsy language.

The technique only works when your intent is genuine. If you’re performing tolerance whilst internally dismissing the participant, they’ll sense it. If you’re using euphemism to avoid engaging with difficult topics, the group will notice. The reframe must be offered with real curiosity about the concern beneath the provocation.

You’re also modelling something crucial: that difficult contributions can be engaged with generously. That exploration is possible without someone being called out or cast as villain. That we can separate what someone said from who they are, and what they’re worried about from how they expressed it.

Bonus: About those ants…

Optional reading — a deeper dive into the hidden mechanics of reframing.

You might be wondering about the subtitle. Here’s what else is happening when you reframe through euphemism.

Ants don’t have leaders telling them where to go. Instead, they leave pheromone traces as they move. When an ant finds food, its return journey strengthens that trail. Other ants follow the strongest trails. Paths that lead nowhere gradually fade as the chemical trace disperses. The colony coordinates through these indirect signals - a process called stigmergy.

Your reframe is doing something similar. You’re not correcting the participant (direct control). You’re modifying the conversational environment. You’ve taken an inflammatory ‘trace’ and transformed it into one that others can build on.

The reframe creates a trail both ‘sides’ can follow. The person who raised the contentious issue doesn’t have to defend their position or abandon their concern. The person who finds the issue abhorrent doesn’t have to attack or tolerate it. They can both follow the trail toward ‘ whether or not there should be some sort of consequence for bad behaviour.’

Neither side had to build this path. It emerged from your reframing. And crucially, it preserves everyone’s face. The speaker is vulnerable. They’re exposing themselves. If the group attacks, they lose face and either retreat (lesson learned: stay quiet) or double down (position hardens).

The euphemistic reframe preserves their face whilst removing the inflammatory framing. Their concern was heard. They don’t have to defend the initial phrasing. They can contribute to the broader discussion. The speaker can stay in the conversation. The group can engage without endorsing what was said.

When you consistently reframe inflammatory contributions this way, you establish a pattern. The group learns: difficult things can be said here, but they’ll be engaged with generously. Provocative expressions will be interpreted charitably. We look for what’s underneath rather than what’s on the surface.

This is collective attunement - the group learning how to be together, not through rules about acceptable language, but through repeated experience of what becomes possible when contributions are reframed rather than rejected.

It’s also a rebuttal to zero-tolerance approaches. Removing participants who use “wrong” language doesn’t build capacity for dialogue. It just teaches people to perform acceptable opinions whilst holding their real concerns in private - or to wait and express them in spaces where they’ll be radicalised rather than constructively challenged.

Strategic euphemism is one of a number of ways to prevent the slide into quarrel. It keeps discourse within the boundaries we established - whether critical discussion, inquiry, or deliberation - even when contributions threaten to break those boundaries.

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I write the newsletter from various coffee shops, imagining I’m chatting with my subscribers over a cappuccino. So if you ever find an issue particularly helpful or thought-provoking, you can now literally buy me the coffee that will fuel the next one. This approach keeps the newsletter free and accessible for everyone while still allowing you to support the work when it resonates with you.

Sources:

Heylighen, F., 2022. Human Stigmergic Problem Solving. In: S. Cifor and M. Ratto, eds. Cultural-Historical Perspectives on Collective Intelligence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp.120–146.

Mouffe, C., 2018. For a left populism. London New York: Verso.

HALLOWEEN HAS JUST PASSED, and for those reading in the UK, Bonfire Night will be flickering into life as this piece is published. The proximity of these two celebrations is no coincidence. The Celtic forerunner to Halloween, Samhain, seems to have run for a few days before and after October 31st. As Christianity spread, the Church introduced All Saints’ Day on 1st November, appropriating and shortening this more ancient celebration. It’s likely, however, that rural populations stuck with the old dates. So when the King instructed the realm to celebrate the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot – a failed attempt to blow up Parliament – on 5th November 1606, bonfires and effigy burning were already on the menu.

Amongst other things, Samhain (pronounced Sow-win), was a time to honour ancestors. Various rituals are recorded involving inviting or guiding the dead back home and providing them with their favourite food. Failure to do so would anger or insult the ancestors and lead to acts of revenge – the ‘trick’ of ‘Trick or Treat!’

But honouring the dead wasn’t only about appeasement. It also held up a mirror to the living. Remembering ancestors meant thinking about the kind of people they were - their courage, generosity, sense of duty - and whether those qualities still mattered. In that way, ancestor rites acted a bit like moral housekeeping: a ritualised reminder that the living were custodians of inherited virtues, accountable not just to one another, but to the long chain of lives from which they came.

Who you gonna call?

Jump forward to the present day. You’re running a session but something doesn’t quite feel right. The Bluetooth speaker cuts out mid-exercise. A normally gregarious group stare at you blankly, and you find yourself repeating yourself. A cold chill grips you, even though the participants are flushed and sweating. Everything feels slightly off-kilter and you can’t shake the feeling of being watched.

There might be a poltergeist in your workshop.

Not a literal ghost, obviously.1 Our profession has its own form of ancestor veneration. We carry forward principles, techniques, and values – some inherited from mentors, some from influential practitioners we’ve never met, some from theoretical frameworks that shaped our thinking. These aren’t the actual people - who were, after all, flawed humans like the rest of us - they’re the symbolic weight of what they represented: ways of working that mattered, values worth preserving, approaches that felt true.

When we drift from these foundational ideas – not consciously evolve past them, but unconsciously abandon them – something goes wrong. The workshop starts behaving as though it’s haunted. And like any haunting, it doesn’t just happen once. The same unease shows up again and again, until you recognise what’s really being disturbed.

Two Types of Haunting

The first happens when you’ve abandoned a principle that still matters to you. Perhaps you’ve stopped carefully framing exercises because explaining structure feels authoritarian – so participants flounder, guessing what you actually want. Or that sensitivity to how things look and feel has been dismissed as frivolous, even though you once knew aesthetics matter. Maybe you’ve started responding with stock phrases rather than actually listening to what participants are telling you. Or you’re filling time with entertainment because empty moments make you anxious, even though you once knew the value of purposeful intent. And somehow, mysteriously, the work starts to go sideways. Not because you’re doing anything obviously wrong, but because participants pick up on the misalignment. The work lacks conviction.

The second is subtler: you’re haunted by an idea that needs burying. Your mentor taught you that your ‘presence’ matters - and it does, but now you can’t stop imposing yourself even when participants need space to discover. You learned that workshops need clear outcomes, but that’s hardened into a belief that completion matters more than what’s learned along the way. You were trained that discussion deepens understanding, but now sessions have become entirely talk, with no action. Or you learned to plan carefully and stick to it - which once gave you confidence - but now means rigidly following the plan is the plan even when discoveries want to emerge. These were good lessons once. But you’re still following them in contexts where they no longer serve. The room can sense it. The work becomes routine masquerading as ritual.

Both types manifest as workshop disruption or unease. Not mystically – in a tangible, practical sense.2 The cognitive dissonance leaks out.

The Appeasement

The traditional remedy for an angry ancestor is acknowledgement and offerings. The remedy for a workshop poltergeist is similar, minus the theatrics.

Ask yourself: What principles did my ‘ancestors’ – real mentors, influential thinkers, formative training – insist mattered most? Write them down. Be specific. Not ‘participant-centred practice’ but ‘make participation the easiest course’ or ‘don’t defend the space, own it’.

Then ask: Which of these am I honouring? Which have I let slip? And crucially: which am I keeping alive out of habit rather than conviction?

Some of your inheritance is worth preserving. Some needs adapting. Some should be respectfully buried, with full awareness of what you’re leaving behind and why.

The haunting stops when you either recommit to what still matters, or consciously let go of what doesn’t. The poltergeist thrives in the unconscious drift – the space between what you say you value and what you actually do.

So before you blame the ancestors for your workshop disruption, perhaps check whether you’ve been leaving them proper offerings: the respect of living out principles that still serve, or the integrity of properly burying those that don’t.

Your workshop might not need better time management. It might just need you to remember – or finally forget – what you learned from the ancestors.

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I write the newsletter from various coffee shops, imagining I’m chatting with my subscribers over a cappuccino. So if you ever find an issue particularly helpful or thought-provoking, you can now literally buy me the coffee that will fuel the next one. This approach keeps the newsletter free and accessible for everyone while still allowing you to support the work when it resonates with you.

Sources:
Hutton, R., 1996. The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Steadman, L. and Palmer, C. 2015 Supernatural and Natural Selection. Routledge

Every artist claims they want to change the world. It’s practically mandatory at this point – the artist as socially conscious citizen, espousing liberal democratic values, sparking important conversations, making people think. Walk into any arts funding meeting, scroll through any artist’s statement, and you’ll find variations on the same theme: my work challenges, questions, provokes, transforms.

We all do it. Not because we’re dishonest, but because these are the phrases that open doors, that satisfy funders, that make our work legible to institutions. The problem isn’t that we’re lying. It’s that these phrases have become so vague they are meaningless.1 A streaming series “sparks conversations.” An Instagram exhibition “raises awareness.” A mural “gives voice to the voiceless.”

If every social act contributes to society – reinforcing or challenging values – then claiming your art is “social intervention” says precisely nothing. You might as well announce that your breathing affects the atmosphere. Technically true, but it tells us nothing useful.

However, whilst announcing you breathe may earn a raised eyebrow, ceasing to breathe is not to be advised. Respiration may not be newsworthy, but it is necessary.

Likewise, as absurd as it is to envisage artists sitting outside ‘society’, swooping in now and then to save everyone with the power of ‘story’, the fact remains that storytelling is how humans coordinate and cooperate. It’s what makes human culture tick. The question facing practitioners isn’t whether we’re doing social intervention. It’s whether our work is actually maintaining that capacity – or whether we are, despite our best intentions, actually part of weakening it.

When Narrative Does the Work of Infrastructure

Last time, we touched on how storytelling evolved as sophisticated social information sharing – gossip that enforced cooperation without violence in small communities. But as societies grew beyond the reach of gossip, something remarkable happened: we developed shared narratives and myths that could coordinate strangers. Stories became the social technology that allowed people who’d never met to cooperate on unprecedented scales.

So what does storytelling look like when it still has to do that work – when formal institutions aren’t there to maintain cooperation?

In 2017, researchers studying contemporary hunter-gatherer societies made a striking discovery. Working with the Agta people in the Philippines – alongside data from six other foraging societies across Southeast Asia and Africa – they found that skilled storytellers were twice as likely to be chosen as neighbours. Not just liked, but actively preferred as community members.

Notice that: skilled storytellers. Not the storyteller. Storytelling isn’t a specialized role in these communities – it’s a distributed capacity that everyone participates in, with some people better at it than others. And those who are particularly good at it become especially valued community members.2

Why? Because in these communities, storytelling creates the space for maintaining social norms and coordination. It’s not entertainment, and it’s not purely instructional – it’s how the community keeps itself functioning.

The researchers analysed 89 stories from these seven societies and found that 70% touched on themes of cooperation, equality, and fair dealing. When they tested cooperation levels across 18 Agta camps using resource-sharing games, camps where more people engaged skilfully in storytelling showed significantly higher cooperation.

This matters because these societies lack moralising gods, formal laws, police, courts – all the institutional apparatus that larger societies use to coordinate behaviour. In their absence, storytelling performs that function. It’s not art for art’s sake, neither is it explicitly instrumental; it’s civic infrastructure in narrative form.

Now consider industrial societies. Our most visible storytellers – movie studios, streaming platforms, bestselling authors – function as an elite, working primarily for commercial gain or personal expression. The stories that reach the most people are optimised for profit or shaped by individual artistic vision. Both legitimate pursuits, but neither is maintaining the civic function that storytelling once performed.

One of many reasons for this is that, as societies scaled up, the storyteller’s role – simultaneously artist, educator, mediator, norm-transmitter – fragmented. That unified function was distributed among specialists, and over time, three distinct modes of artistic practice emerged.

So what was lost in that progression? And where do practitioners like us fit in?

Three Modes of Contribution

People make art for three main reasons.

The first and most obvious is in order to make: both in the manner of fabricating something and also in the sense of making a living. The commercial artist thus utilises their skills in a transactional capacity. The term artisan is often applied in this context and can be used broadly to recognise the artistry in a range of professions. There may be social utility in the work they create, they may draw on deep inspiration and derive satisfaction from the work, but the fundamental goal of this type of artist is the creation of something that someone else is prepared to pay for.

The expressive artist conversely creates to fulfil an inner desire. The work they produce seeks to reify experience, share perceptions or lay bare internal contradictions. The art produced may well be of interest to others who take inspiration or learn from it. The artist might sell the work or be commissioned to produce it, but ultimately the driving force is the need to create, to express, to bring out what is experienced within.

For the citizen artist the work is a means of practicing citizenship, of fulfilling their social obligation as member of a functioning democracy. Their art may encompass the bringing of issues to light, passing on the skills of rhetorical and aesthetic agency or it may provide cultural spaces for democratic engagement. The citizen artist may be salaried, work to commission or volunteer. They will likely invoke their own artistic vision, aesthetic sensibilities and be drawn to issues they are interested in but this type of artist will always be motivated by the shared impact of the work and its contribution to society.

And note – all three are political. All three shape society. The distinction isn’t between political art and apolitical art, it’s about different modes of political contribution.

The Commercial Artist: “I work for you”

This isn’t an insult – it’s a legitimate choice. The commercial artist creates what the market demands, what audiences will pay for, what keeps the lights on. They’re craftspeople, delivering a product or service to specification. There’s honour in this work, and significant skill required to do it well.

But commercial art is profoundly political. It doesn’t just reflect the status quo – it actively reproduces it, makes it feel natural and desirable. When Netflix invests millions in a series, when algorithms optimise for engagement, when brands attach narratives to products, they’re not creating neutral entertainment. They’re reinforcing existing power structures.

And yes, I know – you’re reading this whilst your own Netflix subscription renews automatically each month. So am I. That’s rather the point.

Building on last week’s argument: commercial art increasingly operates as storyselling rather than storytelling. It produces consumable information – content optimised for engagement, designed to be registered briefly and replaced. Stories become products, emotions become metrics, narratives fragment into the very information overload that’s destroying our capacity for collective sense-making.

The Expressive Artist: “I work for me”

This is the romantic ideal we’ve inherited from the 19th century: the artist as singular genius, pursuing their unique vision regardless of audience or market. They create from inner necessity, seeking authenticity and self-expression above all else.

This tradition has given us extraordinary work. When an artist makes visible what’s been rendered invisible, when they give form to what’s been dismissed as formless, they shift what’s thinkable. This is genuine social change – it expands the realm of possibility.

But when artists frame their practice as fundamentally personal expression, they’re making a political claim: “My truth is mine, yours is yours, and never the twain shall meet.” In small doses, this challenges conformity. In large doses, it fragments the possibility of shared meaning entirely.

The Citizen Artist: “I work for us”

This is the artist as inheritor of traditions where storytellers were essential social infrastructure. For the Citizen Artist the work is a means of practicing citizenship, of fulfilling their social obligation as a member of a functioning democracy – not by telling us what to think, but by developing our ability to think together, to collectively imagine alternative futures, to co-create rather than simply choose between pre-existing options. This art may encompass the bringing of issues to light, passing on the skills of rhetorical and aesthetic agency, or it may provide cultural spaces for democratic engagement. It’s about cultivating in audiences and participants the very capacities that make democratic life possible. It practices democracy rather than depicting it.

This is why citizen art can feel at odds with the evaluation metrics funders demand. There’s no finite outcome, no promise of change as product. What’s offered instead is the creation of conditions – cultural encounters that create the potential for change. Citizen art is infinite practice, not a problem to be solved and ticked off.

Maintaining the Capacity

Very few professional artists will fit neatly into these categories. The reality of making a living and adapting to prevailing contexts means that we move between all three modes across different projects, or indeed, within the same one.

But understanding which mode you’re operating in for any given project – not as fixed identity, but as conscious choice – helps you navigate the question at the heart of this piece: is this work maintaining storytelling capacity, or undermining it?

When you’re working commercially or expressively (and we all do), you can still ask: Is there room here for genuine cultural encounter? Am I creating space for collective meaning-making, even within these constraints? Or am I just delivering content and calling it conversation?

The Citizen Artist mode isn’t about moral superiority. It’s about maintaining something humans have always needed: the capacity to coordinate and cooperate through story. The question isn’t which type of artist you are, but how you keep that capacity alive in whatever mode you’re working.

What’s At Stake

Look around at our current moment. Populist narratives thrive precisely because our capacity for collective sense-making has weakened. Political polarization makes it harder to hold multiple perspectives, to negotiate shared meaning, to distinguish between genuine stories and calculated manipulation. We’re drowning in commercial narratives designed to sell us things, saturated with personal expression that atomizes rather than connects. And the cultural encounters where people could practice democratic capacities? Those are increasingly crowded out by work that fragments rather than connects.

When information displaces narrative, we lose our capacity for shared meaning-making. Commercial art treats us as consumers of information. Expressive art treats narrative as personal property. Only citizen art insists that storytelling is a collective practice we must actively maintain.

So when you’re sitting down to fill out that funding application, you’ll still have to navigate frameworks that demand measurable outcomes and proven impact. You’ll still need to speak the language of ‘stakeholder engagement’ and ‘transformative change.’ We are all tired of it. Tired of the justification, tired of the evaluation forms, tired of the gap between what you know the work does and what you can claim it achieves.

Knowing what you’re actually doing – creating cultural encounters where people practice being democratic together – won’t change what funders demand. But it might give you something more valuable than the perfect funding pitch: clarity about which compromises you can live with and which ones would break the work itself. Clarity about when you’re maintaining the capacity and when you’re just playing the game.

Storytelling as civic infrastructure isn’t optional. It’s not a nice thing to have when budgets allow. It’s how humans coordinate and cooperate. It’s breathing – necessary, distributed, something we can’t stop doing just because it’s hard to justify on evaluation forms.

The question isn’t whether we’re doing social intervention. It’s whether our work is maintaining that capacity or undermining it. Democracy doesn’t deal in grand finales. And now, at least, you have a framework for answering that question honestly – not as judgment, but as navigation.

This is the second part of a mini-series on storytelling and citizenship. Read part one here.

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I write the newsletter from various coffee shops, imagining I’m chatting with my subscribers over a cappuccino. So if you ever find an issue particularly helpful or thought-provoking, you can now literally buy me the coffee that will fuel the next one. This approach keeps the newsletter free and accessible for everyone while still allowing you to support the work when it resonates with you.

Sources:

Kim, Y., & Ball-Rokeach, S., 2006. Community Storytelling Network, Neighborhood Context, and Civic Engagement: A Multilevel Approach. Human Communication Research, 32, pp. 411-439.

Lew‐Levy, S., Milks, A., Lavi, N., Pope, S., & Friesem, D., 2020. Where innovations flourish: an ethnographic and archaeological overview of hunter–gatherer learning contexts. Evolutionary Human Sciences, 2.

Migliano, A., Battiston, F., Viguier, S., Page, A., Dyble, M., Schlaepfer, R., Smith, D., Astete, L., Ngales, M., Gómez-Gardeñes, J., Latora, V., & Vinicius, L., 2020. Hunter-gatherer multilevel sociality accelerates cumulative cultural evolution. Science Advances, 6.

Smith, D., Schlaepfer, P., Major, K., Dyble, M., Page, A., Thompson, J., Chaudhary, N., Salali, G., Mace, R., Astete, L., Ngales, M., Vinicius, L., & Migliano, A., 2017. Cooperation and the evolution of hunter-gatherer storytelling. Nature Communications, 8.

HANDS UP if you’re fed up having to justify why drama matters.

It’s that time of year. High School pupils are considering subject options, sixth formers are looking at university courses. Theatre practitioners who work with young people suddenly find themselves giving informal advice sessions or sitting in careers fairs trying to justify the importance of their subject for those who may not necessarily want to make a career out of it. The usual arguments emerge: drama builds confidence, develops creative skills, teaches empathy. All perfectly true. But when young people are bombarded with information about “foundational subjects” and “essential skills,” it’s hard not to feel like you’re trying to flog a soft skill in a bear pit. And harder still not to wonder whether what’s getting lost in all that information is our ability to make sense of it.

We’re living through multiple crises of narrative right now. Islamophobic harassment and attacks are rising, while anti-Semitic incidents in the UK have also hit record levels. Meanwhile, health misinformation spreads faster than accurate information, with people genuinely unable to distinguish between a qualified doctor’s advice and a wellness influencer’s dangerous fiction.

These aren’t separate problems. They’re symptoms of the same deficit: our collective inability to critically examine the stories we’re being told, to understand how narratives shape reality, to recognise when seemingly innocent claims mask something more troubling.

So maybe we’ve been defending drama on the wrong grounds entirely. Drama education isn’t just about building confidence or unlocking creativity. It’s about developing our most fundamental human capacity – one we desperately need right now.

We love our theories about unique “fundamental human capacities”. When I was child, I had a book called “Man the Tool Maker” which, gendered language aside, claimed our ability to use tools set us apart from other forms of life. Then there’s the Homo Rationalis claim – we are the only logical species. Or Homo Ludens, the playful creature.

The trouble is, most of these claims have been quietly dismantled. Crows fashion hooks from wire. Dolphins play elaborate games. Octopuses solve complex puzzles. Our supposed uniqueness keeps getting less unique.

But there’s one capacity that genuinely seems to set us apart: we are the species that tells stories. We’re Homo Narrans – the storytelling animal.

And we’re losing our capacity to do it.

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han puts it bluntly:

Information and narrative are opposing forces. Information is ephemeral, consumed instantly and forgotten. It fragments time into disconnected moments, each demanding immediate attention before vanishing. A narrative, by contrast, exists through time. It creates connections, establishes meaning, provides orientation. Information tells you what happened; narrative tells you what it means.

The Storytelling Animal

Everyone you know is an expert story analyst. When we suspect someone’s lying, we check if their story adds up. You explain coming home with wine instead of bread by saying “it’s a long story.” We can even infer complete narratives from just a few words. Sayings and proverbs are basically freeze-dried stories - we add the water in our heads.1

We start early. Whilst we’re marvelling at a toddler’s first steps or celebrating potty training victories, something far more remarkable is happening. By age two, most children have mastered the fundamentals of narrative: sequencing events, setting action in space and time, and understanding character. By three or four, they’re spinning autobiographies, fiction, and retelling events they’ve never experienced as if they lived them.

They’re not just telling stories – they’re obsessed with narrative accuracy. Change one word in a familiar bedtime story and face the wrath. Leave a gap in the plot and prepare for an avalanche of questions. Children aren’t just wired for storytelling; they’re driven to perfect it.

One strand of recent research suggests this capacity evolved in the Stone Age as sophisticated social information sharing – academic speak for gossip. In small communities, stories were a non-violent way to enforce cooperation. You’re less likely to hide behind a tree during a mammoth hunt if you know Ug’s going to tell Og, who’ll tell Ig, who makes brilliant hand axes but won’t trade with cowards.

But gossip has limits. Once communities grow beyond a certain size, tracking everyone’s behaviour becomes impossible. This is where fiction enters the picture. Fiction allows us to imagine things collectively – Aboriginal Dreamtime myths, biblical creation stories, and even the nationalist narratives of modern states.

As Yuval Noah Harari writes in Sapiens myths give us “the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers.” Nations, money, human rights, laws – none exist outside the stories we tell each other. Yet these fictional constructs enable cooperation on scales no other species has achieved.

They can also tear us apart.

Consider the recent flag campaign in England. On the surface, it claims to be about patriotism, about demonstrating love of country. Who could object to that? But look closer at where flags are being placed, when they appear, what happens around them. The barely maintained fiction of innocent patriotism masks something more deliberate.2 Paint a St. George’s cross on a roundabout in certain neighbourhoods at certain times and you’re not making a neutral statement – you’re telling a story about who belongs and who doesn’t.

This is the dark twin of our storytelling capacity. The same collective fictions that enable cooperation can be weaponised to exclude, to divide, to prepare the ground for violence. And when our ability to critically examine narratives weakens – when we’re overwhelmed by fragmented information rather than grounded in coherent stories – we become more vulnerable to these manipulative fictions. The Islamophobic and anti-Semitic incidents we’re seeing didn’t emerge from nowhere – they grew in an environment where misinformation drowns out narrative clarity, where we’ve lost the capacity to ask: whose story is this, and what purpose does it serve? As Byung-Chul Han continues:

The capacity to critically examine stories, to understand how narratives shape reality, to recognise when seemingly innocent claims mask unpleasant intentions, to participate in the collective authoring of our shared future – this isn’t a nice-to-have creative skill. It’s essential democratic infrastructure. And it’s precisely what drama education develops.

So next time you’re put on the spot to explain why drama matters, perhaps the answer isn’t “it builds confidence” or “develops creativity” – though it does both. The answer is that we’re living through a crisis where information has replaced narrative, where our capacity to tell and critically examine stories is atrophying just when we need it most. Drama doesn’t just teach performance skills; it develops narrative literacy – the ability to distinguish between information that fragments and stories that connect, between fictions that unite and fictions that divide.

In a world drowning in information but starving for meaning, that’s not a soft skill. That’s survival.

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I write the newsletter from various coffee shops, imagining I’m chatting with my subscribers over a cappuccino. So if you ever find an issue particularly helpful or thought-provoking, you can now literally buy me the coffee that will fuel the next one. This approach keeps the newsletter free and accessible for everyone while still allowing you to support the work when it resonates with you.

Sources:

Engel, S., 1996. Storytelling in the First Three Years. ZERO TO THREE Journal, [online] (December 1996/January 1997). Available at: <https://www.zerotothree.org/resource/storytelling-in-the-first-three-years/>.
Han, B.-C., 2024. The crisis of narration. Translated by D. Steuer Cambridge: Polity Press.
Harari, Y.N., 2018. Sapiens: a brief history of humankind. First Harper Perennial edition ed. New York: Harper Perennial.

Economists rely on this one - it’s also why so many of them fail to predict human behaviour!

This is the third newsletter in my series of practical principles to help participants engage productively in discourse about controversial topics. The first, Who disagrees with Jo, articulated the foundational principle of depersonalising contributions. Then in, When the 'Shoulds' Don't Match , we focused on ways to define the nature of a sticking point in terms of the interplay of social values or 'shoulds'. Today the focus is on how we set participant's expectation of the structure of the discourse.

Principle #3: Establish Shared Expectation

I MADE THE QUOTE UP , though we probably all know people just like that. Someone who leaves a trail of communicative carnage until they run out of willing participants and retreat to the internet. The tell tale sign is the moment, mid-conversation, when you realize you and they are engaged in completely different quests. I thought I was outlining my concerns about inequality, not signing up for a pop quiz on statistics. Or that we were deciding how to fix the car, not formulating a dissertation on what caused the breakdown.

By expectations, I'm not referring to the content or nature of the issue, but instead what we assume to be the purpose of the exchange. What are the ground rules? What counts as a good contribution? What's my role in this? There are many different types of discussion - indeed, a whole subsection of argumentation theory is dedicated to categorising them. To further complicate matters, we tend to use words like discussion, debate, and deliberation interchangeably when in fact they mean different things.1 It is no surprise then, that our expectations sometimes clash.

This is different from the content confusion we looked at in When the 'Shoulds' Don't Match - where people argue past each other because they're focused on different aspects of the same issue. This is about structural expectation. People can agree on what they're talking about but completely disagree on how they should be talking about it.

The ground zero example is the stereotypical family dinner quarrel where a, usually conservative, older relative clashes with a, usually liberal, younger member of the family.2 The elder treats it as a Debate - impressing the rest of the table by mustering the strongest possible arguments. The younger, perhaps having initiated the discourse, thought they were going into Dialogue, collaboratively sharing and negotiating understanding. Mistaking a Debate for Dialogue is the discussion equivalent of apples and oranges - clear markers of a category error.

Workshop Discussions

Happily, the remit of this newsletter does not cover family dinner arguments. But discussions play a significant part in any drama workshop - perhaps more than we might initially realise. We might find ourselves discussing the efficacy of particular performance conventions, the direction a devising process might take, or any number of choices in between. In parallel, we exchange thoughts about the social and political realities expressed in the work we produce or watch. We interrogate character decisions and the contexts that give rise to them. We look to the fictions we produce, imagining the world if they were to become real. Depending on the flavour of your work you may do some of these more than others, but you will unquestionably be leading discussions of one sort or another.

The trouble is, each of these requires a different approach. What works for weighing creative options can derail a conversation about social inclusion. The listening skills that build understanding might frustrate someone expecting rigorous analysis. Without clear signals about which type of discussion we're having, participants bring their own assumptions - and those assumptions might not align.

Think of it as three types you'll use regularly, two that require special care, and one to actively prevent.3 And as we've not had an etymological excursion for a while let’s dig under the origins of the words to see if they offer usable insights.

The Three (Core Workshop Discourse Types):

Critical Discussion:

- ‘discussion’ from the Latin discutere is based on a root cutere (to shake apart) shared with 'percussion and concussion'. Critical, on the other hand comes from Greek krinein (to discern or separate) the same root that gives us "crisis," the moment when things get cut one way or another.

Critical Discussion, therefore, involves both shaking and separating: shaking away the noise, discerning the consequential from the coincidental. It's about developing a shared picture by separating what holds up from what falls apart.

Expect to: Contribute to mapping a range of perspective on the issue. Personal opinions and insights can certainly inform this but are not the core focus. This is pre-persuasion work. We're not expecting minds to change, but we hope to use clarity to shake certainty - to create that useful confusion the Ancient Greeks called aporia where people recognise things might be more complex than they first thought.

Examples: Examining different perspectives on social and political themes, testing arguments , analysing competing interpretations of politically charged texts, evaluating the effectiveness of different theatrical techniques.

Inquiry

- from in quaerere, Latin for "to seek into" - looks backward. How did we get here? What's underneath this? This type of discussion only works if the participants recognise, indeed are motivated, by a knowledge gap. Something doesn't make sense? It's not clear why something happened or why someone acted in a certain way.

Expect to: Get into detective mode. Look for clues and evidence. Consider motivations and context. There may or may not be resolution - not everything can be explained.

Examples: The origins of social/political phenomena, investigating the origins of political tensions in a script, character backstory exploration, script analysis of how societal conditions shaped character choices.

Deliberation

- from libra, "the scales" - faces forward. What should we do? How do we weigh our options? Deliberation requires participants to move beyond understanding a problem to making choices about action. It's structured around weighing trade-offs: if we choose this path, what do we gain and what do we sacrifice?

Expect to: Weigh pros and cons of different choices. Consider consequences and trade-offs. Move from understanding a situation to deciding on action. The focus is on practical outcomes rather than theoretical analysis.

Examples: Deciding how to handle controversial content in devising, Forum Theatre interventions, weighing options for staging politically sensitive material, choosing which direction to take when developing work about current issues.

The Two (Situational - Use with Caution):

These can be valuable but require careful setup. Debate needs formal structure and agreed rules or it becomes combative. Dialogue needs psychological safety and genuine commitment to listening or it becomes performative.

Debate

- from battere, "to beat down". A structured process in which participants present and argue opposing viewpoints (which they may or may not actually support) aiming to persuade a third party that they have the strongest arguments.

Expect to: Present the strongest possible case for your position to convince observers. Listen strategically to identify weaknesses in opposing arguments. Focus on logical reasoning and evidence to persuade an audience rather than your direct opponent.

Examples: Used as a formal device for participants to explore two sides of an issue. An exercise in public speaking and developing argumentation. Dialectical approach to exploring the super-objective or fabel of a play.

Dialogue

- from dia + logos, "through words" or "through meaning" - is a process of negotiation, working through something together to reach understanding.

Expect to: Build mutual understanding through genuine listening and sharing. Suspend judgment temporarily to explore different perspectives. Focus on learning from each other rather than winning points. Be open to having your own views expanded or changed.

Examples: Exploring different lived experiences that inform perspectives on social issues, sharing personal connections to themes in the work, building empathy between participants with opposing political views, negotiating shared values when creating collaborative work.

The One (To Be Avoided):

And finally, not technically a discussion, but all too often mistaken as one:

Quarrel

- from querela, "complaint" - is about airing grievances rather than reasoning through anything. This is what happens when other forms of discourse collapse into expressions of frustration, blame, and hostility. It's the terminal stage where the goal shifts from understanding or deciding to attacking and defending.

Expect to: Find yourself defending yourself rather than your ideas. Notice conversations spiralling into past grievances unrelated to the original topic. Experience escalation where voices get raised and personal attacks replace reasoned argument. Feel like you're under siege rather than engaged in productive exchange.

Examples: I’m sure you already have some!

Establishing shared expectation

I can't imagine many contexts where we'd have the luxury to outline all of the above before launching into a discussion. And even if we did, would everyone sit still long enough? Probably not. Ultimately, it comes down to how we launch the discussion and continuously reinforce the expectation through our facilitation.

For Critical Discussion:
Set the scene visually, expressed in terms of definitions, connections, and contradictions

Launch:

• "Let's map out what we're dealing with here - how do people define this differently?"

• "We need to see the connections between these arguments and where they contradict"

• "Let's build a visual picture of the different positions and how they relate"

• "What are we actually talking about when we say [term]? Let's define our terms first"

Reinforcement:

• "How does that connect to what we heard earlier about X?"

• "I'm seeing a contradiction here - help me understand how these fit together"

• "So we have two different definitions of X now - which one are we working with?"

For Inquiry:
Set the scene temporally, expressed in terms of context, evidence, causation, and correlation.

Launch:

• "We need to trace the timeline - what led to what?"

• "Let's look for evidence of what actually happened here"

• "Why would the character do that?"

• "How did we end up here?"

Reinforcement:

• "Is that causation or correlation?"

• "What's the evidence for that sequence?"

• "Let's stay with what actually happened rather than what should have happened"

For Deliberation:
Set the scene conjecturally, expressed in terms of possibilities, advantages, and disadvantages

Launch:

• "What possible ways might this play out?"

• "Let's weigh the advantages and disadvantages of each option"

• "What could happen if we choose path A versus path B?"

• "We need to consider the full range of possibilities here"

Reinforcement:

• "What might be the downsides of that choice?"

• "Are there other possibilities we haven't considered?"

• "That's a clear advantage - what would we be giving up?"

Switching Modes

Of course it's entirely possible, often necessary, to move between modes in the same session - but you have to signal the shift:

"Right, we've traced how we got here (inquiry). Now let's test these explanations and see which ones actually hold water (critical discussion). Then we'll figure out what to do next (deliberation).

Without those signals, people get lost. They're still operating under the previous set of expectations while you've moved on to the next.

Beware Pseudo-Discourse

But there's one expectation that's particularly tricky to manage through framing alone: the belief that any discussion means everyone gets to say everything they want to. It's certainly possible. Everyone gets their turn, but no one listens, and the group leaves unchanged. It feels democratic but it's actually the opposite of discourse. People speak past each other, air their views, and mistake participation for progress.

Now, I want to tread very carefully. There's a long, important, and powerful history of group work focused on silenced voices and marginalized perspectives. Claiming uninterrupted time to tell one's story is the cornerstone of emancipation. That's testimony. That's dialogue work. That's about recognition and understanding.4 But, that's not what we're talking about here.

There is a watered down, appropriated, fetishization of 'Your Voice Counts' that is anything but dialogue. It's a consumer-oriented paradigm where organisations treat participants like customers providing feedback. They dutifully perform "you said - we did" reports, conveniently skipping the middle part where they actually have to grapple with conflicting views. They "do" the things that cost nothing and ignore the rest. This borrows the language of testimony and dialogue but serves an entirely different purpose. And perhaps that's fine for a supermarket or a restaurant. The danger though is it instils individualistic expectations that claim legitimacy via the moral imperative of authentic testimony.

The result is insidious rather than dramatic. Jealousy when someone else makes the point you were about to offer, doggedly returning to a topic the conversation moved on from some time ago, fury that 'I still haven't got to my point' - this isn't about marginalization or silencing. It's about ego - the fear of not being seen to have said the clever thing. The consumer model of participation has created an expectation that everyone deserves a platform, confusing individual expression with collective discourse.

I used to run educational projects called "History Mysteries" - whodunits based on the curriculum. This was inquiry work: tracing backward to understand what happened. During interrogations, if one group of student detectives asked a question that another group had planned, the answer would be greeted with either a cheer or a groan. Not because someone had "stolen" their question, but because the answer either upheld or disproved the theory they were working on. The focus was on solving the case, not being the best detective.

That's what real engagement looks like. Participants invested in what emerges collectively, not in performing their individual cleverness.

Critical discussion isn't "everyone speaks until exhausted." It's about developing a shared picture. Some contributions build that picture. Others, while meaningful to the contributor, don't serve the collective inquiry. The facilitator's job is knowing the difference and having the courage to act on it.

Before It All Kicks Off

These first three principles create the groundwork for productive discourse about controversial topics. They follow a logical sequence that mirrors how conflicts typically develop - and how facilitators can prevent them.

Principle #1 De-personalise issues

Establish the object of discussion rather than making it about the person. "Who disagrees with Jo?" gets people focused on Jo's idea rather than Jo herself.

Principle #2 Define the nature of the issue

Define what kind of object it is. "When the shoulds don't match" identifies the competing values at stake in the issue and how they relate to one another.

Principle #3 Establish shared expectations

Set the rules for how to engage with it. "Did someone explain the rules?" frames the type of discourse needed before anyone starts speaking.

This progression moves from what we're discussing, to what type of thing it is, to how we should discuss it. Each principle builds on the previous one, creating the conditions where good thinking can happen.

But even with the best preparation, discussions can still veer toward conflict. The moment when someone drops an inflammatory comment, when emotions spike, when you can feel the room tighten - that's when you need a different set of tools.

The next set of principles will focus on those critical moments when, despite our best efforts, things seem to be sliding towards a quarrel.

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I write the newsletter from various coffee shops, imagining I'm chatting with my subscribers over a cappuccino. So if you ever find an issue particularly helpful or thought-provoking, you can now literally buy me the coffee that will fuel the next one. This approach keeps the newsletter free and accessible for everyone while still allowing you to support the work when it resonates with you.

Sources:

van Eemeren, F.H. and Grootendorst, R., 1992. Argumentation, communication, and fallacies: a pragma-dialectical perspective. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Walton, D.N., 1998. The New Dialectic: Conversational Contexts of Argument. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

IT WAS A LUNCHTIME TALK about practical wisdom and reflective practice for theatre practitioners. At the end I opened for questions:

Suffice to say, the freelancers in the room responded with passion. I can confidently claim to have utilised the entire curriculum of my Principles to Stop it All Kicking Off series that lunchtime.

The first assertion is hard to contest. Those in full-time roles often shoulder responsibilities beyond core delivery, making it genuinely challenging to carve out time for reflection amid the chaos. Yet freelance practitioners navigate an even more complex landscape - lurching from glut to drought while operating without the safety net of HR, Marketing, or Finance departments.

Which brings me to the jungle. Freelance life is pure wilderness - and I mean that quite literally. You're simultaneously the apex predator and the vulnerable prey, depending on the season (and let's be honest, the state of arts funding). There's no feeding schedule, no infrastructure maintenance, and definitely no veterinary if you should burn out.

As we head into a new term, here's a field guide of stuff every freelance theatre practitioner knows they should do (but - let's be honest - usually doesn't).

The Ecosystem at Work

Now, I'll admit this is something of a departure from my usual format - normally I'd weave this advice more organically through narrative (and avoid anything that looks so suspiciously like a "listicle")1. But sometimes - just sometimes - clarity trumps elegance.

1. Invoice Before Extinction:

Do we send invoices immediately? I suspect most freelancers don't. Natural threats to the freelancer include: forgotten invoices, late payments, and that eternal "just waiting on finance." The email sits in your drafts folder like a territorial marking you're too polite to place. I've been guilty of this myself - treating the invoice as somehow impolite rather than essential for survival. Future you (the one who needs to eat) will thank present you for firing that survival flare.

2. Preserve Your Receipts in the Wild:

Observe the common theatre freelancer stuffing train tickets into pockets, where they degrade into unreadable lint. I've done this countless times. Future archaeologists (your accountant) will not be able to reconstruct expenses from textile fragments. File them like rare specimens; they're worth their weight in tax deductions.

3. Avoid Exposure

Do you put everything into one project without planning for the next? Only chase week-long intensives, or only regular weekly gigs? Successful species diversify: short regular hours for steady income, occasional intense projects for variety, seasonal offerings when the market demands it, plus cross-subsidising work that funds passion projects. A mixture reduces your exposure to cancelled bookings, failed funding bids, or the company who suddenly "doesn't have budget." And always - always - get agreements in writing.

4. Hibernate on Purpose:

Do freelancers mistake collapse for rest? I suspect many of us do. True rest requires intention - planned downtime, scheduled like a performance. Otherwise, you'll burn out faster than a Fresnel with questionable wiring (and I speak from experience here). Even apex predators need their downtime - the difference is they choose when.

5. Mark Your Territory:

An outdated digital presence is like using old maps in unfamiliar territory. When did you last update your website? Is your LinkedIn actually reflecting what you do now rather than what you did three years ago? Your professional trail needs regular maintenance - not flashy rebrands, just honest updates. A short article here, a project reflection there, evidence that you're still thinking and developing. Your digital footprint should make sense to whoever's looking, whether that's a potential collaborator or a commissioning body.

6. Communicate Like a Social Species:

Networking needn’t require a forced grin and evidence of radical social intervention. In the wild, friendly signals - a coffee invite, a "loved your show" email - strengthen the social structures that keep entire ecosystems functioning. Collaboration is how packs survive, but also how they evolve. Remember, though, there is a difference between building genuine relationships and just collecting contacts .

7. Stockpile for Winter:

Freelancers exist within feast-or-famine cycles (news to no one reading this, I'm sure). One month, endless gigs; the next, tumbleweeds and the sound of your own nervous breathing.2 Squirrels stash acorns; you should stash cash. This is less charming advice, more essential infrastructure.

8. Build Your Nest:

You need somewhere to go back to for nourishment. Your ‘nest’ is a system for collecting the ideas, inspirations, readings, and random genius-level thoughts that will fuel future work. That workshop exercise that landed perfectly, the article that shifted your thinking, the participant's insight that changed your approach - where do they live? In scattered notebooks? In the folder screenshots go to die? A collection system you can actually navigate when inspiration strikes will serve you better than hoping your memory works under pressure. And make back up files!!!

9. Mark Your Victories with a Victory Dance:

Freelancers often scurry to the next project without stopping to howl at the moon.3 Do we celebrate the workshop that shifted something in the room, the funding bid that landed, the show that transcended its technical limitations? Tiny rituals of recognition keep the species thriving - and help build the reflective practice muscle we all claim to want but rarely actually exercise.

10. Don't Become The Terrain:

I was once on an outdoor survival course, building shelters. Mine was really good - perhaps too good. The instructor looked at my elaborate construction and asked, "How long are you planning on staying?" He went on to point out that the aim wasn't to live in the wilderness but to survive until we completed our mission or were rescued.

There's a parallel here worth considering. As freelancers, we want to practice - lead sessions, teach, direct, have time to reflect and be creative. The process work - finance, funding, marketing, the endless hustle - these are survival skills, means to an end. The strategies outlined above aren't about becoming better at administration for its own sake. They're about making the business side so routine that it doesn't crowd out the space needed for developing practical wisdom, for deepening your craft, for the work that actually matters.

You need these survival skills or you won't survive to complete the 'mission.' But you also need to make sure they remain in service of that mission, not supplanting it entirely.

The ecosystem needs you flourishing, not just enduring. But it also needs you remembering why you entered the jungle in the first place.

And remember: always send the invoice.

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I write the newsletter from various coffee shops, imagining I'm chatting with my subscribers over a cappuccino. So if you ever find an issue particularly helpful or thought-provoking, you can now literally buy me the coffee that will fuel the next one. This approach keeps the newsletter free and accessible for everyone while still allowing you to support the work when it resonates with you.

A FEW WEEKS AGO, in a coaching conversation, a facilitator told me about their plans for the new year.1 All good stuff, drawn from reflective work we'd been exploring. It was, however, somewhat ambitious.

"Sounds great," I said. "How will you fit all that in?"

Just? I was glad I had asked the question.

The thing is you can’t decide to be super organised. Or creative. Or inclusive. These aren't switches you flip. You can only decide to do. Every time I've promised myself I'll be organised... I have failed miserably. The only times it's worked is when I've committed to doing stuff: invoices on Mondays, planning blocked out Thursday mornings, phone switched off after 9pm. Then, slowly, I end up being organised. Being is the goal of the plan, not the plan itself.

It's a great example of something I call the Sinatra Inversion - after Ol’ Blue Eyes’ famous "do be do be do" in Strangers in the Night. It describes those times we get our be's and do's in the wrong order!

Why good intentions aren't enough

We facilitators are especially prone to this. As summer ends and the new term or season looms, we make these lovely resolutions: I want to be more inspiring, more reflective, more inclusive. All admirable. But aspiration on its own doesn't change much.

Without actions attached, it's just a posture - a hope we carry rather than a habit we practice.

Even Sinatra was guilty. In "New York, New York" he belts out "I'm gonna be a part of it" - but you can't simply decide to be part of something. You have to do the work that makes belonging real.

Psychologists call this the intention–behaviour gap: we assume that deciding to be something is the same as becoming it. Logicians might call it wishful thinking — treating a desired state as if it were already achieved. In reality, it’s backwards. The “being” is always the effect, never the cause.

What it looks like in practice

Take inclusion. Saying "I'll be more inclusive this year" sounds great. But what actually changes in the room?

Compare that to: making sure it's not always the same people who speak first, varying methods of contribution to not always favour those happy speaking aloud, rephrase instructions to make room for alternative interpretations. These are actions not objectives.2 Suddenly inclusion isn't a nice idea - it's something you can practice.

Same with being reflective? It doesn't happen because we wish it would. It happens because we take time after sessions to think through what worked, because we keep notes on what to try differently next time, because we actually ask ourselves what we noticed rather than rushing straight to the next thing.

In every case, the "being" only shows up after you've done the work.

The practical bit

This matters more as we head into a new year full of good intentions. The Sinatra Inversion is tempting because "being" feels bigger, more important. It's quicker to say "I'll be inclusive" than to design the small practices that make it real.

But facilitation is a practical art. It lives in the things you can repeat, adjust, and refine.

So when you catch yourself planning to be something this year, pause. What will you actually do? Can you name three small actions that reliably create that state? Would someone watching your session recognise your intention just from what they see you doing?

If not, you might be humming the Sinatra Inversion off key. Be do be do be... just doesn't sound right! Treating it as a simple 'do then be' misses the point too.

Frank had it right. It's not that you do enough and then earn the right to be something. It's a rhythm - you do something, which lets you be something momentarily, which informs how you do the next thing. The doing and being feed each other, back and forth, like a song.

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I write the newsletter from various coffee shops, imagining I'm chatting with my subscribers over a cappuccino. So if you ever find an issue particularly helpful or thought-provoking, you can now literally buy me the coffee that will fuel the next one. This approach keeps the newsletter free and accessible for everyone while still allowing you to support the work when it resonates with you.

What happens when everyone in the room thinks they’re having the same discussion -but they’re not?

Not a tangent - not a rant about the latest Star Wars film. A shift to subtly different issues. It feels like one conversation, yet each person is arguing from a different understanding of what’s at stake. You would notice, wouldn't you?

So, a group has just watched a devised piece about ‘digital pile-ons’ and launch into discussion :

Jo: Look, free speech is free speech. You can't pick and choose.

Sam: Ok, but making jokes about certain things just isn't right.

Riley: The way I see it, some people just shouldn't be online if they can't handle it. It's a different world.

Alex: People should be held to account but you don't need to ruin their life

Facilitator: Right then, time to put it to a vote?

Put what to a vote?

We might be in the same space. We might be taking it in turns to talk. We might appear to be disagreeing, perhaps even passionately so. But look closer: Jo responds to the general topic, Sam responds with 'Ok, but...' - appearing to engage with Jo while actually shifting to completely different moral ground. Riley seems to dismiss both previous points by changing the context entirely. Alex challenges the group but from yet another angle.

They're taking turns, they're responding to each other's tone and energy, but they're actually operating from four different understandings of what the core issue even is: free speech, the right to dignity, online behaviour, and the meaning of accountability. On one level it's good that everyone's talking but these types of discussion are unproductive at best, polarising at worst.

Luckily there's a 2000 year old technique that can get us back on track.

Stasis Theory: The Practice of Precise Disagreement

Representing yourself in court was a way of life in the Ancient Greek world. Without contract law, almost every dispute ended up in front of a jury. There were no lawyers as such, rhetorical strategies were in high demand. One of the most useful techniques, still taught in law schools today is Stasis Theory, originally formulated in the 2nd century BCE by Hermagoras of Temnos.

Stasis theory uses four specific questions to pinpoint the 'sticking point' of a dispute by clarifying its facts, defining its nature, assessing its quality and context, and questioning the procedure for its resolution.

For our purposes, we're focusing on one key question: What is the nature of this dispute?

The core of a dispute is a clash over a specific subject. Ancient jurists argued about ownership, liability, and agreements, but most of the arguments we facilitate are about what people should do -what matters most, how people should act, which rules should apply.1 Recognising which 'should' is in dispute is key to a productive discussion. The Roman orator Quintilian divided disputes into four broad categories. Each one shows up differently in conversation, and recognising which type you're dealing with changes how you move the discussion forward.2 Let's see how they play out in our digital pile-ons discussion:

Four sticking points

Meaning:

These happen when the exact meaning of a 'should' is contested or unclear . People should not harm each other - seems clear enough. But does that just mean physically? Does it include feelings? Is a surgeon making an incision during surgery doing harm? In our scenario Alex believes in accountability but feels there is point where a line needs to be drawn:

You'll spot these when participants are clearly using the same word but mean different things. The way forward is to discuss what is or is not included in the definition of that term.

Priority :

These disputes occur when more than one 'should' applies to the situation. Should I be allowed to grow a tree, or should my neighbour be able to see out of their window. Should the government combat terrorism or should our phone records stay private. Sam appears to be arguing that a right to dignity is more important than the right to make a joke:

This is a very common dispute in public argument. Indeed, it frames the need for recognition and negotiation at the heart of a pluralistic democracy. A tell-tale sign of a potential priority dispute is the use of 'but': 'Yes x, but, y' where the x acknowledges the legitimacy of one 'should' , whilst arguing that in this case y is more important. Recognising a priority dispute allows the facilitator to move to discussing the relevance or weight of the competing 'shoulds'.

No exception:

A third type of dispute is split between those who say a rule means exactly what it says and those who look to the intention behind it. "No vehicles in the park" - taken literally would ban a child's tricycle or an ambulance attending an emergency which is probably not the intention of the rule. Whilst this may seem obvious consider how overly literal interpretations of 'take back control' led to a swathe of racial abuse just hours after the Brexit vote. Or the proponent of a 'Zero Tolerance' policy who doesn't think it should apply to their friends. In our scenario Jo picked up on another very common no exception dispute:

Jo takes a literal interpretation of 'free' (unlimited license), while others might consider the intended meaning (freedom from government interference)." You'll spot these disputes in the use, or rejection, of absolutes. It's less about subtle interpretation, as in Meaning disputes, and more focused on exact wording. In opening these out to discussion care must be taken not to let it become a 'gotcha' moment. Instead steer the conversation to the origins of the 'should' - what were the original intentions and, importantly, what do they mean now.

Uncharted territory:

These arise when we're dealing with something relatively new and are still working out the rules, norms or values that apply to it. Should vaping be allowed indoors? Should social media platforms be regulated like newspapers? Riley recognises usual frameworks might not apply:

These surface when you hear participants saying variations of "but that's not the same thing." Try: "What's the closest situation we've dealt with before?" "What would be the consequences if we treated it the same as...?" or "It's something new - where should we get the rules from? Who gets to make them?"

Sticking to the point

A group can only address one type of dispute at a time. Trying to cover them all simultaneously is a recipe for miscommunication and confusion. To make things worse there is considerable overlap between each type. Recognising which type of dispute you're actually having - and keeping the conversation there - is the facilitator's job.

The easiest way to keep a discussion focused on a single point of stasis - one specific dispute - is to decide in advance and use it as a launch question. Imagine you are workshopping the early scenes of Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers:

It is, of course, a loaded question, but it identifies the dispute to be discussed - priority. We can now explore reasons for which 'should' carries the most weight in this context.3 The group knows exactly what they're wrestling with.

The other, more difficult, approach is to develop the ability to recognise the nature of a dispute whilst the discussion is taking place, and then use focusing questions to reframe ongoing dialogue:

This offers a lot more flexibility. The facilitator could run with exploring the no exception dispute whilst looking for opportunities to round off and switch to another potential dispute - perhaps the meaning of better in 'a better life'.

Key to both these approaches is the ability to bring participants' focus to bear on the specific stasis/point of dispute and stay with it. It means working with a group to develop discipline and manage expectation of the 'everyone gets to say their bit' dynamic that characterises so many 'open discussions.'4 In my experience participants soon come to relish the sense of satisfaction and achievement that comes from having clearly identified and explored the dispute.

Building on Strong Foundations

In my previous post, "Who disagrees with Jo" we explored how depersonalising issues creates more productive conditions for dialogue. When we can separate the idea from the person who voiced it, participants can engage with difficult topics without feeling their character is under attack.

Now, with the ability to recognise which type of 'should' is actually in dispute, we have the second essential foundation. We move beyond the surface-level exchanges that characterise so many discussions – the talking past each other, the circular arguments, the defensive responses – into authentic dialogue.

The participant who declares "People should be held to account but you don't need to ruin their life" is no longer defending their character, but exploring the boundaries of an important principle. The group wrestling with accountability versus compassion isn't stuck in endless back-and-forth, but working through a genuine priority dispute that deserves careful attention.

These two principles create the conditions where participants can engage with charged topics productively rather than defensively. They can disagree with passion, but also with precision.

As we continue this series, we'll explore how to build on these foundations – but for now, the next time a divisive comment emerges in your workshop, you'll have two powerful tools to turn potential conflict into authentic exploration.

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I write the newsletter from various coffee shops, imagining I'm chatting with my subscribers over a warm cup. So if you ever find an issue particularly helpful or thought-provoking, you can now literally buy me the coffee that will fuel the next one. This approach keeps the newsletter free and accessible for everyone while still allowing you to support the work when it resonates with you.

Sources:

Harris, T., 2022. SNP hypocrisy has reached a revolting new low. _The Telegraph_. [online] 20 Jun.

Khaleeli, H., 2016. ‘A frenzy of hatred’: how to understand Brexit racism. _The Guardian_. [online] 29 Jun.

Kock, C. and Villadsen, L.S. eds, 2012. _Rhetorical citizenship and public deliberation_. Rhetoric and democratic deliberation. University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press.

Quintilian (1920) _Institutio Oratoria, Volume I: Books 1-3_. Translated by H. E. Butler. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

SIX WORKSHOPS, SIX FACILITATORS, SIX DIFFERENT CITIES. And yet, every session began the same way - same three warm-up exercises, same sequence, same rhythms.

It wasn’t a template workshop. And it wasn’t a coincidence.

All six were professional practitioners on a work-based master's programme. A few weeks earlier, they'd shared an intensive study week in which each had taken a turn running a warm-up. No one was assessed. No feedback was given. But when I hit the road for workplace observations, the same three warm up exercises resurfaced time and time again.

At first glance, this looked like a textbook case of the availability heuristic: we're exposed to a new technique and find ourselves using it at every available opportunity.1 But why these three activities out of a week's worth of workshops? It's not that they were especially novel. The only common factor was that each was a variation of a well-known exercise with an innovative twist.

A new spin on an old favourite!

So perhaps these facilitators weren't just mindlessly copying. Maybe they had instinctively recognised the potential of using variations of the structures they were familiar with. New exercises take time to develop and 'bed-in', sticking with material that works is reliable but unlikely to yield new insights. Taking the structure of existing activities and adapting them to serve different purposes or achieve new outcomes offers the best of both worlds. There's some familiarity but also some 'strangeness' - enough to keep both facilitator and participants on their toes and sensitive to possibility. This is what made the three exercises stand out during the intensive week. The variations added a layer of sophistication, explicitly taking things up a level.2 These old favourites weren't recycled, they were upcycled!

Upcycling workshop exercises involves taking the core structure of a game and repurposing it for new objectives. It is not about discarding what's effective but rather about reimagining it. The core mechanics of the activity remain the same, but the objectives and framing shift to align with the specific goals of the workshop. Intention is key. A furniture 'upcycler' doesn't just tinker to see how things might turn out. They might see lots of possibilities in an old cast iron water pump but decide to turn it into a lamp stand. As I've discussed previously purpose comes first.

It makes much more sense to do your own upcycling. This is also the best way to avoid falling into the The Fast Food Seagull fallacy. I think it was this that made the exercise sequence jar in those six observations. The sequence didn't quite fit any of the specific contexts. It was close enough in some but distinctively mismatched in others.

I write this newsletter from various coffee shops, imagining I'm chatting with you. If you ever find an article particularly helpful or thought-provoking, you can now literally buy me a coffee to fuel the next edition. This helps keep the newsletter free and accessible for everyone.

An approach to Upcycling: Frame-casting

Exercises are complex. Not just complicated—complex. They sit at the intersection of multiple, overlapping systems. Spatial and physical constraints (walls, floors, gravity), material needs (chairs? props?), timing, narrative logic, motivational currents, participant intentions… even a game as seemingly simple as Stuck in the Mud contains far more variables than can be usefully listed. So how do we change one?

You can’t intentionally repurpose a complex system by just tweaking bits at random. Or rather—you can, but you won’t know what the outcome means. The only way to shift things meaningfully is to simplify. Not by dumbing down, but by casting the complexity into a conceptual framework. I’m calling this frame-casting.

To frame-cast an exercise is to locate it in a framework that reduces the variables in play and opens up new pathways for purposeful change. The frame lets us ask “what if…” without being overwhelmed by the infinite branching of possibilities.

Take Stuck in the Mud. Casting a spatial frame reveals players are standing, moving independently in an open space. But what if ? What if we restrict movement to a circle? What if it becomes a seated game? What if players are tethered in pairs? A whole new set of exercises begin to emerge—and crucially, we understand why they emerged, and what we’re testing.

I’m currently developing a short course and future post that dig deeper into frame-casting, but the two most useful for upcycling are the “Struggle Frame” and Clive Barker’s Theatre Game Categories. For now, I’ll outline how these two frames can help reimagine even the most familiar exercises in the sections below.

Upcycling Example: Splat!

Splat is a classic drama game. I must confess I'm not a big fan myself, but it's practically ubiquitous and probably the one exercise I can confidently assume everyone knows.3

For those unfamiliar: the group stands in a circle with the facilitator in the centre. In free-flowing turns, the facilitator points at a participant while loudly saying 'Splat'. The participant must duck before the participants either side turn inwards to launch an imaginary custard pie while simultaneously shouting 'Splat'. It's often played as an elimination game, with anyone not ducking or splatting quickly enough being knocked out, leading to a final duel between the last two players.

1: Purposeful Upcycling

It's a weekly drama club. The longstanding older core of the group have moved on, and new members have joined. The group don't seem to be gelling and there is a sense of positioning/jostling for status.

You decide to make the secondary aim of the forthcoming workshop: To build group cohesion

You use the Struggle (or Agon) frame. This identifies the protagonist and antagonist of the exercise. For instance, you might have:

Players against Players - using competition as motivation
Players against Facilitator - The group working together in response to challenges created by the facilitator.
Player against environment - overcoming gravity or physical obstacles
Player against Self - challenging/improving own abilities.

Casting Splat into the Struggle Frame reveals it as a Player vs Player game (though if the elimination aspect is omitted it can also function as Player vs Self).

But what if: Splat were upcycled as a ‘Players vs Facilitator game’? Might this be a way of getting the group to work together for a common goal?

Upcycle as... Splat Back:

1. Group stands in circle.

2. Facilitator as the splatter (makes splatting motion rather than pointing).

3. Splattee ducks (as before).

4. Participants either side send a splat back at the facilitator whilst simultaneously shouting "Splat Back".

5. If the splattee ducks in time and the 'splatback' is simultaneous the group wins. If not, the facilitator wins that round.

6. No elimination but a facilitator vs group scoring system could be added or a simple count of how many consecutive splat backs are successful and try to improve each session.

2. Exploratory Upcycling

Your group loves playing Splat, but you want to shake things up for next term.

You frame-cast using Clive Barker's Theatre Games. This is a taxonomy based on the intention and mechanics of the exercise:

• Movement: Freeing energy from the constraints of social conditioning and self-consciousness.

• Speed of Reaction: Quick decision-making and responsiveness.

• Control of Reaction: Managing actions and responses.

• Sensory Exercises: Enhancing perception through sight, sound, touch, etc.

• Vertigo Exercises: Deliberately disrupting perceptual stability

• Victim Games: Placing someone in a challenging position against the group.

Splat is conventionally a Speed of Reaction exercise. But what if we cast it into other categories for inspiration?

Splat as:

Movement: Change the movement motifs to something more complex or challenging. Instead of elimination the last one to complete the movement has to run around the outside of the circle.

Control of Reaction: Instead of pointing at a splatee, call them by number in the circle (i.e Splat 3). Create a forfeit for anyone who moves when it's not their turn.

Sensory Exercise: Participants have eyes closed. Facilitator moves around outside of circle and stage-whispers 'Splat' to Splatee who claps and ducks while those on the either side shout splat and clap (probably best they don't turn with outstretched arms)

Vertigo: Nothing springs immediately to mind!

Victim: Something whereby the splattee is is 'splatted' by the rest of the group - perhaps with some kind of pressure to get it right or become the splatee.

There's something interesting in the last one which relates to some ideas I've had about exploring peer pressure and cancel culture.

Upcycle as...Pile On!

Turning splat into a victim game to explore "pile-on" culture on the internet.
*Warning to self: victim games should always be used with great care particularly ensuring the exercise contains appropriate measures by which the facilitator can control the pressure placed on any specific individual. Knowing the group well enough to make this judgement is key *

Basic Structure

1. Group stand in a circle.

2. The Namer stands in the middle - (must always be the facilitator)

3. The Namer identifies a participant (The Named).

4. The rest of the group turn to face the Named and complete an action.

Name and Fame - Warm up rounds

1. Namer gestures with an open hand and calls the Named's name affectionately

2. Participants turn towards Named, applauding and calling out their name

3. If Namer spots an incorrect move (someone turning to face another participant) they 'name' one of them with an affectionate "Ohh (name)".

4. Participants turn and repeat "Ohh (name)"

5. If Namer spots another incorrect move, repeat above. Otherwise, begin again.

Name and Shame - Main round

1. Namer points at participant accusingly say "You!"

2. Participants turn towards Named, pointing and accusingly saying "You"

3. If Namer spots an incorrect move (someone turning to face another participant) they accuse one of them with a shocked "You!".

4. Participants turn point and repeat "You!"

5. If Namer spots another incorrect move, repeat above. Otherwise begin again.

I'm not sure how, but I'd be looking for ways to keep it moving swiftly with occasional pauses. Maybe add variation where those in an incorrect move can accuse each other. Or add participants shouting "You!" in canon to add to 'pile on' feel.

Post-exercise discussion explores the experience of being called by name versus "You!", the pressure to avoid mistakes, and the contrasting feelings of being accused versus being an accuser.

Note: I undertook this upcycling process in real-time, demonstrating how frameworks can generate new possibilities from familiar structures. However, this particular variation would require further development and careful consideration before implementation.

Final thoughts..

No one wants their practice to gather dust. But neither do we want to continue the exhausting hunt for yet another edition of '100 Drama Games to...'?

The practice of upcycling is our way out of that false dilemma. It’s how we transform those familiar, reliable structures into fresh experiences. That simple process - 'frame-casting' to reveal the possibilities of the activity, and then testing your iterations - can be more than just a technique; it could be a mindset shift.

The key insight from those six identical warm-up sequences wasn't that the facilitators lacked creativity, but that they had recognised something valuable in exercises that balanced familiarity with novelty. When we upcycle thoughtfully, we create activities that feel both comfortable and surprising, keeping participants engaged while serving our workshop's specific goals.

Most importantly, upcycling encourages us to look more deeply at the exercises we already know. Every familiar game contains multiple potential applications waiting to be discovered through intentional reframing. In a profession where we're constantly seeking new material, perhaps the richest resource is the one we've been using all along - we just need to learn to see it differently.

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Sources:

Barker, C., 1995. Theatre games: a new approach to drama training. Reprint edn. A Methuen paperback. London: Methuen.

The term ends. The participants leave. The lights go out.

It should be time to rest - but your mind lingers on what you did, what you'd do again and the stuff you'd do differently. The insights are fresh, but so is the fatigue.

This moment – awkward, liminal, necessary – is precisely when we have the most to learn. And perhaps, the least desire to do it alone.

So, let’s meet up!

The Sustainable Facilitator Webinar Course:

A reflective, practical space to re-examine how we work - not just what we do, but how we sustain ourselves in doing it.

Over two webinars and a 1:1 tutorial, you’ll be supported to:

• Audit your current practice with honesty and curiosity

• Identify what energises you - and what quietly drains you

• Explore sustainable approaches that support your values, not just your output

• Redesign your practice to prioritise both impact and endurance

This isn’t about productivity. It’s about alignment.

Who is this for?

You might be:

• Caught in a cycle that no longer serves you

• Looking to refresh or reclaim your passion for practice

• Sitting on a bold idea that never quite makes it off the to-do list

Whether you're in education, community, or professional theatre, this is an invitation to step back, take stock, and move forward with clarity.

What’s Included:

• Two 90-minute live webinars
Live, interactive sessions offering fresh thinking, reflective exercises, and group discussion.

• One 30-minute individual tutorial
Personalised guidance, space to focus on your own questions and context.

Course Details:

Location: Online
Language: English
Fee: £85
Places: Limited – designed for meaningful participation, not mass attendance

Dates:

Cohort 1: Webinars 23^rd & 25^th July 7.30pm BST, tutorials by arrangement

Click here to book for Cohort 1

Cohort 2: Webinars 28^th & 30^th August 7.30pm BST, tutorials by arrangement

Click here to book for Cohort 2

I’ll be launching a course platform in the coming months and will advertise future offerings there, including some face to face workshops. There will be a normal newsletter next week!

Please email me here if you have any queries.

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YOU ARE NOT designing a workshop, you are the architect of an encounter. How's that for an inspiring opening! True, it might be hard to believe on a rainy Wednesday as you start your Elders Drama Drop-In workshop fresh in the knowledge that a drum circle has booked the room next door. So let's be honest about what it means in practice: not mystical transformation or life-changing epiphanies, though these can happen, but respecting the fact that when people choose to spend their time with you, they're hoping for something more than you just ticking the boxes of a generic plan.

The difference between activity-first and purpose-first planning

It's fairly standard practice to plan workshops by collecting activities. We build mental catalogues of exercises that "work" - icebreakers that get people talking, games that build energy, skill drills and frameworks for rehearsing or devising. When faced with a new gig, we browse these catalogues and arrange activities into a sequence, perhaps taking for granted that they'll add up to something meaningful.1

Purpose-first planning reverses this equation. It begins with transformation and works backward to activities, recognizing that every workshop serves dual functions: your primary aim (what must happen in this session) and your secondary aim (what would usefully happen to serve the longer journey). It means every exercise becomes intentional, serving either the immediate necessity or the prospective development—ideally both.

Let's contrast these two approaches to planning a session:

Activity-first: "I'll start with my favourite warm-up, maybe some teamwork games, that trust exercise that always works well, small group devising, and finish with showbacks."

Purpose-first: "We need to produce material for our devised show (primary aim). The group are enthusiastic about the reminiscence work but tend to forget to apply performance skills when devising. What would help them rediscover the connection between what they want to say and how they say it? What experiences would give them insight to the perspective of an audience who might not know what's going on? And while we're meeting this immediate need, how might we also build their confidence in physical storytelling for future sessions (secondary aim)?"

The second approach might still include teambuilding exercises and a warm-up, but they'd be selected and adapted specifically to serve both the group's immediate need and their ongoing development.

Begin with the transformation, not the information

Ask not "What boxes do I need to tick?" but "What needs to happen - both immediately and over time - in this gathering?" This shift in questioning changes the very notion of delivery. You're not just handing over content - like a postal worker making sure the package gets to the right address. Instead, you become more like a midwife creating the conditions most favourable to the emergence of the baby.2

The purpose may focus on immediate group dynamics, skill acquisition, or creative output (primary aim), while simultaneously building strengths, addressing longer-term weaknesses, or laying groundwork for future exploration (secondary aim). This dual-track thinking creates workshops with both immediate impact and lasting value.

Working backward from what 'has to happen'

Once you've identified your core purpose - both immediate and prospective - the path becomes clearer. You're working backward from two parallel streams: what must be achieved today and what would usefully advance the group's longer journey.

Start with your primary aim - the non-negotiable outcome. If your group needs to create material for their devised show, that's essential. Work backward: what conditions must exist for successful devising? They need to feel creatively free, connected to their stories, and confident in their ability to communicate with an audience.

Now layer in your secondary aim - what would be useful to happen. Perhaps building the group's confidence in physical storytelling, or establishing a shared vocabulary for giving feedback. These aren't essential to today's success, but they serve the larger arc of the group's development.

Work backward through both streams simultaneously. The primary path reveals the essential architecture: trust before vulnerability, technique before practice, stimulus before exploration. The secondary path reveals opportunities: moments where you can deepen ensemble connection, introduce new ways of thinking about character, or practice skills they'll need next week.

This dual-track planning means your devising exercise serves the immediate need to create material, but the way you structure it also builds physical confidence, establishes feedback protocols, or strengthens group bonds. Every element does double duty when possible, serving both the urgent and the important.

Every element serves the purpose - or it doesn't belong

When planning from purpose, you become fiercely protective of your participants' time and attention. That clever game that makes them think you're hilarious? If it doesn't serve the deeper transformation, it's clutter. That impressive framework you're excited to share? If it doesn't advance the purpose, it's distraction.

This isn't necessarily a case for fewer activities - it's about activities that resonate with intentionality. The workshop becomes a coherent whole rather than a collection of interesting parts.

Design for emergence, not just learning

Traditional workshop planning asks: "What do I want them to have achieved by the end?" Purpose-first planning adds: "What could emerge through our collective effort?" It creates space for the group's own wisdom to surface, for insights that belong uniquely to this gathering at this moment in time.

You plan deeply so you can hold lightly. You prepare thoroughly so you can improvise gracefully. If you truly grasp the purpose you can recognise when the workshop wants to get there in a way you hadn't planned - and trust it enough to follow.

Activities come and go, purpose remains

Activity-first planning jealously guards the activities. Adherence to the activity list becomes a proxy for success. When the plan goes no deeper than which exercise comes next the sequence becomes indistinguishable from the plan - something to be held on to for dear life. If a lack of chairs, uneven number of participants, or a drum circle next door threatens the sequence, filler material may be substituted but only reluctantly so.

By contrast, the purpose-first practitioner recognises that the sequence of activities, whether scribbled in the notepad or held in your head, is only one possible way of delivering the plan - it is not the plan itself. It is our last and best guess, even if based on experience and whatever information is available before the workshop begins.

But once the workshop begins, you get new information. The group's energy is different than expected. Someone shares a story that shifts the whole dynamic. The ownership you thought would take an hour to build emerges in fifteen minutes, or proves more elusive than anticipated. Indeed, the optimum moment for deciding what activity would best serve the purpose is often as you breathe in to announce it - but this flexibility is only possible with a deep understanding of that purpose.

The purpose-first practitioner welcomes the intuition that the next planned exercise won't work. This isn't failure; it's useful information. Uncertainty implies possibility - the possibility of better serving the workshop purpose based on what is really happening now, rather than what you thought would be happening hours or even days earlier. When you feel that familiar tightness that says "this won't land," you can trust it, because you know why you're here.

The activities can change, but the purpose remains. Your carefully crafted sequence becomes a useful prediction rather than a rigid prescription. You might skip the elaborate trust exercise because genuine vulnerability has already emerged through an unexpected sharing. You might extend a moment of creative breakthrough rather than moving dutifully to the next item on your list. The activities serve the purpose, not the other way around.

Your role becomes less teacher and more facilitator in the truest sense - helping create conditions where insights can emerge, where authentic learning can unfold, where people can discover what they already know but haven't yet accessed.

Practical steps for purpose-first planning

• Define the purpose: Before choosing any activities, clarify both your primary aim (what must happen in this session) and your secondary aim (what would usefully happen to serve the longer journey). Write them down clearly.

• Work backward from both streams: Ask "What would need to happen for this immediate change to be possible?" and "What conditions would support our longer-term development?" Map the prerequisites for each.

• Find the overlaps: Look for moments where a single experience can serve both aims. How might your devising exercise also build ensemble trust? How could your warm-up also introduce concepts you'll need later?

• Test every element against purpose: As you select activities, ask: "How does this serve our primary aim? How might it also advance our secondary aim?" If you can't answer clearly, the activity might not belong.

• Plan the arc with dual awareness: Consider the natural rhythm of human change—opening, exploration, challenge, integration, commitment—while staying alert to opportunities to layer in secondary learning.

• Hold it lightly: Stay open to emergence. Your dual purpose provides direction, not a rigid script. Sometimes the secondary aim will become unexpectedly urgent, or new possibilities will emerge that serve both purposes better than your original plan.

Taking facilitation seriously

You didn't stumble into facilitation by accident. Something in you recognised that gathering people for meaningful theatre making is important work. Something in you knew that creating spaces for learning and growth is central to your vocation.

Purpose-first planning is part of taking facilitation seriously. With experience, you may find yourself planning entirely in your head - but given the risk of unconscious assumptions creeping in, occasional longhand planning keeps you honest. Co-leading with someone else? You may have less latitude with the sequence, but shared purpose becomes even more crucial when two facilitators need to move as one.

Begin with intention

The next time you sit down to plan a workshop, resist the urge to dive straight into activities. Instead, spend time with the question that matters most: "What has to happen, and what could happen?"

Let that purpose fill your understanding, guide your choices, inform every decision. When you plan from clear intention, everything else aligns. The activities choose themselves. The timing becomes organic. The workshop breathes with life because it was conceived with purpose and designed with care.

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One of the initial ambitions of this newsletter was to create a space for sharing and dissecting impactful books and resources – those gems that might not show up on the radar. The type of content that doesn’t usually find its way onto a theatre practitioner’s to-read list but holds the potential to change the way we think about our work.1

This is the initial instalment in what will become a regular feature – part guidebook and part book report. The concept is straightforward enough: extract the ideas and methods that can be easily applied, the ones you can use rather than simply look at from afar. Consider it the abridged equivalent gives you enough to put ideas into practice while hopefully also convincing you the entire book is worth the investment.

Flat workshops, underwhelm and other crimes:

NO ONE WOULD PURPOSELY lead workshops, classes, or rehearsals that are as flat, all on one note, lacking climax or clear moments of decision. An unremarkable or unmemorable workshop is unlikely to have been impactful.

Of course theatre facilitators, stage directors and drama teachers know about ‘moments’ - it’s the essence of dramatic action. I can only imagine how many of you will be inwardly quoting Aristotle on inciting incident, rising action and climax or wondering about Brecht’s nodal points as you read the rest of this post. We will call out a scene with no key moments as ‘flat’ or ‘all on one note.’ We will live with a slightly ropey bit of ensemble work knowing it will be overshadowed by the big dance number that follows. But, do we give the same consideration to the potential of moments across a series of workshops, rehearsals, or classes? And does it matter?

Pragmatic non-fiction books rarely reveal something completely and utterly new - something the reader has never encountered. What is more likely is that the text names and explores a concept or phenomenon that we are already intuitively aware of but would struggle to articulate if asked. And this certainly applies to Chip and Dan Heath’s 2017 book on why certain moments have extraordinary impact.

The Power of Moments

The Quick Read:

• A defining moment is a short experience that is both memorable and meaningful.

• Some moments matter more than others: Across a sequence of activity beginnings, peaks, and endings seem to have the most impact.

• Elevate peaks, fill pits, and ignore potholes: A strong, positive moment (peak) and ending outweighs numerous minor dips (potholes). However, a single negative peak or ending (pit) can easily overshadow everything.

• Memorable moments accelerate development: It’s tempting to dismiss ‘moments’ as icing on the cake - ‘workshop jazz hands’. However research points to the developmental importance of moments strengthening group relationships, increasing motivation and marking milestones/transitions.

• Meaningful moments don’t just happen; they are crafted. There are four key elements to consider when designing impactful moments:

  • Elevation: Elevate moments above the ordinary

  • Insight: Create moments of realization and understanding.

  • Pride: Moments of achievement and recognition fuel a sense of accomplishment.

  • Connection: Shared experiences and emotional bonds catalyse meaning and forge lasting memories.

• Don’t take ‘moments’ for granted. Packed schedules, focus on grand or long term goals, replicating previous peaks, lead us to forget to create opportunities for meaningful moments to emerge.

Defining moments:

The driving thrust of the book is a simple observation - some moments in our lives are much more meaningful than others. OK, no great revelation there. Anyone asked to relate their life story will focus on a selection of defining moments. The question Chip and Dan Heath bring to the book is whether such moments have to be left to chance or whether they might be authored, planned or created.

From here the book could have gone one of two ways. It might have pursued a self-help path, providing a recipe for individuals to create their own ‘defining moment’.2 Instead, and more usefully for us, the authors explore how teachers, leaders, employers, businesses etc. might create the conditions for such moments to occur.

Why some moments matter more than others:

The Heath brothers draw on research into a phenomenon called ‘Duration Neglect’: the observation that people tend to ignore most of what happens and instead rate experiences on the basis of just a few specific moments. The counterpart to ‘Duration Neglect’ is known as the ‘Peak End Rule’3 - that the moments we usually remember are 1. the best or worst bits and 2. the beginning or end of an activity - the rest fades from memory.

To think about this visually, consider the diagram below showing participant perceptions of a workshop over time. We have moments of positive experience (peaks), moments of negative experience (pits and potholes) and bits which are neither positive nor negative (meh!)

Peak End rule suggests participants will perceive the quality, meaningfulness, or impact of the activity as falling somewhere in between the peak (x) and end (y) moments rather than charting an average from all the pits and peaks (z).

Once again this might seem fairly obvious. However, let’s imagine you have a stock session you run on a fairly regular basis. It’s not your best workshop, it tends to fluctuate between mildly positive and mildly negative moments. It’s OK, but not great, and you’d like to improve it.

The temptation for many, I think would be to look for ways to address the sections that fall below the line. In this example these are not ‘pits’ - significantly negative moments that must be addressed, but ‘potholes’, sections that don’t quite hit home or muster a lot of enthusiasm. If the duration neglect / peak end rule is correct, though, filling in the potholes would only raise the perception of the activity to just above ‘meh’ (a). Putting similar effort into elevating one of the peaks, on the other hand, would significantly improve impact/memorability (b).

The advice then, is to fill pits, ignore potholes and elevate one or more peaks.

Jazz Hands for Workshops?:

That effort spent completely eliminating potholes (minor negative moments) makes very little difference, certainly rings true to me. Just as you eliminate one pothole, another will appear and an awful lot of participants won’t even notice you’ve filled them in. The potholes might also be mandatory - part of a curriculum or section of a script.

However, I can’t help but worry that what is being suggested is the equivalent to Juvenal’s famous quote about ‘Bread and Circuses’ - that the people can be appeased, come to ignore the negatives, as long as they have food and entertainment.4 Seen in this way the ‘peak’ is a distraction at best and bribery at worst - like throwing a pizza party for participants at the same time you are handing out evaluation forms! Some examples in the book, particularly those focused on consumer oriented ‘customer experience’ moments, underline this interpretation. Furthermore, the emphasis on ‘peaks’ seems to contradict approaches such as Deliberate Practice that recognise the need for sustained, focused, development.

Accelerators of development:

The “bread and circuses” concern is valid — I’d wager we’ve all witnessed those cringe-worthy moments engineered to paper over deeper issues. However, the examples in the book from educational and community engagement contexts point to an altogether more progressive application of the research.5 Defining moments, when crafted with care, rather than calculated superficiality, can serve as genuine catalysts for development.

Consider this: rather than merely offering a shiny distraction from the negatives (which, let’s be honest, rarely fools anyone for long), a well-timed defining moment might just reframe how participants see the whole process. Picture the group who suddenly grasps they can transcend the hum drum of daily life, or the participant who discovers their voice carries weight in discussion. These are no small achievements — they’re jolts of clarity that can crystallize months of practice into something coherent.

And this is where we can see the practical impact. That burst of insight, that flash of communitas? It doesn’t undermine the tedious slog of deliberate practice — it powers it. The difficult process of improvement suddenly doesn’t feel like punishment but possibility. The group are no longer working against the drag of inertia. These transitional moments become the tipping points that offer the exact energy to apply oneself more fully to the work.

From a distractive moment to a transformative one.

The book draws on a range of scientific research and case studies and finds positive defining moments draw on four key elements:

Elevation

Moments of elevation are experiences that rise above the routine. They make us feel engaged, joyful, amazed, motivated.

• Some activities have built-in peaks, such as games or recitals or celebrations. But other areas of life can fall depressingly flat.

• Elevated moments usually have 2 or 3 of these traits:
  (1) Boost the sensory appeal;
  (2) Raise the stakes;
  (3) Break the script

• The third part—break the script—requires special attention. To break the script is to defy people’s expectations of how an experience will unfold. It’s strategic surprise.

• The most memorable periods of our lives are times when we break the script.

• Moments of elevation can be hard to build. They are no one’s “job” and they are easy to delay or water down.

Insight

Moments of insight deliver realizations and transformations.

• They need not be serendipitous. To deliver moments of insight for others, we can lead them to “trip over the truth,” which means sparking a realization that packs an emotional wallop.

• Tripping over the truth involves:
  (1) a clear insight,
  (2) compressed in time and
  (3) discovered by the audience itself.

• To produce moments of self-insight, we need to stretch: placing ourselves in new situations that expose us to the risk of failure.

• Mentors can help us stretch further than we thought we could, and in the process they can spark defining moments.

• The promise of stretching is not success, it’s learning.

Pride

Moments of pride commemorate people’s achievements.

• There are three practical principles we can use to create more moments of pride:
  (1) Recognise others;
  (2) Multiply meaningful milestones;
  (3) Practice courage.

• Effective recognition is personal, not programmatic. (“Star Performer of the Month” doesn’t cut it.)

• To create moments of pride for ourselves, we should multiply meaningful milestones—reframing a long journey so that it features many “finish lines.”

• Moments when we display courage make us proud. We never know when courage will be demanded, but we can practice ensuring we’re ready.

• Courage is contagious; our moments of action can be a defining moment for others.

Connection

Moments of connection bond us with others. We feel warmth, unity, empathy, validation.

• To spark moments of connection for groups, we must create shared meaning. That can be accomplished by three strategies:
  (1) creating a synchronized moment;
  (2) inviting shared struggle;
  (3) connecting to meaning.
  - Groups bond when they struggle together. People will welcome a struggle when it’s their choice to participate, when they’re given autonomy to work, and when the mission is meaningful.

• “Connecting to meaning” reconnects people with the purpose of their efforts. That’s motivating and encourages “above and beyond” work.

• In individual relationships, we believe that relationships grow closer with time. But that’s not the whole story. Sometimes long relationships reach plateaus. And with the right moment, relationships can deepen quickly.

Defining moments can contain any combination of these elements but will generally contain at least one.6 From the perspective of a facilitator/director teacher these could be layered or spread across a session, a workshop/rehearsal process or an academic year.7 A timeline may naturally offer a specific moment - post show euphoria as a moment of pride and connection springs to mind. But customary timelines need not be definitive. An early moment of elevation or insight may give the momentum, motivation, or trust required to get to the ultimate aim of the workshop. Likewise, a moment of pride or connection just before production might help the cast smuggle the best of the rehearsal room through to the first night.

Summary

What strikes me most about this book is how it validates something theatre practitioners have always known but rarely apply beyond performance — that structure and spontaneity aren’t opposites but dance partners. Just as we wouldn’t dream of staging something without considering its dramatic arc, perhaps we shouldn’t run workshops without thinking about the distribution and creation of defining moments.

The Heath brothers offer us a roadmap: create moments that elevate above the routine, spark genuine insight, celebrate achievement, and forge connection. And yes, there’s something slightly unsettling about the calculated nature of it all (are we engineering authenticity?), but perhaps that discomfort is worth wrestling with if it means fewer flat workshops and more genuine breakthroughs. The mathematics are surprisingly simple: one strong peak can outweigh a dozen minor irritations, while a single pit can poison everything that came before. The irony, of course, is that by planning for spontaneity — by designing space for elevation and discovery — we might just create the conditions where genuine development becomes more likely to occur.

Questions for Reflection

What kind of moments do you naturally create?
What type of moments are missing from your practice?
Thinking of a span of multiple sessions - are key moments spread out or clustered together?
When are the key moments of connection in a rehearsal process?
Does this differ depending on whether the performers are professional or not?

Other books I’m currently reading:

The Missing Thread by Daisy Dunn

Dunn, D., 2024. The missing thread: a women’s history of the ancient world. New York: Viking. The Missing Thread - The Guardian Bookshop

There Is Nothing for You Here by Fiona Hill

Hill, F., 2021. There is nothing for you here: finding opportunity in the twenty-first century. Boston, Mass: Mariner Books. There Is Nothing for You Here - The Guardian Bookshop

Reality is not what it seems: the journey to quantum gravity by Carlo Rovelli

Rovelli, C., 2017. Reality is not what it seems: the journey to quantum gravity. Translated by S. Carnell and E. Segre UK: Penguin Books. Reality Is Not What It Seems - The Guardian Bookshop

Get the The Power of Moments:

Heath, C., 2017. The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact. New York: Simon & Schuster.

The Power of Moments - The Guardian Bookshop

More about the Heath brothers

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IT WAS GOING SO WELL AND THEN IT WASN’T. Have you ever reached an utter impasse in a rehearsal or workshop process that had started so promisingly? You end up trying every trick/strategy/technique/ploy you know and still somehow you can’t gain traction again. Maybe you’ve observed this supervising a devising process. One group gets off to a flying start and you turn your attention to others who are struggling for ideas. You check back in later and find they have completely stalled.

Nature of error:

The monkey trap is a ubiquitous tale, probably South Asian in origin, made popular in modern Western thought by Robert M. Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.1 The narrator in the novel uses the story to explore a concept he calls Value Rigidity:

Value rigidity, according to Pirsig, is an inability to evaluate/re-evaluate information because of a commitment to a previous idea or decision. It’s allowing a perception to get stuck in a pattern. Like the monkey refusing to let go of the fruit even when the hunter is coming, value rigidity means clinging so tightly to an idea or way of thinking that you can’t adapt, change, or embrace new, potentially better possibilities. You become trapped by your own unwillingness to let go of the previous value, even if letting go would mean freedom or growth.

Stuck on: the first idea

It may be that the devising group above became stuck when the initial idea somehow ran out of steam - a not uncommon occurrence in any creative work. However, the level of excitement created by the ‘great’ idea might have resulted in an inability to recognise when the idea has reached its limits. Rigidity sets in. The fact that the idea is no longer working is staring them in the face, but they don’t recognise it. Likewise, new ways forward are invisible because all value (importance) is inviolably ascribed to the previous commitment.

Anchoring Effect: The ‘idea’ might be the first one that came to mind, the most vivid, or the one that has been focused on from the outset. This initial thought (the anchor) can disproportionately influence decision-making, making it difficult to consider alternative, potentially better options.

Stuck on: what we already know/care about

Let’s consider a different example. A workshop leader has been invited to work with a group of participants subject to social marginalization. The facilitator has read widely about this form of marginalisation and has deep personal commitment to addressing it. Based on a hunch, the facilitator becomes convinced that the participants are concerned about a specific, potentially controversial, societal issue. They begin the workshop. It is somewhat hard going - the group is reluctant to engage with the topic. Instead of revisiting the hunch in light of this new information the facilitator soldiers on. The group’s concern for the issue has clearly been deeply repressed - so the facilitator believes.2 The only way forward is through. That this may not be the right time or space never enters their mind. The group may need time to feel comfortable. The importance of the issue may not be felt equally amongst the participants. Or, indeed, felt at all.

Availability Heuristic: An issue might be judged as more likely or important simply because examples of it are easily recalled from memory, perhaps because they are recent, vivid, or frequently encountered. This readily available information can disproportionately influence judgments and decisions, leading individuals to overestimate its frequency or significance compared to less salient, but potentially more accurate, data.

Stuck on: what is mine

In our final example, let’s consider a theatre director who has a specific vision for a crucial scene. The description of this in production meetings led to gasps of awe. Artistic genius! Significant kudos for the director. However, during rehearsals, it becomes evident that the idea isn’t landing with the actors or is technically challenging for the crew to execute smoothly. The director stubbornly clings to the concept, bemoaning the unwillingness of the cast and crew to make it work. Precious time is lost that might have been spent developing an alternative.

Endowment Effect: We tend to ascribe more value to things we already possess or have created ourselves. The director’s big idea feels inherently more valuable simply because it originated with them. This feeling of ownership, often linked to psychological attachment or loss aversion, can disproportionately influence decision-making, making it difficult to objectively evaluate value or part with it when others might consider it reasonable.

Potential Consequences:

· Reduced engagement and participation.

· Compromised quality and effectiveness.

· Missed opportunities

· Damaged relationships

Ways of interrupting the fallacy:

In each of the examples the importance ascribed to each ‘idea’ is removed from the broader context that gives it value. The monkey values the piece of fruit as a means of avoiding starvation. However, avoiding starvation is part of the broader goal of staying alive. It would be better in this case to be a hungry live monkey rather than a dead one with food in its hand. The broader purpose of the action has been subsumed into a single measurable goal.3 We have promoted a possible means of achieving the goal to the only means of doing so. In a way the ‘idea’ has become a substitute for the whole.

It would be easy to reach for the oft-quoted axiom that creatives must be prepared to “kill your darlings”. This is not necessarily bad advice. All creativity requires a kind of ruthlessness as generation turns to editing and refinement. The phrase neatly captures the pain that accompanies the decision to excise cherished ideas. But we’re dodging the issue. The monkey probably never consciously decided to put its hand in and grab the fruit, much less refuse to let go of it. It was more likely a pattern of behaviour that had served it well in the past. Likewise, our own patterns may not be obvious to us on a day-to-day basis. ‘Kill your darlings’ only works when you know what needs to be let go of and why.

Pirsig offers the following advice:

It’s probably helpful here to point out that Pirsig is using the Monkey as a metaphor for a motorcycle mechanic trying to diagnose a fault.4 Like a mechanic, a facilitator or director is rarely, if ever, in possession of all the relevant information. Any decision or hypothesis must be open to question and change. All the more so when dealing with people rather than machines.

The suggestion then is to stop, stand back and try to re-engage with the fundamental goal, aim, driving force etc. of the activity in question. Only then can you begin to untangle the unconscious commitments that got you into the pickle in the first place. Personally, and I’ve lost count of how many times my hand has been stuck in the jar, I find it useful to draw or physically map out the project. A long walk, bath, or swim can also be extremely useful. This is not dodging or procrastinating. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s a professional responsibility. This type of quiet and conscious reassessment is far more effective (and sustainable) than the more rash impulses to kill darlings or, in a more self-help paradigm, go full Elsa and just ‘let it go’.

Questions for Reflection:

1. What is the ultimate goal here?

2. If the idea was impossible to realise what would you do instead?

3. Can the idea be seen as a stepping stone rather than the end point?

4. What evidence would it take to convince you that the idea is not working or is no longer the best approach?

5. Whose needs does this idea ultimately serve?

Always an Error?

I’m always slightly concerned that my Facilitator Fallacy posts might be taken as somewhat of a telling off. You do X and X is wrong because of Y, deduct 5 facilitator points and here’s (another) stick to beat yourself with! In reality the fallacies only achieve this status because of their proximity to perfectly appropriate ways of working. This is particularly true here.

I’ve no doubt that my examples above will have provoked as many ’ yeh-but-what-abouts’ as they did knowing nods. Who hasn’t met with the group that jettisons everything they’ve worked on at the first obstacle? Who hasn’t let their own reticence or lack of confidence prevent themselves from sticking with a group as they work through a tricky issue? And aren’t there times when you need to stick to your guns and prioritise a certain scene or piece of staging, even when others don’t agree?

Yes, though these counter examples are really just the same trap with different fruit.

Consider the devising group so invested in getting top marks that they change their idea for something ‘better’ each week. Think of the times when your fear of imposing actively prevents a group from engaging in issues of importance. Or when adherence to the rehearsal schedule, or an inclination to avoid conflict, leads you to abandon a vision for a simpler compromise. Same rigidity - different values.

So ultimately it’s less about whether we are in a monkey trap and more about figuring out which one you are currently stuck in!

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Sources:

Kahneman, D., 2012. Thinking, fast and slow. Penguin psychology. London: Penguin Books.

Pirsig, R.M., 2014. Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. New York: Vintage

Rosen, M (2018, February 8) Michael Rosen: The data have landed. Available from http://michaelrosenblog.blogspot.com/2018/02/the-data-have-landed.html