Figure I-1. The Improv Cycle
Innovation is a learned behavior. And improvisation is your guide.
Improvisers arrive onstage without a script with the goal of creating entire one-act plays on the fly. It sounds terrifying to some people, yet improv has clear guidelines that allow troupes to be collaborative and innovative in the moment.
The reason an improv troupe can create scenes out of thin air is because of the foundational principle “Yes, and.” No matter what I contribute on stage, my troupe immediately does two things: agrees with me (yes) and adds to my idea (and).
So if I declare, “I’m a Warrior Queen!” a fellow improviser may say, “Yes, you are my Warrior Queen, and I’m your shield bearer!” and so the scene is off. You see, the yes is the acknowledgment that we agree and we’re here to play. The and is the building block. We can’t just simply agree, then hang our scene partner out to dry by making him come up with all the ideas. We have to say and to add to it—increase the possibility, get onboard, spice it up, move forward.
There’s a real magic to those two simple words, and they are surprisingly revolutionary to some corporate cultures. Our natural inclination is to say no to new ideas. We’re actually wired for it, and our immediate skepticism acts as a sort of defense mechanism. Researchers have found that in multiple cultures and languages, 50 percent of our emotion words are negative, while 30 percent are positive and 20 percent are neutral (ABC News 2005). Our overuse of negative words also affects our communication and relationships, making it difficult to build trust and work together effectively. And negativity is anathema to improvisation.
On the improv stage, it’s called denial and it kills good improv. My favorite example is the apple scene, which we use during training workshops with our corporate clients. This simple scene shows corporate audiences what can happen if you deny everything onstage. Here’s how it works: I ask a volunteer to join me onstage. The person is usually excited, very nervous to be in front of her colleagues, and very brave, as she is usually the first volunteer. I instruct her to improvise with me by opening up the scene with the simple line, “Here, I brought you an apple!” However, instead of playing along, I immediately deny: “That’s not an apple.”
I’m always impressed by how creative and tenacious my volunteers can be—they describe the apple, insist that it’s a gift, try to get me to smell or taste it, and yet I just keep saying, “No. It’s not. No.”
Sometimes after so much denial, the volunteer will finally say, “What do YOU think it is?!” She is clearly frustrated and doesn’t know what to say next. The audience, while pulling for her and starting to hate me, is confused and getting bored because nothing is happening in the scene.
After I end the scene, we discuss what happened: How did it feel to hear no so much? What was your response when you just kept getting shot down? Answers range from frustration to anger to retreat. I have a sad memory of one man actually admitting, “This is what it felt like my first week on the job. I haven’t contributed an idea since. I just do what I’m told because who wants to feel stupid or unvalued every time they try to contribute?” Yikes.
And that’s the rub. Negativity is a serious problem for innovation, and words are powerful. Once most people hear no, they are statistically less likely to contribute again.
I’ve had people monitor their language use and report on the number of negative versus positive words they use. They’re often surprised by what they discover. I had one shocked general counsel sit down with me after only half a day and say, “I need some coaching here. I’ve been frustrated by the lack on involvement on my team for two years, and I just realized I haven’t said a positive sentence all morning.”
The key, too, is that we may not understand how little it takes to lose a team member. Again and again, we hear corporate participants report that it only takes a few instances of no for them to cease contributing.
Meanwhile, back to my improv partner onstage. I apologize for my negativity and promise to be a better improviser. This time, when she offers me an apple, I respond with something like, “Yes! It’s a gorgeous apple and I bet you picked it in your grandmother’s orchard!”
It’s incredible where they go from there. Volunteers who have never improvised before start adding onto the scene and it takes off in the most humorous, unexpected, and creative ways. I had one scene partner (who had never improvised before) get the entire audience to sing an apple pie song and pretend to pick apples off of an imaginary orchard over their heads!
This “yes, and” behavior is critical to innovative teams because it allows all ideas to be contributed. And it allows people to feel heard. Even if a contribution isn’t used in the end, the process of listening, agreeing to hear them, and discussing an idea is monumentally affirming.
The key to “yes, and” is that it encourages contribution. Some managers are afraid it means they have to accept anything their team says. On the contrary, “yes, and” is about saying, “Yes, I hear you. And let’s discuss this idea and please continue to contribute.”
Many scenes on the improv stage are dumped if they end up not being funny or working, but at least we tried them out. The same thing happens in corporate teams. An environment of acceptance, discussion, and addition allows ideas to be vetted, rather than trashed before even being tried.
This improvisational behavior is key to creating innovative environments and teams. How we choose to behave can either foster innovation or shut it down. There are also a lot of stereotypes and misconceptions about innovation that are getting in our way. We think innovation is reliant upon huge undertakings, gigantic creative efforts, and blinding feats of change—it’s got to be big, expensive, and world-changing. We believe we have to be Renaissance people who seamlessly write symphonies while penning novels and programming groundbreaking smartphone applications.
That’s a lot of pressure and we need to get over it. We need to realize that we all have the capability to innovate. And the behaviors we need can be learned. By anyone.
Many meaningful innovations are actually a series of small steps that come from ordinary people working together in extraordinary ways. When a call center pro figures out how to fix a customer’s problem in one minute rather than three, or a group of managers sees a way to improve a product and save a nickel in every transaction—that’s innovation. And those little eureka moments add up to big advantages for organizations.
But how do we make sure those small, good ideas bubble up? How do individuals become more innovative and how can managers and leaders engage their teams to tease out the solutions that may be hiding in plain sight? It all has to do with how we interact, how we choose to collaborate and communicate, and whether we are willing to play.
How we choose to behave has much more influence on innovative outcomes than a million strategic initiatives; that is because strategic initiatives only happen, and only work, when every person is working to drive that strategy. The little things we do every day at our desk or in our home are the tiny wheels that push big changes forward.
Behavior drives innovation. So how do we learn to think and behave differently? What model for behavioral innovation exists that can guide this change? Get ready—the answer is:
Improvisation!
I know, the exclamation mark worries you. Just hang in there—this is exciting news! The behaviors improvisers use in every performance to create shows out of nothing are the same behaviors that great innovators put to use. Our choices about how we interact, live, question, play, and think are the building blocks to every innovation we could ever hope for—and a very simple way to approach very big problems.
We all have the ability to engage in behaviors that can change the way we work, live, think, and innovate. And yes, your brain can be trained to think more creatively and you can engage in behaviors that will allow you to innovate. And the same is true for your colleagues and family and friends. We tend to believe that creative ability is something we are born with, or not; that in the nature versus nurture argument, we come up short if we aren’t born to a creative family. Yet, when researchers studied more than 110 pairs of identical and fraternal twins they found that only about 30 percent of creative ability is attributable to genetics. This means nurture is responsible for more than two-thirds of a person’s ability to solve problems and be creative, innovative, and playful. In other words, if people want to be more creative, they can engage in behaviors to boost their creativity, especially if they grow up around other people who behave collaboratively (Reznikoff et al. 1973).
Carol Dweck (2006), in her brilliant narrative Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, discusses people’s ability to change how they think and behave. She even admits that she had to undergo a significant change in mindset and behavior after she earned her PhD. It took intentional work; she was not only capable, it set the path for her life’s work. Change isn’t always easy, but the human capacity for growth throughout life is extraordinary.
In three independent studies tracking creativity training by the University of Oklahoma, the University of Georgia, and Taiwan’s National Chengchi University, researchers found that the effects of improvisationally based creativity training radically improved subjects’ abilities to think, reason, and create novel solutions. By integrating the processes of improvisation, subjects taught themselves to use divergent thinking to come up with many ideas, and then use convergent thinking to combine all those ideas for novel results (Bronson and Merryman 2010).
I was having a rowdy conversation with my family one night, asking for their opinions about innovators. What makes an innovative person? My 11-year-old son, Trey, who had been quiet up to this point, suddenly answered, “They innovate themselves, Mom.” His comment was so unexpected, the entire family stopped and considered. And I realized he nailed it. Almost every account of innovation and innovators that I had been gathering was about the person’s ability to become—to improvise in the face of uncertainty or difficulty and write his own score. Just like a jazz musician, he created a new type of music that had never been heard before.
Lisa Seacat DeLuca changed from a frustrated outsider at college to IBM’s most prolific inventor with more than 420 patents. Bessie Coleman, born to sharecroppers in 1892, went from impoverished girl to the first Native American–African American woman to earn a pilot’s license. Hedy Lamarr (yes, that Hedy Lamarr) may have been a femme fatale in movies, but she was bored offscreen and wanted to contribute to the World War II effort. So she tinkered around with machines and finally patented a technology that laid the groundwork for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Steve Jobs created technology that didn’t sell; then he tried and failed again and again before he finally got to the world’s most recognized technology, Apple computers (Jacobs 2015; Singh 2016; Griggs and Grinberg 2015).
They all went through years of learning, tinkering, failure, and effort to become the innovators they are and were. That is exactly how improvisers behave—they are constantly stretching, trying, failing, succeeding, and starting over. DeLuca, Coleman, Lamarr, and Jobs all innovated themselves. So can you.
Go With It: Embrace the Unexpected to Drive Change will show you the methods, mindsets, and behaviors that drive improvisers. These techniques can be learned and nurtured, which in turn will nurture your ability to be an innovative person. And then you can model and teach those behaviors to others.
The first four chapters explore four major improvisational concepts that lead to behavioral innovation and change: embracing the unexpected, preparing like an improviser, playing in the moment, and thinking upside down. Each category is critical to putting on a good improv show—and critical to driving innovative behaviors. Then, the final chapter discusses how you can shape the future by managing change through improvisation. Additionally, each chapter features a case study based on real-life examples, an exercise for you to try with your team, and an improvisational sketch presenting Improvisation and Innovation as human characters.
Go With It is about changing, embracing the unexpected, and innovating—like an improviser. This cycle of growth is lifelong, and will allow you to be flexible, adaptable, and innovative, no matter what comes your way. This book will introduce you to the cycle that improvisers live in (Figure I-1):
• Prepare. We’re constantly practicing, preparing, and setting the foundation. You never know when you’ll need to perform.
• Play. We engage in play, exploration, and experimentation. Play tests the limits of our preparation so we can learn where we hit the mark and where we need more work.
• Think. We have to look at things upside down, in weird ways, and with diverse groups. We’re always pushing the boundaries of our play and preparation.
• Change. When all that up-front work pays off, we have to embrace the change we discover. We have to evolve. And once those new skills are mastered, it’s time to start again.
So enjoy! Everybody improvises. Even you.
Figure I-1. The Improv Cycle