How play can turn any team into All-Stars: lessons from improv
Back in June, the April 2014 cohort had weekly training in the form of a creative team-building session with Jon Khoo, an On Purpose fellow and currently working with the Co-Innovation team at Interface. During this afternoon, we played a series of team games which included a lot of role playing, hula hooping!, thinking on your feet (literally and figuratively) and absolutely no… PowerPoint! (Sorry Microsoft.) As much of my cohort already knows, this got me particularly excited as it allowed me to tap into a new hobby I’ve been diving deep into: improv, or improvisational comedy: a form of theatre where most or all of what is performed is created at the moment it is performed.
For the past few months I have been learning improv with Maria Peters at Hoopla in London. She’s not only a master improviser, teaching and performing regularly around London, she also uses the principles of improv to train teams at work to be more confident, collaborative, and creative. Here are some thoughts on how improv could benefit the workplace:
- Yes! Yes, what? Yes and!
Yes and is the first and fundamental rule of improv. When your partner/colleague suggests something (anything), your first job is to accept it — say YES, and then add something to that idea. This is how creativity flourishes; every idea is a good one and worth developing, and you often come up with something more original than if you’d completed the task alone. Imagine conducting your next brainstorming session in this way: forget whether an idea is any good or whether it’s even feasible. Take every idea on board and then explore its potential. Who knows, you might end up holding your next staff holiday party on a hot air balloon!
- In it together
The best improv comes from committed teamwork and communication. Great teambuilding improv games include storytelling games where a group tells a story in a one-word or one-sentence per person form. In these games, no one person has control over the story and listening closely to what others have said is the biggest factor of success. As a result, the team and the story always take precedence over individuals, and egos fly out the window. Taking these skills into work could forge a strong bond within any team. In my experience, I’ve also found that when you lean into the vulnerability of making an absolute fool of yourself in front of others, that’s where you can really have fun and form friendships with your teammates.
- I fail, you fail, we all fail (down?)
Let’s face it, anyone willing to try improv is also willing to flirt with failure.
It is a scary thing but this is one of the things Maria at Hoopla does best: she creates a safe circle of positivity and support in which everyone encourages each other, no matter how well they do. When someone ‘loses’ in a game, they have to jump up and cheer like they’ve just won the Olympics. In improv, when we celebrate failure, we’re really celebrating someone trying, putting themselves out there and exploring the unknown. Leveraging these skills in the workplace can lead to more confident, innovative and risk-taking teams.
If this made any sense to you: see how Ask.com used improv training for innovation and problem solving, and subsequently how their head of HR came up with a solution for bugs for the engineering team. Better yet, find out how to get some All-Star team training yourself with Maria Peters!
