Centre Stage: Using Improvisation as a Training Tool .

Performing for success: Can improv be an effective training tool? .

How do you encourage workers to free their creative energies? An increasing number of managers say thrusting them onto centre stage to role-play with their colleagues can do just the trick. .

Today's business world requires quick thinking, flexibility, and an ability to see things from multiple perspectives. Improv - like other forms of experiential training - takes workers out of their usual environments, presents them with unusual problems and encourages bonding, collaboration and communication. But as writer Celene Adams reports, improv initiatives need management support to have a lasting effect. .

A group of men and women from some of Canada's top firms sit in a circle. Sam, a sales manager with a large manufacturing company, stands up and mentally prepares for his turn. His task: to recall everyone's name and the gesture they just made, such as sticking out their tongue or scratching their knee. .

All heads in the circle turn to Sam. He thumbs his nose at everyone and begins: "Amanda, Roger, Mario…." Sam is flapping his arms and puffing out his cheeks, recalling others' gesticulations and names fairly well until he gets to the woman sitting directly to his right. For the life of him, he can't remember her name. He laughs and gives up, passing to Andrew - the man on his left. Andrew salutes his peers. Then - starting again with the first person's name and gesture - he works around the circle to Sam. But, when he gets to Sam, Andrew also draws a blank. .

Sam, Andrew and the others were participants in a recent training workshop using a method that has become something of a trend - using theatre improvisation techniques to teach creativity and innovation. .

Imaginative Exercise
Albert Einstein once said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge," and many Canadian firms are realizing the truth of this statement. Challenges common to many businesses - such as building new teams after restructuring or acquainting older employees with doing business on the Internet - require not just knowledge, but adaptability, flexible thinking and mutli-dimensional perspective. Doing business today, says Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter, is less a results-oriented process than "an imaginative exercise." .

That's where improv workshops come in. Exercises such as freezing in ones' steps, describing the surrounding scene and adding something to it, or choosing a pretend occupation and defining how and object in the room facilitates the job are designed to help people adapt their skills to the environment at hand and access knowledge under pressure. .

According to those who've tried the technique, improv, when used as a training tool in the workplace, can develop creativity and foster trust and collaboration - the so-called "soft assets" essential to doing business in the 21st century global economy. "There's an old adage," says Andy Burnham, president of Improv at work, which offers creative thinking and public speaking workshops: "If it ain't broke don't fix it. The new adage is: if you don't fix it you'll be broke." .

Experiential Training The idea of applying improv to business may have originated in 1992, when the Second City comedy troupe founded Second City Communications - a group of trained facilitators who took their stage experience into offices across Canada. Since then, government agencies and corporations in such diverse areas as aerospace engineering, computing and magazine publishing have hired theatre types to bring their masks, wigs, and funny hats into the workplace in hopes of stirring up energy and ideas. .

It's a new twist on a not-so-new idea. Improv - based training draws it pedigree from experiential training such as that offered by companies like Outward Bound, the wilderness adventure school that aims to bolster leadership and team spirit among employees. Popular in the mid-eighties, adventure training was criticized because it appeared to some that it offered little in the way of new skills or lasting behaviour change, despite its reputation as a good team bonding experience. .

So the question is, does improv offer anything more? Can a one - or two-day workshop really change anything in the long run? .

Many human resources and training professionals think so. .

"I found it really, really, really effective because you're doing, not sitting…You're learning though doing…And as you go through the exercises you have so much fun that you're paying keen attention because you're entertained at the same time that you're leaning," says Pat Meta, curriculum product manager with Polar Bear Software Corp. and IBM PBSC regularly offers Second City workshops to all its employees. .

What improv has in common with other experiential training methods is that it takes people out of their unusual environments, presents them with unusual problems and encourages bonding, communication and collaboration. But there are some important differences too. The emphasis in much adventure training, for examples, is on team dynamics, assessing risk and building trust between team members. Rock climbing and canoe expeditions teach participants to trust their co-workers and give them insight into each other as individuals. Back at the office, employees who've gone through the program share their common experience of being forced to rely on each other and they may be more open to sharing ideas. But, critics say, they don't necessarily have any specific tools to think differently or do a better job. .

Real-life challenges
The goals of improv exercises are often less obvious. Sam and his colleagues in the game illustrated above, for example, aren't honing their memory skills - although they assume they are. They don't find out what they're really doing until the end of the exercise. That's when the facilitator points out that hardly anyone in the circle has been able to remember the name of the person beside him or her. Why? Because just before your turn, you get nervous. And when you get nervous your capacity to retain and communicate information decreases significantly. .

The point, says Michael Rosenberg, in his book The Flexible Thinker: A Guide to Creative Wealth, is that, in the Information Age, "since we cannot possibly know all the facts, it is much more important to know how t use what we do know in new and different ways." Because the point of the exercise was murky, Sam and the others weren't able to gear their responses to what they thought they should be doing and so were open to learning something new. .

Further, the exercise reminded participants that there are two types of communication - verbal and non-verbal. "People sometimes don't remember the others' names but if they're cued with the gesture the person made, they remember," says Lindsay Leese, a Second City corporate workshop facilitator, emphasizing the important of paying attention to both verbal and non-verbal signals in the workplace. Andy while improve doesn't challenge people to scale a cliff or ride the rapids, it does have immediate application to real-life challenges. .

Tony Pattinson, a Six Sigma master agent with Bombardier Inc.'s engineering and product development Montreal division, recalls an international problem-solving workshop held to re-engineer administrative processes. The workshop, Pattinson says, was floundering - one woman almost called her boss to say the workshop was a waste of time and she was about to leave. But then Pattinson instructed the attendees in how to apply some of the techniques from Rosenberg's Flexible Thinking course. Hours later, after donning silly hats and throwing and orange around the room while coming up with different names and uses for it, the group arrived at solutions to the problems at hand. .

But do the results stick? Like an corporate initiative, that depends on management support and on-going implementation. "I encourage companies to take one-hour weekly 'break-outs,' where…you do some improv. You take a problem, you use the tools that we give you, you leave the old company culture behind and just enter this other culture - suspend disbelief," Burnham says. .

But suspending disbelief when it comes to the efficacy of improv as a way to stimulate improved problem-solving abilities is sometimes a stretch. Aside from evaluation sheets, there's no hard data that proves whether or not the training is effective. "One of [our] basic tenets is that you only know what you measure," says Pattinson. .

Difficult to measure
Still, you can't always measure success, and Pattinson is more then enthusiastic about the workshops. He says his own observations satisfy him that employees are able to use the tools the workshops provide. "looking at how they're working, listening to what they're saying, the way in which they're interacting with other people. I'm talking about people I have known for years…When you see them staring to work cooperatively together, something has triggered that." .

Lisa Brubaker, who works with Manulife Financials Learning Services division, concurs. She recollects how, during construction of a new Manulife building, she didn't have a suitable location for a new-hire luncheon. At first, she says, she felt frustrated, but then she applied the flexible thinking techniques she'd learned in an improv workshop and decided to collaborate with a hotel. .

Not for the shy
This new type of thinking freed her to consider alternative she might have missed in the past. "We were able to create more options to come up with the best solution for our customers…The concepts the courser teaches are how to use obstacles as opportunities, and how to build on others' ideas," Brubaker says, adding that these skills have the additional effect of lowing stress levels in the workplace. Which it may do. Unless, that is, you happen to be one of those shy souls who quakes at the prospect of exposing a silly side - or insists your silly side doesn't exist. .

"Anybody who's very introverted is just going to hate it," Pattinson says. You can't customize these courses to suit different personality types. Although the structure of the courses can be modified by mixing people from different departments or making sure no one has to perform alone, there's no way to evaluate individuals' learning styles, or to accommodate people who prefer to have material thrown directly at them versus those who need to be coached. .

Leese recounts one incident where a participant simply refused to do an exercise. The exercise, designed to illustrate the importance of being both a leader and a follower, is called OneVoice. People sit across from each other and try to say the same thing at the same time. The ideas is to co-operate with your partner instead of jumping in first or waiting for the other person to say something. "It operates on the principle that you're in sync with your partner. You don't know what you're going to say, but you're saying it together. [One] woman was very, very resistant…She didn't get the point," Leese says. .

Resistance is a predictable obstacle most people encounter before breaking through to increase creativity. But pushed to the limits of their preconceived ideas of how to approach problems - such as inventing up to 100 new uses for an orange - people start to enjoy the creative process. "They go through 'o.k., we can handle that,' to resenting me…to being really mad and feeling like 'no way,' to pushing through that and finding creativity on the other side," Leese says. .

Some risks
But you have to be prepared for the shift, laughs Rosenberg. "I've told organizations that you …have to think about whether you want this course, because it might be detrimental to you," he says, referring to one company whose employees took the course and then proceeded to go above and around their unsupportive supervisors. .

Back in the circle, everyone playing "the name game" has had a turn and believes the game is over. Almost everyone has found that they can remember the names of others in the circle - with the exception of the person sitting directly beside them. Now the game has wound it way around again to Susan, the first person in the circle. Susan thinks she's had it easy because she's only had to remember one person's name before passing to the next. But then the facilitator asks Susan to recite everyone's name. She starts out, and to their own and everyone else's surprise, is able to name each person. The point? Because Susan thought she didn't have to perform, she relaxed. And in so doing, her ability to remember outstripped that of all of her peers. .

It doesn't take an Einstein to know that's to be good for business.