Taking Lessons from Improv

Why: To create an organizational culture that allows for mistakes, encourages perseverance, and engages all of your stakeholders around a common goal, a key driver of a team’s success is resilience. One way you can help your team build resilience in the workplace is to explore the skills and experiences related to improv comedy.

How: There are three core components of improv that lend themselves to building team resilience and engagement:

1. Focus: In improvisational comedy, participants must come together as a unified team to make an improv scene work, no matter their skill level or seniority. When even the most tangential (wacky) ideas, distractions or curveballs are introduced, it is up to the team to collectively bring focus to the scene through adapting to the change in stride.
2. Commitment: Commitment on stage is no different than commitment in the workplace. Those participants who are committed (not just “doing” but COMMITTED) to a scene are as successful and contributory as those who are committed in the workplace.
3. Energy: The longest engagements, solutions, services, or efforts will most certainly languish if your workforce doesn’t bring energy to the process. So, too, will an improv exercise languish if the participants don’t bring over-the-top levels of energy to their words and actions. Energy becomes the engine for an organization to be resilient and sustain their efforts.

There is a key concept in improv called the “yes, and…” rule. Instead of thinking about problems as obstacles, and stifling team members with a “yes, but…” response, the “yes, and…” rule allows your team to brainstorm as a collective, build off of each other’s ideas in a positive way, and foster an environment of creativity and innovation.

Animal Ad Agency Exercise: Break into small groups. Five to seven is ideal. Each small group forms a circle. Ask each group to name two things:

• An animal. (Take the quickest or best answer.)
• A common household product. (Take the quickest or best answer.)

Then explain that your organization has been hired to be the advertising firm to sell the common household product to a group of those animals.

Describe the process to the group.

Someone starts by identifying a feature of the product that would be compelling for the animal; the next person says “yes, and…” then gives their feature; and so on around the circle. It might sound like this for selling Eyeglasses to Elephants:

• Person 1: The glasses would be enormous, to fit their large head.
• Person 2: Yes, and…they would have a special nose-saddle to adapt to the movement of their trunks.
• Person 3: Yes, and…they would have a heads-up display that pinpoints distance to their next meal.
• Person 4: Yes, and…they would have special bifocals strictly for seeing their tiny mouse friends.
• And so on…

When you debrief, discuss the importance of “yes, and…” in terms of the creative process. As a team of professionals, what types of new possibilities are created by thinking in terms of “yes, and…” instead of the more often heard “no, because…” or even “Yes, but…”

The benefits of an exercise of this type will remain evident into the future as well. Meetings and discussions will include more “yes, and” thinking—and the results will be immediate and valuable.

Source: https://gothamculture.com/2015/06/18/one-surprising-way-build-resilience-in-the-workplace/