The intention is to dramatize aspects of work that are rarely talked about or other kinds of ghosts in the organization - and to laugh about it. Getting people to laugh of what they find difficult or challenging liberates and opens new perspectives, thereby building new connection, both between people and ideas.
Concept & technique
- Use Ghost busting as part of a creative workshop, or any intense work process as an excuse to engage in play about challenging tacit and cultural dimensions of work.
- At the start of the dinner, introduce the exercise by saying that “now we are going to have this exercise that we call Ghost busting. Ghost busting is about 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 on the other side, the stuff we talk about all the time, but that we don’t find our way to go about to reach a solution. In your group, agree on what ghost you want to focus on. Your task is to make any kind of performance of that ghost, it could be a poem, a song, a play, anything. Be creative. You will be judged on performance and content. We will meet at nine o’clock to see all of the group performances.”
- The groups prepare their performance for about an hour.
- Every group performs their Ghost buster.
- At the end, the 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 StatoilHydro. The Ghost busting exercise is derived from Snowden’s (2001) concept of “story virus” and “exaggeration”. The point is to dramatize aspects of work that are tacit and challenging and to laugh about it, and in that way reframe 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