We took the tables out of the room. That was the first clue our latest CBSL Onyx morning wasn’t going to be a normal one. No desks. No slides. No rows to hide behind - just a circle of chairs and a room full of company directors wondering what they’d signed up for. What followed, a session on the fine art of improvisation, turned out to be one of the most useful mornings on leadership I’ve run in years. And nobody saw a single PowerPoint.
I’d wanted to bring John Cremer to Onyx for a long time. Years ago, before CBSL Onyx existed, I sat through one of his sessions as a peer-group member and never forgot it. John is an award-winning speaker who founded the improv troupe The Maydays and has taken this work into Deloitte, Microsoft, Airbus and the Academy for Chief Executives. His gift is to make a room laugh for three hours and only realise afterwards how much serious learning has landed.
He built the whole morning around one deceptively simple idea: knowing what to do when you don’t know what to do. Because how often, in business, are we actually told what to do? We make a plan. Then reality turns up with plans of its own.
John told us about the best year his diary had ever seen - clients in the States, a fishing trip to the Bahamas, the biggest client he’d ever signed - all lined up beautifully in January 2020. We could all guess what happened in the March. There is the plan, he said, and there is the reality, and in the gap between them sits all of our stress. Most of us try to crowbar reality back to fit the plan. Improvisers do the opposite: they step into the gap on purpose. It’s a discipline any leader who has lived through the last few years will recognise.
There was no theory and no handout. We were on our feet within minutes. And John reduced the whole art of improvisation to three things he insists every one of us can do:
There’s a moment I’ll remember for a while. Sixteen accomplished business owners and directors, standing in a circle, glancing at one another and silently working out who on earth was going to be the first to make a “fool” of themselves. Inner voices in ears!
What changed it was safety. John set one rule above all others: it is impossible to make a mistake. No wrong answers, no bad ideas, nothing to get caught out on. And because he genuinely meant it, people believed it - and started to move. One got up, then another, and within minutes the whole room was in. By the end, every single person had taken part. Not one person sat it out, and not one person was left feeling exposed. That, for a room of senior leaders who mostly like to be the ones in control, is no small thing.
John gave us a simple model for what was happening, and it’s one I’ll be borrowing. Picture three concentric circles. In the middle is your comfort zone - familiar, safe, easy. Around it is the stretch zone - where things feel new and slightly uncomfortable, and where all the growth happens. And outside that is the panic zone - where fear takes over, the shutters come down and nobody learns anything.
The whole morning lived in the stretch zone - the growth zone - and never tipped into panic.
The whole morning was designed to move us out of comfort and into stretch - repeatedly, and on purpose - and then let us step back, reflect, and go again. What struck me was that everyone made that move, and nobody was ever pushed into panic. That’s the real skill on display: creating an environment where people willingly do the uncomfortable thing because they feel completely safe doing it. It’s exactly the environment we try to build at Onyx, and exactly the one worth building in your own business.
The morning then built to a live performance. Directors who had walked in insisting this was “absolutely not their thing” got up and improvised scenes on the spot, from suggestions the rest of us threw at them. Plenty of laughter, plenty of glorious nonsense, and more than one person quietly amazed at what they’d just done in front of their peers.
Underneath the fun, the business relevance kept surfacing. Where do you want “yes, and” thinking in your business - strategy, new ideas, winning work? And where do you genuinely need “yes, but” - compliance, health and safety, the board review? One challenge landed especially hard: don’t let a regulated environment become the excuse that quietly kills your growth mindset. The more regulated the business, the easier it is to say “we can’t do that” - and the more discipline it takes not to.
My own favourite moment was quieter. John pointed out that most leaders are sitting on a goldmine in their people - usually the quiet ones, who think deeply and rarely push to be heard. A short, specific question, and the nerve to leave the silence unfilled, will often draw out the best idea in the room. I watched several members clock that in real time.
I asked a few members afterwards what they were taking back to work. The answers said it all:
John closed with a line I keep coming back to: the rest of your life will be improvised. There is no script. The plan and the reality will keep drifting apart - and if you listen, say yes at the right moment, say “yes, but” at the right moment, and commit, you give yourself more options exactly when you need them.
So here’s my question for you, and I’d genuinely love the answers: what’s the biggest gap you’ve ever faced between the plan and the reality - and what did you do in it? Drop it in the comments.
CBSL Onyx is an invitation-only community of company directors who meet to work on exactly this kind of thing - the leadership questions that are hard to take anywhere else. Our mornings are deliberately small, but we always welcome a few guests who’d like to experience one before deciding whether it’s for them. If that’s you, drop me a message. Bring your comfort zone. You won’t need it.
