In these recessionary times how can businesses deal with widespread disengagement and difficult conversations? With a little play acting, says Elizabeth Gates. Could sociodrama be the next big thing?
Last week, your client was leader of a maintenance team on a council estate. The team would complete half their daily tasks before going to the pub, safe in the belief they had jobs for life.
This week, though, management has turned into a public/private sector arrangement. A housing trust runs the estate and your client and his team have been catapulted into a commercially sensitive world. He must now make his team do their work properly – or all be out of a job.
Nothing in your client’s working life has prepared him for this. But he is not alone in feeling anxious.
Employers who wish to support their workers by improving their communication skills and connecting them to their own resources are beginning to embrace sociodrama. This creative development gives employees a trial run of a difficult situation.
Professional watchdog, the British Psychodrama Association (BPA), defines sociodrama as “a method by which a group . . . select and spontaneously enact a specific social situation common to their experience”.
It says psychodrama is a forum for:
- resolving conflicts
- clarifying values
- developing social skills
- solving problems
- diagnosing an organisation
- developing and rehearsing action plans
- improving personal effectiveness and awareness.
According to the BPA, psychodrama is used in a growing range of educational, health and business environments, from the NHS and social care settings to multinational corporations. No previous theatre training is required.
Sociodramatist Ron Wiener, who has a global team-building practice, says: “The benefit of a sociodramatic intervention for an organisation is that it explores how it interacts with its network of stakeholders – both internal and external.”
Role play
He gives the example of a newly qualified teacher who, as often happens, has been given the worst-behaved class. Sociodrama can examine minutely the interaction between the role the teacher is holding and the system that is failing to support her, exacerbating matters by its own blame culture.
In this case, he explains, the benefit for the individual could be the removal of a sense of personal failure, highlighting that any newly qualified teacher is likely to fail in this situation.
Di Adderley, a specialist in communications training and co-director with Wiener at the MPV/SAM School of Sociodrama and Creative Action Methods, adds: “Through role play – and other action methods – sociodrama can provide insights as to other people’s hilltops – alternative perspectives on a given situation. It’s an empathy build. It leads to greater understanding – even more kindness – among colleagues.”
Sociodrama can tease out a group situation’s commonalities and differences – and then foster the empathic understanding that underpins future action. As such, it has grown into an attractive training and development option since first being developed by Jacob Moreno in the 1930s.
It is closer to coaching than it seems. Sociodramatic objectives often parallel coaching outcomes, helping people understand what the current situation is, where they want to go and how and when they’re going to get there.
In the case of our maintenance team leader, he is the ‘hero’ in his team’s sociodrama. He may give the six houses waiting for maintenance a ‘voice’ or they can be silently represented by six chairs. He might ask or invite others to represent the other stakeholders.
Meanwhile, adopting the role of coach, the sociodramatist director may ask open questions to help get the leader ‘into role’ such as:
- What’s it like to do your job?
- Which parts of your job do you like the least?
- Which parts of your job do you like the best?
The purpose of this ‘hot seating’ is for the client to articulate ‘them’ and for their colleagues to understand what the leader’s difficulties are. The director may choose to give the client space in a soliloquy to explain these, or indicate conversations that will advance understanding.
The client’s team may then bring their own suggested solutions or – by doubling the leader, mirroring his posture and actions – may express what they believe to be his unspoken thoughts and feelings. He is free to challenge these if his ‘double’ has misunderstood.
Prompted by the director, role reversals with colleagues can show them what needs to be clarified.
Or the skilled sociodramatist director may choose to translate the whole situation into the metaphor of another setting. The client’s maintenance crew could become the crew of the housing trust manager’s yacht.
At the end of the sociodrama, ‘characters’ are de-roled and invited to share their experiences and learnings. Difficult conversations often become easier and employee engagement more achievable. However, there can be challenges.
Wiener, author of Creative Training1, says sociodrama can only succeed when the timing is right and where there is openness to change in attitude and behaviour. “People who are most likely to resist this are those who perceive loss in a changed situation, those who are convinced that the best course is to keep things as they are.”
Enlightenment tends to occur when the individual recognises the right question, for example: “What do I want that other stakeholders want too, which can deliver what the organisation wants?”
The action from this becomes collaborative rather than confrontational.
Readiness for change
Adderley says that for some managers the approach can be uncomfortable at first.
“If you’re used to barking out orders, it can feel very strange inviting people to do something instead. So we coach managers through this evolution.
“I may ask them: ‘When or where in your life might this [barking] approach work less well?’
“As the brain doesn’t process negatives easily, they have to think of their usual approach as ‘working’ before they think of it ‘not’.”
Adderley recalls one communication skills workshop when executives from the nuclear industry arrived suited and ready for ‘death by PowerPoint’.
The initial hurdle was to encourage them to make use of the safe, confidential and empty space. “And the first cultural shift was abandoning the table,” she notes.
She says that persistent inertia may exist in organisations unwilling to examine diminishing, dysfunctional or irrelevant systems and structures because they have served them well in the past.
But organisations need to be supportive as well as patient. As Adderley points out, “changes in behaviour take time to embed”.
Wiener adds a warning note: “Dysfunctional families are often given hours of therapy. But a sociodramatist may be expected to turn around a dysfunctional team during a one-day programme.”
Perhaps one of the major challenges for the sociodramatist is the fear of acting among participants. But, as Adderley explains: “Taking on the role is important. It gives you kinaesthetic insights – physical, sensatory, emotional – you’d otherwise miss.”
Sociodrama’s unique selling point is that participants experience first-hand their personal responses to group themes in a confidential and safe space. The prize is the enormous shifts which then occur.
Elizabeth Gates is a writer, journalist and coach and founder of Lonely Furrow www.lonelyfurrowcompany.com
Case study: Mission impossible?
A policy strategist for a multinational body was asked to co-ordinate a policy for more than 30 national industrial conglomerates. His issue: ‘How can I do this?’
With the help of sociodramatist Ron Wiener, the workshop group was able to sculpt out the system, using participants and objects to represent the stakeholders. The workshop also explored the role of the policy strategist.
Insights included:
- The policy strategist had no power to change the situation
- The job (of producing a policy) was impossible
- The question was no longer: ‘How can I do this [impossible] job?’ But: ‘What is it that keeps me doing this impossible job?’
Action flowing from the sociodramatic intervention:
Policy strategist’s comment: “Thank you. That’s given me something to think about.”
References and further info
- 1 R Wiener, Creative Training,JKP, 1997
- MPV/SAM School of Sociodrama and Creative Action Methods www.mpv-sam.com
- The British Psychodrama Association www.psychodrama.org.uk
07794 125602 email: administrator@psychodrama.org.uk
Coaching at Work, Volume 6, Issue 2