The Applied Improvisation Mindset

Tools for Transforming Organizations and Communities

Theresa Robbins Dudeck, Caitlin McClure, Theresa Robbins Dudeck, Caitlin McClure

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350143623
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Interprétation et audition

How can the practice of improvisation become the lens through which we view the world? The Applied Improvisation Mindset takes readers deep into the maturing field of Applied Improvisation (AI), with stories of 18 practitioners from five countries who embrace an improvisation mindset to create a more collaborative, equitable, sustainable, and joyous world. Myriad organizations have discovered how the mindset and skills applied by great improvisers onstage can reveal emergent, generative ways of interacting with others offstage. With case studies on developing presentation skills, reducing anxiety in teens, or preparing climate risk managers across the globe for the challenges ahead, this second volume serves as a valuable resource for both experienced and new AI facilitators. It is a primer for higher education and K-12 faculty combatting traditional teaching limitations and a practical "how to" for theatre practitioners, artists, educators, or anyone seeking to transform their organizations and communities.

PART ONE

Developing the Leaders We Need

1

Improv Is the Gym: Presentation Skills and Beyond at H4B’s Catapult College

Kat Koppett

Kat Koppett is President of Koppett, a training and consulting company specializing in the use of improvisational theatre and storytelling techniques to enhance individual and group performance, Co-Director of The Mopco Improv Theatre, and co-host of the podcast Dare to Be Human. Her book Training to Imagine: Practical Improvisational Theatre Techniques to Enhance Creativity, Teamwork, Leadership, and Learning (2013) is considered a seminal work in the field of Applied Improvisation. Kat holds a BFA in Drama from New York University and an MA in Organizational Psychology from Columbia University. In 2019, she received NASAGA’s Ifill-Raynolds Lifetime Achievement Award.

Ten hand-picked workshop participants stand in pairs, half of them facing the screen at the front of the room, their partners facing them. The ones facing the screen begin to recount a recent experience—an interaction they had with a colleague or the details of their morning commute. As they speak, instructions flash on the screen hidden from those listening: Continue telling your story “as if” you are a small mouse; you are running an auction; your body is made completely of fingers; you are Oprah.

After cycling through ten such instructions the participants switch places and listeners become speakers: You are a drill sergeant; it’s a secret; you are a fortune teller; you are Elvis. Dutifully following instructions, the participants leap and shout, crawl and wiggle. Sometimes, frankly, they freeze and peek around awkwardly at each other. But then another prompt appears and they dive back into their stories. However they engage, one thing is certain, they are pushing the boundaries of their normal behavior.

This Do It As If exercise (Workbook 1.1) has been intentionally chosen to jumpstart our two-day presentation skills and leadership communication intensive with the members of H4B’s Catapult College. Health4Brands (H4B) is one of a cluster of healthcare-focused advertising agencies that collectively make up Havas Health. Now in its ninth year, Catapult College was designed by Cathy Infante, Head of human resources at Havas Health, Pat Chenot, H4B’s Training Director, and their colleagues. Catapult College’s purpose is to develop mid-level agency operations and creative staff who were otherwise missing opportunities for leadership growth and client exposure. Chenot says the team conceived the program to meet four main objectives:

1. To develop leadership internally from the bottom up

2. To increase attraction and retention of world-class talent in a highly competitive field

3. To provide opportunities to pitch and interact with clients for folks who were, under normal circumstances, lacking access to them

4. Inspire the larger Havas Health network

The H4B group is headquartered in Hamilton, New Jersey, a suburban town near Princeton, an hour and a half drive from New York City. Hamilton is home to a plethora of major drug companies—a perfect location for an agency that specializes in serving this industry. Being near New York but outside of it, H4B provides an ideal environment to grow a culture with high standards that recognizes the high-stakes game it is playing in but also has room for creative experimentation and conscious internal culture-building. The program solicits internal applicants from whom ten high-potential professionals are chosen each year. Over the course of a few months, those ten attend courses and workshops on various topics and work in two subgroups to develop and ultimately pitch real campaigns for a real pro bono client. As the program was initially conceived, the subgroups would develop competing pitches a la the TV show The Apprentice, which they would then present to the client who would declare a winner. The winning work would be given gratis to the client in exchange for their time and feedback.

In 2012, a year after the program launch, Cathy Infante approached Koppett & Company about contributing a course to the developmental mix. At first blush, she seemed to be seeking a simple presentation skills course meant to prepare the group for their formal pitches; but after a short conversation, it became clear that we could help with deeper and broader needs. As theatrical improvisers, we do not see performance skills as limited to formal presentation contexts. Havas quickly realized that an improvisation mindset could help with the general leadership communication and personal–professional branding that their developing leaders needed.

We crafted a sixteen-hour course with the following learning objectives:

• Acquire tools for structuring clear and compelling presentations;

• Apply storytelling, metaphor, and imagery to enhance a presentation’s impact;

• Practice gathering and assessing audience needs;

• Engage techniques to strengthen their physical and vocal instrument for increased influence and impact;

• Identify best-practice strategies for using paper and electronic materials to support their message

• Plan, develop, and deliver multiple individual and group presentations; and

• Receive individual coaching and feedback that will enhance personal understanding of one’s strengths and areas for growth.

Koppett, like many of our applied improvisation (AI) compatriots, believe that human beings are inherently performers—that we are performing all the time. Sometimes when we first present this idea, people get uncomfortable. “I don’t like the idea of ‘performing’,” they say. “I don’t want to feel ‘fake’. I want to be myself. I want to feel ‘authentic’.” This prompts an important clarification. When we say human beings are performing all the time, we are not implying that we behave inauthentically—we may or may not, in any given moment, choose to act in alignment with our values and feelings. What we mean is that we are continually making choices about how to “show up”—how to speak, move, respond. Those choices are different depending on what “scene” we find ourselves in. For example, how I show up with my husband cuddling on the couch in the evening differs a fair amount from how I show up with my accountant going over my year-end tax report or pitching a new project with my major client or cooking soup with my daughter or cooing over a friend’s six-month-old baby. I endeavor to engage authentically in all those contexts and certainly there may be some coherence across scenes that people recognize as core personality traits (although increasingly psychologists debate even this; see Walter Mischel’s work on personality theory); but in many ways my performances will diverge. Imagine if I treated my accountant the way I treated my friend’s six-month-old. “Ooh, do you like that coffee? Look at you, drinking coffee! Yumm. Good job!”

So, if it is true that we make these varied performance choices constantly, why are more of us not comfortable flexing our styles and making conscious performance choices in the moment? Although humans perform naturally, we also tend to get stuck performing unconsciously and habitually. Most of us, by the time we are adults, get stuck in—even identified with—these set patterns of behaviors, which can become limiting. Sometimes we recognize our ruts as such. “I’m stuck,” we might say. “I need to find a new way to do this.” But often, as adults, we do not even realize that we have reified complex behaviors, for example, we assume that becoming an “adult/professional/expert/authentic” means taking on one “right” or “coherent” way of being that is predictable, comfortable, and familiar.

As children, at least in healthy environments, we recognize learning, growing, and transforming as our job. Caregivers and teachers provide opportunities not just for knowledge acquisition but for identity and behavioral exploration. When a toddler, for example, begins to move from crawling to walking by pulling up on a table, taking a few teetering steps and falling, we cheer and applaud. Neither we nor the baby think, “Ah, clearly they are an ‘authentic crawler’ and an ‘inauthentic walker’.” That would be ridiculous. But as adults, we are expected to appear fully developed. Personality and behavioral-type indicators such as Myers-Briggs and DiSC only exacerbate our tendencies to identify with certain ways of being as “true to ourselves.” No one around us cheers when we try something new and teeter and fall the first time we create a PowerPoint presentation and get our slides out of order. We have learned to limit our ranges and shrink our comfort zones. When we do this, we limit our capacity to connect and influence commensurately. The good news is, human personality has proven to have much more flexibility than these indicator tests imply. In fact, these instruments have limited construct validity and even more limited correlation with performance outcomes in the workplace (Pittenger 1993). Some psychologists, like Walter Mischel of the famed marshmallow/self-control study, question the very existence of a coherent definable personality at all, as opposed to a set of tendencies or probabilities that interact with environments in more or less predictable ways (Mischel and Yuichi 1995; Mischel 2014). In other words, people have much more capacity for and often behave with much more variability across circumstances than we give them—or ourselves—credit for.

Enter improvisation! When we share the tools and techniques of improvisational theatre, when we create protected space for adults to explore our performance choices, we allow ourselves to recognize and stretch our field of play. At Koppett we have two goals. We want to help clients:

1. Expand their awareness of their current performance choices and the impact those choices have;

2. Expand their range of options so that when the impact is not aligned with their goals or intentions, they can shift.

Improvisation activities, like Do It As If above, break us out of our habitual ways of being and thinking. That, in and of itself, regardless of the results of the immediate performance, has great value. In this way, improv becomes the gym for exercising our performance muscles. The point in this exercise is not to choose a “correct” or aligned performance—in fact, the opposite. We begin by simply exercising our willingness to take the risk to expand our range. Then, once we realize we have this capacity to behave in ways beyond the habitually narrow and unconscious, a whole new world reopens to us. Ironically, what allows us to make choices better aligned with our intentions in real life is our willingness to try out performances that seem outrageous or inappropriate for a given context. Once these performance muscles are toned and exercised, we can come to high-stakes interactions like meetings or client presentations or conversations with our kids with increased self-awareness and options. When we become more conscious of our habitual choices and then more willing to step outside them deliberately we also become more effective.

For example, imagine Syd’s standard way of interacting in meetings is to listen intently, wait for others to make contributions, and then add thoughtful comments when—and only when—Syd feels confident they will add value that has not already been offered. This behavior has much to recommend it. People probably view Syd as collaborative and easy to get along with. Syd’s style leaves room for others to voice thei...