How does improvSense work?
ImprovSense Act 1 Episode 3: Debate
Marius van Wyk, sales manager at FUNDA Training and Conferencing, sat up quickly.
Wait, I get that people can be encouraged to work in groups and dialogue, but that is not the kind of creative participation you are talking about. You said ‘improvisation theatre’. That means people make things up on the spot in front of others. I call that ‘put on the spot’. That is terrifying. Our client base with its high volume of financial people and government employees will never feel comfortable with that. Even if we were to buy this concept, how on earth will we sell it?
Ok, so making people feel safe is important to you – especially safety from being put on the spot. It seems to me you value the autonomy of your clients to choose how and when they participate. According to David Rock’s SCARF model both safety and autonomy is necessary for the human brain to function at its best, so you are spot on. ImprovSense is not about putting people on the spot against their will and expecting them to be clever at a whim. ImprovSense is a skill with three layers:
1. to be aware and listen to one another,
2. to step in with confidence and risk their ideas and
3. to work together to let all the diverse ideas integrate into a coherent whole.
To listen, to step in with confidence and to give and take ideas cannot happen when people feel put on the spot, they have to feel safe and free to choose. You can therefore be sure that we take real care with both these conditions before we start working. We ask people how they feel when they hear they are going to improvise. This gives them a chance to air exactly the kinds of fears that you expressed. It is part of the Story-Strategy we follow as we design our processes.
Among the feelings, though, there are always also excitement and some curiosity. People are drawn by the idea that they will learn to trust their instincts and come up with innovative solutions together. These are the feelings we want to build on. Apart from safety and autonomy, the brain also likes status, such as the kind that comes from people accepting and using your ideas, relatedness that comes from people sharing solutions and fairness that comes from people all being in the same boat together. All these abound when people improvise collectively.
I don’t understand, show me a game.
Check out the walking exercise, it is one of our favourite games to start with and really simple, but it creates a feeling of relatedness and fairness within 5 minutes and quickly gives a sense of accomplishment to everyone, which raises their status. It only works though, if people risk moving autonomously and having the safety and certainty of knowing that other will support them. Within 5 minutes everyone’s brain got what they needed to engage further with whatever the content of the training or learning is going to be.
So ImprovSense opens people up to the content of the training and the conference? I think I like it. This may seem contradictory, but if you just stay on the beach and in the shallow water with them, how do they ever get good at the skills of ImprovSense so that they can keep learning? Listening and speaking up with confidence is not something that can happen in 5 minutes.
That may be the most important question of them all. It relates to the question Claire asked about the stickability of the learning. The brain can get into a space for creative participation within 5 minutes, but it takes a lot of practise to keep it there and to get it there when the pressure is on. There can be a range of things that keep people from listening to each other more often, from speaking their truth with confidence and from integrating diverse ideas into a coherent whole as a way of being. Yet without these skills teams cannot keep learning and developing to keep up with change and stay on the cutting edge of their industry and business.
What do you suggest then?
We like to work with teams over time in a group coaching type space to help people identify what holds them back and we work through it using improvisation exercises. What keeps them from listening to each other, from speaking up and from integrating diverse ideas into a coherent whole that is innovative and produces lasting solutions? Over time the way people relate to each other and the way they learn and develop in an organisation can completely change. We like to do more that just revamp how people train, conference and learn, we like to create a team climate in organisations where learning, innovation and development is a way of life. In an organisation like that training, team building and even conferencing is not a once off let’s hope it hits the mark type thing, it is a way of life and conferences or training workshops are just instigators for deeper learning processes.
That is a mouth full. If it is the way you say it is, then why do most of our training workshops run for only half or full days, maybe up to 3 days in a row if we are lucky. The skills you talk about develops over time. Are you saying we must change the way we structure our training?
I did not say that, but it may be something you are saying.
It sounds expensive and time consuming. I want to see how it works first.
Great, then stick around. You may find it far less time consuming and expensive than you think – especially if you can learn the tricks yourself and do not have to pay experts to run it all the time…