Improvisation: Transforming a Secret Fear into a Secret Weapon

I’m an operations guy. I spend a lot of time thinking about process—how we can get from where we are to where we want to be as quickly and efficiently as possible. In normal times, it’s a fairly simple formula: make a plan, put it into action, measure results, implement improvements, and repeat as needed.

But I also recognize that there can be a downside to process. Once you establish a route between point A and point B, the path starts getting well-worn and you risk falling into habit. You might feel like you can stop exploring—and that closes your mind to new ways of getting where you’re going. This introduces risk: what happens when you hit a roadblock?

The San Francisco Fed hit a big roadblock this time last year. We pride ourselves on being a community-engaged bank. And at the beginning of 2020, we had a lot of engagement planned. Meetings, roundtables, conferences, convenings… you name it, it was probably on our calendars.

Then the first stay-at-home orders hit in March. Events were canceled. Our calendars cleared. Travel was grounded. And we found ourselves facing a question we never anticipated: how can we be a community-engaged bank when it’s dangerous to engage with our community?

We found the answer in our next pandemic superpower: improvisation. Improvisation is the ultimate routine-breaker. When the universe hands you a new set of circumstances, it forces you to take inventory and assess what’s possible. How you’ve always done things suddenly doesn’t matter so much anymore.

When we assessed the new set of circumstances that 2020 handed us, we quickly realized that we were too set on equating our community engagement goals with being face-to-face. So we started asking ourselves: what’s the true goal of our engagement?

The answer was clear: listening. Understanding what’s happening in the diverse communities we serve, and how those learnings should inform our policies and actions. We didn’t need to be in-person to do that. In fact, because everyone else was grounded at the same time, it could even be easier to schedule and organize connections than ever before. 

So we changed our approach. We launched a series of fully virtual events that could be opened up to bigger audiences than we’d ever be able to fit in a meeting room. We scheduled individual and small group phone calls, allowing us to have more meaningful and in-depth conversations than would be possible at a large event. Some of our most distant constituents, like the Alaskan Native community, felt closer than ever before. And the end result was clear: we were more community-engaged in 2020 than we would have been before the pandemic.

Of course, the San Francisco Fed is hardly alone in this. Everyone became an expert improviser in 2020, whether by pivoting to remote learning, working from home, or reinventing business models. This is a superpower that can be honed and leveraged moving forward—if we’re brave enough to make it part of our regular practice at work.

The truth is, improvisation can be a little scary when it’s not absolutely required—like walking a high wire without a safety net. But the payoff can be huge, because a nimble mindset creates nimble organizations. So here’s the challenge: where will you embrace improvisation to improve the agility of your team this year? 

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I’m sharing the hidden superpowers I’ve noticed and how they have the potential to create better leaders and more effective organizations. My hope is that this will inspire you to think differently about 2020—and the unexpected abilities you have coming out of it.

Stay tuned for the next installment of the Pandemic Superpower Series. Until then, what’s been your best moment of improvisation since the pandemic began?