Lessons on climate leadership, from ballet dancers
How a Climate Week arts event provided insights on how we might better collaborate. Read More

Like many other climate activists, I participated in a wide range of meetings and climate-related events during Climate Week NYC. (Kudos to Ann Davidson and the Climate Group for all they did — it gets better and more impactful every year.) I learned much that I did not know and experienced a lot that was new to me.
But a unique experience for me occurred at an event called the Global Exchange sponsored by the Lincoln Center and held at its spectacular performing arts facility on Columbus Circle.
This was, I believe, the second “Global Exchange,” but the first for me. As people associated with the art world predominated, and I am an unsophisticated heathen, I knew nobody and nobody knew me. The premise of the event was to show the power of the fine arts to contribute to solving the world’s most intractable problems, such as conflict resolution and, yes, global warming.
I participated in a breakout session focused on the power of movement. It was led by an ex-dancer, now corporate consultant, and featured two dancers, a prima ballerina from the American Ballet Theatre, a classicist, and a principal dancer with a modern dance company. They never had worked together. Indeed, we were told, they never had met before.
Fortunately for me, and for the future of humanity, the session did not involve audience participation.
What it did involve was the leader of the session interspersing verbal observations made to us, his audience, with brief episodes of visual instructions to the dancers. After he made clear with emphatic clarity that he himself was not a choreographer, he proceeded to choreograph over the course of the one-hour session a complete dance, building it up part by part.
But he didn’t do it alone. Indeed, it might be more accurate to say that the two dancers self-choreographed it. The leader would give them minimal instruction as to what he wanted and then he would encourage them to collaborate, interpret and build on the previous steps. It was captivating to see what the two dancers, with light guidance and plenty of encouragement to experiment, created in just an hour.
Nuturing turtles
As I watched these dancers demonstrate creative collaboration, I was struck by how different the act of innovation is in the corporate world. In my experience as a CEO of a big company, you hope and pray that one of your employees will have a great idea and the courage to speak up about it to someone, and that you would hear about it before it gets snuffed out by the naysayers in the corporate bureaucracy. A new idea in the corporate world is like the baby tortoises scrambling from an egg a few feet down the beach into the ocean, trying to avoid being picked off by seagulls along the way. Only about one in 100 make it.
In the C-suite, you play the role of the ocean — providing sanctuary for the new idea and its proponent. You try to subtly use the power of your office to protect the innovator and nurture their idea until it can be developed and get a full and fair hearing.
Collaborative creativity
At NRG, we were trying to enshrine collaborative creativity across disciplines into our new headquarters, complete with a dedicated (and protected) space for it to occur. (Jeff Immelt told me he was doing the same at GE HQ, as I expect other forward-leaning companies are doing as well.)
Yet it was not as intuitive for the organization as it clearly was for these two dancers. I imagine when a full dance company gets into rehearsals, the process of collaborative creativity is enhanced even further, again juxtaposed against the corporate world where the rule of thumb is the more people you invite to a meeting, the more that you can be certain that little will be achieved.
Another thing struck me observing these two dancers. While they were receiving choreograph guidance from the instructor, they were listening to him with a singular intensity. That struck me as natural given that they were going to be asked to duplicate, in front of an audience with no rehearsal, the moves he was showing them. But what struck me as unusual was that even after they were done with their dancing, they sat together on the steps of the stage and listened to the instructor give his final observations to his audience, with the same listening intensity as before.
I half expected them to act like everyone everywhere you go these days — “multitask listening,” which is what I call listening while playing with your cell phone.
But it was more than that. They also were avoiding the more subtle, equally ineffective listening trap that we all fall into regularly (and which I witnessed a lot during Climate Week), which is waiting-to-talk listening. We spend our time at meetings, which are supposed to be iterative and collaborative, not actually listening to what the other person is saying, not thinking what we might do to build on the thought being expressed, but rather just formulating and incessantly refining in our own mind what we might say when it becomes our turn to talk.
It’s natural. Everyone wants to appear smart or at least avoid appearing stupid. But if we are to continue to bring the best and the brightest from across disciplines, as we did during Climate Week, to innovate our way to a win against global warming, we need to listen to each other — really listen — like those two dancers.
