INTRODUCTION

“We all [improvise] everyday – none of us goes through our day to day life with a script to tell us what to do.”

Kim “Howard” Johnson, Truth in Comedy

“My contention is that creativity, now, is as important in education as literacy. And we should treat it with the same status.”

Sir Ken Robinson

Back in 2001, when Stylus first published Training to Imagine, the term Applied Improv was barely in existence, and the idea of using improvisational theatre techniques in business settings verged on the wacky. Our publisher showed courage and agreed to publish a book on how to use improv as a training tool, as long as the word “improv” did not appear in the main title. Now, a decade later, there is a global community of practice with annual and regional conferences call the Applied Improv Network. Our collective clients touch virtually every age group and industry. What seemed like a flaky or merely gimmicky approach to organizational development just a few short years ago, has grown into a relatively mainstream set of skills and principles embraced by even the most traditional of organizations. At Koppett + Company alone we have designed and delivered programs for bankers, corporate sales forces, physicians, state government workers, engineers, healthcare workers, academics, and of course trainers and consultants. We have traveled from India to Brazil to Paris to Oklahoma, and anywhere we go we find professionals eager to learn new ways to surf the ever-shifiting 21st-century tides.

Why has the professional world, even in its most conservative halls, come to embrace improv? It has become obvious that the world is moving at increasingly fast speeds, with increasingly diverse participation, and a set of rules that shift radically and with lightning-fast frequency. Thought-leaders such as Daniel Pink, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Stephen Denning, Thomas Friedman and countless others have articulated for us that success moving forward in our ever-changing world will require a different set of skills from those historically focused on in business settings. As Daniel Pink writes in A Whole New Mind:

The Future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind – creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers. These people – artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers – will now reap society’s richest rewards and share its greatest joys.

In this context, organizations are looking for ways to develop their creativity, flexibility, and communication skills. And, we have come to believe, improv is uniquely positioned to address those development needs. Why?

Soon after the release of Training to Imagine, I got a call from an actor colleague with a lead on some work for a national healthcare provider that was looking to bring improv into their patient-physician communication skills program. The company had already had conversations with a out-of-town provider, but since we were local and connected, we landed a meeting. With all the eagerness and passion of an eager, passionate young practitioner, I pitched the value of improv for the workplace. I am guessing I spewed all of the chapter headings in the book, plus good chunks of text. I quoted studies; I used all sorts of jargon from graduate school; I crafted a brilliant case for how creativity and collaboration skills could enhance outcomes and the bottom-line. My potential clients nodded and responded satisfactorily. But then, at last, when I had finished my spiel, there was a pause. “Uh…” said one of them gently, “What about the idea that we are all performers, and we are all performing all the time?”

Oh. Yeah. That. The fact that we are, in fact, all improvising all the time – that what we do each day is make up what we are saying and doing, with greater or lesser effectiveness. What a simple and brilliant idea. “Oh, yeah. That, too.” I said.

A couple of years later, I met my competitors for that sale, a New York-based group called Performance of a Lifetime. It was they who had provided our client (and by proxy ourselves) with that elegant language. I have since had the privilege of working with their principles on a variety of projects and credit them with furthering my work, and the field of Applied Improvisation in general, greatly. What Performance of a Lifetime has taught me is that the case for applying improv to the business (and life) stage is outrageously simple. Human beings are improvisers. We are improvising all the time. Any interaction can be viewed as an improvisational scene in which we are the actors and writers and directors. By studying the principles and techniques of the improviser then, we are just looking to figure out how to do it more effectively. How can we become better at our performances as leaders, team members, teachers, students, parents, innovators and managers? Duh, improv applies to human interaction at work: Who wakes up to find a script for the day waiting for them on their bedside table?

Improv training in business environments can still be viewed skeptically, of course. Often, when we speak to stakeholders in the design phase, we hear some version of, “Well, I think what your doing is incredibly valuable and interesting, but you need to understand our people are _____________ [doctors, engineers, professors, senior executives, front-line managers, whatever]. They are different.” And you know what? The folks who tell us that their colleagues are different are right: doctors have different challenges and cultures and languages from engineer who differ from sales people who differ from teachers. What we all have in common is that we are human beings.

Just as you need not be a performer to apply these approaches, you need not be a professional trainer to facilitate these activities. Anyone can bring improv philosophies and techniques to work, through their own individual practices, or by sharing the activities with others. To that end, we have changed some of the language to focus on “leaders” rather than “trainers”. We consider anyone who takes action to have positive impact a leader….

The power of improv as a development tool resides in its experiential nature - its ability to connect people to their intuition, their bodies, their whole brains and each other. My hope is that the practices in Training to Imagine will be engaged in, not just read about. With that in mind, let’s get started.

The Principles

“Hey, could you read this letter on stage?” the young man says. He proffers a note written on lined binder paper. “I want to propose to my girlfriend tonight. I thought you could read this to her on stage, and ask her to marry me.”

“Sure! Anything, man,” Kenn, an improvisational actor scheduled to emcee the evening’s show responds. He is experienced and confident. The code says make the audience happy. Plus, the assignment sounds great. Romantic. Exciting. Good theatre.

A half-hour later Kenn is on his knees in front of the proposee. With the urging of her boyfriend, she has volunteered to come up on stage, where she has played a scene with Kenn. They are now at the top of an imaginary hill, resting their legs after an imaginary bike ride. She is being proposed to by proxy. Kenn reads the letter. “Kelly,” it says, “you are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met. I love the way you care for people and are so generous and kind. I would like to share the rest of my life with you. Will you marry me?”

There is a pause. “Well?” Kenn says.

“Uh…” For a moment the woman is unsure. Is this real? She looks out at the audience.

“I need an answer,” Kenn says, the tickle of panic beginning at his scalp.

“Uh… no,” Kelly responds.

At this point, most of us would probably have cut our losses, and, embarrassed for ourselves and the less than blissful couple, ushered the woman to her seat. Not so with Kenn. He was committed. He was going to accept whatever the woman said and continue on with the scene. As if it were himself he was fighting for, he persisted.

“No?! Why not?” he says.

“I just don’t feel that way about you,” she says to Kenn, caught up herself in the role-play.

“Is there someone else?” he asks. The improvisers cringe backstage and look around for a vaudeville hook.

“Yes,” she says. The woman says “yes” in front of an audience of strangers!

“Who?” Kenn asks.

“This guy at the gym,” she says.

“What’s his name?” Kenn astonishingly pursues.

“Hank,” she replies.

Improvisational actors – improvisers – make up scenes, songs, stories, entire plays, on the spot, with no script or planned scenarios. They work collaboratively in front of paying customers who expect to be entertained and amazed, with only their skills, philosophies and colleagues to guide them. Sometimes the results seem magical. Sometimes they feel disastrous. Only through the willingness to risk failure, though, are improvisers able to delight audiences with their successes. The secret improvisers know is that the “failures” – as in the scene above – can be as satisfying and useful as the successes.

Does the job on an improviser sound familiar? Not so different from everyday life, right? Rather like surviving in the contemporary business culture. Increasingly, the world of corporate America is looking like the world of improvisational theatre. The script is constantly being reinvented. The opportunities to plan deeply before acting are becoming fewer, shorter and less reliable. Not coincidentally, in recent years businesses have begun to realize the value of consciously fostering creativity and teamwork within their organizations. The techniques, philosophies and exercise of improvisation, then, are a rich source of learning for them.

Often people ask how improvisers can “rehearse” if they don’t know what is going to happen in a show. Like athletes, improvisers practice skills that can be utilized in a variety of situations. They work on expanding and strengthening their abilities, even though they do not know what the specific events will be in an individual game. The fundamental skills that improvisers develop are:

Trust
Spontaneity
Accepting Offers
Listening and Awareness
Storytelling
Performance Presence and Range

Let’s take a look at what these entail and how they might apply to the workplace.

Trust

The heart of collaboration is trust. Without it no oratory will be convincing, no agreements solid, no relationships productive. This truth is evident to the improviser, as it is to police partners or army buddies. When you willingly walk into danger with nothing but your colleagues to protect you, you had better trust those colleagues. Perhaps it is a little extreme to compare performers to military personnel at war. I certainly would not want to diminish the bravery and importance of those men and women. But improv certainly feels dangerous. So, improvisers demand that they have colleagues that they can trust, and they have developed exercises (and tests) to build it.

Team members in any field can use these activities. Sometime the workplace can feel like a war zone, too. Competition is rampant; casualties are reported everyday; daring acts of bravery are required. It is no longer enough to be on the “leading edge”. Now we aim to live on the “bleeding edge”. Imagine then, how important it is for leaders, managers and trainers to create an environment of trust when they are virtually sending their people into battle.

Spontaneity

From a very early age, most of us are taught to censor ourselves. Good thing, really: Without the ability to control our impulses, make judgments, and choose when and if to act, we would be crippled. We could not learn to read, eat with utensils, or shed our diapers. Civilization, itself, is a set of agreed upon limits we place on our uncensored actions. However, there is a price. We spend so much time exercising our judgment muscles that our creativity muscles can atrophy.

In order to create, a person needs to trust his impulses and follow through on seemingly irrational, non-linear or “foolish” ideas. While the abilities to evaluate and critique are important, if they are out of balance with our abilities to brainstorm and take risks, creativity is sadly impeded.

In improv, there is no time to evaluate. By definition, improvisation is creating in the moment without the ability to revise. Improvisers practice getting out of their own way so that they can recognize and utilize their innovative ideas. What is especially interesting about unleashing one’s impulses is that it is often the ideas that seem the most dangerous or the most obvious – the ones that our rational mind would have us censor – that yield the greatest fruit. If Kenn, in the scene recounted above, had followed socially acceptable restraint and refrained from questioning his audience volunteer, everyone might have been more comfortable, but the resulting scene would have been much less compelling and memorable.

Accepting Offers

When we practice being spontaneous, we learn to accept our own ideas. It is equally important to accept others’ ideas. Teamwork of any sort depends on both our ability and our willingness to do that. In improv, ideas and actions – words, physical actions, character attributions, musical accompaniments, lines of dialogue – are called “offers”. Anything your partner does or says is an offer. In a moment, an improviser can accept or reject a myriad of offers. Improvisers learn early that if you do not accept whatever is offered to you, you can spend loads of time searching around for something better, and never get anywhere. All you have got when you are improvising are the current offers. There is no other plan or guideposts. Nothing else exists.

The correlated truth in business is more applicable than one might expect. Often, organizations lose speed and opportunities, because ideas are rejected (or merely nominally accepted) when there is value to be had. Saying “yes” sounds good, but can be hard in practice. People reject ideas without fully exploring them all the time, for many reasons. New ideas may mean more work; people fear that someone else will get more credit; the idea feels risky; someone thinks he has a “better” idea of his own. However, every time we say “no” to an idea instead of “yes”, an opportunity is lost. That does not mean, of course, that evaluation is not useful. Or that we should commit to every idea. When we depend on our judgment muscles exclusively, though, we throw the baby out with the bathwater, the electricity out with the light bulb.

There is another step to accepting offers in the improv world. Just saying yes, as powerful as it is, is not enough. Improvisers live and die by the “Yes, AND…” rule. “Yes, and…” means that not only must I, the improviser, accept an offer, I must build on it. I must contribute. I must make an offer of my own in response to my partner’s. It is this process which harnesses the power of collaboration. Everyone offers and accepts. Each team member is responsible for both contributing to and supporting the group’s activity. Through the implementation of this method, brainstorming sessions lead to innovative solutions. Even the smallest spark can be fanned into illuminating flames.

Listening and Awareness

It is impossible to accept and build on others’ ideas if we cannot recognize them. By enhancing listening and observation skills, teams and individuals can harvest significantly more ideas, increase their understanding of each other, and communicate more effectively.

Improvisers have the pressure of having to listen and react in front of an audience. They worry not only about what they must say next, but how they will look, how people will judge them, and not falling off the stage. These concerns diminish the ability to sense and build on offers. The feelings improvisers can have on stage - self-consciousness, pressure to get things right, not wanting to make a fool of themselves - are different only in intensity, not in kind, to the pressures that many of us feel most of the time. So many internal and external realities vie for our attention. Keith Johnstone, the founder of Theatresports, and a beloved and admired improv teacher, dedicates much of his work to combating the fear that can blind performers to offers that are terribly obvious to passive observers.

Most people are both more and less aware than they think they are. We take in an extraordinary amount of information that we ignore, and at the same time, our inability to really pay attention can confound our sincerest attempts to communicate. The good news is that listening and general awareness are muscles. They can be developed and exercised.

Storytelling

Why is narrative so important? All communication, it can be argued, is storytelling. The way humans make sense of facts is by creating narratives that link bits of data to each other and to past experiences. Audiences, then, are constantly looking for stories to help them understand the information being presented to them, and to keep them interested. As long as an audience is wondering, “what happens next?” they will continue to watch.

Audiences may leave a performance remembering a funny line, but the improviser who uttered it will tell you that it was the team’s ability to create a compelling narrative that sustained the show. Lots of the climactic moments that audiences remember are only satisfying because of the context surrounding them, many of the characters only defined and adored because of the situation in which they behaved. Charna Halpern and Del Close, the great Chicago improv guru, say, “The most direct path to disaster in improvisation is to make jokes.[ii]

Like cotton candy, an improv show with gags and no stories can be delicious for bit, but quickly becomes unfulfilling. Among other things, if you are going to present an entire evening of jokes – as many stand-ups do – they had better be really, really good jokes. That is why comedians can spend years perfecting a single line. Improv, of course, does not provide that opportunity. In an attempt to offer their audiences (and themselves) turkey dinners in lieu of cotton candy, many of the most respected improv companies have turned to new show formats that allow them to create performances with longer, more complex storylines. And even within the most traditional “short-form” structures, storytelling opportunities are increasingly more sought after.

Storytelling, both within the world of Applied Improv, and completely independently, has become a widely recognized leadership competency. Thought leaders such as Stephen Denning have been championing it as an invaluable tool for increasing influencing skills, knowledge-sharing, building organizational culture and learning of any kind. By incorporating stories into communications, leaders can increase their ability to inspire and clarify action. By incorporating storytelling activities, a trainer can support the unconscious process of story creation, thereby enhancing the participants’ attention and ability to retain information. Storytelling can be used for everything from increasing presentation skills to building teams to reviewing technical processes to motivating employees. And the best news is that we Humans are hardwired to think narratively, so getting better at soliciting and telling stories is a goal we can ALL achieve.

Performance Presence and Range

As we know from presidential debates, there is much more to being a good communicator than the words we use. A sneer, a peak at a watch, sweat, all can have more impact than the content of the arguments. That is why so many corporate executives have begun to hire media trainers. A tilt of the head, an “um” or an “ah”, a smile can define our trustworthiness and our character.

Although, we may feel sheepish about judging books by their covers, we most certainly do. In a famous treatise on trustworthiness in communication, Silent Messages, Albert Mehrabian found that when the people perceived a contradiction between the words, the tone and the physicality of the speaker, they believed the words least of all, and measured nearly all of their faith in the speaker’s trustworthiness by the tone and physical appearance (vocal cadence, gestures, clothes, facial expressions) of the speaker.[iii]

Perhaps the above is not as superficial as the phrase “judging a book by its cover” might suggest. Just as our subconscious is evident in our dreams, it reveals itself in our bodies. There are lots of exercises improvisers use to increase their ability to be heard, to be relaxed in front of people, to support their content with their tone of voice and physical expression. Without these abilities, no matter how good they are at making verbal offers, performers will be unable to convey a variety of characters, or convince an audience of their authenticity.

An interesting subset of the behaviors that improvisers explore and play with (non-verbal and verbal) falls under the heading of “Status”. Johnstone, in his seminal work, Impro[iv] devotes a substantial section to the topic. Exercises designed to recognize and manipulate status behaviors have become some of the most enlightening and useful techniques to translate into business settings.

In general, if we think of ourselves as performers, and track how we are presenting ourselves in any given moment, we expand our range of options and our abilities to achieve our goals.

As such a rich source of creativity, communication and collaboration techniques, it is not surprising that companies tap improvisation as a source for organizational development. The following chapters will explore these principles, and offer ideas, exercises, tips and techniques designed to expand your improvisational mindset and exercise your improvisational “muscles”.

Just say, “Yes.”

[i] Spolin, 1983.

[ii] Halpern, C., Close, D., Johnson, K. (1994).

[iii] Mehrabian, Albert. (1971). Silent messages. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

[iv] Johnstone, 1979.