Keith Johnston Books
Keith Johnston is a consultant and co-founder of Cultivating Leadership, focusing on adaptive leadership and organizational change.
Known for: Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre, Simple Habits for Complex Times: Powerful Practices for Leaders
Books by Keith Johnston
Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre
Impro is a seminal work on improvisational theatre by Keith Johnstone, exploring spontaneity, creativity, and the psychology of performance. The book presents exercises and insights that help actors, ...
Simple Habits for Complex Times: Powerful Practices for Leaders
Simple Habits for Complex Times is a practical guide for leaders facing a world that no longer behaves in neat, predictable ways. Jennifer Garvey Berger and Keith Johnston argue that many of the habit...
Key Insights from Keith Johnston
Spontaneity
Spontaneity is the heartbeat of creativity, yet it’s the first quality education often drives out of us. In teaching, we reward correctness, not curiosity. By the time students reach my classes, they’ve learned to seek approval rather than discovery. My first task is undoing that conditioning. When ...
From Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre
Status
One of the most illuminating discoveries in my teaching came when I began analyzing everything in terms of status. Every interaction, I realized, is a negotiation of relative status. Whether we’re aware of it or not, we constantly raise or lower ourselves and others through posture, tone, and gestur...
From Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre
Why Old Leadership Habits Break Down
The most dangerous leadership assumption is that harder thinking will always produce a better answer. In stable environments, that can be true. When problems are clear, causes are visible, and outcomes are relatively predictable, leaders can analyze the situation, choose a course of action, and exec...
From Simple Habits for Complex Times: Powerful Practices for Leaders
Adult Development Shapes Leadership Capacity
A leader does not just act from skill; a leader acts from how they make sense of the world. One of the book’s most important contributions is its use of adult development theory to explain why some leaders handle complexity better than others. The authors suggest that leadership effectiveness depend...
From Simple Habits for Complex Times: Powerful Practices for Leaders
Trade Control for Curiosity
When leaders feel uncertain, their instinct is often to tighten control. That instinct is understandable, but in complexity it usually makes things worse. Berger and Johnston argue that one of the simplest and most powerful habits leaders can develop is curiosity. Curiosity interrupts certainty, ope...
From Simple Habits for Complex Times: Powerful Practices for Leaders
See Through More Than One Lens
A single perspective can feel complete when it is familiar. Yet one of the core realities of complexity is that no one sees the whole system. Berger and Johnston encourage leaders to cultivate the habit of seeing through many eyes. This means actively seeking out different interpretations, experienc...
From Simple Habits for Complex Times: Powerful Practices for Leaders
About Keith Johnston
Keith Johnston is a consultant and co-founder of Cultivating Leadership, focusing on adaptive leadership and organizational change.
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Keith Johnston is a consultant and co-founder of Cultivating Leadership, focusing on adaptive leadership and organizational change.
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