Creativity is fast becoming a priceless currency to any kind of company. But creative ideas that change businesses and bottom lines require the right space – not only to work, but also to thrive. Years of lockdown have not made it any easier to create that space. So how can you reclaim and redefine it in a way that runs deeper than ping pong tables and new funky hangouts?

Copenhagen-based agency &Co spent 2500 billable hours doing something completely unrelated to their business. A total work life turnaround to ensured that time spent on work doubled as time spent on life. How? By making ballet dancing part of the workday. Ballet? Yup. Not to help employees nail a plié, but to make sure that going to the office also meant being challenged, achieving personal growth and the great human experiences, you normally seek out in your time off. Experiences that, in addition, unleash the creative mindset no business can survive without.

How do you enhance creative thinking and creative culture in one? Well, vulnerability is key to creating both a world-class creative workplace and ideas.

So, by stripping away titles and experience and doing something that everyone will be bad at initially, ballet training became a way of infusing work life at &Co. with some of those great human experiences, you would normally seek out in your time off work.

On the other and more up work- focused hand, presenting kick ass ideas takes vulnerability and courage. And both needs to be trained and kept sharp. That’s why we put ourselves in deep water. And deepest or water was, for us, to learn how to dance ballet and perform it in front of a huge crowd.

But putting together a ballet takes a lot of effort. We hired professional ballet-instructors, weekly training facilities, ballet shoes (of course) and the booked one of the most iconic ballet stages in Europe for our final performance. The Pantomime Scene located in the Tivoli gardens. To create time for practicing every week we established a new policy within the agency, that meant no internal or external meetings every Friday afternoon because of, well, ballet training.