Putting Together a Production: A Rehearsal Strategy for Design

Developing a Rehearsal Strategy

The authors of Artful Making were not the first to ponder the transferability of the concepts of rehearsing, or playmaking, to business processes. In an article on the metaphor between theater and organization, Cornelissen says that the idea of theater as an analogy for business, while not ground breaking, “has just provided a language of theater (actors, scenes, scripts, and so on) for framing and communicating identity and role enactment within organizations.” In another article on the same topic, Boje says this perspective “draws on the theatrical metaphor as a means of studying and illustrating social processes in which organizational members are essentially human actors, engaging in various roles and other official and unofficial performances.”

So, if we want to entertain the idea that innovative product or software development is just a social process, in which members engage in roles that lead from the unofficial performance of prototype testing to the official performance of product release what then? What does that mean for how we approach the process? In their book Artful Making, Austin and Devin talk about the relevance of rehearsals as an iterative creative tool, when thinking about innovative product development. They look, in depth, at the rehearsal process of a particular group of actors—the People’s Light—to understand how certain business processes, like agile software development, are similar to the rehearsal process. In my mind, the two don’t differ much at all.

If we observe with an open mind and consider the facts, we can see that rehearsal is structurally similar to agile software development. The script isn’t the play—any more than design specifications are the actual product. The script guides, but is not the totality of the play. If it were, what would we need the actors for at all? Most of what a theatrical group needs to do to make a play come to life needs to be created anew for each production. There are the director’s and actors’ interpretations and choices and the overall production to take into account. That is why successful playmaking results in such varied productions that do not resemble their predecessors at all. It is also one reason audience members continue to enjoy productions of scripts—such as those of Shakespeare—that have been done countless times.

What makes a script come to life is the work that occurs during the rehearsal process, which results in a living, breathing performance. So should it be with the specifications for a design—bringing concepts to life in a prototype, putting the prototype through the motions, and iterating the prototype to bring forth a living, breathing product that is sure to be innovative and unique in every instantiation.

Breaking the Straight Line

The problem with many current approaches to the product design process, though, is that they tend to be linear—the traditional waterfall methods we have all become accustomed to following. Making the change to work in an iterative manner requires a more helical type of process. In Figures 1 and 2, I have illustrated what translating an iterative rehearsal process to a traditional user-centered product design process would look like. (Just remember that cheap and rapid iterative design requires enabling technologies such as version control systems and automated testing systems to help support the process.)

Two Processes, One Phenomenon

The parallels between the characteristics of a rehearsal, or playmaking, process and a software or product design processes, shown in Table 2, aren’t really all that extraordinary—after all, they are both creative processes. What does excite me are the possibilities for supporting a design process that works more organically and in line with other creative processes—allowing artists of all kinds to be just that, artists. For all of us, the phenomenal implication of such an advance is that we will find our way to much more innovative outcomes.

Table 2—Iterative product design process versus a rehearsal, or playmaking process

	Product or Software Development	Playmaking
Iterative cycle	Prototype build and test	Rehearsal
Distributed, independent, simultaneous invention	Individuals work on separate pieces	Individual actors prepare between rehearsals
Unifying action	Build	Rehearsal run
A director who facilitates	Project Manager	Director
Forum for conversation	Meetings, collaborative forums	Rehearsal room
Way of setting structure	Code holds structure	Actors hold structure

Note—Table 2 is a recreation of a table from Artful Making.

Rehearsals are progressing for our production. The way things always manage to come together is amazing. My stomach has stopped jumping, my nerves are calmed, and my shyness has worn off. We continue to work iteratively as an ensemble toward our opening night—gulp—with creativity and spark that becomes more finely tuned with every iteration. The excitement is building—just as it does before a product launch. While our work will end when the show closes, iterative product design continues, as teams move forward to create future versions. The evolution of the product continues. 

References

Austin, Robert, and Lee Devin. Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work. Upper Saddle River, NJ: FT Press, 2003.

Boje, David M., John T. Luhman, and Ann L. Cunliffe. “A Dialectic Perspective on the Organization Theatre.” PDF American Communication Journal, 2002.

Cornelissen, Joep P. “What Are We Playing at? Theatre, Organization, and the Use of Metaphor.” Organization Studies, Volume 25, Number 5, 2004.