Archive for the ‘Teamwork’ Category
Improv and Gamification: Introduction
You can divide improvisation into two rough categories: short-form and long-form. Short-form improvisation consists of games (also called “scenes” or “forms”) that last about 3-8 minutes and, generally, have specific guidelines to which the players should adhere. Many organizations, including ComedySportz and Theatresports (from which ComedySportz was derived, with the permission of Keith Johnstone), use team-on-team competition to enhance the audience’s experience. Winning a round gets a team points, which are compared on a scoreboard, and provide a clear metric for the state of the show.
Gamification, the practice of applying game elements to business and social activities, has become increasingly popular. Kevin Werbach of Penn’s Wharton School and Dan Hunter of New York Law School (and adjunct faculty at Wharton), two leading gamification proponents, wrote For the Win, a book that’s available inexpensively on Amazon through Wharton Digital Press. In their book, they describe how companies have gamified internal processes and customer/product interactions to add fun to what might otherwise be boring situations. If you’ve ever become mayor of a business by checking in on FourSquare, you’ve been gamified.
Werbach and Hunter go into significant detail on how gamification works, but I’ll focus on four points (mentioned on p. 44 of the book) over the next few posts. They are:
- Motivation
- Meaningful choices
- Structure
- Potential conflicts
I’ll tackle each point from the perspective of an improviser who also spends time in the business world.
If you’d like to learn more about gamification, you can take Werbach’s Gamification course on Coursera.org. The next section of the course starts on April 1, 2013, but he offered it in the Fall of 2012 and, with luck, it will be available again for readers who learn about the course after the current session ends.
Introverts and Crowds
One of the most difficult aspects of being an introvert is finding a way to get ahead in a world dominated by extroverts. The unfortunate truth is that, especially in our early years, we overcompensate.
I was particularly guilty of this type of behavior in high school. I didn’t understand that other, more outgoing students weren’t just being loud and aggressive. Instead, they were simply acting the way their instincts told them to. Social awkwardness and much unintentional hilarity ensued.
I found my way out of this particular trap by joining and staying with a couple of improv groups, one in DC for three years and my second here in Portland for seventeen. I highly recommend improv, or theater in general, as a way to break out of one’s shell and learn how to cooperate with others in the business and in life. Don’t expect immediate results, but it’s like going to the gym — your friends will probably notice the change before you do.
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.
Improspectives 