Applied improvisation: what it is and where it comes from

Picture a room at an office in Glasgow. Twenty people are standing in a circle with the chairs pushed to the wall. One of them is trying to finish a sentence, a colleague is adding to it before it is finished, and a third person adds to that. There are no slides, nobody has read anything beforehand, and inside ten minutes everyone has said something out loud. That is a session of applied improvisation about ten minutes in. What follows is the plainest account of the field I can manage, for anybody in Scotland who has been asked to book it and wants to know what they are buying.

The short version is on the About page. This is the longer one.

What happens in the room

Applied improvisation takes the exercises improvisers use to train and points them at skills that matter at work. The first is listening under load, and the exercises for it make it impossible to plan your next sentence while somebody else is talking. Then accepting and building, which is taking a colleague's unfinished idea and adding to it rather than closing it down. Status and presence is about how tone, posture and pace decide who gets heard in a room. The last is failing cheaply, recovering from a mistake in front of colleagues in a few seconds, and people only try the other three once they can do that.

Everything is played in pairs or small groups, and nobody is put up alone in front of the others. The order of exercises is set so that the risk only rises once people are ready for it, and anyone can sit a round out and rejoin when they want. It ends with a debrief about what people will do differently on Monday, and a few words of vocabulary the team can keep using afterwards.

Where the exercises come from

They come from theatre improvisation, where performers make scenes up on stage without a script. The exercises were built to train performers to listen, accept what a partner offers and recover in front of an audience, and over several decades practitioners adapted them for training in organisations. The reason the stage versions are the ones used is that this is where the skills get drilled hardest, since a performer who stops listening has nowhere to hide. A difficult meeting is the same, with more riding on it.

It is an established field with a professional body. The Applied Improvisation Network has run since 2002, and practitioners across the UK deliver this work to public bodies, universities and health organisations. If you need to justify the spend to somebody who has never heard of it, there is a discipline to point at and a search term they can check.

What applied improvisation is not

The commonest confusion is with a comedy workshop. Nobody is asked to be funny and comedy is never the instruction. The instruction is to listen, accept and build, and an exercise is judged on whether people did that.

The second is a performance. Nobody stands up alone in front of the room and nothing is staged for an audience. The full-day session does close with the team playing short scenes for each other, low pressure and opt-in, but that comes after a day of practice in pairs and it is the exception.

Some people also worry that it will tip into something personal. The sessions work on how people behave in a meeting. Feedback is about what a line did to the conversation and never about the person who said it, nobody is asked to share anything personal, and a real situation with HR or legal sides to it stays with HR.

Applied improvisation in Scotland

This practice is based in Glasgow and runs sessions on site across the Central Belt: Glasgow and Edinburgh, and out to Stirling, Falkirk, Lanarkshire and Ayrshire. I run every session myself. I'm a software engineer during the week and I perform improv in Glasgow, and the sessions are where the two overlap. The meetings I'm describing are the ones I sit in, and the exercises are the ones I know from the stage.

Sessions run from two hours to a full day, at your office, in any room with space to stand in a circle. Every price is published. The two-hour Taster is the usual starting point and is set out step by step on the site, so you can see what happens before anyone books anything, and if the session doesn't land the fee comes back in full.

How to tell whether it is what you need

Ask what would be different on Monday if it worked. If the answer is that people would let an idea finish before taking it apart, that the quiet half of the room would say something, or that a manager would have the conversation they have been avoiding, this is the kind of training that gets you there, because those are things people only learn by practising them out loud. If the answer is a good afternoon and better moods, an activity day is the better buy and I will tell you that on the call.

What each of the five sessions contains, and what each one costs, is on the sessions page.