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A small group of us (initially Phil Cantor, Sam Deeks, Brian Hunt and me, later to be joined by Julian, Fiona, Colston…. sorry if I have forgotten anyone) gathered to discuss Travelling Theatre.

This arose from 3 separate post-its defining Wants and Offers that had been clustered:

• Travelling Theatre
• Doing something commercial to make money
• Here and now experiencing

Maybe an unlikely grouping - but bear in mind that at one stage almost all the post-its from 17 people were gathered in a single cluster named Travelling Theatre, and we deconstructed the large cluster. The linking thread in our 3 post-its was "doing" something rather than "talking about" something.

The initial discussion raised questions such as:

• Who is our target?
• What is their need?
• What would we do that is distinctive?

At first this seemed to cover old and somewhat sterile ground. The target was defined as development professionals, schools and charities, fun and learning minded people everywhere. Then we got into debate about whether we would want to do something not for profit and how important the commercial element of this was. Are we making a second class offer of fun and learning as a kind of charitable donation to people who can’t afford the real thing? If we really believe in fun and learning, why don’t we do it within our commercial activities anyway?

We experimented with a format that Phil offered for expressing a distinctive offer:

This raised further questions and discussion about what is the "thing" we want to do. Was for refreshing fatigued professionals, akin to rebooting a computer?

It seemed we were interested in doing something based on the values of:

• Whole person
• Using self as a starting point
• Relationships.

The discussion turned to what worked so well in a recent Voice Workshop some of us attended run by Anthony. Sam summarised some key ingredients that seemed to make this day powerfully participative:

• Being personally invited
• Both giving and taking during the day
• It is not an intellectual space, but one that recognises there is a "mechanism of limitation"
• Being taken into a creative place where you meet your own boundary/limitation and see and work with it through a different "view frame"
• Simple repetition not smorgasboard

But Anthony ran a masterclass and we were interested in finding a different model.

Our discussion identified weaknesses in the Travelling Theatre metaphor in that it implied the theatre is delivered like a show by a group of us who arrive on a wagon at your company, as opposed to being co-created with you.

An alternative term "Theatre of Work" was more attractive and accurate as a reflection of what New Intermediaries do in that:

• It applies to any meeting taking place at work, but also to the special kind of meetings that we sometimes orchestrate as in Boundary-crossing and Forum Theatre.
• It suggests work and life as a "drama", making the workplace where people meet into a "theatre"
• It focuses on relationships as the heart of work, not on tasks, systems or other artefacts
• It can include all the joy and pain that are part and parcel of relationships
• It provides a way of dis-identifying, by stepping out of and into different roles, thus giving participants some new and different choices in a way that is distinctive and easier than therapy… and does not require dressing up in costumes like "real" theatre on a stage

So in summary:

Where do we take this next?