Dramatising the ghosts within the organisation; the aspects of work that are rarely talked about – and laughing about it. Getting people to laugh of what they find difficult or challenging liberates and opens new perspectives, thereby building new connections between people and ideas.
Concept & technique
- Using ghost busting as an excuse to engage in play as part of creative workshops or intense work processes dealing with challenging tacit and cultural dimensions of work.
- Introducing the exercise, getting all of the ghosts out of the closet, at least the scariest ones. Ghosts are the stuff we don’t dare to talk about, or stuff we talk about all the time, but cannot find our way around in our hunt for a solution. Which of the ghosts that should be the focus point are agreed on in groups, with the task being to make a performance of that ghost. It could be a poem, a song, a play, anything. Be creative. Participants are judged on performance and content.
- The groups prepare their performance for about an hour.
- Every group performs their ghost buster.
- At the end, performances are ranked, and a winner is announced. Members of the winner-team is awarded a book.
Research foundation
Ghost busting has been developed as part of Idea Work and tested in exploration teams throughout Statoil. The Ghost busting exercise is derived from Snowden’s (2001) concept of “story virus” and “exaggeration”. The point is to dramatise tacit and challenging aspects of work, and to laugh about it, thus reframing the perspective of the challenge. Evoking laughter is the cousin of all creation because the base mechanisms are the same: bi-sociative – perceiving a situation, an event, or a set of data from two incompatible frames of references or models (Koestler 1967).
“True ambivalent and universal laughter does not deny seriousness, but purifies and completes it. Laughter purifies from dogmatism, from the intolerant and the petrified; it liberates from fanaticism and pedantry, from fear and intimidation, from didacticism, naïvité and illusion, from single meaning, the single level, from sentimentality. Laughter does not permit seriousness to atrophy and to be torn away from the one being, forever incomplete. It restores this ambivalent wholeness.” (Bakhtin, 1984, pp. 122-123)
Readings
- Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984). Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Midland-Indiana University Press, 1984.
- Koestler, A. 1967. The Act of Creation. Penguin, part 1.
- Snowden, D. J. (2001). Narrative Patterns. Knowledge Management ARK July 2001. Online: www.cognitive-edge.com/ceresources/articles/41_narrative_patterns_-_perils_and_possibilities_final.pdf