Managers striving to foster creativity often use the time-worn phrase “thinking outside the box” to encourage workers to come up with something nobody else in the room is thinking. But the improvisational actress Patricia Ryan Madson has a better idea: Look inside the box and take a fresh look at what’s already there.
The author of Improv Wisdom: Don’t Prepare, Just Show Up, Madson helps organizations find new ways to play off one another in an unscripted romp towards what might be. Turning the planning process inside out, she says, is an important part of learning how best to “ready, fire, aim.”
“We’re all creators, given the conditions and permission to do so,” she says. “All too often, there are corporate cultures that say: ‘Be creative, but don’t make any mistakes.’ Improv opens doors to doing things a different way.”
In workshops and seminars, improv consultants pull stodgy executives to their feet, creating novel situations to which they must react, encouraging them to move their bodies, jump, say wild things, clap or sing or dance, play with toys, sit on desks, crawl on the floor and generally provide crazy-seeming new points of view. Tension melts away. Competition takes a back seat. And new ideas miraculously start to flow.
That’s not to say that every business brainstorming session should turn into a stand-up comedy skit. But, the openness and playfulness that characterize improvisational acting can create a sense of cooperation and affirmation that is foreign to highly competitive workplaces. When workers actively shoot down each other’s ideas to help their own ideas win, nascent notions that could develop into something brilliant die on the vine.
Instead, Madson and other improv consultants, including a team out of Portland, Oregon, called On Your Feet, are hoping to create what Madson calls “a culture of ‘yes’.”
“Saying yes sounds implicit, but it’s profound,” she says. Barriers go up in front of fresh ideas within moments of their creation, leading to an atmosphere of “we can’t do that”, she says. “The improv idea of saying yes from the start,” she adds, “allows business folks to entertain things that would ordinarily get axed out.”
Madson has been a senior lecturer in drama at Stanford since 1977; her interest in using improvisation to improve business and education evolved slowly. Brilliant as they were, Stanford students were very good at giving what they perceived as the correct answer to a question, but became much shakier when asked to come up with original answers.
Too often, the student mind—not to mention the business mind—is looking for a formula to latch on to that will provide tried-and-true ways of solving problems. But that can block fresh ways of viewing a situation.