“Imagining should be as effortless as perceiving.”
- Keith Johnstone

Close your eyes. (All right, open them or you won’t be able to read.) Imagine the keypad on your cell phone. What words, numbers, symbols and colors are displayed there? Are there letters along with the numbers as there are on a traditional keypad? What letters correspond to the number 4? What happens when you make a call? What appears on the screen?

Before an offer can be accepted, it must be recognized. Not as easy a task as one might think. There is so much information bombarding us in any given moment that to make sense of it, we blot out and distort the data. We make choices about what to focus on. Who has time to study her cell phone screen? Why bother? And yet, what important information do we miss - by not listening to instructions, not hearing feedback, not recognizing discrepancies between what we believe and what exists?

As we discussed in Chapter 2, our perceptions of the world are deeply flawed. We will never be completely accurate trackers of data or “reality”. We look for what we expect. (For some revelatory fun on this topic see Christopher Chabris’ and Daniel Simons’ Invisible Gorilla experiment.) We look for things to confirm our assumptions and self-concept. (Check out Mistakes Were Made, But Not By Me by Carol Tarvis and Elliot Aronson) Often, we simply do not (or cannot) perceive much of what is going on around us.

Dr. Francis Crick, one of the two scientists who mapped the structure of DNA, went on to study the brain. He has been quoted as saying, “80% of what we experience as true we make up.” Even if the statement is only 20% true, it leaves us plenty of room to doubt ourselves.
Remember playing “Telephone” as a kid? You would whisper a phrase into someone’s ear and they would whisper it to someone else and so on until it came out in some mangled version at the other end. Many of us played that game for entertainment, but did we internalize the lesson? Amazingly, in everyday life, we expect to be able to understand and pass on messages without distortion.

That said, we can be more aware of how much we miss. Organizations have taught courses on listening skills for years and suggest relatively simple techniques for increasing retention and understanding. They include asking questions, checking understanding by feeding back information, and taking notes. Most of these techniques come down to an acknowledgement that our memory, retention and understanding are untrustworthy at best. We advocate using support strategies like these whenever possible.

Not every situation lends itself to the use of such methods, though. And not every offer can be captured in this way. As improvisers, we rarely get the chance to double-check our assumptions or write down details before moving forward. To successfully create coherent stories and songs instantly, we must track and retain all sorts of details - objectives, attitudes, past events, names - in the moment, the first time around. So, improvisers approach listening and awareness as muscles that can be exercised and strengthened. We work on our ability to focus and to see, hear and retain information, just as a basketball team would work on passing and making free-throw shots.

“Story Exchange," serves both as a workout for listening muscles , and as a jolt, highlighting the complexity of listening well. Participants pair off and take turns telling a short story from their lives. Then, they switch partners and each person tells the story that they just heard, as if it were their own, trying to repeat the words, gestures, and inflections of the story as accurately as possible. Again, the participants switch partners, telling the story that they heard most recently. Finally, the entire group comes together and each participant recounts the last story told to him or her. At the end of this process, not one of the stories is completely accurate. Some are so different as to be unrecognizable.

“Story Exchange” illustrates the frailty of our listening, understanding and retention skills. But improvisers who practice listening notably improve their ability to recount the stories accurately. Chris Oyen, one of my first improv coaches at Chicago City Limits in New York, amazed me one night when I was babysitting his two-month-old daughter. Rebecca was a beautiful but colicky baby, and she was screaming. The Mets were playing a game on TV. The dog was snoring, and Chris was passionately discussing an event that had happened at the theatre the night before. After about a half-hour of this mayhem, Chris’ friend came in from the kitchen and asked me, “What’s the score?” I had no idea. It had been at least twenty minutes since any of us had paid attention to baseball, as far as I could tell. Chris, however, interrupted himself in mid-sentence, turned to his friend and said, “It’s 7-3 Mets, bottom of the 6th, men on first and third, 2 outs.”

Perhaps Chris is just lucky enough to be born one of the 2% of humans how are fabulous muli-taskers or "super-taskers", and the rest of us never will approach his competence. (Huge amounts of research have come out in the last decade or so revealing that except for that small minority, most of us are terrible multi-taskers. Please do not use your cell phone -even hands-free - while driving. [Horrey, William; Christopher Wickens (Spring 2006)]). But regardless of innate ability, I know that Chris practiced tracking dual conversations, offers in his environment, and emotion and intention in his scene work six times a week on stage as an improviser. He took seriously maintaining and strengthening this kind of hyper-awareness. It showed in his work, and as we, his students, aspired to match his listening skills, it showed in our work, as well.
We pick up information both consciously and unconsciously. Increasing listening and awareness skills, is less about sensing more things, and more about sensing things more consciously. At any given moment there are events and facts that we are paying attention to, and a whole host of other details that are in our broader, less conscious awareness. What the best improvisers are able to do is widen their circle of consciousness to include more information.

The great West Coast improviser, Stephen Kearin (one of the SIMS videogame voices, among other things), attends to astonishingly specific details when he works. It makes him the Michael Jordon of creating vivid imaginary objects and environments. Once Kearin was teaching a class on making vocal sound effects. In one scene, a student, lying on the floor, pretended to saw off his leg. He attempted the sound of a chain saw and Stephen stopped him. “All right,” he said, “your sound is generally okay, but what are you cutting?”

The student replied, “Uh… my leg.”

“Yeah, all right, but, listen,” Stephen continued. He then performed his version of the sound, changing it subtly three or four times as he drew the imaginary blade through his limb. “Did you hear it as it cut through?” he asked. “Not just ‘leg’. Flesh, bone, flesh, floor.”

The lesson of Stephen’s admittedly gory demonstration was that it is not the dexterity of an improviser mouth, but the specificity of his awareness that elevate him to greatness.
Developing our awareness consists not only of increasing our capacity for information, but in heightening our awareness of the different types of information that can be gleaned.

In the “Story Exchange”, a few different types of mistakes occur when participants retell the stories. The most straightforward is that facts and events get changed or dropped. Another error involves emotional content or attitude. Whereas the first storyteller might feel excited and positive, the person repeating it might express confusion or apathy. Finally, participants misconstrue the intent of the stories they hear. In other words, there are three things that we can listen for when we listen:

* Facts
* Feelings
* Intentions

Facts are the simplest to perceive. They are objective and concrete. Not that we always get them right by any means. Improvisers notoriously struggle to remember the character names they have given each other. Some improv companies have gone so far as to implement a rule that mandates everyone go by their real name on stage. Still, although we may fail to remember these details, they are ultimately black and white, right or wrong, easy to track. Improving our ability to perceive and retain facts entails simply strengthening our focus and memory. (Or finding supporting technologies, like pencil and paper to capture them. This is where note-taking, etc. can be most useful in real life.)

Perceiving feelings is a little trickier. Especially in business settings, we are taught to hide and ignore our feelings. We are not used to focusing on emotions, except in the safest and most intimate environments. However, the feelings of the communicator may be more important that the specific facts. Here is an example of how the emotional content of a story got missed during “Story Exchange”.

Stacey, a woman in her late twenties, described how, as freshmen in college, she and her roommate had heard a spot on the radio advertising fur coats for “$39.99”. They gleefully headed to the store to pick out their coats, expecting a small, seedy storefront – but hey, they were in college, seediness was part of the fun. When they arrived, the store was luxurious. Rows and rows of beautiful minks and foxes, sables and chinchilla hung on racks of brass. Saleswomen waited on the girls like royal servants, and when Stacey and her friend had picked out their coats, the saleswomen offered them wine in celebration, asking ‘Will that be cash or charge?’
The girls figured they could pay cash – even with tax the tab couldn’t come to more than 50 bucks. They said so, pulling out their bills. The saleswomen went pale. ‘Ahem. No.’ they said, ‘the coats are three THOUSAND, nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars. Not thirty-nine dollars. These are REAL fur coats, you know.” And so the girls left without their garments.

In the original telling, Stacey expressed deep embarrassment. Later, she confirmed that she remembered this incident as one of the most humiliating of her life. By the time the story got to the fourth storyteller, though, it was a story of teenage mischief. “Two hip, young college chicks set out to torture the evil fur-hocking sales ladies.” Interestingly, most of the factual details stayed the same. It was the tone of the voice, the emphasis, and the look in the teller’s eye that changed.

Sometimes, the details of a story are just conduits for expressing emotional content. How many of us have said things like, “You always interrupt me,” or “Why don’t you ever include me in meetings?” Just as many of us have had someone respond to us by saying, “I don’t ALWAYS interrupt you.” In these cases, it is the feeling, not the detail that it is important to hear. Unless the emotional content is addressed, all the data in the world will not result in clear communication. That is not to say that data is unimportant. If you are building a rocket ship, the specific numbers matter. In most of our communications, though, facts are just one aspect of the message. A body of work on Emotional Intelligence, popularized most by Daniel Goleman, tells us that our EQ, (emotion quotient) correlates more strongly with success than our IQ. (Goleman, D. 1996) Among other measures of emotional intelligence, our ability to recognize feelings and empathize deeply affect our ability to build relationships, solve problems, and influence others.

This brings us to the third kind of information we can listen for: the intention of the communication. Understanding the point of a message qualifies as the most important aspect of listening. To put it in terms of our discussions so far, at any given moment we are accepting a huge number of offers, and ignoring others. A good listener’s job is twofold: to expand the amount of information that she can take in, and then, quickly assess the relative value of that information. In order to understand the point of a story, we need to be able to evaluate what data is crucial and what is peripheral.

At Freestyle Rep, I had a colleague – let’s call her Kelly - who was infamous for missing the most valuable pieces of information, while accepting some other innocuous offer. I remember a scene in which she played an old dowager. Her partner entered the scene as her butler. He was carrying a tray and as he spoke, he set the dishes and pot on the table in front of her.

“Madam,” he said, “I must inform you that your son has just returned from the war. He is alive, although it looks as though he is missing a number of limbs.”

“Ooh,” Kelly cooed in response, “Tea! Yummy.”

The actor playing the butler accepted this offer as an indication that Kelly’s character was a little batty. (Remember, it is impossible to be blocked.) But the fact that it was teatime certainly was not the richest offer put forth in the scene.

In Jump Start Your Brain, Doug Hall suggests that the greatest fallacy about creativity is that material is manufactured whole cloth inside one’s head. In fact, he says, the best way to create is to stimulate your imagination from the outside by dumping as much external content into your brain as possible, and letting it serve as the raw stuff from which ideas are formed – rather like feeding threads into a loom or car parts onto an assembly line. Barbara Scott of BATS Improv, is heralded by her fellow improvisers for her ability to receive and understand their offers. Barbara says that she has become skilled at this, because she cannot come up with ideas of her own. She is being modest, but the resulting principle is valuable: Enhancing our listening and awareness abilities can increases not only communication but also creativity. Here are some non-game-based activities that you can try to enhance awareness:

Eavesdrop on conversations
Mimic personalities on TV
Pay attention to the details of habitual activities (e.g. brushing your teeth, washing dishes, petting the dog.) Turn 90 degrees and try to recreate them in space with imaginary objects.
Close your eyes and quiz yourself on the details of the room you are in; your partner’s clothing; your kitchen sink.
Watch strangers and make up stories about what their lives are like, based on behaviors you observe.
When someone tells you a story, feed back your interpretation of his or her point.

To improve their abilities to perceive facts, feelings and intentions, actors practice “being in the moment”, which means heightening one’s awareness of what is happening right now. With all of our inner voices, and external pressures, being in the moment demands great discipline.

People are able to pay attention for a given amount of time, but then some word or other concern captures their attention and they drift off. When they re-focus, a gap exists in what they have heard. This means they are listening at a lower level of efficiency. There are two facts that make this reality especially discouraging.

The amount of time that studies have shown people can concentrate is about 90 seconds. (And that was in 1964. These days, advertisers believe the time frame is more like 6-8 seconds.)

The smarter the listener is, the more quickly their listening degenerates, since more intelligent people tend to make faster and more frequent connections, and therefore have their minds spin off on tangents more easily.

Given these realities, how can we ever communicate effectively? Improvisers know that their partner will be distracted sometimes. For goodness sake, there are scores of people staring at them and an imaginary environment to keep track of. Therefore, in addition to practicing awareness skills, improvisers practice communicating clearly so that the information they are relating will be easier to receive. They train themselves to repeat information – like a character’s name- over and over. They also learn to state their intentions clearly so that a partner does not have to struggle to discern them.

When students begin improvising, they resist explicitly voicing their intentions. The practice seems unnatural or too obvious. The most experienced improvisers, on the other hand, articulate their feelings and intentions blatantly. Strangely enough, audiences never seem to mind. Or even notice. An improviser will say, “Happy Birthday. Here’s a present for you. It’s a puppy,” and the audience will be astonished when another improviser thinks to jump out of the box – an imaginary one, remember - as a puppy. “Oh, that was so creative,” they will say of the second actor.

I was sold on the power of blatantly articulating intentions onstage, when I was picked as a volunteer during the show, Fool Moon. The performers in the show, Bill Irwin and David Shiner, are brilliant clowns, who perform an involved first-date scene with an audience member. In this case, me. Neither of them speaks in the show, but while I was on stage, they were talking to me the whole time. “How are you feeling? You’re doing great! OK, look over there. When I ask you to kiss me, say ‘no ’.” Each step of the way they coached me, in voices easy to hear and understand. Here’s the amazing part. No one noticed! Not even my date. At intermission, everyone came up to me, convinced that I must have been a plant. How could I have known what to do? How could I have supported them so well?

In a way, the audience members were right. I was not acting naturally, following my own impulses, and making my own choices. But I had not been briefed ahead of time. I was briefed on stage, in the moment, in front of everyone. When I told my date that Irwin and Shiner had been speaking to me, he was shocked. He had not seen or heard a thing.

A common sales technique illustrates the power of straightforward communication in proposals for potential customers. Before presenting design ideas, skilled proposal writers include a section called some version of “Our Understanding” which summarizes the clients’ needs and objectives. When I first began writing proposals, I interpreted the client’s concerns in my own words. I had to sound intelligent, right? I could not just parrot what they had told me. Now, I do just that. I repeat their words as exactly as I can. And the clients are delighted. I have had at least half a dozen of them tell me that it was my insightful analysis of their needs that sold them.

There is a final piece to this puzzle. No matter how much time we spend dissecting and heightening awareness, there is an unidentifiable component to it. Del Close and Charna Halpern talk about “group mind” saying,

People who have never experienced it may be skeptical, dismissing it as New Age nonsense, but the group mind is a very real phenomenon. This is not to say that each person can read the others’ minds or project specific thoughts; but when a group mind is achieved, its members have a very strong sense of the group as an entity of its own, and connect with its feelings and requirements.

“Group Counting” (page ____) illustrates this intangible connection that individuals can form with one another. The group stands in a circle and focuses on a spot or object in the center of the floor. The goal is to count “one, two, three…” and so on, with each successive number supplied by one and only one of the group members. The trick is that there is no order in which the participants say a number, and no patterns or signals allowed. Each member of the group is required to feel when it is his or her turn to contribute a number. If more than one person offers \ a number at the same time, the group begins again from “one”.

“Group Counting” comes as close to magic as any of the exercises I know. When I first discovered it, I thought, “Well, sure, the odds say that if they try long enough, eventually people should be able to count to 20. What’s the big deal?” Very quickly, though, I realized that the activity could not be explained away that easily. My students counted to higher and higher numbers each week. By the end of a six-week session, it was not unusual to have groups counting to 70, 80, 100 on the first or second try. That’s not statistics. There are straightforward lessons that groups learn through this exercise. Things like if there are 15 people in a group, and you are counting to 20, each person, on average, gets to say only one or two numbers. If you have 22 people, two of them, at least, must remain silent. And those people who do refrain from saying a number will contribute just as much to the achievement of the goal as those who speak.

The lesson with most impact remains for me the power of our instinctual awareness of others, and how quickly we can grow and harness it.

The Principle in Action

As a trainer, it does not matter how much you know if you cannot communicate with your students. Leaders who are unable to gather and interpret information will find themselves at a significant disadvantage. Here are some areas on which to focus.

Enhance Your Own Skills

All of the activities suggested in this chapter are recommended for the trainer or leader himself, as well as for his group. Trainers must be able to assess what their students understand, how they are feeling, what confusions they are trying to express. Just like performing, training requires a person to take in a large amount of information, even as she is presenting. In order to be successful, a trainer must have highly- honed awareness skills.

I knew a trainer who had a brilliant mind and, in theory, designed terrific courses. In practice, he often lost his students, because he got so involved in presenting his material that he failed to notice when they were tired or perplexed. Participants would shift in their chairs, whisper to each other, or fall asleep, and Joe would continue on. At that point, he may as well have been presenting to stuffed dummies.

Similarly, a manager that I worked with would consistently answer a different question from the one she had been asked. She was so sure of her answers that she anticipated the question without taking time to absorb the heart of it. Questions are little flags that signal unmet needs. If we cannot effectively hear and understand them, we will miss opportunities to satisfy them.

Read Between the Lines

Not all communication will be straightforward. Sometimes individuals will hide information intentionally. Other times they, themselves, may be unaware of their real message. Do not be satisfied with a cursory understanding of what people tell you. Look for discontinuities between the words they use and the feelings they express non-verbally. Search for the reason that someone has taken an action or made a statement. If a student asks you to repeat something, they may not have heard you. Or they may not understand the principle. Or they may disagree. If the impetus for asking was either of the second reasons, merely repeating your statement will not help. Often you will find clues in the way the question is asked or the answer is received that will let you know if you have provided a solution.

By the way, this attitude can be useful in real life, too. A friend of mine was in a relationship that ended, she said, when she and her boyfriend started taking what the other said at face value. They both ended up feeling misunderstood and uncared about.

Train the Team

Because we have been listening since day we were born (if not before), we do not think of listening as a skill that needs to be developed. The simple act of discussing the pitfalls and techniques of listening can improve a team’s effectiveness. By also engaging in listening activities, teams can augment their listening skills, and also learn more about each other. As therapists know, tenacious conflicts can disappear as soon as individuals feel they have been heard.

Listening exercises also serve as warm-up activities. Before asking participants to take in new information, remind them what skills doing so entails.

Check for Understanding

No matter how vigilantly we try to pay attention, we will misunderstand. There is just too much information coming through too many of our own filters for us to receive messages 100% accurately. Remember Dr. Crick quote? “80% of what we perceive to be true, we make up.” Check your understanding.

Separate Observable Behaviors from Interpretations

As coaches, we need to be adept at assessing performance and giving feedback. As we do, we must remember that objective reality is not the same as our interpretations. Listening for intentions and reading between the lines are useful, as we have said. However, remember to distinguish interpretation from the objective observable behaviors that led to them. And when you speak to someone you are coaching, make sure to ground your assumptions in those behaviors. The individual being coached is likelier to accept and benefit from feedback when it is articulated this way. (Chris Argyris' "Ladder of Inference" and Peter Senge’s Left-hand column work are some great tools for exploring this topic.)

Let’s take the example of Gail, a manager that a colleague of mine, Susan, was coaching. The manager struck Susan as arrogant and rather petulant. That was her interpretation. Gail’s actual behaviors were rolling her eyes when Susan offered suggestions and telling Susan that her ideas would never work. Gail told stories about how lazy and belligerent her workers were, and that if it were not for her hard work, nothing would ever get done. When addressing Gail’s attitude, rather than beginning with her own assumptions, Susan began by listing Gail’s actions– concrete behaviors that Susan had seen and heard. Then Susan asked Gail to explain her intentions and interpretations of those behaviors. As it turned out, Gail had replaced a very popular manager and felt that her staff did not like her. Her intention was to protect herself in the face of antagonistic co-workers. After their conversation, Susan was better able to address Gail’s problems, and Gail was more willing to listen.

Articulate Your Intentions

Just as we make assumptions about others, they make assumptions about us. And the more power you have, the more others will analyze and interpret your behaviors. When someone has power over us, we scrutinize the smallest offers behaviors for clues to that person’s thoughts and feelings. In order to avoid incorrect and potentially damaging attributions towards you as a leader, err on the side of articulating why you are doing whatever you do. Explain how you reached decisions. Share the thoughts behind particular activities and instructional designs. Frame your questions, so that people do not feel attacked. It is unrealistic to expect that others will understand us all the time. The more straightforward and complete your communication. the more effective and pleasant your interactions will be.

Feed Creativity

As we become more aware, we will find our creativity increasingly stimulated. Continue to provide sensory input to trigger creative thinking through quotes, physical objects, music, colors, and stories. Our heightened senses can provide us with internal massages. Awareness is not just hard work, it is also glorious fun.

Key Points:

Before an offer can be accepted it must be recognized
Listening is more complex that we think
There are three types of info to listen /watch for: facts, feelings and intentions
Enhancing awareness entails making more of our unconscious processes conscious.
Once information is received it must be analyzed and prioritized.
Receiving information stimulates creativity
Enhance awareness through practice
Make it easier for others to listen to you by articulating your desires blatantly.
Enhance your skills
- Read between the lines
- Train the team
- Check for understanding
- Separate observable behaviors from interpretations
- Articulate your intentions
- Feed creativity