Improv and Meetings: How to Achieve True Collaboration

Performance improvisers are taught one very basic rule: Always say “Yes!” to your onstage partners. If your partner says, “Look at that huge dark cloud,” don’t say, “That’s not a cloud – that’s a Plutonian spacecraft!” Instead, accept your partner’s offer of a “cloud” and build on it, for example, “Yes, and there’s a rotating cow in it!” You may have a great storyline in mind involving Plutonian spacecrafts, but if you try to steamroll your partner with that idea, here’s what’s likely to happen:

1) He’ll resent your denial of his “cloud” offer;

2) He’ll feel more like a second banana than an equal partner in the creation of the scene;

3) He’ll retaliate by denying your offers;

4) He’ll focus less on listening to you and more on vigorously asserting his own ideas of where the scene should go.

While all of this is being played out, the audience will become wise to the fact that you’re trying to upstage your partner and trying to put on a one-man show – and that’s not what they came to see. Savvy improv audiences expect a collaborative give-and-take, not a struggle for dominance. A bout of back-and-forth contradiction (a la Monty Python’s Argument Clinic sketch) is, frankly, boring to watch.

If you think about it, business organizations tend to be hotbeds of offer-rejection. In a typical meeting, you frequently hear people insistently asserting their positions and trying to get the upper hand, rather than listening to each other, seeking to understand the other’s point of view, and working together to find a solution. The results of offer-rejection behavior in the meeting room are the same as they are onstage: resentment, suspension of listening, power plays, competition, retaliation. To outside observers, the proceedings would probably seem as boring and banal as a contentious round of one-upmanship between two improv performers.

REFLECTIONS FOR THE YES! LEADER

Improv performers have a lot to teach the YES! Leader about what true collaboration looks like – and how to achieve it. Many improv activities (for example, Word at a Time Story) are geared toward giving performers (and nonperformers as well) a sense of how it feels to go with the flow of a group-created effort. Such an activity can also be a gauge of a person’s natural comfort (or lack thereof) with relinquishing control and seeing what emerges from the group process.

You might benefit from these kinds of activities if your typical meeting behaviors include:

·        Getting frustrated when somebody makes a suggestion or observation that seems impractical or off the wall, rather than asking the person to elaborate and opening your mind to the possibilities;

·        Invariably responding to another’s opinion (“I think X!”) with your own opinion (“Yeah, well I think Y!”) rather than a question (“Why do you think X?”);

·        Prematurely cutting off brainstorming and kicking around of ideas by saying, “We need to get going on this. Here’s what we’ll do …”

·        Putting down others’ contributions by using IdeaChillers such as “We tried that before and it didn’t work” or “You can’t be serious!”