Ten things theater taught me that are useful for human-centered design facilitation

First they tell you that being a theatre nerd won’t get you anywhere.

Then, you travel the world gigging in glittery outfits and collaborating with brilliant artists, and eventually land a “real job” facilitating the design of experiences using all your accumulated skills. At least, that’s what happened to me.

Real face I was making while reading from Glitter & Grit, a Lambda-award winning book documenting six years of my curation and community theatre.

I’m both a longtime technologist and a live performer. I’ve curated and toured community theatre projects on and off from 2003–2016, have created solo and group participatory live art pieces, and have been on hundreds of stages giving talks, workshops and emceeing events.

And that’s just when I’ve been gathering people for FUN.

I’ve seen audiences react badly to people accidentally bleeding on stage, purposefully setting off smoke bombs, and unintentionally saying horribly rude things. I’ve also seen the incredible results of intentionally crafted stories that hushed a room of hundreds into rapt silence, the church-like fellowship that can be built among participants of an event, and seen live engagement deepen folks’ understanding of complex subjects from queer lineage to the nature of democracy.

Frankly, in my current technologist practice as a design thinking facilitator and strategist, theatre skills play in heavily. One of the greatest gifts in my life is the connection I’ve been able to draw between performance and human-centered design practices, whether I’m in the field researching or on a stage engaging a hundred people.

The father of facilitating Design Sprints, Jake Knapp suggests that you “get reps.” So, from my 18+ years of reps as an emcee, live performance curator, and theatre performer I’m sharing…

Ten theatre skills that translate to a professional design facilitation career:

1. Engaging a group of people is work: An audience is not an unidentified blob of (hopefully) attention. It is made up of people, just like soylent green. However unlike soylent these people are alive, and are therefore full of thoughts, desires, and the regular attention spans that people have. You must, must, must deeply consider the people you are speaking to, engaging with, or trying to entertain. Every audience is different: account for that, and you can honor them — which means you can get your message across or outcome moved forward. This is human-centered design in a nutshell: them there’s people out there. Bring yourself to people.
2. Energy matching is a thing. It might be a woowoo thing where you’re from but in NYC where I live it’s a hardnosed laser-like skill in which you try to mirror your being’s presence to the room you’re in so everyone comes along already. Everyone is sad and morose? Don’t bring on the clown act. Everyone is happy and likes each other? Let them stay happy for crissakes and inject fun into your presenting. It’s ok to try to change the energy in a room, but do it in steps, and know what you’re doing when you making people’s heads snap into a different direction. If people expect to laugh they are more likely to do so, and conversely if they expect to be serious and buttoned up it’ll be harder to inject jokes or humor. Read your room, people.
3. Levity translates into attention. If you can make people laugh, you can make people listen. Laughter is a genuine state where the guard goes down for a moment. It connects a group, and lets you, as a presenter or facilitator have an entry point to bring in a dramatic or difficult idea with more ease. It’s also just healthy to laugh, it invites positive memory, and energizes a room. Whether it’s a joke, an icebreaker, or part of the piece — help people laugh.
4. People like to be bossed, but only a little. Tell me what to notice next! Tell me what you want me to share! Tell me that you want me to care! But don’t tell me how to think, and for the love of dogs don’t tell me what I think. As an emcee or as a facilitator, you are juggling precious items: time, attention, experience, and outcomes. Try to think of the role as walking a fine line between good witch and wicked witch. We all know which witch to be, don’t we my pretty?
5. Our communication methods with the people we aim to communicate with matter a lot. Enunciate, go slow, repeat important information. Whenever I want something to be remembered, quoted, or tweeted I repeat it at the beginning and end of my statement. Works. Every. Time. Why? Because people aren’t memorizing your words, they’re listening. If you do a good job orating, it’s not until you’re done talking that they’ll care and be excited. Capture attention, expand your point, then repeat what captured their attention so they can integrate it and take it away with them!
6. People have smart ideas and contributions. But, you need to give them a pathway or scaffold via which they can share said ideas. Make it clear, make it meaningful, make it fun, make it accessible to people with different physical realities or rooms with various setups. Their take doesn’t have to be your take. If everyone left an event or workshop thinking exactly like you, that would be scary mean girls lord of the flies borg shit. Don’t build for that. Instead, go for people synthesizing your event against what they know. Give them a chance to write, talk to someone next to them, contribute to the group etc, and they’ll remember their ideas, and therefore takeaways from the experience, better. BONUS: Get the participants to document and to share back to increase buy-in!
7. Every audience is different and it’s ok to customize to them. I think about the particulars of any group I’ll be with and design engagements accordingly. Rather than being shifty or disingenuios, I think it’s a mindful approach that focuses on the right target: creating an inclusive experience for participants. Are they a group of friends? Colleagues? Strangers? People at a conference they want to impress? Future possible romantic options? Thinly veiled enemies? These realities will impact how someone shows up to an engagement, so why not account for them to lower the barrier to entry?
8. Every day is a new day. Sometimes there’s a heinous political event that day. Sometimes there’s a joyous internal event. Don’t pretend like people can or want to compartmentalize or dissociate — invite their whole selves and recognize what’s going on for them as part of the engagement. Pause the show and talk about it if you want, you’ve got the mic after all.
9. The show must go on — even if the show goes wrong (and it will). Guess what? Something is going to go awry for you at some point. If you’re lucky you’ll have a safe and boring life and never have to manage actual danger going down, but don’t write it off. In a physical space, know where the exits are. In a digital space, have a plan for how you’ll continue to engage in the space when — not if — the tech breaks down. Know how you will handle troll-like or derailing behaviour. At some point you will need to put down and get back to a mic while making it look effortless and planned — so rehearse a one-liner now. Remember that others are following your lead: if you emulate a “we’ll be fine” attitude, participants will feel more fine.
10. It’s about them, not you. People are hoping to have an experience. Understand it; learn about it; explore their take in it; play to it; help them play.

Participatory theatre making and collaborative learning experiences both benefit from human-centered design.

And vice verse, as kichiman wrote for AJ&Smart, “Running workshops is about being an entertainer.” Designing workshops, and a genuine approach to human-centered design both benefit from knowing how to make theatre.

If you are a fellow performer who wonders how you might apply your theatre background to facilitation, note that being comfortable carrying a group of people through an experience is key but not the whole kaboodle. My team at ConsenSys is made up of a former lawyer, concert pianist, a stand up comic, and me (insert joke here) — people with honed public presentation skills who also happen to be brilliant digital strategists, service and product designers, and sprint runners.

I spent my latter theatre decade also working in digital comms, as a full stack web developer, digital engagement designer, and eventually an innovation lab director, so YES fellow theatre nerds, you can try this at home but be forewarned that you’ll need another layer of skills.

That said, if you’ve got both tech and theatre in your back pocket let me tell you there’s a really fun job out there for you! It may be called “work”, but it’s still as fun as theatre ever was!

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Hadassah Damien is a design thinking facilitator working at the intersection of innovations in technology and participatory experiences as well as an artist and economics researcher.

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