Embracing the Unexpected
A man goes down on his knee onstage and proposes to a woman. We (the audience) expect her to be thrilled and say, “Yes!” And although the actress may do that, it’s far more interesting if she adds a look of shock, glances behind her back furtively, and seems to be accepting under duress. That creates tension. We wonder what is wrong, and why she seems so worried when the man is obviously happy. Now the troupe has a huge amount of room to play with, explore the scene, and try to uncover dramatic improv gold.
On the improvisational stage, if everything is wonderful and perfect all the time, the audience will get bored. We may accept everything as improvisers, but we also know that good theater comes out of dramatic conflict and character tension. While the acceptance and openness of “yes, and!” is critical to improvisation and innovation, things don’t always go smoothly and much of the best improv and innovation grow out of surprise, problems that must be overcome, and tension.
Improvisers like to explore the uncomfortable and the unsaid. Comedy often arises from saying things no one else will say or exploring interactions that we all have but choose to ignore or avoid. Discomfort is an excellent marker of good improv and good innovation. It means you’re leaning into the tension of the unknown. That takes courage.
Every night, improvisers get up onstage willing to meet the unexpected every moment of the show. We literally do not know what’s going to happen from one moment to the next. And it’s not always good—there are a lot of “off” nights in improv.
One misconception about improvisation is that we can hide problems from the audience. If something goes wrong, people assume we’ll be able to cover and no one will be the wiser because we can improvise anything. Wrong! When a scene is out of sync, a character is called by the wrong name, or if two people are doing different things at the same time, everybody knows—the troupe, the audience, the sound and light pros up in the booth, sometimes even the ticket taker in the hallway.
That being said, some of the best and funniest moments in improv happen when things go horribly awry on stage. They are funny because the improvisers acknowledge that everything has gone off the tracks. Audiences love the moment when the performers realize their mistake, give each other a look or almost crack up, and figure out where to go from there. They might make wild, hysterical explanations or launch into utterly new story lines based on the surprise. In fact, some of the best shows I’ve done came out of a moment of uncertainty.
The “oops” is the obvious moment when anyone realizes something is off-kilter. How we choose to respond and act determine whether that oops remains awful or has the potential to become a eureka. In improv, we are bound by our guidelines to acknowledge the issue to the audience, use it in the scene, and keep the show going. In fact, if we act as though nothing unusual occurred, the audience gets disappointed because they know something was weird. When we share the oops and bring the audience into the moment of discomfort, the entire theater becomes one team. Everybody is in on the joke! We can all enjoy the funny discomfort, and lean in and pull for the performers while they figure it out.
It takes courage to acknowledge a mistake. You may feel stupid, wonder if you’ll get into trouble, or try to blame someone else. One of the unfortunate legacies of risk-averse, hierarchical organizations is that people are afraid to speak up, try something new, or make a mistake. Yet innovation and change come out of experimentation. It comes out of failure, learning from mistakes, and realizing that your new knowledge has led to a eureka.
Michael Jordan’s meme on failure states, “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot, and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
Are all these surprises and issues easy? No! Tension, problems, and the unexpected are scary, even for improvisers. One of the most obvious ways to avoid tension is through lack of diversity. Diverse groups can be uncomfortable, but we undermine our ability to be innovative when we lean toward comfort and familiarity.
Many industries struggle with a lack of diversity in their ranks. Theatrical improvisation is no exception. Comedy has been stocked with funny white dudes for decades, which may have seemed fine for a while (and no knocks, they are really funny!), but it left no room for innovation. As a matter of fact, back when I was improvising in Chicago, major improv theaters capped their troupes at two women only. A director once looked at me in confusion when I questioned the practice and replied, “How many wives and girlfriends do we need on one stage?” My blood still boils to think about it. He could only envision me playing a female foil to the stars of the show—the men. The irony was how hard he laughed whenever I played against type, insisting on being the CEO or the gross, belching football fan in the scene. Comedy came from surprise—from changing up the obvious choice, which I loved doing with my troupe members.
So I set out to find and create troupes that had a wider range of people and ideas. It’s not so much that I was angry. The comedy coming out at the time was fabulous. But there were so many opinions, ideas, and perspectives that weren’t being explored, leaving a lot of potential untapped. I knew that at some point following the same formula would become boring for audiences.
Fortunately the comedy genre is evolving. Some of today’s most impressive new material is coming from diverse comedians who are making us reconsider assumptions about race, gender, sexual orientation, and religion. They are bringing new formats, plot lines, characters, and perspectives to the psyche of the audience; it’s untapped, risky, and above all, funny.
The research is in. Racially diverse teams outperform nondiverse teams by up to 35 percent (Hunt et al. 2015). And the employment website Glassdoor reports that almost 60 percent of employees wish their work environment was more diverse. Diversity is also important for workplace culture. When companies promote and train for inclusion, they solve problems faster and more creatively, which is reflected in their revenue. Teams where men and women feel equal earn more than 40 percent more revenue, and bilingual employees earn 10 percent more than single language employees no matter what the language (Badal 2014; White 2014).
A lack of diversity may help you achieve results on a standardized, simple operation, because the comfort, familiarity, and sameness of more homogeneous teams keep outcomes consistent. Diversity, on the other hand, breeds innovation. To innovate is often uncomfortable; it makes you question what you thought you knew, and introduces divergent concepts. It’s not always fun, but improvisation and innovation are about challenge and pushing outside preconceived boundaries.
To be more innovative, resist your ingrained survival instincts, which you’ve honed through years of being right, avoiding risk, working with people just like you, and wanting to feel safe. Move toward the new behaviors slowly if you need to; try failing in a safe environment first. Learn something new and engage in the frustration of being a beginner before you put your job on the line at work.
This is tension, in all its glory. An individual, team, or organization’s ability to integrate innovative behaviors and thinking may at first seem like an elusive goal. But it’s critical that we explore the interplay of improvisational and innovative behaviors. There is enormous tension in the process of going from a creative idea to innovation.
Creativity is the ability to envision anything and see the impossible working; innovation is the application of creativity. In its empirical form, creativity is basically the theory, idea, and vision—it must be applied. The moment that you paint on a canvas, write notes on a score, or design a building, creativity is transformed into innovation. That’s what changes everything—that’s innovation.
Simply put: Creativity + Application = Innovation.
Creativity:
The ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, and interpretations. Also known as originality, progressiveness, or imagination.
E. Paul Torrance, an American educational psychologist, is well known for his research on creativity. He challenged the importance of IQ tests as the single indicator of intelligence, believing in the importance of creative thinking skills, which can be increased through practice. Torrance defined creativity as the ability to alternate between divergent and convergent thinking. In divergent thinking, we come up with many ideas and see unusual connections and endless possibility. In convergent thinking, seemingly unrelated things suddenly connect, allowing us to envision brand-new solutions.
In 1958, Torrance performed a series of creativity tests on more than 400 Minneapolis children, and then tracked them over their lifetimes. He found that the children who continued to think and behave creatively won patents, founded businesses, performed in artistic and corporate leadership, won awards, designed buildings, and wrote books, music, and public policy. They were creative improvisers, yet they also achieved through innovation. They accessed both sides of the behavioral coin: the ability to come up with interesting and novel ideas as improvisers and the tenacity to do something about them as innovators.
Like any good coin analogy, creativity and improvisation versus innovation and execution offer two very different sides. (And the discussion around which is heads and which is tails will be held after hours.) They rely upon each other and are symbiotic in many ways. They are also highly different, and often clash in the corporate environment.
We must allow room and space for creativity and improvisation, which entails positivity, “yes, and,” oops to eureka!, openness, and craziness. However, once we start to execute on those ideas, we desperately need the organization, detail-orientation, and drive of a project manager crossed with a financial editor. There’s inherent tension there—let the rule-followers in too soon, and ideas are squashed. Leave the execution to the dreamers and nothing will ever get done.
Vijay Govindarajan, of the Harvard Business School and Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, researched the intrinsic issue in innovation and found that it is not that organizations lack creativity; rather, they:
• don’t go bold enough on their ideas—they shut down the dreamers and the crazy talk way too soon
• cannot execute—they become overwhelmed or cannot figure out how to bring ideas to life.
So how do we bridge that gap? How do we address the behaviors necessary for both sides of that behavioral coin? We must encourage creative people to speak up and build good ideas, while simultaneously giving everyone the resilience and courage to hang on through a difficult execution. From a behavioral standpoint, we must not only be champions of both styles, but protectors of very different processes.
One of Govindarajan’s most compelling examples of that tension is from his research on reverse-innovation, a term he coined with his colleague, Chris Trimble. In developed countries, we tend to see innovation as new, high-end, and technological. We assume that greater levels of wealth and education lead to better innovation, so we rarely look for it in underdeveloped places. However, if you think like an improviser, you realize that interesting ideas often come from a dearth of resources or a need to create solutions with very little. A reverse-innovation (also known as trickle-up innovation) is an innovation that is either seen first or likely to be used first in the developing world before spreading to the industrialized world. The following story is a great example of the improvisational behaviors in this book. Let’s explore how Harman International used improvisational behaviors such as “yes, and,” engaged diverse teams, and dealt with the tension of innovation.
Harman International is a U.S.-based company that uses German engineering to create the world’s most sophisticated, specialized, and expensive dashboard audiovisual systems. When Dinesh C. Paliwal became CEO in 2007, Harman dominated 70 percent of the luxury car market, which accounted for two-thirds of the company’s revenue—not much growth potential there. Paliwal saw a huge opportunity in emerging markets, where Harman’s products were virtually nonexistent. However, instead of doing what most high-end companies did, which was simply strip down their existing technology to try to sell at lower cost (which would still have been too expensive, not to mention hardly functional), Paliwal put together a team to reimagine how to deliver a great experience at a low cost for new customers. A natural improviser, Paliwal might have said of emerging markets, “Yes, that’s a possibility, and I wonder how we could serve them.” He also turned over the stereotype that better is more expensive, and challenged his team to change their point of view.
The initiative was called Saras (which in Sanskrit means “adaptable”), and it was entirely different from anything Harman had done before. The new team was small and cross-functional, rather than highly specialized like Harman’s other large, singularly focused engineering teams. It mixed skills, education, and nationalities, and was located in an emerging market rather than an industrialized office in the United States or Germany. The team also set ridiculous goals, such as creating an infotainment system that had all the functionality of their luxury systems at half the price and a third of the cost.
Sounds gutsy, right? And craziest of all, it ended up working. That was thanks to Paliwal’s flexibility and improvisational capability to nurture the creative front end of development despite lots of mistakes and restarts, and the tenacity to support the difficult process of getting the innovation manufactured and out to market.
It’s difficult to imagine the resistance the Saras team met along the way. Suspicious engineers hated the work and said it would ruin the company’s reputation as a high-quality provider. They refused to contribute, so the Saras team hired new, highly diverse engineering talent who didn’t have preconceived notions of what could and couldn’t be done. They threw them together as a team—and the difficulty galvanized them.
Once the product was ready, salespeople balked and refused to sell the systems because they feared it would cannibalize their commissions. At one point, the chief technology officer even led a coup to kill the entire project and unseat Paliwal. He was unsuccessful and was rousted himself. Through it all, Paliwal and his team kept exhibiting the behaviors of great improvisers. They said “yes, and” to ideas, learned from their mistakes, understood that innovation is an arduous process, and stayed open and supportive. By late spring 2011, Saras had generated more than $3 billion in revenue and set new standards for serving both ends of the market successfully (Govindarajan 2012).
The irony is that the very term reverse-innovation implies innovation can only come from a developed market and flow downward to an emerging market. The ego inherent in expensive, developed ideas is that “we are the best.” Or that a company must reverse their thinking to get out of their assumptions that “high quality” and “customized” is best. Yet Saras, the low-end, scrappy innovator, redefined what could be delivered. The creativity of lower-end, emerging markets taught the developed markets a thing or two. You don’t have to be rich and own a luxury car to get a great sound system in your vehicle. By reversing our assumptions and letting go of ego and hierarchy, we can innovate in the most unexpected ways.
The story of Paliwal and Harmon is a testament to the victory of improvisation and innovation. It wasn’t easy, but they didn’t give up. That tension between creativity and execution is daunting. But it doesn’t mean we can’t do this. We can integrate and exhibit the behaviors of improvisation, leading to greater innovation for ourselves, our teams, and our companies.
“The greater the contrast, the greater the potential. Great energy only comes from a correspondingly great tension of opposites.”
—Carl Jung
My company, ImprovEdge, was once hired to consult with a law firm that realized there was a problem in its initial client engagements. It was losing cases to other firms or discovering key information late in the legal process because clients weren’t sharing everything the lawyers needed to know.
The managing partner, who was about to tear out his hair, told me: “We cannot afford to learn critical information about a case two weeks before it goes to trial! Not to mention I just found out another law firm, which is not nearly as qualified as we are and is more expensive, just won out over us! What is going on?”
The situation was becoming critical, and no one seemed able to figure out what was happening. We decided to look at the most tactical possibilities: Could it be caused by their communication style?
When we attended those critical first meetings and observed the attorneys, we were astonished by the clients’ body language. While they began the meeting leaning in or speaking quickly, they slowly drew in on themselves, sat back, and crossed their arms. Although the attorneys were there to uncover information, they brought an internal and verbal critic with them. As the clients disclosed details about their problem, the attorneys often jumped in, telling them what they had done wrong. Their responses were peppered with negative words. The clients were there to find solutions to extremely emotional situations, but instead felt as though they were on trial.
I surveyed some of the potential clients who had met with the firm. As I spoke to one man leaving his first meeting, he whispered to me, “They certainly are tough, which is something I’ll need. But I just don’t think they care about how difficult this is for my family. And I had no idea I’d been so dumb about my document preparation. I’m not an attorney! I did the best I could!” He did not hire the firm.
These well-meaning attorneys were bringing risk-aversion, negativity, and a need to show their superiority to their initial client meetings. But their clients wanted a partner in something as scary as a legal battle. They wanted to know someone had their back, understood their mistakes, and had answers.
We took the attorneys through improv sessions that focused on “yes, and,” leaning into discomfort, and having creative, collaborative conversations. After that, the firm instituted a five-minute, improvisational “yes, and” period for all first meetings. The attorneys were asked to listen and respond to the client’s comments with, “Yes, I bet that was really hard! And then what happened?” or, “Yes, I understand why you chose that action. And I’d like to know more about the other person’s response.” Those positive, open-ended comments drew in the clients and allowed them to feel heard without criticism.
Once that initial listening and encouragement period was over, the attorneys and clients were able to enter into a collaborative conversation and brainstorm about next steps. We found that the amount of time the client spoke in these new meetings more than doubled. One small office of the firm won $750,000 in extra work in the first six months of instituting this simple, straightforward improvisational technique.
If attorneys—who are intentionally educated to fear risk, apply the brakes, and say “no” as often as possible—can do this, you can too!
This exercise is meant to get you or your team out of the comfort zone. Patterns can be stifling, and the simple act of changing a few small things can refresh your viewpoint and allow you to start experiencing things in a new way. This is a first step to taking on larger changes in behavior to drive innovation.
Children’s brains are fantastic sponges. They learn with color, music, gooey clay, pets, and constant interaction. Ironically, adults struggle to learn new things and yet we choose less engaging ways to learn. Neuroscientists are also finding that failing to challenge our brains may increase our risk of serious consequences, such as late-life dementia. So let’s move away from our sterile lecture environments, interject creativity into our professional lives, exercise our brains, and try new things. After all, it’s good for our health and our careers.
• Think about the materials and modes that you use to work and learn. Are they the same ones you’ve been using for years?
• Acquire things that will force you to document your work differently, such as an artist’s notebook, colored pens, books about other industries or interests, a camera, or crossword puzzles.
• Consider how you express yourself. Do you always write in paragraphs, speak in statistics, or present in PowerPoint? Try a completely different tactic such as mind-mapping, telling stories or anecdotes, or engaging in a group exercise rather than a lecture. If you use social media a great deal, take a full day (or week) off. What happens? Conversely, if you don’t understand or avoid social media, get an account and spend time learning how it works.
• Integrate different ways to learn into your everyday life. Take lessons on an instrument, go on a field trip with your work group, or try playing a new game. It may be uncomfortable at first, and it probably won’t be perfect. But you will start to see things differently and find new talents in yourself. You’ll also give your brain a much-deserved workout.
It’s fun to think about the personification of concepts, and that’s what we’re doing in the comic strip that runs at the end of each chapter. Improvisation embodies many of the aspects of the art form I love: He’s goofy, rough around the edges, and open to play. On the other hand, I see Innovation as a smart, sharp, incredibly effective leader.
