Yes, And

Kelly Leonard,Tom Yorton

• Publisher: Harper Business
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780062248558
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Liderazgo

Executives from The Second City—the world's premier comedy theater and school of improvisation—reveal improvisational techniques that can help any organization develop innovators, encourage adaptable leaders, and build transformational businesses.

For more than fifty years, The Second City comedy theater in Chicago has been a training ground for some of the best comic minds in the industry—including John Belushi, Bill Murray, Gilda Radner, Mike Myers, Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, and Tina Fey. But it also provides one-of-a-kind leadership training to cutting-edge companies, nonprofits, and public sector organizations—all aimed at increasing creativity, collaboration, and teamwork.

The rules for leadership and teamwork have changed, and the skills that got professionals ahead a generation ago don't work anymore. Now The Second City provides a new toolkit individuals and organizations can use to thrive in a world increasingly shaped by speed, social communication, and decentralization. Based on eight principles of improvisation, Yes, And helps to develop these skills and foster them in high-potential leaders and their teams, including:

• Mastering the ability to co-create in an ensemble
• Fostering a "yes, and" approach to work
• Embracing failure to accelerate high performance
• Leading by listening and by learning to follow
• Innovating by making something out of nothing

Yes, And is a must-read for professionals and organizations, helping to develop the invaluable leadership skills needed to succeed today.

1

THE BUSINESS OF FUNNY

The Lansdowne Conference Center in Leesburg, Virginia, is a fine place to hold a business meeting, but located in the D.C. area wine country, with a hotel-style glass-and-brick facade and two championship golf courses, nobody would ever confuse it with a mecca for comedy. Yet every January for the past thirteen years, Lansdowne has rocked with laughter brought on by actors from The Second City who come to Virginia for an unlikely reason: to help about a hundred Major League Baseball rookies adapt to the unusual challenges of life in The Bigs.

These challenges are wide ranging and quite foreign to mere mortals who can’t throw or hit a 95 mph fastball: how to deal effectively with veterans in the clubhouse and the rapacious media hordes, how to manage a newfound fortune when you grew up poor, how to find work-life balance when there is none, and how to navigate the perils of performance-enhancing drugs, aggressive autograph seekers, and the influence of organized crime in sports. Typical stuff for professional athletes, but not the typical fodder of comedy.

But Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association know their audience (mostly guys around twenty years old, brimming with swag and testosterone) and because they know them well, they know that lectures and classroom finger wagging aren’t effective ways to teach the vital life skills that will allow the rookies to have long and productive careers on the field. So they made the unlikely choice to bring in Second City talent who, over the course of four days, perform custom-written comedy vignettes based on real-world baseball situations, facilitate productive conversations around those vignettes (with Second City alum and clinical psychologist Dr. Kate Porterfield), teach improv-based communications skills, and in general, win over a tough audience of ballplayers who will be better equipped to protect their careers because of the time they’ve spent with a bunch of comedians and improv instructors. While our work at this conference is fun and funny, we’re not brought in for mere entertainment. We’re called on to bring serious topics to life through comedy, to get young athletes engaged, and to give them some important communications skills that will help them cope with circumstances few of us could ever truly understand. They do this because what The Second City knows, and what Major League Baseball has learned, is that the individual who is armed with an improvisational tool kit has an instantaneous advantage in dealing with all manner of difficult situations that naturally arise in the course of one’s career. When, for instance, a long-lost third cousin once removed comes calling for a loan to start a deli/vinyl record shop, the young ballplayer will have learned improv skills to both disarm and deflect the advance—the same set of tools we’ll give you to turn around difficult employees and disgruntled customers. Improvisation, at its most basic level, lets you respond more quickly in real time—and when practiced, also allows you to use comic relief to ease a potentially awkward confrontation.

Make ’em laugh. Make ’em think. A winning formula not only for baseball rookies, but for education reformers, cruise line directors, and the millions of other professionals whom Second City has reached over the past three decades by reformulating venerable theatre teaching methods into cutting-edge business training programs for the twenty-first century. We’re not merely offering an improved communication tool, either. We’ve introduced a whole new skill set for invention and innovation that has been proven to unlock the creative forces of individuals and teams and make it easier for them to test those creative ideas and launch them in the marketplace.

The more The Second City works with folks from the business world, the more we have come to understand that despite all the planning, processes, controls, and governance, business is one big act of improvisation. For anyone who has spent time working in or running a business, you know that a great deal of your time and energy go to dealing with the unplanned and the unexpected, with the curve balls and gray zones that typify corporate life.

This book is for you, to help you build the tool kit you’ll need to deal with that challenging reality.

SETTING THE SCENE

Maybe we’re not brothers from another mother, but our comedy troupe and the businesses we work with have a lot of the same needs and priorities. We both work in teams that have to adapt to change and new information under high pressure and rapidly changing circumstances. Just as businesses must create and innovate (or die), so must we, every night on the stage. We are both ultimately accountable to the audiences we serve. Like our corporate clients, we must find and develop new talent to make sure our business grows and stays vibrant over time. We face silos separating departments that would benefit greatly from a higher degree of interaction and collaboration. When sales goals aren’t being reached or the competition steals away a client or that new product launch lands like a lead balloon, we are just as likely as others to drop our best practices and work out of fear. The list goes on, to the surprise of many, though probably to none more so than the founders of The Second City. They could have had no idea that their small cabaret theatre catering to University of Chicago intellectuals and a burgeoning countercultural movement would one day take its radical practices into the same institutions it questioned and challenged in the late ’50s and early ’60s.

When The Second City, housed in a converted Chinese laundry, first opened its doors on a snowy December night in 1959, few attendees would have suspected that they were present at the birth of an institution that would serve as the leading source of cutting-edge comic artistry for the next half century. Today, we take for granted that original comic voices have venues for expression across all manner of stage and screen. But to understand how truly radical The Second City was when it launched, we need to understand the cultural and artistic landscape at the time.

“My wife will buy anything marked down. Last year she bought an escalator.” Such was the flavor of popular comedy in the late ’50s. Henny Youngman, Jack Benny, George Burns, Lucille Ball, Jackie Gleason—all very funny, even legendary, comedians, but none of them satirists. Their comedy, rooted in the inherent funniness of relationships and family dynamics, was never vulgar or political. By the late ’50s, however, a new breed of comedians appeared on the scene—Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, and Dick Gregory, for example—who would become part of the countercultural movement of the 1960s. Playing clubs such as Mister Kelly’s and The Gaslight Club in Chicago, The Hungry i and North Beach Nightclub in San Francisco, and The Bitter End and The Duplex in New York, these new voices of stand-up represented an entirely different kind of comedy. They talked openly about sex, race, and politics, and, in the case of Lenny Bruce, they got thrown in jail for the profane language they used onstage. Prior to this movement, popular comedy was seen mostly as entertainment or diversion—rarely as part of an artistic movement that promoted social and political change.

The founders of The Second City—Paul Sills, Bernie Sahlins, and Howard Alk, all University of Chicago graduates—approached their work on two important fronts. They created a new form for the comic arts: ensemble based and rooted in the improvisational games that Sills’s mother, Viola Spolin, taught as a social worker for a WPA-sponsored program on Chicago’s South Side, designed to help immigrant children assimilate into their new culture. At the same time, in terms of content, these artists used comedy as a way to challenge the status quo. They combined both to react directly to the Eisenhower era—which they saw as conformist, intellectually bereft, and morally bankrupt—often shocking audiences in the process. The comedy they were creating was rooted in truth, rather than broad parody or exaggeration; the behavior they portrayed onstage was real and recognizable.

For example, in the classic 1961 Second City scene, “Family Reunion,” a son, Warren, who moved to Chicago, welcomes his parents to the apartment he has shared with his roommate, Ted, for twelve years. The apartment gives every indication that it is shared by a couple, but the parents just won’t see it. Warren finally summons the courage to tell his parents the truth:

WARREN There’s something I want to tell you about myself. I hope you want to hear something about myself. I’m—I—Ted is a homosexual.

FATHER Well, Warren, I’m glad to see that living in the city has taught you tolerance.

That scene was startling to audiences when it was staged in 1961, but it ushered in a kind of comedy that blended the personal and the political.

Form and content: At The Second City, they are linked, and the more powerful for that. In an improvised art form, the actors are also the writers; they create their content in concert with their fellow ensemble members and in an ongoing dialogue with their audience. In addition, they abide by an old saying in the field: “It’s funny because it’s true.” This compels them to draw from their personal experiences and to share true feelings and insights, both what brings them joy and what keeps them up at night. For the first generation of Second City artists, improvisation became the vehicle for a new kind of comic self-expression unlike anything that had come before. The work was funny, honest, and, because it dealt often in the most serious of subject matter, revolutionary.

Over the next half century, The Second City continued to challenge convention while further developing teaching methods, tools, and techniques that would turn it into an eagerly sought-out, creative beacon that attracted many of the country’s brightest future comic stars—from Bill Murray to Gilda Radner, John Candy to John Belushi, Steve Carell to Tina Fey—each honing his or her craft in classes and onstage in The Second City’s touring and resident ensembles. Along the way, however, a new breed of performer also began seeking out The Second City: managers, marketers, teachers, lawyers, advertising executives, and business school graduates. Even politicians and daytime television hosts found their way into the entry-level improv classes that filled up The Second City’s classrooms on weeknights and weekend days. (Oprah Winfrey’s Second City classmates probably didn’t realize that she might be using her improv training for some greater purpose than to get on Saturday Night Live when she took classes in the mid-1980s.)

While many of these individuals took classes at The Second City as a fun diversion or a way to meet people, it quickly became apparent to them that The Second City had much more to offer the world than mere entertainment. Whether they were looking to innovate more quickly, seeking a performance edge, hoping to improve teamwork and collaboration in their business units, become better presenters, or learn how to adapt to the change that is inevitable in every business, they found that The Second City’s improv-based training approach was a potent way to build the essential skills that separate the stars from the also-rans in the corporate world. We were stunned, amazed, and more than a little surprised that our humble theatre, which had made its reputation as a place that took on authority figures and challenged “the man,” could also be a place where “the man” learned how to develop professionally. Elliott Masie, CEO and founder of the MASIE Center, a think tank devoted to corporate learning, thinks the explanation could be due to a gap in the traditional B-school curriculum. As he explains, “It’s about filling the room with truth and trust rather than just with loudness and noise. Laughter can be a big part of that. The one piece they don’t teach in business school is the role of laughter and humor, [yet] I can’t think of a single important contract, acquisition, sale, event—for that matter, any hiring or firing that I’ve done—when there hasn’t been some humor in it, or some laughter.”²

So after many years of working in an ad hoc but increasingly successful way with corporate clients, we decided to create within the company a division dedicated to working with the business world; in 1989 The Second City Comedy Marketing Group, later renamed Second City Works, was born. Although it was originally developed as the company’s corporate entertainment arm, over the past decade Second City Works has become a training ground for individual professionals and teams increasingly confounded by the amount of information they are expected to process, the speed at which industries, technology, and markets change, the volatility of the workplace, and the new standards for transparency and customer engagement. More and more people are recognizing what we at The Second City have known for a long time: Professional success often rests on the same pillars that form the foundation of great comedy improv: Creativity, Communication, and Collaboration.

SEVEN ELEMENTS OF IMPROV

While there’s nothing wrong with the quantitative, strategic, and analytical skills traditionally taught at B-schools, those alone do not guarantee success in business, where things tend to be messier and more fluid, and where success often rests on the ability to form winning coalitions that will back a good idea. Here, the soft skills—such as a willingness to listen, forge trusting relationships, take and support responsible risks, adapt to change, and stay positive in the face of adversity—are seen as those essential to allowing people and businesses to respond with agility and nimbleness to the fast-moving information, opportunities, and challenges of today’s workplace. These skills are no longer merely nice to have—they are paramount. And they can be learned, using the same seven elements of improvisation that have inspired some of the most brilliant creative performers of our time.

1. Yes, And

These two words form the bedrock of all improvisation. Creative breakthroughs occur in environments where ideas are not just fully explored, but heightened and stretched to levels that might seem absurd at first. That is where the best comedy comes from, and that’s where invention is realized. It’s a mantra to apply at every level of your work. Work cultures that embrace Yes, And are more inventive, quicker to solve problems, and more likely to have engaged employees than organizations where ideas are judged, criticized, and rejected too quickly. With Yes, And, you don’t have to act on every idea, but you do have to give every idea a chance to be acted on. This simple idea has amazing power and potency to improve interpersonal communication, negotiation, and conflict resolution. In application, these two words are ground zero to creativity and innovation. We will show you ways to incorporate Yes, And into almost every aspect of your business, and we will offer a none-too-subtle suggestion that this approach can work wonders in your personal life as well.

2. Ensemble

We celebrate the stars who break out at The Second City, but they didn’t become stars by working as solo acts; they did it by learning to work in groups. The ensemble is the preeminent focus of everything in our business, and it pops up everywhere—in sales teams, executive boards, retail staff—and it is a vital ingredient in almost any organization’s growth and competitiveness. Unfortunately, shockingly little attention is paid to building, maintaining, and developing ensembles. The consequences of that oversight are all around us, from the conference room full of smart people more interested in showing off their brain power than actually solving a problem, to the leader who takes credit for success and dodges accountability for failure, to the individual who whitewashes all his or her problems.

There is a way to reconcile the needs of individuals with those of the broader team. In fact, you can strengthen both at the same t...