Applying Theater/Improv at Work

I’ve been in the Bay Area working in technology for nearly 20 years now, but in the first five years out of college, I was in New York doing theater. It was an amazing time and still foundational to who I am and how I work. I learned how to bring a group of people from different backgrounds and with different perspectives together to create and deliver a cohesive project.

The work I do in the tech world has the same fundamental premise. People with different roles and different temperaments and personalities have to work together to deliver something unified. Product managers and designers are different from technologists. Some engineers are strictly analytical and others are more creative thinkers.

We all work with people who think in very different ways on a spectrum ranging from purely instinct driven to highly analytical. Harvard Business Review recently published an article about how teams solve problems faster when they’re more cognitively diverse. The article provides a compelling argument for why you want to be aware of and help balance cognitive diversity on teams.

“Intuitively, this makes sense. Tackling new challenges requires a balance between applying what we know and discovering what we don’t know that might be useful. It also requires individual application of specialized expertise and the ability to step back and look at the bigger picture.” https://hbr.org/2017/03/teams-solve-problems-faster-when-theyre-more-cognitively-diverse

Given the benefit of cognitive diversity, what if you have a team overloaded with analytical thinkers? How can you shake things up without re-stacking the team or hiring new people? There are ways to train our brains to think more creatively and be more adaptable to change. At my last company, we embarked on a grand experiment a few years ago. As an organization, we’d lost some of the elastic thinking required for more creative experimentation. Our CEO had the vision to try improv training as a way to unlock our brains. Working with Sue Walden and ImprovWorks in San Francisco, we set out to train the entire organization using improv techniques to see if we could unlock creativity.

This type of training is not about learning how to be funny (a common misperception), but about learning how to move into the unknown, being open to new possibilities, expanding our thinking beyond what we’ve done before and feels safe. You can absolutely accelerate your own and your team’s creative thinking and collaboration skills through this kind of training.

A small handful of people were excited about this idea, but everyone else absolutely hated it or was downright terrified. And I’ll be honest, not everything we tried was successful and not everyone was on board, but there were a few very impactful changes.

One major example is how we retrained everyone, especially the executive team, to stop shutting down new ideas before they had a chance to succeed. To do this, we needed to shift from saying ‘but…’ to ‘yes, and’. Think about that for a second. How many times does someone come to you with an idea and your first thoughts are how it won’t work. You start with ‘but,’ and go on to explain all the problems with the idea.

There’s a reason we do this when offered a new idea - we are using the analytical side of our brains. It makes sense. We are assessing an idea and so we analyze it. But in terms of fostering new ideas, this is a terrible response! Instead of exploring new opportunities, thinking about what won’t work shuts down creativity. Instead, you can train yourself and your brain to respond creatively and collaboratively using this very simple ‘yes, and’ technique. By accepting an idea and adding to it, you begin to refine and develop something new.

That one tactic - which takes a significant amount of practice to take hold, can be game changing. Even people who thought the improv training at work was not useful, I’d notice many of them still using the ‘yes, and’ technique years later. For a great read on the power of saying Yes and how creative thinking can help you survive the corporate workplace, check out the book Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon MacKenzie. I read this book years ago and the stories in it continue to inspire me.

Thinking again about cognitive diversity, there is an exercise Sue Walden taught me that I still use to help teams ‘wake up’ their brains before an idea generation exercise. I ask everyone to simply walk around pointing at objects and instead of saying what it is, say the last thing they pointed at. It’s harder than it sounds - especially with a group of people walking around you doing the same thing. Taking it further, we do the same exercise but now point at objects and call out anything but what you’re actually looking at. You point at a chair but say “lemon” out loud, for example. It’s harder than it sounds. You are actually rewiring your brain, making it break long-held assumptions.

At the end of a few minutes of this, if you ask the group to stand still and close their eyes and pay attention to their bodies. People smile. They talk about how weird they feel. Their brains are literally buzzing and they feel changed. Jumping from these exercises into brainstorming groups is exciting. Paired with knowledge of how to effectively use ‘yes, and’ to build on ideas, teams can generate breakthrough thinking beyond what would have been capable in a regular conference room session.

I know that a lot of people would hesitate to bring improv training onsite and try this out. But I’m a big believer in trying new things to shake yourself out of a rut. I can attest to the value of this kind of experiment. Looking at a situation from a different perspective can be very freeing and lead to breakthrough thinking. This type of work lays the foundation for new paths into creative thinking and builds muscle memory around learning to move your thinking from analytical to creative.

If you’ve done this type of work, I’d love to hear how it worked for you. Or if you’re interested in learning more, I’d be happy to connect and share my experience.

And if you're ready to give improv a try, Sue Walden is a gentle, friendly guide into the world of improv and how to effectively use it improve your adaptability. If you’re interested in learning more and giving improv training a try, I recommend her as a trainer. She’s teaching a day long workshop on May 4 in San Francisco that will be a great introduction to this type of work: https://improvworks.org/bendablebrain/.