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There’s a scene in Season 3 of Hacks where the lead character Deborah Vance (a comedian who has spent decades perfecting every syllable of her act) is dragged into an improv warm-up. The eye-rolls, the stiff compliance, the barely concealed contempt. It’s funny because it’s recognizable. Many of us have been Deborah in some corporate offsite workshop, waiting for the ‘silly’ part to be over so we can get back to real work.
Deborah’s skepticism isn’t entirely misplaced as we’ve repeatedly seen that the lessons from many improv workshops don’t persist, even though the emotional memories do. Teams have a great Tuesday afternoon. They laugh, they drop their guard when someone from Finance does something unexpected and charming and then, on Wednesday morning, the same people are in their regular meeting, killing the same ideas the same ways.
The problem is that we treat these workshops as events rather than as practice.
Status - The Real Barrier
‘Psychological safety’ has become the dominant explanation for why teams don’t innovate and with good reason. However, there’s a part of the story that often seems to be missing when psychological safety is examined carefully as an effect.
Ask yourself: what is the cost of a bad idea? In a psychologically safe team, the answer should be that the cost is small if not actually zero. This is because psychological safety emphasizes the freedom to explore. The nuance here is that the cost of a bad idea is unevenly distributed based on status.
A junior designer who pitches something weird risks looking naive. A VP who pitches something weird might be called ‘visionary’. Same idea, different person, entirely different consequences.
We’re yet to see an improv exercise that can really change the reality of those power dynamics. However, a well-designed improv-based experience can do something almost as valuable: allow people to try different status dynamics temporarily (in a low-stakes environment). We’ve found that helping people forget their existing status relationships, feel what it’s like to speak first and be heard, or to take a risk that lands are all exercises that give them more confidence to play things differently when they’re back at their desks.
What The Gym Teaches Us About Improv Practice
Nobody expects to get fit from a single spin class. Nobody thinks one session rewires their body. And yet we routinely expect one team building afternoon to rewire a team’s culture.
The same logic that makes physical training work (frequency, consistency, progressive challenge) applies here too. Exposure to different status dynamics, repeated often enough, starts to make them feel available, not just in play, but at work.
When we ran an extended applied improv program at Riot Games, we didn’t deliver a workshop. We built a curriculum: a series of courses, plus a regular drop-in practice session where people could keep honing what they’d learned.
You could argue that Riot was, in some ways, an ideal environment. Gaming culture takes play seriously, so when we pitched something built around games and play, the response was immediate. What nobody fully anticipated was the depth of the impact. Participants specifically reported (and their teams and managers affirmed) meaningful increases across the board: confidence, creative problem-solving, a stronger sense of belonging within their teams, the generation of fresh ideas, and a sharper ability to spot patterns and make unexpected connections.
That last one was particularly important. Pattern recognition and the capacity to make fresh connections are the engines of innovation. And they’re trainable if you put in the reps.
What It Looks Like in Practice
You spend a few sessions modestly playing with the improv principle “Yes, And”, learning reflexively to build on the suggestions of others. Three weeks later, you catch yourself in a meeting about to say “no, we tried that before” and you pause. In that moment, the more junior person who raised it doesn’t get the implicit message that their idea was naive, or a product of inexperience.
Instead you say, “when we did that before, the biggest challenge was X - what’s your thinking about that challenge?”. In doing so, the status disparity between you and the suggester is dissolved by the assumption that ‘everything is an offer’ and that the most wonderful things happen when people and ideas are nurtured.
Hungry for more?
You’ll find several improv inspired professional development exercises in our back catalogue…
The principles of improv are woven into almost everything we do at PeopleStorming. If you want to experience what this actually feels like rather than just read about it, our interactive Playful Leadership talk is a good place to start.