Enable your team to thrive

Enable your team to thrive: an exploration of the cultural atom in group-focused interventions

Author: Irina Stefanescu

First published in “Sociodrama – The Art and Science of Social Change” within the Erasmus+ project “Performers II”.

attachment: Table – Synthesis of cultural atom explorations – Irina Stefanescu

Summary

Two examples of group-focused explorations of the cultural atom: a short-term group builds the future professional role repertoire of its members; a functional team starts to strengthen its internal identity and produces striking results. As a present or future sociodrama and action methods practitioner, you can get answers to what sociodrama
is, why we do it, with whom, in what contexts and what the options are for how to explore the cultural atom of groups and teams.

A group of future coaches builds the professional role repertoire of a corporate coach

June 11th, 2020, Bucharest, Romania. A bit of respite after the advent of the Covid. Ten people maximum may meet in a room with masks, keeping their distance. It is the end of the Be a Coach course at Coachingdipity school, which is ACSTH accredited by the ICF (International Coach Federation), one of the best coaching schools in Romania, just before the national accreditation exam. For the second day of the last workshop dedicated to team coaching modalities and techniques with sociodrama and action methods, we have the courage to meet again in the local puppet theatre, enjoying the large space and considering the rules. So, here we are: six students, a co-facilitator and me in the room, plus a student attending from abroad via Zoom.
In the afternoon, it’s time for the cultural atom to explore and process. We perform a morning warm-up1 to self, to the others, to the space, to the method using games, body work and also group sociometry2, then the work with group sculptures3, using  double4, role reversal5 and mirrors6, all of which a good and consistent warm-up process for this piece of work. Just before starting, we do some mindful neuro-agility training exercises using hands7, then come back to our own bodies to be present after the refreshing lunch break.
After listening to two short stories highlighting the context and the benefits of exploring the cultural atom in the organisational world, the group decides the theme and we have a contract to develop the role repertoire of an executive coach together.
The timing is perfect: at the end of the training period as coaches and near the beginning of this certified profession. After that, the individual ACC (Associate Certified Coach) certification by ICF would follow naturally.
I pull a chair into the middle of the room, ask everybody to make as much space as  possible around this central chair and say: “This is our stage now. I invite someone
here, in the middle, to be the COACH and to represent us all as coaches.”
Alina comes and takes the role (all the names are changed for confidentiality
reasons).

Ilinca grabs a chair and comes on the stage as the sponsor. She places her chair to the left of the coach. Veronica comes as the client and sits in front of the coach. Dorina comes as the client’s team, next to the client facing the coach. Sorin comes as the HR (Human Resources) manager/business partner, putting his chair to the right of the coach, and slightly behind. Andrei comes as the close peer of the coach, sitting behind the coach, then the coach invites his peer to sit on his right, shoulder to shoulder. And now we are out of actors, so say “you can propose other stakeholders or satellites too and place their chairs on the stage, then you can go back to your initial role or you can take the new role”.
A chair for family is put on the stage to the left of the coach, then a chair for the mentor/supervisor, also on the front-left. So now we have the first map (Figure 1) representing the professional universe of a corporate coach. The little triangles in Figure 1 indicate their ‘noses’.

Figure 1. The spontaneous initial social atom(8)  map of the coach.

At this time, I can announce that we are very close to completing the first phase of the exploration of the group-created cultural atom of the coach: mapping the system of the coach as a collective role. Yet, we need to negotiate a commonly agreed map, as the map belongs to the group, not to a single person. I take Alina off of the stage and ask every member of the group, one by one, to leave temporarily the role on the stage and take a tour around the stage, sit in the central chair, feel the system around, arranging and rearranging the satellite chairs, while giving the motives for their movements. At some point, a new satellite appears, a chair for the ‘possible future client’. When every member has had their own tour, they all stand up, go to the margins of the stage and become observers for a final collective helicopter view, consultation and possible final re-arrangement of the satellites around the centre. Shortly, we arrive at the final map of the system (Figure 2).

Figure 2. The negotiated social atom map of the coach.

Now it is time for me to add: “As the COACH in the middle stands for us all and other coaches, being a collective character whose roles we build together, most of the satellites that you’ve brought here to the stage are also collective characters. We build them together, so feel free to contribute in any acting role you feel warmed up to. The more voices, the richer the collective roles. All you need to do is to stand up and speak, so I can make sure your voice is heard.” And I demonstrate how to double(9) or tag (10) a satellite role.
Wow! How much energy, how warmed up is (almost) everyone to contribute. They double a lot, enriching and diversifying the satellite roles. Even Alina, who plays the COACH, stands up several times and doubles other roles. People take turns to speak from the empty chairs too, the latest three satellites. As the actors keep practicing this, the messages change from superficial and cliché-like to a deeper level, the voices change, some emotions appear, even some tears when the ‘family’ voices speak.
“Well done, you have defined the satellites and their relationships with the centre so richly. Now, Alina, you stay as COACH and just listen carefully. You’ll receive some messages for us all. They are very important.” Alina listens carefully and her face is changing. “How is it now for you?” “A bit overwhelmed, I need to be careful with the sponsor and the HR manager, I feel highly supported by my family, mentor and peers. I feel grateful to myself for having the courage and determination to finish this training and get certified.”
“Well, here we have a complete social atom in which the centre’s satellites are identified, mapped, defined and their relationships with the centre are defined too. We could have made a diagram and could have talked about it, but it’s far more relevant when built on the stage, with the energy of the entire group. You can step out of your role for a while, shake it off, breathe, move, do some stretching and have something to drink. Come back to your chair and share from any of the roles you’ve played and a bit from yourself, if you want.” The sharing is very rich.

“To continue the exploration and discover the cultural atom, we need to create and define the roles of the COACH (the centre) in relation to the satellites so that we can cluster (group) them according to the criteria we consider important. Role naming means you think of the function of the COACH in relationship to a satellite to give the noun of the role, for example partner, friend, apprentice, companion, colleague, etc.; then think of the attitude of the relationship, of the main value that the COACH conveys in this relationship, and this gives an attribute, an adjective of the function, for example trustful (partner), caring (friend), curious (apprentice), cheerful (companion), supportive (colleague), etc. Although this sounds like a very intellectual exercise compared to what we have so far experienced, you’ll find it easy as you remember all the rich messages from the satellites to the COACH. Should we have more time in this session, we would enact some dialogues and we would reverse roles to find the intentions, thoughts, attitudes, emotions and messages of the COACH that would enable functional and harmonious roles and relationships with the satellites.
As we now build a functional role repertoire for a new professional identity (the COACH), this means a series of conscious decisions for this group. Once we make conscious decisions as individuals or as groups to be the best versions of ourselves and, therefore, maintain or develop progressive (highly functional) roles towards the important actors in our lives, we have the chance to develop the intentions, thoughts, attitudes, and to manifest the actions, that are congruent with these roles and invite others into harmonious and productive relationships.

“So, grab a colleague, pick three roles, get paper and markers and negotiate these names, writing each on a piece of paper. Remember, these are the roles that we all, as coaches, have towards each stakeholder on the stage. Once you finish, you can move to another group to help or learn until you’ve learned about all and you’ve contributed as much as possible.”
They come up with a long list of roles, wanting to include everybody’s opinion and every nuance in that relationship. They are happy with the result, as they now have a very rich role repertoire to choose from, according to their own personality and specific contexts. This group will dissolve the next day, so I leave the list as it is and we discuss the importance of a shorter list for a functional team, as those roles influence the related interventions and messages and shape the identity of the group.
The final sharing reveals that they feel gratefully at peace, richer, calmer and more confident regarding the relationships in their future profession. They also like the exploration of the cultural atom as a team coaching process. Some of them are eager to start small with a familiar person in an individual coaching session and then try it with familiar groups, slowly. They are all aware that it takes more training, practice and supervision to get to explore fully the cultural atom of a group and many of them are willing to continue their training in this direction. The processing session is rich and a great learning experience for us all.

My reflection

The seventh person, who was online from Switzerland, had to go to a meeting, so for part of this session we lost her. For the rest she was an observer, taking notes. If we were to work with her as well, I could have asked the co-facilitator – who intervened briefly and mainly covered some of the missing actors – to hold the laptop so she could feel included and see from many perspectives what was happening.
I realise that hybrid working raises many logistical issues that need to be managed and solved. I could have asked for other satellites to come up on stage, non-human but also
important: learning (books, conferences, podcasts), business (in order to activate roles such as healthy finance cultivator, etc.), health (to stimulate the self-carer), relaxation (music, travel, yoga, hobbies, etc.) and so on. I made a conscious decision not to so that I could give the group enough time to act, observe and process, using as less is more approach. In addition to this, there were only six actors for nine roles.

What is a cultural atom? Why do it? With whom? When?

What is it?

The pattern of role relations around an individual as their focus is called his cultural atom. Every individual, just as he has a set of friends and a set of enemies, – a social atom – also has a range of roles facing a range of counter-roles. J. L. Moreno (1946) Psychodrama, vol. 1, 84

Moreno (1953) coined this term, thinking of the smallest functional unit within a cultural pattern. Why cultural? Because he thought we could consider roles and relationships between roles as the most significant development within any specific culture. When I became curious to explore the role repertoire of a group, I was wondering if Moreno’s definition could be transferred from an individual to a group. I am not very sure that “cultural ATOM” is the appropriate expression when focusing on a group, when the structure of the role relations becomes much more complex. As a chemist, I would play with the expression “cultural polynuclear compound”. But, until we find a term to agree upon, using the same name seems reasonable enough.
The explorations of the cultural atoms are opportunities for role relationships repair and role analysis. Thanks to Lynette & Max Clayton and to Sue Daniel for defining the categories of roles as:

Why do it?

The cultural atom, also known as the role atom, has been widely explored in individual or group psychodrama to evaluate a person’s role relationships at important moments in therapy, counselling or coaching. With groups, exploration of the cultural atom is a great evaluation resource, which is why we start with it as a diagnostic instrument (the present state), then as a goal-setting prompt (the desired state) and, in time, as a monitoring device to check the pulse and measure progress.
Despite other diagnostic methods, the group is highly involved and the members are able to live and witness the action, their internal actor and their internal observer equally stimulated, so that they have a chance to perceive the reality of the group and ask themselves about the next interventions.
The way that Moreno shaped the concepts of social and cultural atoms offers us a visual and verbal language to depict the relationships in a group and the roles that influence patterns of behaviour in individuals and groups. When exploring the cultural atom, we talk about roles and relationships, and in doing so we talk about identity and values. By ensuring this baseline in teams coaching practice enables group members to look at the present and be fully aware of who they are in the moment, then look at the future and decide who they want to be and have more confidence in building that future, have more hope, and to start dreaming again. The pandemic curtailed our vision so much that we don’t even know what is under our noses anymore. Therefore, exploration of the present and future-projected cultural atom is an effective way to engage teams in order that they reshape and trust themselves more and do better.

With whom and when to do it?

With a short-term group – during a training programme, or a group coaching session, or a mastermind group – the cultural atom can build either a role repertoire for a specific role that they have in common (for example future professionals, parents, partners, activists, etc.), or effectively position group members in a system for a short-term project. My clients in this area were mainly students at various schools (adult learning, university, high schools), members in a patients’ association, parents, etc. The best moment to lead this intervention was immediately after the group was formed and warmed up to work and to each other for the groups who had already an established common identity; for the groups who were learning or transitioning to a new identity, the appropriate moment was towards the end of their common journey, when they already had a good understanding of what they were supposed to do when ending the time together.
With a functional team, for example during a sociodrama session, a team coaching programme, a team development centre, a team strategy session, a training or team building programme:

During a sociodrama training session, the trainer can freeze the drama to record the cultural atom as it is perceived at that moment (Di Lollo, 1987), especially for teaching reasons so that students learn to ‘read’ a cultural atom in its dynamics in real time. I found it important at any moment, both onstage and off stage, to be able to notice the dynamic occurring in the cultural atom of the group while interacting with its stakeholders in the larger system. Thus, I can spot the roles from which the group is more likely to change its perspective, then its behaviour, if needed.

How to explore a group-focused cultural atom.

The contract: what, why, with whom, how long, where, possible results. A clear contract with a sponsor and with the group is very important. Having clarity allows us to direct this intervention in the most useful way for that specific group. If some of the things are still unclear, exploring the cultural atom in the diagnosis phase can bring more clarity and the contract can be renegotiated. We need to establish the group’s needs and goals and make sure they are really willing to work and to support the work. Finding their why is the first stage, entailing a ‘what’ – the answer being the strategy and structure.
In terms of how long, a cultural atom exploration with a group of 12 people may take 3 to 4 hours, including warm-up, enactment, sharing, ending and break(s). The space should be generous enough and have a furniture-free area for the stage. Plenty of chairs, ideally light enough to move them several times, or with wheels.
I usually ask for a well-lit and ventilated room, with a comfortable temperature. Other logistics are strips of paper and markers for the role names, plastic cones or scarves to replace the missing actors and rope or string to mark the role clusters.
First, we need to get a social atom for the group: a centre, a map and identified satellites and relationships.

Here is a structured recap of the social atom depicted earlier:
1. We place a chair in the middle of the stage and invite a volunteer to represent the whole group.
2. We ask the group:
a. who affects your activity?
b. whom do you affect?
c. who else?… who else?… who else?…
3. For every answer to (a) and (b), the group places the satellite on the stage, arranged sociometrically according to the quality and intensity of the relationship with the group (centre).
4. The map is negotiated and renegotiated by the group until they can agree upon it.
5. Once the map is ready, every satellite, through the voice of its actor, says to the centre:
a. I am…
b. I see our relationship as… /My relationship with you is…
c. I need from you…
6. The person in the centre, representing the group, listens to all the messages from the satellites, then shares.

From the group’s social to cultural atomgroup: the repertoire of role relationships.

As we have the map of satellitesand their relationships with the centre, we can look at the roles relationships by developing vignettes in which the centre can try various types of behaviour, give messages and initiate actions until the group feels they have reached a good level of functionality for the entire system. In group work, we invite as many members as possible to speak from the centre, using doubling or tagging as well as encouraging them to take turns playing the satellites or doubling them. Role reversal is very useful, especially in moments of conflict.
Then we name the roles of the centre towards the satellites by recognising the pattern of behaviour in these relationships. If, thus far, we have used short scenes, double, tagging and role reversal, this is a moment of mirroring and reflection. Following the pattern of those roles, they can be clustered, especially if there are quite a few, for possible future interventions.
“Role-naming is a form of spontaneity training”, says Sue Daniel (2007, p. 104). It is never too early to engage in a role-naming game, to warm-up participants to this work, which sharpens the attention, enables reflection and boosts creativity. The result is a pair consisting of a function and its descriptor; the function shows who I am and what I do in relationship to you; the descriptor shows how I behave in this function, in relationship to you.

“The roles are dynamic, so it’s the cultural atom”
(Di Lollo, 1987)

For example, when a woman gives birth to or adopts a boy, she becomes his mother; this is her function in relation to her son. As she loves him very much and shows this very often, we could use a related descriptor, her role is a ‘loving mother’, which most of the time invites him into the role of a ‘loved son’. During the weekend she starts as a ‘cheerful wake-up singer’, making him a ‘cuddling and smiling wake-uper’, then she becomes a ‘creative nourisher’ when she serves some smiling sandwiches next to an omelette and he gets to be a ‘grateful, smiling eater’; a bit later they decide to play together for a while, becoming ‘playful playmates’; when he teaches her a new game, she gets to be the ‘curious apprentice’ of a ‘patient mentor’, and soon, as she doesn’t get all the tricks, she is a ‘clumsy player’, so he gets the chance to be a ‘glorious winner’. At lunch time, before again being a ‘careful nourisher’, she sometimes has to stop and take on the role of ‘firm limit setter’ when he wants to continue as ‘playful playmate’ and continue playing with her; when she insists, he often becomes a ‘stubborn rebel’. Soon ‘careful nourisher’ and ‘firm limit setter’ becomes ‘playful nourisher’ so that he can smoothly slide into ‘playful eater’. And the story goes on and their roles dance together the whole day. The relationship elements of their individual cultural atoms are dynamic. When the husband and father is at home, the mother’s relationships with her husband and the child’s relationships with his father increase the dynamic of their individual cultural atoms.
This situation is the same with a team that interacts with other teams and other people. When we lead group exploration of the cultural atom, we try to have names for the main roles (such as ‘loving mother’) while remaining aware that under each such hat, there are lots of wigs of various shades and styles.

A bit more about working with teams

With teams there is much more complexity in this dynamic, depending how strong the culture of that team is and how homogenous it is. The big advantage with sociodrama and action methods is that during the warm-up phase (plus the preliminary discussions and personal research), the facilitator can start to spot those elements and can lead a cultural atom diagnosis that reveals areas to work on. As skilled facilitators with enough time, we can plant into the structure of the cultural atom exploration of various other vignettes and group-work, or conduct an exploration of a cultural atom to help reveal in which collateral areas to intervene or where the team’s present cultural atom needs repair. Our decisions and interventions are mainly based on the roles we perceive in the cultural atom of the group and the roles we perceive in the individual cultural atoms. This is why it is useful to work with individuals as well so as to constantly train our capacities to spot cultural atoms in their dynamic.

Optional role clustering

When there are many satellites on stage – human and non-human – there will be many roles to play. A closer look reveals that some of these many roles belong to the same family (for example trustful partner, reliable partner, etc.). I usually cluster stakeholders or roles according to a criterion or a set of criteria that is important to them, for example function, descriptor, internal vs external, etc. Then I ask the group to name the clusters, so we get to work with a reasonable number of roles, agreed by everyone in the group.
Working with a department in a financial organisation, the team identified 15 stakeholders (satellites). Before starting to name the 15 related roles, I asked them to decide how they would group the roles in order that the role they had makes sense and can be fully functional with regard to that group of stakeholders. They came up with 4 clusters for each of which we named 4 roles.

Running an online group-focused cultural atom exploration

October 2020: for me exploring the cultural atom on Zoom meant the next level. I was running the programme with three teams of financial analysts who needed to work on some critical relationships within their close professional environment as well as develop a better connection with each other during the pandemic.
Working on Zoom with very busy young analysts and suffering from Zoom fatigue was quite challenging. Let’s look at the adaptations I needed to make when working on Zoom:

We need to get visible and important: A functional team’s story.

A new department in an international bank, consisting of a department manager, a product manager, an administrator and seven regional coordinators, had to lead at least one hundred specialised sales counsellors and their managers across the country so that they could develop the market and sell their services successfully. After six months they called for consultancy, as they were experiencing difficulties and the expected results were still very far away.
They accepted a four-hour diagnostic session so that we could discuss and evaluate the goals, resources, difficulties and way of working, and make a plan for interventions. As the reported difficulties mainly concerned the regional coordinators, we met them and the department manager.
In the preliminary discussions, they mentioned that the regional coordinators (I’ll call them RCs), while being successful with their top external clients, had many problems interacting with the agency managers and their direct subordinates, the specialised sales counsellors. They also had issues with other stakeholders in the bank with whom they were competing for the time and attention of these agency managers.
In addition, the manager thought that the RCs were perceiving their professional environment quite differently, according to their various preceding positions and, therefore, were acting differently towards the common stakeholders. So, part of my plan was to see how they positioned themselves in the competing internal system of the bank, mainly towards their internal clients. I chose to start with an exploration of the RCs’ cultural atom as a team with the intention of using a volunteer to set the RCs social professional atom, then leading a team negotiation for the stakeholders’ positioning, and after this role naming. Thus, I could have not only a diagnosis but also start the first intervention.
Well, as we know from working with groups, a well warmed up group may offer far better approaches than an experienced consultant. After the first volunteer placed her colleagues as stakeholders and finished mapping her social atom as an RC, and just before I wanted to start the team negotiation process, another RC jumped from his chair and said: “My map looks so much different. May I show it?”. As we had time and they were moving fast, I invited the new volunteer to set his map. And then the third wanted to show his map and so on. They were working quickly and smoothly, respecting each other’s perspectives, staying curious and making astute, funny comments. My job became as easy as possible: I was simply observing and asking a question from time to time. By the end of the seventh map, the positioning negotiation was redundant as they had optimised the map with every version.
It was time for a short break, but before that I asked for a quick sharing about the process. Apart from the two first volunteers, the other five said that their map was massively influenced by the ones before and they loved how the process was very dynamic and left space and time for everyone to express their own vision.
During the break, the manager – whom I asked to refrain from comments or nonverbal
cues and remain neutral – told me that she was bewildered to witness her team’s first conflict-free negotiation. Well, thank you, action with structure.
The next steps – naming the relationships, needs and perceived roles, then naming the roles – revealed and specified the problems in some relationships that were important to the RCs. So we had a clear and unanimously accepted present situation.
As in coaching and consultancy we also need the aimed-for situation, they also named the desired roles in their critical relationships. For example, in relation to the agency managers, the RCs found themselves very often in the role of ‘unwanted woodpeckers’ (present state), while aiming to become ‘helping and reliable partners’ (desired state) to the managers. Naming present and then the desired roles helps the group align its efforts in order to adopt those wanted roles that would allow them to build healthier relationships with their significant others in their professional environment, to give the same messages, to display a specific, unique professional identity.
So we focused our work in the remaining hours on better understanding some of their very important internal partners, then finding the appropriate attitude, behaviour and messages to build those desired roles and invite their internal partners into functional counter-roles. For this we used short scenes to enact difficult encounters in which role reversals, doubles (or, as Diane Adderley says, role expanding voices in sociodrama as opposed to doubles in psychodrama), soliloquies11, mirrors, concretisation and sculptures helped the group to accelerate the understanding not only of the others, but also of the underlying forces that could help or hinder their relationships and, therefore, their work. Although one of the themes they chose to work on was the difficult transition from the diminishing role of ‘inferior and despised competitor’ to the progressive role of ‘trustful partner and gracious door opener’, the role training session for the desired roles was like champagne: full of ideas, options, enthusiasm, sparkles of humour, will and grace. We ended with a short session to reflect upon our work by sharing from roles and from ourselves and sharing the learning, then the group members wrote down the findings, created an action plan and agreed upon the team’s new messages in the internal environment.
Fun fact: we came in for a diagnostic session and ended with a diagnostic, a good intervention and a medium-term action plan in just four hours. How could you not be grateful to sociodrama and action methods and to such a willing group of people? After this session and other short interventions, we built an internal development centre for their specialised sales counsellors, with a certification system that was then exported to every country in Europe that the bank had subsidiaries.
Eight months after this diagnostic session, the service that the group members promoted became a market leader in Romania, remaining in this position for a long time. The department became visible and important not only internally, but also externally, strengthening the image of the bank.
This is a story from the end of March 2010. My most precious lesson was that even the most structured and somehow prescriptive process of sociodrama – a team’s exploration of it cultural atom – can be approached in multiple ways, for example our exploration of seven social atoms in a row in order to get a good map of the entire team and only then proceed to make the cultural atom visible. This was another proof that sociodrama is a ‘work in progress’, it evolves continuously as a co-creation of the facilitators and the participants. Since then I have remained even more open to the new possibilities of practice that emerge during the sessions. The condition for me to do this has been to be attuned to the group’s energy. Isn’t that a fundamental condition for a sociodramatist?

P.S. Practising and developing the exploration  of the cultural atom: important work to continue

It was 2009 when I saw Ron Wiener facilitating a cultural atom exploration in my first year of sociodrama training and I fell in love with this possibility. I started to practice it immediately and intensely, then, after graduating with a diploma in sociodrama and action methods, I started to teach the exploration of the cultural atom, mainly to team coaches but also to some European psychodrama schools. This method soon became one of my favourites. While continued to practice, teach and develop it, I started to wonder if the concept didn’t deserve a better definition, possibly a re-conceptualisation. When researching this article, I came across Peter Howie’s (2018) article in the AANZPA Journal on his work about the meaning of warm-up in psychodrama. Howie inspired me to take the eight criteria he developed12 (Howie & Bagnall 2018) and use them to evaluate the concept of warm-up. Because “these rich and vibrant terms deserve to emerge from the semi-obscurity of oral and experiential traditions so that they can be available to the wider world of social investigation and research.” (Howie 2018). So this is part of my future work around the cultural atom.
In the meantime, I will continue to talk explicitly about the importance of the cultural atom and how we use it. The cultural atom is there, it belongs to the person or to the group we work with. It’s not our job as facilitators or coaches to do or run or lead a cultural atom, it is the work of our clients. Ours is to enable its discovery, exploration, investigation in the present state and/or future needs. This is working together at our clients’ identity level and we need to stay humble about it.
The practice and development of the cultural atom / role atom / role repertoire explorations
with individuals and groups has been offered me one of the most graceful, delicate, effective, rewarding and fascinating professional experiences. It’s a continuous learning journey for me and I am excited to carry it on and discover more.
I welcome your feedback on this chapter and on the ways you explore and experience the cultural atom exploration in your group leading practice – feel free to write to me at  irina.stefanescu@sociodrama.ro
Enjoy the learning, enjoy the practice!

Notes:

1  Warm-up in psychodrama and sociodrama is the process of getting a person or a group ready for action and possessing a certain degree of spontaneity. See also the Glossary.
2  From ‘socium’ = companion and ‘metrum’ = measure. Sociometry – the study of human connectedness – was created by J. L. Moreno as “a method for describing, discovering and evaluating social status, structure and development through measuring the extent of acceptance or rejection between individuals in groups” (Moreno 1953). See also the Glossary.
3  Sculpture – the actors shape and place their bodies alone or in relation to other actors to help visualise a specific situation. See also the Glossary
4  Double in sociodrama happens when a person comes on stage behind an actor and gives voice to thoughts and emotions that were not expressed by the actor in that context; the function of doubling in sociodrama is of a role expansion. See also the Glossary.
5  Role reversal or reverse roles means swapping the roles between two actors or two groups of actors, to experience the relationship from the other’s perspective, to feel how it is to be the other. The technique was created by J. L. Moreno and is of critical importance in psychodrama and sociodrama. See also the Glossary.
6  Mirroring is when a person verbalises what s/he sees or mimics an actor in that situation. See also the Glossary.
7  For similar examples see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCpiteBel8E&list=LL&index=1&t=3
32s, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sB4lXUhRfMU&list=LL&index=2&t=427s, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=DJt6ORwxKmE&list=LL&index=3. 
8  A short definition of the social atom: a network of significant others around a person. See also the Glossary.
9  Offering a double.
10  Tagging means the replacement of the initial actor in a role with another actor, warmed up to take that role and play it further. The sign is a tap on the replaced actor’s shoulder. The technique was created by Ron Wiener and is inspired by wrestling. See also the Glossary.
11  Soliloquy – means that an actor in a play talks by himself/herself, voicing own thoughts and emotions.
12  For the eight criteria – clarity, comprehensiveness, parsimony, resonance, differentiation, connectedness, epistemic utility and practical utility – please see Howie, P. C., & Bagnall, R. G. (2018) Sociological Methods & Research, 1- 23, DOI: 10.1177/0049124118769104.

References.

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Clayton, L. (1982). The Use of the Cultural Atom to Record Personality Changes in Individual Psychotherapy. Journal of Group Psychotherapy, Psychodrama and Sociometry Fall:111-117.
Clayton, M. (1994). Role Theory and its Application in Clinical Practice. In Holmes, P., Karp, M. & Watson, M. (eds.) Psychodrama Since Moreno (pp.121-144). Routledge, London.
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Information about the author:

Irina Stefanescu (Romania) Passionate and experienced Learning & Development Partner for organizations and their people. Chemistry graduate, she got accredited as trainer (1997), recruiter and headhunter (1997), coach (2005), psychodramatist (2009) and sociodramatist (2012). Licensed to use LIFO® (1999), Thomas International Management System™ (2000) and Human Synergistics® (2005). Has founded FLUX Training and Consultancy (2004).
irina.stefanescu@sociodrama.ro