Archive for the ‘Improv Performance’ Category
“Yes…and” isn’t always your friend in business
Improvisers are trained to accept other players’ offers so scenes can move forward. In fact, it’s nearly impossible for an improvised performance to succeed unless the actors say “yes” to others’ contributions “and” extend or heighten those offers.
In negotiations of all types, and especially in a business context, part of the battle for victory hinges on establishing the reality you’re discussing. As a writer, I have to place a value on my services and the benefits they bring to my clients. A potential client who’s interested in getting the best service at the lowest possible price could point out that they are a new company acquiring lots of content, so they aren’t in a position to pay me what I think I deserve. The “Yes…and” approach pushes me to accept what they’ve said as truth and take the contract as offered. The problem is that I’m not in a scene meant to entertain an audience — I’m in a negotiation over whether I get paid what I deserve. Many factors influence the decision, such as whether I’m bored or need the work, but in the end I have to live with the consequences of my choice. Accepting less than I’m worth drives down my value and, worse, my self-perceived value. Unless the situation is dire, you shouldn’t bend to the version of reality they’ve put forth.
You should also watch out for internal battles at a company, even one where you’ve worked for a while and established a trusting relationship with your colleagues. Your co-workers might misunderstand a situation or, if you’re competing for a promotion or assignment, want to influence how a situation is perceived. “Yes…and” can be a weakness others exploit. It’s tough to maintain a proper balance between acceptance and skepticism, but it’s worth the effort to try.
Improv and the Game of Chicken
If you’ve watched any movies from the 1950s about disaffected youths, you are surely familiar with the game of Chicken. In the game of Chicken, two kids drive toward each other at high speed. The first person to swerve loses – that is, that person is the chicken. As with all 2 x 2 games, there are four ways for it to play out. The payoffs appear in the following table.
The first outcome is if both drivers swerve, which results in payoffs of zero. Both drivers swerve, so that means that neither of them won. But, because the outcome was equal, neither of them lost, either. The next two outcomes occur when one driver swerves and the other stays straight. In that case, we do have a clear winner and a clear loser, which is reflected in the payoffs of plus one for the winner and minus one for the loser. In the fourth case, disaster strikes. In that fourth case, neither driver swerves and there is a high-speed, head-on collision.
You probably don’t have to stretch your imagination to see how this game can play out in improv and business. When you create an improv scene, someone has to be willing to give up control. Even if it’s only for a moment, players must accept what other players say and do so they can continue to build a consistent reality without interrupting the audience’s enjoyment. The best outcome in a game of Chicken when you’re performing an improv scene is to have one player swerve and one player continue straight on. That means one player made a solid decision and all the other player has to do is follow along and build on what is been established. If both players swerve, that means no one is taking the reins and attempting to drive the scene forward.
Next…chicken and business.
Dialogue and Cooperative Play
Success at improv and business requires the clear communication of ideas and a willingness to incorporate others’ contributions into your work. This interchange doesn’t just happen verbally…among architects, this type of exchange happens on paper. In an opinion piece published in the September 2, 2012 New York Times, architect and Princeton professor (emeritus) Michael Graves wrote about an unspoken dialogue he had with a colleague during a boring faculty meeting:
While we didn’t speak, we were engaged in a dialogue over this plan and we understood each other perfectly. I suppose that you could have a debate like that with words, but it would have been entirely different. Our game was not about winners or losers, but about a shared language. We had a genuine love for making this drawing. There was an insistence, by the act of drawing, that the composition would stay open, that the speculation would stay “wet” in the sense of a painting. Our plan was without scale and we could as easily have been drawing a domestic building as a portion of a city. It was the act of drawing that allowed us to speculate.
Players from the ComedySportz Portland improv group love the game of Paper Telephone. The idea is that you write a starting line at the top of a piece of paper, then pass it to a friend. Your friend reads the first line, writes a second line, and then folds the paper so only the most recent line is visible. You continue passing the paper around until there’s no more room, then unfold the paper and read the story. A fun variation is to have as many pieces of paper as there are players so you get lots of stories. The results are often hilarious and the similarities among stories can be eerie.
If you haven’t played Paper Telephone, you might have written stories with a friend, trading off after every paragraph. I’ve found this method works well for developing business presentations. Sit down with two or three of your colleagues and take turns telling a story or building an outline one line at a time. Don’t worry about coherence or order yet — all you want to do is get the information down so you can revise it later. This type of cooperative play helps you get beyond the creative person’s nightmare: a blank page.
Connections and Revelations
Del Close, the legendary improv director, once said: “Where do the best laughs come from? Terrific
connections made intellectually or terrific revelations made emotionally.”
A well-rounded player can take both approaches, but so many players rely on one approach to the exclusion of the other. I’m definitely on the intellectual side of that equation. For many years, I didn’t pay much attention to how I (or my character) felt about what happened in scenes. Instead, I focused on the “what” of the scene and tried to explore it instead of the character interactions. I’ve definitely become a more successful player, both as an individual and as part of a group, now that I’ve added some emotional range to my work.
Other performers I’ve worked with focus so much on emotional connections that they ignore the substance of the scene. Not reacting to an offer to explore the “what” of the scene is just as much of a denial as my reluctance to engage on an emotional level.
You’ll often run into the same split in business environments. Many executives disdain the emotional side of decision-making and choose to focus on the numbers. I think most of this approach is due to the fear that allowing emotions to affect them implies they can be manipulated. Marketing and sales professionals try to get their customers to engage emotionally, so their approach is often at odds with those of their technical and executive teams.
What’s the best combination of emotion and number sense? There’s no set formula, just experience and the intangible ability to judge which moves to make. Just be ready to meet your team members on their own ground every now and then.
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