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 to evolve – not only to work, but also to thrive. Years of lockdown have not made it any easier to create that space. The idea to create a ballet company and spend more than 2500 billable hours on dancing ballet was born out of our need to reconnect internally by throwing everybody into deep water. The deepest of waters we could think of was making everybody dance ballet together, as we would all start from square one. A pretty uncoordinated and inflexible square one, that is. Every Friday for 6 months we danced. At the end of it, we even performed on stage in public.

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 to evolve – not only to work, but also to thrive. Years of lockdown have not made it any easier to create that space. The idea to create a ballet company and spend more than 2500 billable hours on dancing ballet was born out of our need to reconnect internally by throwing everybody into deep water. The deepest of waters we could think of was making everybody dance ballet together, as we would all start from square one. A pretty uncoordinated and inflexible square one, that is. Every Friday for 6 months we danced. At the end of it, we even performed on stage in public.

Vulnerability is key when creating world-class creative workplaces and ideas. Especially when punching above your weight. Furthermore, studies show that having fun increases the production of creative ideas by up to 30-40 % (Center for Creative Thinking). Dancing ballet reminded us of all of that.

But how do you strategize implementation of a seemingly stupid idea? We didn’t. Not in the traditional sense, at least. However, for the initiative to succeed in engaging employees professionally and personally, we needed everybody to be onboard. Instead of asking who wanted to participate, we asked those who didn’t want to participate to raise their hand. No one did.

For 6 months we filmed and self-taped the frustrating and exhilarating process of learning ballet together, compiling the footage in a 6-minute award winning documentary. It caught the attention of both national and international press and was shared on owned and earned digital platforms.

Besides great internal pride, strengthened fellowship, and thousands of laughs, the story of our ballet also gained massive attention externally.

Industry leading news platform Adweek featured an in-depth interview as well as a full episode of Adweek’s “Yeah, That’s Probably an Ad” podcast. The story turned out to be Top 3 article on Adweek.com for over a week.

Additionally, the project gained media coverage in industry media across US, UK, DK, and France as well as national coverage in non-industry media.

Based on the ballet, we were invited to talk at the international LEGO Remix conference as well as at the world’s most sustainable energy company, Ørsted. We even turned the project into a SXSW submission and gained exposure on the SXSW platform.

Finally, and most importantly, we proved to ourselves that chasing ideas that initially seem stupid or impossible is the only way to create something truly original.