Heretic’s Foundation XI: Managing Complexity, From Plays to Performance « Clyde Fitch Report 9/4/09 8:52 AM

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Heretic’s Foundation XI: Managing Complexity, From Plays to

Performance
Friday, September 4, 2009
Heretic’s Foundation

By John Hudson
darkladyplayers@aol.com
Special to the Clyde Fitch Report

For 200 years, some of the smartest literary researchers have worked on understanding the plays attributed
to William Shakespeare, the western world’s greatest genius. Now, suddenly, some of that work has begun

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Heretic’s Foundation XI: Managing Complexity, From Plays to Performance « Clyde Fitch Report 9/4/09 8:52 AM

to yield fascinating new results. Could the applied narrative and problem-solving techniques developed to
solve the world’s greatest literary question have practical applicability in addressing other issues, such as the
lack of agile problem-solving skills in the modern workforce?

Becoming Better Witted: Plays as Problem-Solving

One purpose of the Shakespearean plays, we are told in the preface to Troilus and Cressida, is that after
seeing them on stage, people should depart “better witted than they came.” We are also told in the First Folio
preface to the Great Variety of Readers that to fully “understand” the plays we need not to see them
repeatedly on stage, but must read them “again and again.” Watching a play in performance would mostly
have been a pleasurable, entertaining experience, as we know from contemporary accounts. Not even the
“wiser sort,” as contemporary poet and scholar Gabriel Harvey called them would be able to cognitively
“understand” a play while the actors were reciting it at 200 words — eight lines — a minute.

Almost every minute there would be a musical and Biblical allusion; every few minutes some other literary
or classical allusion. All of it had to be integrated and interrelated. Even for Elizabethans, with their
sophisticated memory skills, the speed and flexibility required to do this in real time would have been
humanly impossible. Nobody could have caught every allusion and put it all together. But even the attempt
at doing so could perhaps make one “better witted” as a kind of brain exercise — a more advanced example
of what recent studies suggest can improve brain functioning.

So, one under-appreciated, highly significant value of Shakespeare’s plays is not simply as passive
entertainment but as highly complex, multi-layered works designed to engage an audience as a kind of
literary puzzle or sophisticated brainteaser, set in different kinds of environments. Certainly at court, where
many of the plays were performed, there was a constant competition about who could best “decipher the
figure” of an allegory or solve an anagram. Like other pageantry, Shakespeare’s plays presented intellectual
challenges. This is not an aspect of the plays that gets much attention in theaters today. Solving the puzzles
contained in the plays today requires a sophisticated process of literary analysis. Merging it with a new kind
of performance designed to promote critical thinking and problem-solving.

Skills in Critical Thinking and Advanced Literacy

The value of such skills is becoming increasingly important: stimulating creativity among employees is a
significant challenge for many companies. Speed, flexibility and adaptability to change is now ranked
number three in CEO top challenges. Unfortunately, these are not areas in which the workforce is strong.
According to a report on 21st century skills, three-fourths of American high school entrants are deficient in
critical thinking and problem-solving. Half are deficient in innovation and creativity. The modern labor
force also is increasingly reliant on advanced literacy. Indeed, a new Canadian study shows that investing in
advanced literacy is the single most important tool for stimulating economic growth. In the U.S.,
unfortunately, the recent National Assessment of Adult Literacy report showed that the proportion of those
who are “proficient” in document and prose literacy has declined from 15% in 1992 to 13% in 2002. It will
likely continue to decline further unless remedial action is taken. Studies have also shown that 79% of the
population believe that imagination is key to innovation, and 90% believe that the arts are essential in
building imagination, but the majority think American schools are doing less than other countries to develop
this capacity.

During the Elizabethan Renaissance, creativity, problem-solving ability, cognitive flexibility and
sophisticated literary understanding were critical skills for stimulating entrepreneurship and the exploration
of new lands. It was no coincidence that this coincided with a period of growth in Elizabethan drama, since
dramatic arts improve creative skills — they nurture the ability to handle complexity, to integrate knowledge

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Heretic’s Foundation XI: Managing Complexity, From Plays to Performance « Clyde Fitch Report 9/4/09 8:52 AM

across multiple areas, to articulate new understandings.

More than any other dramatist, the works of Shakespeare offer a particularly important way of developing
those skills. One might expect that applied drama (especially applied Shakespeare) would be sought out by
corporations to develop greater skills in their workforce — and valued by city officials to promote the skills
necessary for fiscal growth.

Applied Shakespeare as Management Tool

As Peter Brown noted in his article ‘Can Shakespeare really be a useful management tool?’, most
consultancies that have attempted to use Shakespeare’s plays for business applications have not done so
very effectively — perhaps because aspects of the model they were using were inappropriate. That,
however, may be set to change. For the last couple of years, I have been part of a network of knowledge
management and strategy consultants; we are developing the latest dramatic and narrative approaches to the
plays into new methodologies designed to increase advanced literacy, creativity, improve the management of
complexity, problem-solving and cognitive flexibility.

So for instance our current production, which opens on Sept. 5, of the Virgin Mary allegories in
Shakespeare’s plays, has been specifically designed to overturn existing assumptions and promote creative
thinking and innovative questioning of established models. One way it does this is by inter-relating texts
that are not normally conjoined, and using the play itself — which, downstairs at Manhattan Theatre Source,
will be a site-specific production on two alternating stages, each with parallel casts — to link them together.
By borrowing modern media storytelling techniques, we are able to deconstruct the underlying thought
structures and assumptions across these 400-year-old plays. This exercise in applied theater will then
stimulate a process of self-reflection on the narrative structures that we all inhabit.

A number of actors have already trained in this new approach — with surprisingly beneficial results. In the
fall, starting with a workshop at Eastern Connecticut State University, this new approach will be offered to
partner colleges, schools and companies. Seemingly, techniques of managing a complex organizational
knowledge structure are somewhat similar to the skills required to envision the dynamics between 1,200
different characters across 40 different plays and to transform it into performance. In the future, perhaps,
applied narrative diagnostics and dramatic simulation techniques will one day become routine as a key
training tool for corporations struggling to comprehend the increasing complexity of the modern world.

John Hudson is a strategic consultant who specializes in new industry models and has helped create
several telecoms and Internet companies. He has recently been consulting to a leading think tank on the
future of the theater industry and is pioneering an innovative Shakespeare theory, as dramaturge to the
Dark Lady Players. This fall he will be Artist in Residence at Eastern Connecticut State University. He
has degrees in Theater and Shakespeare, in Management, and in Social Science.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 4th, 2009 at 5:00 am and is filed under Heretic’s Foundation. You can follow any
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