Chicago

Improv Training Is Making Management Throw Away the Script

Sep 29, 2015 Improv Training Is Making Management Throw Away the Script

Description

The next consultant to visit your office may not be from McKinsey.

Originally Posted on Bloomberg Business
September 29, 2015 - By Anthony Effinger

Ali Khan is a corporate ninja. He has a black belt in Lean Six Sigma, an amalgam of two hypermethodical management systems developed by Toyota (Lean) and Motorola (Six Sigma).

Khan is all in: To get his belt, he had to pass 13 exams proving he could read a Pareto chart and use Kanban analysis. As a Lean Six Sigma process director at Sun Life Financial in Toronto, he teaches the stuff. But he recently had his mind blown by another, more unusual corporate tool: improvisational theater.

In April, a team of actors from The Second City, the Chicago theater company that launched Steve Carell, Amy Poehler, John Belushi, and Gilda Radner, came to Sun Life to help lead three days of training. At one point, an actor mimicked putting something imaginary at Khan’s feet and said: “Here is a box. What’s in it?”

“There’s a flower inside,” Khan said.

“What do you want to do with it?”

“I want to give it to you.”

Khan, 43, describes the simple exchange in tones of the sublime, as though it changed his life. And in fact, it did, he says. In another exercise, everyone clapped whenever a Sun Lifer said something. “You know it’s not real, but it feels awesome,” Khan says. And it led him to this: “Instead of judging your co-worker, you collaborate. You build on each other’s capabilities.”

Few hard-charging business leaders have put imaginary boxes at their employees’ feet (or paid anyone else to), but they should, says Steve Johnston, managing partner at Second City Works, the theater’s corporate-training subsidiary. Clients, including Google, Farmers Insurance, and Dow Chemical, are using improv techniques to foster communication, collaboration, and creativity. These are not necessarily skills MBAs are learning in business schools. “They come out really strong on the quant skills,” Johnston says, “but not so much on the soft ones.”

So what is improv, exactly?

Say the word to later baby boomers and Gen Xers and you conjure memories of comedians on TV’s An Evening at the Improv. Almost none of that was improv, though. It was performers doing jokes they had rehearsed for months. True improv was born during the Depression in the slums of Chicago, where a woman named Viola Spolin used what she called theater games to help immigrant children assimilate.

Her son Paul Sills and two friends appropriated the games and turned them into a comic art at The Second City, a theater they opened in an old Chinese laundry in 1959, aiming their split-second satire at Eisenhower, suburbia, and fallout shelters, according to The Second City Unscripted: Revolution and Revelation at the World-Famous Comedy Theater, by Mike Thomas. A year after the founding of the theater, The Second City started a workshop for training its actors. In 1985 it started training...

Read the entire article now on Bloomberg Business

Tags

Newsletter