Keith Johnston Books

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

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

When we first begin a leadership journey, most of us learn to fix problems, plan ahead, and make decisions based on rational analysis. These are the hallmarks of traditional leadership training, inherited from eras when the world felt more predictable. In this book, we start by acknowledging that th...

From Simple Habits for Complex Times: Powerful Practices for Leaders

If managing complexity requires new habits, then those habits must grow out of new ways of seeing the world. Here’s where adult development theory enters the picture. Jennifer and I draw on decades of research in constructive-developmental psychology to show that adults don’t simply accumulate knowl...

From Simple Habits for Complex Times: Powerful Practices for Leaders