Improv Notebook » Richard Cox

Why improv can help your team collaborate

Richard Cox — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 15:00:59 +0000

Nilofer Merchant has an excellent article on Harvard Business Review blog named “Eight Dangers of Collaboration” These are the reasons that keep people from starting down the road of collaboration and innovation.

Here are the eight dangers she lists:

Not knowing the answer
Unclear or uncomfortable roles
Too much talking, not enough doing
Information (over)sharing
Fear of fighting
More work
More hugs than decisions
It’s hard to know who to praise and who to blame.

When is collaboration the right choice?

It’s true that collaboration is not the silver bullet for new century business. It’s just the newest hammer that people have found, but, don’t forget that not everything is a nail.

Collaboration is great for innovation and group problem solving. For big endeavors or when you are really stretching the status quo to get to something new, collaboration will help you get there.

Collaboration works best when it’s integrated deeply into your whole organizational culture. It’s a mindset in addition to a methodology. When everyone understands the principles behind it and buys-in you get the real multiplier effects and avoid the dangers that Nilofer points out.

How to create a collaborative culture

With a few changes the list of “eight dangers” is a good assessment of what improvisers face going into a scene.

Not knowing what happens next
Unclear roles or characters
Too much talking, not doing enough
Information (over)sharing or making too many offers
Fear of fighting
A new way of working
More offers than story
At the end there is nobody to blame or praise, you are in it together

Improvisation is a pure form of collaboration. Because of that, improv has a great set of tools to learn the skills you need to work with a team when ambiguity abounds. Unlike work it’s afun and engaging pursuit and provides a great training ground for teamwork.

So, how do you get your organization to embrace this new mindset?

Start at the top

Culture change only works when the everyone is in. Teams can benefit from spot interventions and work better together, when it’s supported from the top its happens more easily. For example, when you look at how the board and executives feel about fiscal policy, professional development, or any aspect of a business you will see that reflected through every part of the organization. Get the executive team going on improv along with everyone else.

Integrate Applied Improv Into Learning and Development

Applied Improvisation is a well established corporate consulting discipline that uses the lessons of performance improv (yes, like the television show “Who’s line is it anyway?”) The main difference is that there are specific learning objectives and every exercise gives an opportunity to debrief with the group to draw the lessons from them. If you are working with someone who just plays games and moves on, find someone else.

For more see my Applied Improv Principles series or join the Applied Improv Network.

Encourage employees to start improv clubs, troupes, or sponsor classes

The lessons of improv are easily available to anyone who takes a class and learns it for performance. The truth is that exposure to improv helps people in myriad ways – confidence, public speaking, thinking on their feet, better communication… but that’s another post.

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Improv ideas in stressful situations

Richard Cox — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 18:52:48 +0000

You are stuck in the airplane for hours with little information, you are waiting for traffic piled up in front of you, or a false alarm fire bell empties your building to the parking lot. These are times when big changes happen to everyone’s routine and people get stressed out.

Right now I’m in the first case. I the middle of my flight to Munich we diverted to Boston because the main cabin lost all power. Sleepy travelers, who have not been given much information find various ways to cope or find some control.

This is a time when I hope that everyone on the airplane has taken an improv class.

Accepting offers you are given: often they can’t be changed so accept them and move forward with what has been given.

we are diverting to Boston
we are sitting on the tarmac

Making your partner look good: makings things better or easier for others make you both feel better.

the flight crew can’t change things, taking it out on them doesn’t help
helping other unhappy passengers get bags, move past, eases tensions

Serve the story: what can you do to make the situation the best for everyone instead of focusing just for yourself.

Don’t be the loud person who has to get off right away
The story changed so focus on what comes next to tell the story as it is now, what is the next flight I need now.

The principles of improv are great for life every day, and really come into clear relief when the pressure goes up.

What are situations where you have used these ideas yourself, or what have you seen where you wish others had taken an improv class?

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Status in London Business School

Richard Cox — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 07:00:12 +0000

Professor Gabe Adams at London Business School is one of a growing number of academics that have seen the power of applied improv in the business world and integrated it into their curriculum. The students go from skeptical to evangelists in a single class. Applied improv can bridge the rigor of academic theory and real world practice in the classroom and prepare the students for the ambiguity that business life brings.

Prof. Adams asked me to teach status in her class Paths to Power which looks at many aspects of power. Status in improv, which is different than social status, looks at the behaviors and nonverbal communication that gives us authority or makes us approachable. Language still plays a role, but there is a whole world to explore when the dialogue is eliminated or constrained.

Status – a dynamic condition of a relationship or interaction

Social Status – a ranking of worth, value or importance

Even the simplest of exercises can start to explore the relationship of power and status. Dan Klein at Stanford University introduced me to a simple activity that asks students standing in a circle to take a single step forward and calmly say “Hello, my name is. And, I here.” before stepping back into the circle. There are a huge number of variations that display the level of comfort the students have and their own relationships, in that moment, to authority and power. From humor, to rebellion, to simple and calm confidence to participate without changing the exercise or words – their actions speak loudly to the rest of the class as they observe.

Each student will take away their own lessons, insights, and learning from the class. However, one of my stated learning objectives was:

All human interactions are communication in the language of status. Making conscious choices in what you say nonverbally increases your chance of successful leadership.

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On The Margins, Between the Lines: Learning to fail through improv

Richard Cox — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 18:35:13 +0000

Jamie Solomon, Stanford Student

Jamie Soloman, Stanford University

This weekend was the Stanford Improvisors’ (SImps) 20th reunion. I spent the whole weekend doing improv with alumni, getting to know them and hearing them reflect on the role that improv and the ideas behind it have had on their lives. As one alumnus said, “Improv is so much more than improv,” and it has truly affected many of the alumni’s lives in more profound ways than simply being the focus of a group they were part of in college.

In many ways, improv is a philosophy for life, and the tenets behind it can be paradigm-shifting for students in an environment like Stanford’s.

Living at Stanford can be taxing at times because everyone is always running around, there’s so much to do and everyone you know is amazing at everything. Because of this, joining our improv group has been one of the best things that has happened to me at Stanford. It has given me an all-too-brief respite from the Stanford grind — a few days each week in which anything and everything I do is wonderful, there are no standards to measure up to and I get to both fail and embrace my failure. The lessons I’ve learned in Drama 103 and with the SImps can’t help but seep into the rest of my life.

Improv teachers from Stanford deliberately set up environments with as little pressure as possible, which is such a gift to students. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to and you can do no wrong. In practice and class, everyone will sit on one side of the room and a few kids will stand up at a time in front of the group and improvise scenes or play games. If I’m having a bad day and don’t feel like doing anything, I have the ability just to sit on the floor and watch everyone for two hours and laugh.

However, I also know that if I decide to get up and be in a scene, I have full permission to be terrible. Without this understanding, improvisation doesn’t work. When doing improv, you can’t try to be funny and you can’t try to be good. Often, the harder you try to be funny, the less interesting the audience finds your performance. The comedy comes much more frequently from the surprising or bizarre moments, or when there’s a strong grain of truth. Lines delivered to make the audience laugh will often fall flat. Pressuring yourself to try to make a good scene is also almost guaranteed to backfire — doing so inflicts a form of paralysis. If you can only do things that you know ahead of time will be good, then you cease to do anything, and a scene immediately dies.

The only thing to do is embrace the fact that you will fail. Every time you stand up to perform, you accept the possibility that you may be awful, and that it is perfectly okay. You don’t try to be the best improviser; you just try to be average (which, for a Stanford student, is a mind-boggling point of view to take). All you have to do is just show up and do something. Just be present in the scene, listen to others and react. There are no lines to forget. There are no critics in the audience. You can’t do anything wrong because to do good improv, you have to do bad improv.

And at Stanford, this is the most refreshing mindset. It’s one of the things that has kept me sane in the past year. It’s a space where I don’t have to do anything well. I just have to do it, and that alone is enough to bring me joy. So much of the rest of my time is spent stressing out about trying to write a great paper, impressing my professor (especially salient because I’m at the point where letters of recommendation become important) or keeping my grades at the high standard I’ve set for myself. I want to excel in everything else at Stanford. In fact, there have been numerous times where I’ve looked around at all my friends and acquaintances and thought about how much of an underachiever I seem to be — considering that everyone here seemingly spends all their time making the impossible happen. But then I go to SImps practice and am reminded that it’s okay to be average. All I need to do is just show up. I can both look forward to failure and celebrate it.

Jamie didn’t improvise this column. She spent a lot of time writing it! You should reward her with an email to jamiesol “at” stanford “dot” edu.

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Thank you for your reflections about the value of Improv as it applies to life. Please continue to share your thoughts with us.

Reprinted with permission by Jamie from The Stanford Daily.

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AIN – Research and Business Case

Richard Cox — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 02:01:14 +0000

AIN 2011 is the year that many colleagues collectively said Enough!

The History. For many years improv has had a bad name in business. It has been a hard sell, has been limited or diminished to “soft skills”, was limited to ‘just for fun’ teambuilding, and has not accepted by the business world in general. Nevermind the fact that, for years, it has been a key tools that can transform business and organizations to propel them forward to being more innovative, productive, happier, and successful.

Well enough is enough.

The Changing of the Tide. At the AIN 2011 conference several different initiatives were all focused on one thing – making a solid business case with the research and data behind it. Finally we can stop making the case individually with each new client – and address it in the bigger picture as an industry.

What will it look like? It will take many forms from websites, research projects, peer-reviewed journals, academic papers, conference presentations, white papers, and many other ideas. The current holding place of all of the information are a few discussion groups on the AIN website – but this will surely evolve and mature.

Fortunately the tide is already starting to shift and I am seeing improv show up in business media more all the time. That’s just one more case that people are waking up to the benefits that improv brings to organizations.

Do you have research, articles, news, or book references that support the benefits of improv in business?

Let me know in comments below.

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AIN Open Space

Richard Cox — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 08:14:52 +0000

Welcome to the AIN conference, we have no idea what this conference will be about – let’s make it up.

There is a little more too it than that, but that is what this conference is. It is an improvised conference. The participants create deliver and participate in the program but it is made up each day. We all knew ahead of time and people still prepared material to present, but there was no official program schedule created.

The concept is structured and has rules and is called Open Space. It is based on the idea that the best part of many conferences is the coffee breaks where great conversations take place and tries to make the conference all coffee breaks.

It is particularly intriguing for improvisers who love to life in the moment and create on the fly. There can be a slight downside in that it can tend to have a lack of flow in some sessions because the prep work is not there, but it can also be inspirational and capture what is current and interesting to many people.

And, if it’s not good – the law of two feet requires that you get up and leave if you feel like you don’t want to be there anymore. So the social contract of not being rude by leaving the middle is changed. It can be a big relief when it’s just nor for you.

So, would you come to a conference if you knew there was no program?

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Improv Accents in another language

Richard Cox — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 22:31:49 +0000

How many accents can you speak? In how many languages?

I was recently talking with a friend who is a Dutch improviser. Well, actually I talked to almost 200 of them, but this one in particular was in Amsterdam. Being from Holland Dutch is her first language and English falls into the category of not-first language along with a few others. Ahhh Europe, where people speak several languages. Americans are so lucky English is as common as it is, without that we would be stuck.

We started talking about accents in improv and she can do many accents in Dutch, but in English none. It’s an extra level of difficulty to use an accent from one country in a language that is not your first.

Since I am in Spain for a week, with a tiny Spanish vocabulary, I thought I would try to habla Espanol un poco con accent (see how bad my Spanish is?) With lots of thought and practice I could do a few simple phrases with different accents – how good these are, I have no idea.

So dust off your high school language books, use google translate or try in a secondary language you know and do accents from around the world in that other language.

“I’m sorry, I don’t speak English.”

“Where is the bathroom?”

“I would like another beer please”

“I have a pencil. A yellow pencil”

I’m dying to know what people think – so try it and leave a comment about your experience below!

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National Theatersportweekend – improv in the Netherlands

Richard Cox — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 22:32:40 +0000

National Dutch Theatersports Weekend Well, I’m almost recovered from my first National Theatersportweekend in the Holland. For years improv groups from all across the Netherlands have been coming together at the Stayokay in the town of Elst for a weekend of workshops, improv demos, performances, playing games, eating, dancing, almost anything you can think of except… sleeping.

There was an amazing amount of energy from 200 improvisers set free for a weekend of fun and play. Spontaneous chanting, drumming, and several rounds of “the wave” rippled through the dining room at dinner. There was a costume parade for this years theme of “supermarket” that had groups of scanners chasing bar code groups around and bag ladies in plastic bag skirts defended by a super-man character with a cape that I didn’t quite understand – not to mention most of it was in Dutch.

I was an honorary guest of several friends who were improvisers, I just happened to be in Amsterdam that week for work. I’m not exactly sure how I got there, but it was many conversations and slow yes-anding that did it in the end. It started with a short visit after a train trip and ended up being the beginning of a 48 hour adventure that took me to the weekend, staying overnight, a mad early morning trip to the airport and flight home to San Francisco.

And, oh so worth it. So to my Dutch friends -

Dank je Wel. Tot Ziens! And, of course – whatever happens at theatersportweekend, stays at theatersportweekend.

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21st Century Business Skills

Richard Cox — Wed, 25 May 2011 14:21:26 +0000

I’m sitting the of office of Troje, in Amsterdam, where I just had lunch with Henk, Alieke, and Liselotte – all “van Troje”. All of us have used improv with organizations for years in several ways – from Role-play to corporate performance to workshops on change, communication, collaboration, innovation and everything in between.

Improv is a growing buzzword in the business lexicon these days and is being adopted around the world, although Europe has a few years head start on the US right now in our experience. But more articles are showing up in business press including the recent article on CNN.

In education 21st Century Skills are teaching children four primary areas – Creativity and Innovation, Critical Thinking and Problem Solving, Communication, and Collaboration.

These 21st Century principles, mindset, and skills are required for improv and are useful in many places and are the key to the business world as we move into the 21st century. These 21st Century Business Skills have been “discovered” by software developers in the Agile and SCRUM movements, by designers in Design Thinking being used by the Stanford d.school and IDEO to name just a few.

Applied Improv is a rich toolkit for teaching the principles and mindset and give the opportunity to practice the lessons and skills.

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Space Object Objective

Richard Cox — Fri, 20 May 2011 19:13:02 +0000

When you enter a scene look at what your partner is doing and ask:

What’s my role in that activity?
Are we heading for a goal or doing an ongoing task?
What is going on with us while we do that activity?

We know from CROW that objective is an important part of a scene that needs to be established at the beginning. It can help define who you are, where you are and what’s going on. Most of the time objective means “What does your character want?” and the best ones involve the other character “What does your character want from the other character(s)”. Your objective playing poker might be that you want to intimidate the other guy into giving you the information but the improvisers can agree on the space object objective of playing cards together while they talk.

The dialogue should be about the characters, relationships, and story – how often do you talk about the dishes when you do the dishes at home, right?

I think there is also a ‘space object’ objective for the scene that comes in one of two flavors – a mutual goal to be accomplished or an ongoing task that is sustained. Both of these let everyone clearly know how to interact and you can keep that up for the whole scene.

Mutual goal

Just like in our real lives, we engage in activities toward completing an action that is defined. It’s an easy way to start a scene and everyone can get on the same page with trying to complete the activity by the end of the scene, but not earlier. Sure, sometimes you won’t make it, but for the scene you are all on the same page playing your role in accomplishing the goal.

Some examples:

Washing dishes
Folding laundry
Packing a suitcase
Setting up camp
Making the bed

Ongoing Task

We spend our lives talking to people while other things happen, sometimes for hours. These actions can happen for the whole scene and be the backdrop for everything that happens. But it keeps the characters in their world, and adds “life” to them.

Some examples:

Playing cards
Putting together a puzzle
Knitting, sewing
Peeling endless supplies of potatoes in the army

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