The art of improvisation and the world of business are two things you might not imagine mixing, but investing in learning some key improv skills can be a hugely powerful catalyst for change within businesses.
We sat down with some of our best ‘Improv for Business’ facilitators to unpack the ways that this spontaneous performance style can benefit corporate culture. Through their insights, we explore how improv can reshape teamwork, spark innovation, and cultivate a thriving, empathetic work environment.
Whether it’s managing the discomfort of failure or unlocking hidden creative potential, these interviews highlight the profound impact of improv on the workplace.
Join us as we navigate the surprising intersections of improv and business, and uncover how these playful, yet sage techniques can lead to a more innovative, cohesive, and empathetic workplace.
What’s improv’s potential role in a company?
Steve: At a surface level business is made up of numbers and finance. However if we go deeper, business is actually made up of people working together. Improv helps you focus back on the people.
In a successful business, it’s impossible not to focus on the people. If you study management or leadership, it’s actually an investigation of how we deal with people. It’s ever changing, it’s never fixed and it’s more of an art than a science. It’s impossible to separate emotions from work, we don’t just become robots the second we’re in an office.
Katy: I think there’s a lot to be said for support and looking out for each other. A team is obviously stronger if everyone’s working together for the same or similar goals, rather than being really competitive with each other. Being competitive might seem like a good idea in the short term but it doesn’t create a pleasant environment to work in for the long term.
Max: It’s common to hear companies throw around clichés such as ‘teamwork makes the dream work’ and name checking buzzwords such as ‘collaboration’. But improv doesn’t consider these as abstract terms for ticking boxes. What improv does is break everything down into specific and applicable behaviours so that people can actually change the way they work.
For example, people often consider themselves to be good listeners. However, after taking an improv workshop they realise that actually they aren’t a good listener at all! By being specific to the best practices of collaboration and looking at them as individual teachable behaviours, people can identify their weaknesses and actively improve.
Why should teams undertake improv for business training?
Steve: Improv allows us to practise skills that you read about in any leadership or management book. These are skills that we don’t often get the opportunity to practise. Listening is one of the biggest of those skills. The ability to listen to your staff is of vital importance but most of the time you never really get to practise it. This means you won’t be listening as well as you could be and won’t be as empathetic as you could be, creating large gaps in your communication skills. Not only do we give you improv techniques for business, we also give you a chance to experience and practice in a safe place. We give you real human skills that are going to benefit you and your company.
Katy: While I think there’s lots of reasons, I think the ability to be present is really important so that companies actually listen to their customers. There is also the added value that colleagues will be more present in listening to each other for the purposes of team work.
Maria: Improv allows us to create an atmosphere of no judgement which is exceptionally valuable if we want a team to generate new ideas. This comes from the improvisers attitude towards making mistakes. As opposed to judging and stigmatising mistakes, we use them as opportunities for growth.
You can’t make any progress without making mistakes along the way. If you’re not making mistakes and moving out of your comfort zone you’ll never achieve any real success.
Amy: I think often businesses come to improv because they are keen to unlock creative potential in their staff.
Improv unlocks this creative potential as it is a very levelling activity. Everyone is equal when doing an improv workshop and everyone can take part. It’s a quick and easy way to allow for a change in attitudes and behaviour.
An aspect of improv I use to help to establish this environment is the technique of ‘yes and’. It’s about embracing the opportunity to have no blocks when offering suggestions and delaying our own judgement on creative suggestions. It creates a space where people are able to make brave decisions and not feel judged. It allows people to take risks and therefore unlocks the hidden creative potential of their staff.
What’s the most valuable improv technique for business?
Max: Improv teaches you that the best way to solve a difficult problem is to start.
While this seems like an obvious thing to say, in the real world people don’t follow that advice. Rather than start, most people plan extensively. Of course planning can be useful but only if you know exactly what the solution will look like. When we’ve got complex problems to solve, it’s impossible to know what the solution will look like so we need to prototype quickly.
Let’s say that you were a website designer and you wanted to create a site for a window cleaning company. You don’t know what the end product will look like at the beginning of the process. Instead you need to build something first to show the client so that you can learn based on feedback and your own experience of building it. You can gain a lot more from the improvisers philosophy of building a prototype and testing it, rather than sitting on a problem and planning it to death.
Susan: ‘Yes and’ is really useful. I think the idea of delaying judgement is brilliant for anyone in any kind of business or any kind of discussion, particularly when addressing a creative brief. To clarify, that doesn’t mean we have to say yes to everything but rather to explore an idea fully before discarding it.
If you immediately judge something, then you end up discounting loads of potential ideas that could blossom into something amazing. Immediate judgement also shuts down peoples’ ideas, which damages morale and discourages collaboration.
Steve: Improv gives you the ability to listen to and expand on ideas, essentially creating a culture of innovation. In business, sometimes people can have a tendency to devalue ideas. Well, what’s an iPhone? It’s just an idea that’s been carried out to its completion. Anything that ever makes money, has to come from an initial idea first. So if you’re closing down ideas, and you’re not even hearing ideas from your team, there’s potentially a huge amount of revenue going right there and then.
By listening and expanding on ideas, we create an environment where people feel like part of a team. Toxic environments come about in places where people don’t feel valued and listened to. Consequently, this makes people leave which will mean a business will constantly have to train new staff. It also causes competitiveness, people end up fighting for a position or just look out for themselves. Whereas in improv, people are going to want to be there. They like each other and they’re going to want to work with each other.
For me, improv is where people can experience pure positive and productive teamwork. If teamwork isn’t valuable for business, then why employ people? For me; and maybe this is just common sense, if you’re not listening to your staff then why have them, especially if their role is generating ideas? If you’re not listening to each other, then we’re just spending money on people who are in isolation chambers. But when you have extreme listening and collaboration, that’s when you can really work as a cohesive team.
What’s the relationship between mistakes and innovation?
Maria: When we’re innovating, we’re going through uncharted waters and finding new things out. Because we’re in unfamiliar territory, mistakes will be inevitable. Companies shy away from the idea of making mistakes and yet if you asked a company if they wanted to be more innovative, which company would say no to that? If you want to innovate, be prepared to fail a lot but you’ll also end up learning a lot too.
Innovation doesn’t just have to aim towards coming up with the next big idea, it can also mean we reevaluate our day to day operations. For example, looking at our own processes such as ‘How can we be more efficient with X,Y or Z tasks?’. This is a very direct link towards the tangible goal of increasing our profits.
Susan: The whole mindset of improv is creating a supportive atmosphere, forgiving each other immediately for mistakes that are made in a low stakes environment. It encourages a place where innovation can happen because you’re prepared to forgive yourself and others for the first outline or draft of an idea (which is never perfect). Whereas, if you’re creating an atmosphere where people are under pressure or being judged immediately, then it’s much harder to take those risks and get a foothold on an idea.
Max: Improv allows us to practise being out of your comfort zone. I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily being comfortable with being uncomfortable, or being in a constant state of terror or happiness, it’s about being somewhere in between. Business Improv training is about: what is my attitude when things go wrong?
Our society’s narrative behind mistakes say that they are shameful, show stopping disasters. However mistakes are always part of the process when running a company, they are unavoidable. Improv teaches us to learn from our mistakes and pivot off of them rather than be paralysed by them. It teaches us creative agility, and that is key to innovation.
Why is creativity useful in business?
Katy: I think creativity is useful regardless of whether that’s your specific role in a company. Being creative means that people are prepared to entertain possibilities, they’re ready to take on board someone else’s idea and run with it. A lot of ideas in business are stopped very quickly due to the knee-jerk ‘no’ reaction to things. Having a much more creative ‘Yes, and’ improv mindset can lead to some really innovative ideas.
Monica: It would be rare to be in a situation where you are offering a service or a product that other companies are not already offering. So how do you separate yourself from the competition? Creativity allows you to unlock new avenues and approaches so that you’re not simply a rehash of something that already exists. Being more creative also puts you in a situation where you are trying new things, fostering a culture of people who are willing to learn and pivot off of new information.
Why is empathy important to businesses?
Steve: Everyone’s different. If you academically study topics such as motivation in a team and what it is that motivates someone to be in a job, there is no set answer to that. There’s loads of theories but the actual answer is different for every single person. Everyone has a different context and background. If you are able to listen and have empathy with a person, it gives you a greater understanding of where they’re coming from. It also means you can pick up on the times when co-workers are telling you one thing but deep down they’re trying to tell you something else. Often buried in a two page email is a message that is difficult to say directly such as ‘I feel undervalued’. Empathy and real listening allows you to pick up on that.
How do the principles of improv make work cultures more inclusive?
Monica: First of all, ‘Yes, and’ requires inclusion to work in the first place! ‘Yes, and’ means that we are delaying any initial judgement on ideas and instead we accept and build. ‘Yes, and’ allows us to equal the status of everyone in the room, anyone who wants to join in with the process gets to have their say.
Another improv tenant that is valuable for inclusion is listening. If you’re really listening to someone, it makes them feel included. To go deeper than that, listening makes sure we are engaging with that person and it means our response will be directly inspired by any communication offers that they are giving us.
Listening is also a fantastic tool for countering any preconceptions we have about someone. For example, we could look at a person’s background or whatever their job is and jump to conclusions about what they are like and who they are as a person. However if we replace this with active listening and focusing on that person rather than our own preconceptions, it means we no longer make these potentially damaging and incorrect judgements.
What is the most common challenge you encounter in corporate workshops?
Katy: The most common challenge I encounter is discomfort with failure, despite it being necessary to any creative process. While people understand this as a principle, they often have a difficult time embodying it.
I use a series of exercises designed for failure; things that are difficult to do but not of high-importance. We look at the ways in which our bodies and brains react against the discomfort of failure and start to program a healthy relationship with it, replacing fear with enjoyment and acceptance.
Steve: People feeling safe to share ideas. For a lot of people there’s a significant difference between freely saying an idea in your work life and your private life.
Say you’re a couple of beers in with a friend and they say to you, “I’m thinking of doing this with my life…”, you can reply, “Let’s have a chat and bounce ideas around”. It feels like a safe and low risk environment to share a big idea. Whereas in a workplace, it sometimes feels like there’s a risk to saying an idea, due to fear of judgement. There can be a fear of “How will this affect my career?”.
So in our corporate workshops it’s not just about teaching employees to say their ideas, but also about teaching the leaders to create a space where people feel able to share ideas. It’s about establishing psychological safety so that you can really hear from each member of the team. When you do that, the risk just goes.
What is the most frequent communication mistake in the business world?
Amy: I think poor listening is at the root of a lot of mistakes and accounts for poor team work and poor team sales. The competitive business environment makes people keen to be the one to be seen as smart, clever, fast, intelligent, alpha or whatever. It often means people predict, or think they know, what you’re saying because they’ve already jumped ahead to their own conclusion while pushing their own agenda. This means you’re not really working together as a group because it’s about what each person wants to say rather than what the group is building.
This was successfully handled in a previous business I worked in where interruptions were really frowned upon. Unfortunately this is not the case in all organisations. A step forward for these companies would be establishing some sort of courtesy where people were able to finish their ideas and thoughts before everyone else jumps in. I’m certainly not saying that every idea we come up with will be perfect but a space in which every idea is welcomed is useful. It allows us more choices when sifting through suggestions and we can then pick what fits and what’s relevant to the conversation.
Steve: If you ever feel angry or upset when something bad has happened at your company, don’t respond via email or text, just speak to them directly. There’s always another side to the story.
Sometimes when managing a group of people, you hear rumours that staff aren’t delivering or underperforming. There’s a managerial instinct of wanting to react immediately and fix what that person is doing. In actual fact you need to step back and immerse yourself in that person’s world. They’re usually doing a lot of work that no one even knows about and that they receive no credit for. Speak to them. I know that sounds obvious but after talking the problem always seems less huge.
If I’m going to have a difficult conversation, I use the technique of drawing a stick person of myself, the person I want to talk to, and a third person that I respect and admire. You write what you want to say, such as “I want you to ****ing do this”. Next you imagine the person you want to talk to, try to come at it from their point of view, and write down what you observe from that. Then you move onto the third person and from their perspective you write down how you should have this conversation.
Based on this method you can decide what you’re actually going to say after looking at all three of the different points of view. Sometimes there is a need to assert yourself and be non-negotiable, but at other times you can see things from a different perspective and it will change the way you approach the conversation.
In a nutshell, it comes down to directly talking about any issues, and having empathy. For people who are more structural or project driven, it’s a system that forces you to have more compassion and empathy as a leader. For me it helps to have those checkpoints.
What is your favourite improv quote and why?
Katy: “Hold on tightly, let go lightly” – Anonymous
In an improv performance this manifests as “I have this amazing idea, I’m going to do it, it’s going to be brilliant.” Then you get on stage and you find that the idea isn’t going to fit with what the other person has said or done. You’ve come on stage with a strong plan but now knowing that it doesn’t fit, you change your attitude to “My idea no longer works, I’ll just throw it away and instead I’m going to work with what’s in front of me.” I think that works in any team based environment.
If you’re trying to push an agenda; say it’s sales for example, it’s common to go into a meeting with a client and be like “I really want to sell X”. However if they’re telling you the problem for them is a different problem than the one you’ve come in with, then let go of your agenda lightly. Don’t worry about what you came here to sell. Ask yourself: what do they need? It might be different from what they wanted but there’s still a client there and they need you.
Amy: “Make your partner look great” – Patti Styles
What Styles means by that is: improv is a team game, it’s not a competitive sport. It’s about making the team look amazing and that means making your team players’ suggestions look brilliant.
What can you add to make the light shine brighter on their idea or suggestion? The focus is on the other person, not yourself. As soon as you take the pressure off yourself and focus on someone else, it means your own performance is likely to be much better too.
Susan: “Don’t bring a cathedral into a scene, bring a brick and let’s build it together” – Del Close
I love this quote because I think it sums up everything about improvisation. You’re never on your own. You’re always building something together, the responsibility is never on one person. So that allows you to take greater risks and the end result will be completely unexpected and way more interesting than if it was just one person.
Steve: “Accelerate your rate of failure” – Keith Johnstone.
This came from Johnstone’s own observations of becoming better at drawing faces. He initially struggled and after a couple of unsuccessful attempts, he came to the conclusion that he wasn’t very good at it. While working as a school teacher, he observed children drawing faces. Keith noticed that before the children judged their own ability, they would just draw endlessly and keep trying to get better.
Seeing that they were much better at drawing than he was, Keith took on the same attitude as these children. He decided that his goal was to draw a thousand faces. There was a great deal of failure with large peaks and troughs of quality along the way. However, by the time Keith got to a thousand faces, he had become pretty good at drawing.
When I first got into improv I thought I’d apply this same attitude: “I’m not going to do one improv show, I’m going to do a thousand”. It meant that the first dud show I did gave me an attitude of “I learned from this” rather than “This is game over”. I think this philosophy gives people that same persistence and tenacity.
Remember that you’re not deliberately trying to fail, I think people often misinterpret that point. We’re still trying to put on a good artistic endeavour or trying to run a successful company but you accept the fact that you’re not always going to get it right. Whereas, if we’re too timid we’re not going to grow. If it takes a thousand mistakes to make a good company, you’d better make the first 500 mistakes pretty quickly. It’s an iterative process to get things going and it’s quite liberating. It takes the pressure off and it means you can go for it like a legend.
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