How to Use Improv as Part of Your Company's Innovation Strategy

A company without an innovation strategy is dead in the water.

This isn’t hyperbole either; a company that isn’t generating new ideas quickly becomes outpaced by its competitors.

Innovation strategy goes hand in hand with collaboration. While there is value in coming up with ideas individually, this only works as a starting point. True innovation comes from building on each other’s ideas and cultivating a safe creative environment for ideation.

Silicon Valley is a great example of this culture in action, with people from similar disciplines forming creative networks that extend even beyond their companies to create one of the most innovative places in the world in the field of technology.

Improvisers are the masters of innovation strategy. They are constantly in a state of ideation when performing in front of an audience, and offstage they develop new show formats to present to their patrons as a fresh canvas for their craft. In the ever-evolving business world, taking the innovation skills of an improviser and applying them to some popular creation models will give your company a jump start.

Short on time? Head straight to our Key Takeaways at the bottom of this page.

Creating a Balance Between Structure and Improvisation

When thinking in terms of bringing improvisation into your innovation strategy, a common question is how do you find order in the chaos? While it may seem that improvisers are free-wheeling and coming up with ideas free of a structure, this isn’t actually true.

Most improvisers structure their performances using games and formats, giving them the benefit of creative freedom while using a structure for creative direction. Essentially, they give themselves a brief to work within, putting rules in place to make sure that all of the performers onstage are on the same page.

The Harold

The Harold is one of the most common formats that improvisers train with to learn how to best structure their improvisations. While there are some complexities to the Harold, for our purposes in this article we’ll keep it relatively simple:

1. The audience gives the performers a suggestion. This can take many forms, but for this example let’s say the suggestion is a single word.
2. The performers broaden out the suggestion using something called an opening. This can take many forms—for example, one person monologuing inspired by that word, or the whole team having a back-and-forth chat about it—but it always leads to coming up with lots of ideas from that initial one idea. Essentially, it acts as the ideation stage.
3. Using three half-ideas from the opening, the improvisers then create three respective scenes called the ‘first beat’.
4. Each of these three respective scenes are then returned to and built on, in what is called the second beat. In this beat, players refine the comedic ideas that they began developing in the first beat.
5. In the third, and final beat, these scenes are revisited once more. In this beat, the best ideas from the three different scenes are melded together.

‘The Harold’ allows improvisers to create freely during their performance while giving them a structure to work within. This keeps their improvisation focused and purposeful, allowing them to generate a large quantity of ideas at the beginning, refining the most successful ones in the middle, and combining them at the end for a satisfying finale. Some improvisers go even further than this, taking the scenes that were most successful in front of an audience and developing them offstage into sketches and as starting points for larger scripted shows. The American improv theatre ‘Second City’ is probably the most famous example of this, essentially using their improv shows as a research and development process for material to add to their touring sketch shows.

Many innovation methods exist in the business world that follow a similar pattern to that which improvisers use in the Harold:

• Beginning with an abundance of ideas.
• Refining the most promising ideas.
• Testing these ideas.
• Using this information to deliver a result or product.

Let’s look at one of those models now, The Double Diamond.

The Double Diamond

Below is the Design Council’s Double Diamond. This is a model which sums up the creative process across multiple disciplines and acts as a framework for innovation:

© The Design Council

Let’s break this diagram down:

1. Discover: The discovery phase is when we approach the problem from as many perspectives as we can. By gathering insights from various angles, we allow ourselves an abundance of choices in identifying the exact problem we want to try and solve in the ‘Define’ phase.
2. Define: In this phase, we look at the choices created in the ‘Discover’ phase and decide which one is currently the most important and/or practical. We use this stage to define our creative brief.
3. Develop: Here we expand upon our creative brief. Once again, we give ourselves lots of choices for potential solutions to the specific problem we are trying to solve. This should involve a lot of prototyping and testing of our ideas so we can refine our strongest concepts and learn from what is and isn’t working.
4. Deliver: The final phase is when we pick a solution to our creative problem. Here we are thinking in terms of practicalities as we finalise and launch the product in question.

Ideating Like an Improviser

In both The Harold and The Double Diamond innovation strategy models, we have periods of ideation. In a Harold, this is the ‘Opening’, and in the Double Diamond, this is in the ‘Define’ and ‘Develop’ phases. The role of these stages is to ideate, to come up with lots of possible solutions and options that could be developed into an innovative new idea.

Improvisers are fantastic ideators, and as a result are able to generate lots of choices in this stage, as well as build upon those that are inspiring the group. Through a combination of listening attentively to everything, and ‘Yes and-ing’ half-finished concepts, improvisers create an environment where judgement is delayed on promising ideas as they are taking form. They understand that the more choices you give yourselves at this stage, the higher the chances of forming better ideas by the end of the process.

Another way of thinking about this is in terms of divergent thinking. This is a mindset in which we give ourselves options, even if they initially seem unfeasible. We put aside our critical brain and delay our worries about practicality so that we can allow ourselves to think big. Failing to enter this mindset during these periods leaves us with fewer, or no, options to take into the rest of the process. It’s similar to how farmers plant more seeds than they need to, as they know not everything they plant will flower and mature to be harvested later. Likewise, even our most promising initial ideas may not be able to stand up to later scrutiny and fall apart when put into action. By giving ourselves a plethora of options, we increase our chances of coming up with a truly innovative idea that will be able to hold water.

Making Hard Choices Like an Improviser

Our innovation strategy models also share periods of making hard choices. In a Harold, this is when improvisers pick which ideas they will take from the opening into their first beat, and in the Double Diamond, the ‘Define’ and ‘Deliver’ phases both require decision making. These are the stages of the innovation process in which we bring back our critical faculties and we put our most promising ideas to the test.

During these phases, we are approaching our potential solutions honestly, using our own experiences and respective points of view to judge these ideas without bias. That is to say, we pick the best ideas regardless of who the originator was.

It would be a misunderstanding to think that good improvisers blindly say ‘yes’ during this period; instead, they think about what would be the best course of action for the group. Using their own expertise and experience, they decide what ideas are most promising from the opening and then actively test them in front of their live audience. As their performance continues, the improvisers listen intently for feedback from their audience. They ask themselves what is working and what isn’t. Towards the end of their performance, the best improvisers continue to use the most successful elements of their show and softly disregard ideas that are no longer relevant or aren’t receiving a response from their audience. While we are using The Harold as an example, this is a common trait found in all the best improv performances.

Although in a different medium, successful innovation strategy models follow the same philosophy. We take the strongest ideas based on our own expertise and experience and put them to the test. For businesses, this takes the form of a critical discussion and then the trialling of ideas.

By reintroducing a critical mindset, we move out of divergent thinking and into its opposite: convergent thinking. Without engaging with this part of the process, we cannot refine our ideas. Through convergent thinking, we can ground and analyse our concepts to see what stands under pressure. We listen to feedback from our colleagues and likewise give our honest, constructive feedback on all the ideas that are on the table. By doing this, we can take the strongest ideas forward, prototyping them and putting them into real-world scenarios to see what works and what doesn’t.  We learn from what isn’t working, and we develop what is.

Honesty is pivotal at this stage. We have to remove our own ego from the equation in order to be honest about what’s working and what isn’t. The best innovators pick the idea or ideas that are most beneficial to the group. That means avoiding putting your own ideas on a pedestal, or giving undue prominence to the ideas coming from senior members of the team. Ideas are judged on their own merit with the goal of success for the group rather than the individual.

In improv, once an idea has been decided upon by the team, everyone fully commits and contributes to the development of the concept as if it was their own, pulling together as a team. The same must be done when innovating as a company. Clinging onto previous ideas doesn’t just slow down the process of your innovation strategy; it kills it. It means we’re not focusing on the common goal anymore as we try to keep pulling from our own brainchild.

Key Takeaways

• Structured Creativity: Improvisation operates within a structured framework such as The Harold to guide and focus creativity. This structured approach is mirrored in innovation models like The Double Diamond. Some structure ensures more productive ideation processes for businesses, allowing space for creative ‘big thinking’ as well as more critical refinement processes.
• Collaborative Ideation: Improvisers ideate well by delaying judgement and building on each other’s ideas in real-time. Businesses can benefit from fostering a similarly collaborative ideation environment where team members are encouraged to contribute their ideas equally, without any hierarchy.
• Divergent Thinking: Generating a wide array of ideas in the initial stages of innovation, thanks to delaying judgement and working collaboratively, increases the likelihood of finding truly innovative solutions because it expands your pool of potential ideas and solutions.
• Convergent Thinking: After generating multiple ideas, improvisers use critical thinking and their own experiences and expertise to refine what ideas they take forward. Businesses must engage in the same convergent thinking. This involves critically evaluating and testing ideas to identify and develop the most promising ones.
• Commitment and Adaptability: The final stage of successful innovation requires a team to commit fully to their chosen idea whilst maintaining the flexibility to adapt it based on feedback. This ensures the innovative idea is developed to its fullest potential.

By embracing the structured creativity of improv with its principles of collaborative ideation, divergent thinking, convergent thinking, commitment to ideas, and adaptability, businesses can enhance their ideation process, refine their most promising ideas, and ultimately deliver more innovative solutions. Practising two of the key improv skills—listening and ‘Yes, and-ing’—as part of your company’s ideation process will also lead to a more resilient and innovative company culture.

You can read about what some of Hoopla’s facilitators had to say about the topic of ‘Women in Innovation’ here.

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