Improvisation isn’t just about quick wit and spontaneous performances; it’s a transformative skill that can go beyond the stage, bringing profound benefits to everyday life and workplaces.
Improv contains many useful lessons and skills that can help you:
- Be more creative
- Listen better
- Become more mentally agile
- Improve spontaneity
- Enhance collaboration
- Embrace failure and learn from it
We spoke to Max, one of the founders of Hoopla Business, about his improv journey. From attending a drop-in class run by his future business partner, Steve Roe, to falling in love with the improv mindset, Max’s experience highlights the unexpected ways in which improvisation can change lives.
In this interview, Max shares insights into the principles of improv and its powerful applications in the workplace. Whether you’re a sceptic when it comes to “arty-farty” activities, or a believer in their transformative power, Max’s story is sure to enlighten and inspire.
Short on time? Head straight to our Key Takeaways from the Interview at the bottom of this page.
How would you define improvisation?
On a very simple level, improvisation is acting without a script. Many people would normally associate improvisation with being on stage – playing jazz or improvising comedy theatre. But we act without a script in life all the time.
How did you get into improv?
I came into it for two reasons. So at the time, I was a professional stand-up comedian. And a big part of that job is you have to often do a role in clubs, which is emceeing or hosting, so normally within that you deliver some material, but you have to do a lot of crowd work and be very in the moment and spontaneous and I just wanted to learn some skills around that. But that, for me, was almost the kind of rational intellectual cover story for what I realised in hindsight, as I wrote my book, was a much deeper, emotional need, which was around being confident, but being confident without having control, which I think is such a lovely thing to have in life. And I think confidence might even be the wrong word. I think it’s freedom from your critical internal monologue, freedom from the need to please others, freedom from fear. And so those were the two things I wanted to get out of improv. So I attended a drop in class that I found online. That was run by Steve Roe, who later became my business partner! And the more I did it the more I fell in love with it. I thought, “this is absolutely transformational”.
And it’s interesting, because I can see how it’s easy to be cynical about improv. To be honest, I’m intuitively that guy. I’m a bit suspicious of ‘Arty-Farty, Flim Flam’ things, not in a closed-minded way, rather that I take a more rational perspective. And I came to improv expecting to hate it, but I was blown away, and by the end I was absolutely in love with it. It really has changed my life. And as I’ve worked with other people I’ve seen how it’s changed their lives too. How they’ve used the concepts and ideas from improv to change theirs. And that’s what my book is about really, it’s sharing these concepts and applying them to the stuff we do every day
How do you think improvisation can help in the workplace? How can it really help businesses as a whole, and people more generally in their work?
I think improv is all about your relationship with change. It’s a way of practising dealing with change. On a day to day basis, when a change happens, we go through a loop. First, we have to notice the change, and that seems quite easy but actually, it’s really hard. Often we bring cognitive biases with us, and we don’t have very well developed listening skills. So we have to work to actively notice the change. Next, we have to respond to it. We have to let go of our existing plan and surrender control, which again can be pretty difficult. Often we’ll have some cost to letting go of the existing plan: whether that be energy, our own ego, or money and resources. The final part of the letting go process is about reframing it, and making a new decision based on the change. Once you act on that decision you are back at the start of that loop. And that’s what improv is all about really. It’s about allowing ourselves to be changed by our scene partner’s offer. To accept it and then build off it to make it work, even if the offer is not something we were expecting. And that ability to adapt to change, to employ creative agility, is a crucial tool for every business. Improv is all about making choices with limited amounts of information. Which can be uncomfortable when we like to plan and know exactly what’s going to happen. But by practising that skill, of making lots of new choices quickly, through improv, we get much better at it. At being flexible, adaptable and agile. And that’s a really useful tool for businesses, and for individuals to have at work in general.
On top of that improv is a brilliant tool for learning the art of really attentive listening. It requires a deeper level of listening, where you really allow what others are saying to land and influence you. And that ability to listen attentively is a very valuable quality for not only brilliant leadership but also more effective, innovative brainstorming sessions.
People usually think they listen well, but then when you put them through a series of exercises in one of our improv workshops and they realise, “oh, wow, I really don’t listen attentively at all”.
There’s such a difference between thinking that you’re listening, and the sense of being deeply present in the moment when you are truly listening in improv, isn’t there?
Yeah, the way improvisers talk about listening is a little bit different to how we tend to talk about it in business and in life. Lots of people have gone on active listening courses at work, which focus on how you behave when the other person is speaking. A lot of it is about nodding and making the ‘right’ faces, maybe repeating certain phrases back. But really, how do you know someone has genuinely listened to you? When you see what they do with what you’ve said. So in improv we define listening as the willingness to be changed. That means when I’m truly listening your words should land on me, and impact what I say next. Not only does that create stronger rapport between me and you, but it allows us to co-create ideas together, and at a greater level of connection than we’d get to without it.
And I think that, for me, is why improv is so simple yet complex. Because it’s not just about the skill of listening, it’s also about the emotional blockers we bring that stop us from really doing it. What are the patterns we have that mean we get in our own way of really listening? For example, we aren’t truly listening because we’re bringing ego to it; we want to make sure the other person knows that we know what we’re talking about. Or we bring fear, so we’re worried we’re not going to get through what we want to say, or that we’re losing control of the conversation. And if we can become aware of those emotional blockers in our interactions, it frees us up to behave and act with more spontaneity.
I might throw something else in here. I haven’t haven’t spoken about this in an interview before, but I’ve started having therapy. Initially I started doing it as part of another project I’m involved in at the moment. I did it in quite an archetypical blokey way, you know, for a project, not because I needed it… And I thought I’d be doing it for about six weeks, but I’ve done it for four or five months now. And what I’ve realised is what therapists do is help people identify their patterns. Patterns we’re not even aware we’re repeating, or how ineffective they are. And I feel like in a similar, more every day way, improv helps you to become aware of your patterns in terms of how you’re responding to others.
And, as my therapist put it, with awareness comes choice. If you’re not aware of the patterns, you have no choice and you can’t change your behaviour. That’s a really inspiring, empowering idea. And I think it’s so useful.
And we can apply it to how we listen. Communication is really hard, but sometimes, when we’re talking past each other, we don’t call it out. If we can bring a little more awareness to the conversation then perhaps we can acknowledge, “Hey, I think we’re talking past each other here”. It doesn’t have to be done in a heavy way, say it with a smile and give yourselves the chance to reset. Often, when I’ve had terrible conversations it’s because I haven’t called out what’s going on. Sometimes just labelling it is half the battle and if we call it out we can come back to a more attentive way of listening.
One of the core improv principles we haven’t explicitly mentioned is ‘Yes, and’. Do you want to explain what it is, and how it works in business?
Sure. So, ‘Yes, and’ is sort of the big underlying idea of most improvisation. It’s a simple concept that allows improvisers on stage to build scenes very quickly. It’s based on the premise that if I say something, say a line, you accept the idea and then you add something to it. So if I say, for example, “Ah you’ve delivered me the milk”, then you, as my scene partner, would respond with something like, “Yes, I delivered you the milk and I’ve thrown in a little treat for you there on the side, just for free, winky face”. So I’ve accepted the milk idea, and I’ve added something to it, and now we’ve got a situation which we can build on. This principle helps us to be very effective in building scenes when we haven’t got anything planned at all.
Offstage, this is also a really useful skill when you’re trying to create an abundance of ideas to find an innovative solution. ‘Yes, and’ is a great mindset to bring into a brainstorming session or a meeting if you want to generate lots of ideas. Accepting and building off others’ ideas in the business world can often be anathema to a lot of people though, because people bring status into the room. They bring expertise and with that a tendency to criticise and shoot down ideas before they’ve had a chance to really flesh. Not only does this mean that fresh new ideas get killed before we’ve developed them enough to see if they’ve got legs, it also means we create an emotional culture in the room where people don’t want to pitch their ideas. And the outcome of this is that we’re discarding a lot of ideas and being less creative.
And it can seem a bit flimsy: how does that one interaction make a difference? But cultures are built through these minor interactions and when you add them all together, well that’s the culture of a place.
And again, it’s about self awareness. It’s about asking “Why are we saying no to ideas?”. Often we’re saying no as an unconscious reaction to uncertainty, or because we’re bringing old habits from what we’ve done before, or we’re afraid of risk… Keith Johnston, one of the pioneers of improvisation in the UK, says “There are people who prefer to say yes, and there are people who prefer to say no. Those who say yes, are rewarded by the adventures they have, and those that say no are rewarded by the safety they attain”. I really love that quote.
And it’s important to remember that saying yes to an idea doesn’t mean dropping our point of view. We’re dropping our agenda so we can co-create on the same page, but we’re not dropping our perspective.
Is there any practical advice you can offer for people wanting to practise ‘Yes, and’ within their business? Say for a brainstorming session or an ideation process?
I think a very simple thing you can do is to lay out clearly what you are expecting of people in a meeting. So being clear about what the problem you’re trying to solve is, and that you’re going to spend 20 minutes in ‘Yes, and’ mode where you’re going to try and come up with as many ideas as possible – that we’re actually going for quantity over quality. Then, at the end of that 20 minutes, that’s when we’re going to be much more critical. We’re going to pick the top three answers and really look at how we develop these.
By communicating that really clearly to your team, then the more analytical, critical minded people can relax and think to themselves “Okay, I’m going to get my chance to be more analytical and data driven later, so I can go all in on this ‘Yes, and’ approach first”.
It’s about communicating the separate phases of the brainstorming or ideation process, and letting people know that it’s okay to throw out any ideas in that first, initial ‘Yes, and’ phase.
Another exercise you could try in your team at work is to set a brief with a tight deadline, and give everyone a target number of solutions/ideas to come up with in that tight deadline. For example 50 ideas in five minutes. What the deadline does is it shuts people’s inner critic up, because they’ve got to get a particular job done in a certain amount of time, so they haven’t got time to overthink it or criticise themselves. After the five minutes everyone gets to bring in the more critical side of their brain and pick their top three ideas. And what’s interesting is, typically, your top three ideas are never within your first 25 ideas. But when I do this exercise with corporate teams in our workshops I ask them, “How often are you writing down more than 20 solutions for a problem when brainstorming?”, and they’ll say, “Never because we spent so long on the first three ideas, beating them to death…”. So that’s a simple exercise you could try at the start of a brainstorming meeting to get people into the “Yes, and…” mindset. Or you could also do it as an icebreaker in a meeting as well.
What are your rules for good productivity?
I think productivity is all about doing very simple things with a boring level of consistency. In any sort of creative job it’s not just about talent, that’s a fraction of it, but talent is useless without the very basic discipline of turning up every day for a small amount of time. And it’s linked to the ‘Yes, and’ philosophy: productivity comes from coming up with lots and lots of ideas, and being able to ‘kill your darlings. You come up with double – treble of – what you end up using. That’s the grunt work, and productivity comes from scheduling in time to do that work, in my opinion.
I’ve also got a section in the book called ‘Sweep the Scene’. That title relates to how improvisers end a scene in a show – and if you haven’t seen improv before, basically it’s a load of made up scenes, normally linked by what’s happened in the scene before, and to end each one you do something called ‘sweep the scene’. And the way that works in an improv show is someone runs across the front of the stage. It’s like drawing a line under it, to say ‘right that’s finished, what’s next’. Which allows you to move on to something new and fresh. Having that mentality of ‘sweeping the scene’ is a great one to have in life too. I think it can help you to stop ruminating, and move on, or start something new. And that can feel scary – it can create uncertainty – but I think it’s always worth renegotiating your projects and asking yourself, “Do I want to do this anymore? Is this productive? If I end it, will I have space for something that I’m actually going to enjoy or that is going to be more useful?”.
And you run workshops on public speaking, which a lot of people are terrified of. In what ways do you think improv can help us to manage that fear?
When people think of improv, they go “That’s absolutely terrifying. How do you do that? You must be so nervous!”, and the answer is, I’m not, actually. I’m more nervous for a phone call with a client I’ve not met before than I am going on stage to improvise a comedy show. There are a few reasons for that. One is that I’ve practised. There’s no getting away from it: the more we do something, the more comfortable we are. That’s one part of it. The other part is, I know my teammates on stage have my back. Before shows we literally look each other in the eyes, touch each other on the back and say “I’ve got your back.” So, there’s support there. And the final thing is that I have a method, and so my focus can be on executing the process, rather than on the outcome. So I’m not worrying about whether the audience likes me, instead I’m thinking about my process: listening really well, calling out anything that’s unclear, and coming on with energy.
This same idea of focusing on the process can be mapped across to whatever we do in life. I’m a massive cricket fan, we’ve got the Indian test team over here at the moment, and a lot of what the coaches talk about is executing the skill, rather than worrying what’s going to happen if you get a nought. Really, the reason people get nervous about public speaking is we get lost in the outcome. We worry about what the audience are thinking, we think about the consequences of this for our career, and we lose sight of the process. If you can focus solely on the process it can really help you to control your nerves.
4 Key Takeaways
- Improv Enhances Essential Soft Skills: Improvisation can significantly boost creativity, listening, mental agility, spontaneity, and collaboration. These skills are invaluable not only on stage but also in everyday life and work environments.
- Improv Teaches Mental Agility: Improv teaches the importance of adaptability and dealing with change effectively. By practising improvisation, individuals learn to notice changes, let go of existing plans, and make new decisions quickly—skills that are crucial for both agility and innovation in the world of business.
- Improv Encourages Attentive Listening & Collaboration: True listening in improv involves being willing to be changed by what others say. This deep level of attentive listening enhances collaboration, fosters stronger connections, and leads to more effective brainstorming and problem-solving in the workplace.
- Improv Fosters More Positive & Creative Environments : The key improv principle of “Yes, and…” encourages acceptance of others’ ideas, fostering a positive and creative environment. This mindset is particularly useful in brainstorming sessions, helping teams generate a wealth of ideas and enhancing the overall creativity and productivity of the group.
Max Dickins is the Company Director and co-founder of Hoopla Business. His book, Improvise! Use the Secrets of Improv to Achieve Extraordinary Results at Work, is out now.
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