In this episode of Work Shouldn’t Suck, host Tim Cynova connects with the ever-awesome Shannon Litzenberger to explore the intersections of democracy, creative practice, and collective thriving. Together, they dive into how artistic methodologies can expand leadership frameworks and help shape more caring, equitable communities.

In this episode:

• How creative practice informs leadership and systems change
• The importance of mutual care and collective thriving
• Sensory attunement, attentional awareness, and improvisational leadership
• Disrupting default systems and embracing world-making as a practice

Fresh from the national tour of her production World After Dark and moments away from presenting at a social theory, politics, and the arts conference in Spain, Shannon shares insights on how creative practice can serve as a catalyst for personal and societal transformation. They discuss the power of mutual care, the significance of sensory attunement, and the need to reimagine default patterns in both the workplace and society.

This episode also touches on the enduring influence of Shannon’s friendship and collaboration with the late Diane Ragsdale, their shared exploration of aesthetics and embodiment, and their co-authored chapter in Democracy as Creative Practice. Plus, hear how Shannon is bringing her artistic ethos into unexpected spaces—like reimagining an academic panel as an improvisational score.

Tune in for a conversation packed with practical wisdom, unexpected insights, and a reminder that thriving workplaces and thriving communities are built on mutual care, relational leadership, and a willingness to embrace the unfamiliar.

Quotables

“This is where I find a lot of fertile ground for transformation, and why I feel it's so important for creative practice methodologies to gain purchase in this conversation around change, because they're practice-based, and practice is how we change habits. We can have lots of fruitful conversations that evoke ways of knowing that we understand, but to actually become something different than what we've already been conditioned to be requires practice, not just a kind of conceptual knowing.” – Shannon Litzenberger

“ Practice is the pathway to change. If you want to be able to expand your repertoire of being and doing, you have to practice things that are unfamiliar.” – Shannon Litzenberger

“Identity is a very powerful organizing construct in society. The pandemic especially I think really highlighted identity significantly as an organizing structure, as a way of revealing structural harms and inequities. It also started to deepen the way that we are relating in these identity-based affinity groups, and in a sense, this is a challenge when it comes to developing practices that are supportive of a pluralistic democracy. Because, in a pluralistic democracy, we need to develop an ability to be together in ways that are not so strictly codified that we are all twisting ourselves in a knot to try to belong, that actually we need to be able to embrace differences within a dynamic whole in order to work well and co-create well together.” – Shannon Litzenberger

Highlights:

• Values in Creative Practice (02:14)
• Exploring “World After Dark” (04:08)
• Leadership and Collective Action (09:32)
• Navigating Post-Pandemic Challenges (11:10)
• Creative Practice in Organizations (17:43)
• Improvisational Leadership (27:09)
• Collaboration with Diane Ragsdale (35:33)
• Improvisational Score as Panel Discussion (42:29)
• Final Thoughts and Reflections (45:52)

Related Resources:

• Shannon's Substack
• Democracy as Creative Practice: Weaving a Culture of Civic Life Edited By Tom Borrup and Andrew Zitcer
• “The Snapback: Why Workplaces Are Reverting and What We Can Do About It” by Tim Cynova
• “Beyond the Snapback: Designing Change That Lasts” A Facilitator’s Guide

Bios

Shannon Litzenberger (she/her, Tkaronto) is an award-winning choreographer, director, researcher and embodiment facilitator. She creates sensory-rich multi-disciplinary performance experiences that animate our relationship to land, community and the forgotten wisdom of the body. Her imaginative collaborations connect art forms and communities, centering participatory experiences in artistic processes. Throughout her 25+ year career, her work has been presented across Canada and the U.S., in collaboration with many of Canada’s leading artists across disciplines.

The creative principles and embodied practices she works with regularly in the studio are also central to her work in relational leadership, organizational development, and systems change. Her approach to personal and collective transformation focuses on recovering our capacity to sense and make shared meaning of our complex, rapidly changing world. The collective experiences she designs focus on strengthening our ability to respond generatively to what a moment is asking of us, in service of mutual thriving. They invite a conscious recovery of embodied capacities like sensory attunement, expanded attentional awareness, reciprocity, imagination, collaborative play and worldmaking.

She works frequently across corporate, academic and non-profit spaces in support of creating a healthier, more interconnected, caring and resilient society. She is currently a Public Imagination Network Fellow and Artist Researcher in Residence at Creative Community Commons, within University of Toronto’s School of Cities. www.shannonlitzenberger.com

Tim Cynova, SPHR (he/him) is the Principal of WSS HR LABS, an HR and org design consultancy helping to reimagine workplaces where everyone can thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and a trained mediator, and has served on the faculty of Minneapolis College of Art & Design, the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Banff, Canada) and The New School (New York City) teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design, and Strategic HR. In 2021, he concluded a 12-year tenure leading Fractured Atlas, a $30M, entirely virtual non-profit technology company and the largest association of independent artists in the U.S., where he served in both the Chief Operating Officer and Co-CEO roles (part of a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team), and was deeply involved in its work to become an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization since they made that commitment in 2013. Earlier in his career, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts in New York City, had a memorable stint with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, was a one-time classical trombonist, musicologist, and for five years in his youth he delivered newspapers for the Evansville, Indiana Courier-Press. Learn more on LinkedIn.