Send in the Clowns

Learning to clown will make you a better Scrum Master. 

Ok that may or may not be true but I've just returned from a weird and wonderful 2 weeks of clown training* and I want to share some reflections on how that can help agilists everywhere with our work. 

First some clarifications - clowning is a dramatic art, they teach it in drama schools. Don't be fooled, clowning is serious work. I invite you to put asides the stereotypes (wigs, big shoes, flowers that squirt water, riding a tiny bike and fitting many clowns into a tiny car) and consider what a clown is in their essence. Clowning is broader than just circus clowning, it includes deep emotional practices and ritual. 

BREAK: (if you want more of this kind of thing, sign up to my Substack where I'll be publishing in the future)

A clown take ordinary things and provides an extraordinary take on them. An everyday item is no longer what you think it is, it's a toy to be explored. Everything is the object of play. Nothing is sacred to a clown, everything is potentially the subject of humour. A clown works with what is there already and finds humour in exploring the unseen and the unexpected. 

On Young Clown we explored how you can improvise using different objects in a dramatic scene. A pillow became a belly, an umbrella, a television. A map becomes a cigarette lighter, a guitar, a sword. Anything is possible, it's about how you conform yourself and your behaviour to the object, and how you help the audience do the same. 

A clown is also both the butt of the joke and the orchestrator of it. To inhabit that space a clown needs to have a certain humility. As the clown you are the medium for making the audience laugh. You access your emotions in order to find what is resonant with a situation and exagerate it. If something makes the clown sad it makes them clearly, profoundly sad. If a clown is frustrated or happy in a scenario they furrow their brow or they hold their sides laughing. Their currency is emotional intelligence, amplification, and taking risks with how they portray that. 

We explored our own pasts for inspiration here, we spent a day finding events and seasons which resonated emotionally. We painted our faces and shared of our stories non-verbally with our colleagues. It was a  beautiful, cathartic, empowering, emotionally intense experience taking core emotions and memories onto the stage for dramatic effect.  

So what's this got to do with agility and building high performing teams? 

In order to answer that question I want to take us a much further back in time to the invention of shamanism (I've pinched these ideas from John Vervaeke's excellent series). The shaman's role since the Upper Paleolithic era has been to sit on the outside of the tribe and help them see things in a different way. They help with the hunt by becoming the animal, heal the sick by invoking the (powerful) placebo effect with various social and ecstatic rituals. The shaman would live on the periphery of the tribe, outside the normal cut and thrust of day to day life. 

This was adaptive. If you're struggling to hunt a deer and out of ideas, having someone go to great lenghts to act as a deer and think like a deer can break the framing of the problem, which in turn may give you new ideas to successfully hunt the deer. We tell people to think outside the box, but this is hard. We live in the box. The role of the shaman was to live outside the box and help those inside it to step outside, even if only temporarily. 

So too with the clown - they are in essence separate, outside the society looking in and exploiting that position for comic and healing effect. So too I want to argue with the Scrum Master and the Agilist. 

Our role is to sit alongside the team, but to be separate from them. We keep ourselves apart from the cut and thrust of the daily work so that we can see what nobody else sees. Like the clown exagerating emotions, when we detect something uncomfortable we speak it and give it air time. When we see something good we try to exaggerate, scale and support it. 

We see what is possible in a way other may not, like the clown improvises with day to day meetings, we know how to experiment with meetings. We say what we see when nobody else is able to see it. 

A clown risks failure. Every joke may work or may not. If it doesn't, then the failure of the joke becomes funny, the reaction to the failure becomes the joke. So too agilists propose experiments, we help the team produce sometimes outlandish ideas and create a structrue for those ideas to be tested. If it makes things better then great! If not, then the failure of the experiment becomes the success. At least we tried something, and we taught the team that ideas are welcome and can come to life.

The clown does the internal work to be ok with sitting on the outside, and often it is lonely. Being an Agile Coach or a Scrum Master can be lonely. You are not quite in the team, but you are there for them. I'm arguing that this state is essential - if we belonged too much we would become part of the framing and unable to see beyond it. We live in this tension. We use the discomfort to help the team and the organisation. We do what we need to do to help ourselves become ok with that. 

Now, there's a million ways in which what I've just said can be argued with and has wrongness to it. I invite you however to try to find some resonance in the analogy. What can it teach you about your practice? Can it help you to become ok with some of the inherent loneliness in the role? Can it give you more self confidence in challenging and magnifying what has become normal for your teams and organisations? 

I'm setting it as a challenge for you dear reader and for myself. Send in the Clowns.  

*The course I attended was the Young Clown Erasmus programme with participants from across Europe (and one of the last ones accessible for UK participants).