Human Conservationism: On improv, creative play and developing negative capability as leadership practices with Gabriella White

What if the most important thing a leader can (re)learn now is to be silly and playful? In a world obsessed with optimization and yearning for certainty, Gabriella White makes the case for a radically different kind of readiness and skill building in the age of AI: one rooted in play, presence, and the courage to be ordinary.

Gabriella is a trained actor turned interdisciplinary creative leader who calls herself a “human conservationist”. A deliberately playful provocation that names something many of us are feeling. Drawing on the German word/concept of “Torschlusspanik”, that gate-closing panic of time running out, she argues we’re in a moment of collective unease that deserves attention, not dismissal. Rather than prescribing answers, through her work she invites people into creative practices – improv theatre, somatic exercises, automatic writing, embodied learning – that build the capacity to sit with uncertainty instead of grasping for false certainties.

Ben sits down with Gabriella to trace a line from the Industrial Revolution’s obsession with predictability to today’s AI moment and what she calls “a beyond-human” future. The conversation goes deep into what’s broken about how we train leaders (and people more generally speaking). Since the Industrial Revolution we’ve been trying to compare ourselves to our machines, and now with AI we’ve finally built the version of ourselves we could never become – and we worship it. Together, we explore why the creative process, particularly improv, acts as what one teacher calls “a gym for the heart” – stripping away self-consciousness, perfectionism, and competitiveness to reveal that we already have everything we need. Gabriella’s advice to young people captures the whole conversation in five words: don’t be afraid to be ordinary.

Resources & References

John Keats / Negative Capability — Concept from Keats’s 1817 letter to his brothers: “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Jacob Collier, multi-instrumentalist and Grammy-winning musician; referenced for his concept of “wiggliness” – the idea that people are born to wiggle but live in a straight-line world

Christopher Heimann, improv teacher at RADA, founder of Spacecraft, based in Berlin; coined the phrase “a gym for the heart” for improv

Maria Montessori — Referenced for the quote “The hands are the instrument of man’s intelligence” from The Absorbent Mind

House of Beautiful Business, global network for the life-centered economy, Gabriella oversaw strategic development and experience design

Improv Art Club, community series founded by Gabriella in Lisbon (2024) exploring improv theatre and blended arts

Connect with Gabriella White

Website: https://www.humanconservationist.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabriella-white/

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