What You Can Learn From Improv To Improve Your Brainstorming Sessions
When there’s a group of people spontaneously putting together a performance, there’s an interesting phenomenon that happens — we communicate with each other not through words, not through actions, but something altogether more vague and almost imperceptible. We communicate through intention.
By default, somebody sets up the stage; They create the context of the narrative. They almost always will do it in a way that’s different from what I imagine. After all, they are a different person with their own imagination. And that’s okay, because they will always create entry points in their act — something that another actor can use to enter the story, or build on top of it. As an actor, my cardinal duty is to take one of the offers and build on it. These offers are points of continuity in the act. If my team has set the stage for a funny incident that happened on the road, I can’t enter the act and talk about how I want to fly a plane — we’re then talking about two distinct stories at the same time, and then there’s cohesion in our story any more, and the audience will instantly catch onto that. There’s no other way for someone to tell me when they want me to enter — there’s no pause in between for us to huddle and strategise; everything has to happen seamlessly, one after the other. Taking and giving offers is internalized for a good improv actor — you have to train to see them as clearly as signposts on the road guiding your path, as offers guide your story.
There are interesting parallels to discussions I’ve had with people who aren’t on the same wavelength as me. Especially in brainstorming sessions with my team, someone offers a tentative suggestion — a seed that is often half-formed in their own minds. In a world that teaches us to be extremely confident about everything we’re saying and banish doubt from our language, it’s easy to dismiss these seeds. But that’s a mistake, because when we eliminate the seeds, the discussion becomes a competition of survival of the most well-formed ideas, not the survival of the best possible ideas. How many ideas have never seen the light of day because somebody more outspoken dominated the discussion? And think about it — the ideas that are most well-formed at the start itself tend to be the conventional ones, because non-conventional ideas, by their very definition, need to be created and developed.
So the next time you’re in conversation with somebody, try to read beneath the words and discern offers that somebody is making, even if they don’t know it then — you might be surprised by the direction the discussion will eventually take. Some of the most creative ideas we’ve implemented in our marketing team took birth as tentative half-formed thoughts and suggestions, offered in a low, almost apologetic voice.
