Dancing, choreography and business change: more similarities than you might think
This week I’ve had the privilege to meet Fiona Brockway. Fiona has a fascinating CV. She’s danced in numerous Principal roles for prestigious ballet companies, has established an amazing dance production company, Steps Ahead, working with global brands and she also teaches dance and choreography at The Hammond, the North West’s leading provider of Performing Arts education.
I wanted to explore the disciplines of dance and choreography with Fiona… and in the process see if I could learn anything to help inform approaches to project delivery and business change. What I found was a treasure chest of inspiration that has helped me take a fresh look at how we might better shape our programmes, engage our teams and embed enduring capability across our teams.
Choreography, collaboration and cohesion
The Greek khoreia means ‘dancing in unison’. Fiona talked about the importance of the many, dancers working together and playing their part in the whole; this idea of unison. In ballet, ‘the heart of the company is the Corps de Ballet’, she explains when describing the group of dancers performing in unison, supporting the Principal dancers. This group have to be perfectly synchronised, enabling and amplifying the Principal. The question this raises for me is, ‘how well do our business Corps de Ballet work together?’ The answer is frequently not so well at all. I’ve seen large organisations disconnected across functions. I’ve seen large projects grappling to align multiple workstreams. This discord, where different teams or workstreams are not tightly synchronised, results in re-work, delays, gaps and frustration.
Think Spectacular
Fiona has a big imagination and has delivered some spectacular events. Her concepts are unique, engaging, remarkable and extraordinary. She showed me some of the business events that she has led and also shared some of the site specific pieces put on by her students. They are genuinely arresting, put together with creativity, innovation and bravery. Taking this idea forward in the transformation space, we have an opportunity (and a challenge) to change the way people think and act. This is as much about hearts and minds as process and technology. We need to inspire and engage; build excitement and energy. I think there’s some invaluable inspiration offered by Fiona, setting down the challenge for bringing our transformation visions to life and sprinkling in the spectacular.
A Visual Story
Fiona talked about dance as storytelling … without words. It’s a universal language. It transcends culture and capability, bringing the audience together in a shared experience. This made me think about the different ways we can engage our teams and communicate our change stories. I’ve seen some great examples of ways we can tell our stories in more visual ways such as setting up open project spaces with lots of pictures, building future prototypes, playing customer interviews and recording colleague stories. Not everyone is excited by thick programme documents. Introducing more visuals and telling our stories can help to connect with everyone.
Fiona has many years of dance and choreographic experience. She’s earned her stripes. She talked a lot about her role as trainer rather than teacher, inspiring not managing. For her dancers, training means 24/7 focus and a complete commitment. Everyone needs to come to the studio with total focus. They are provided with strong guiderails, coaching, mentoring, space and hands-on expertise. Her class members take the lead on choreography, team work and performance, learning through experimentation and risk-taking in a trusted environment.
With this approach she is enabling the development of future dancers and choreographers, encouraging individual creativity and demanding personal accountability. She is building a team who are self-managing, continuing to collaborate long after Fiona takes off her ballet shoes. I’m fascinated by this and thinking that as part of our people development commitments we should be thinking about training as a way of being (not a course). It’s a mutual commitment as we expect our teams to step up, ready to learn and lead. And we are there for them, every day, sharing our experience, providing individual coaching and supporting them where needed. It’s an individual development plan for our teams which builds pride, brings out individual talents and delivers enduring capability.
Dance may seem a very different discipline from Change but at a basic level we are challenged with the same question’ “How are we going to get from here to there?” I’ve been inspired by Fiona and her insight as she reflects on her career as Principal dancer, choreographer and trainer, standing behind the next generation of dance professionals. It’s been a privilege to spend time with her, listen to her brilliant stories and discuss how the disciplines of dance can expand our thinking about transformation and change. In fact, it’s been a real meeting of minds and we’re now working together to build out some principles, tools and methods. If you’d like to know more, please get in touch.
Fiona Brockway profile
Fiona was a Professional Dancer and has worked in some of the most prestigious companies in the world. Trained originally by Margaret Brockway and as an RAD Scholar, she then went onto train at the Royal Ballet School, before joining The Royal Ballet Company where she became a 1st Soloist. Here she danced numerous Soloist & Principal Roles and worked with many distinguished Choreographers including Sir Kenneth Macmillan, Sir Frederick Ashton, Sir Anthony Dowell, David Bintley, Jerome Robbins, Natasha Makarova, William Forsthye, Wayne Eagling, Jonathan Burrows, Andre Prokovsky, Ashley Page, Michael Clark, Nils Christie to name a few!
Fiona’s own Dance Production Company, Steps Ahead (with Partner, Jun Mabaquiao), works with major brands such as Chanel, Tiffany’s and Audi and collaborating with artists from around the world including Stomp, Tap Dogs, Cirque De Soliel & Franco Dragon, leading on design concepts and choreography.
