Agency
The part where you go off-script—that's agency.
Life doesn’t stick to a script. Why would we? Do you enjoy when you receive a call from someone who’s reading a script?
How many conversations are exactly the same as others you’ve had in the past?
Things you invent and come up with in the spur of the moment can be as good as those you labor over. The best sales people I worked with know that listening and being in the conversation with customers and prospects is the winning way.
Experience shows when you have accumulated enough mileage to let go of the rules long enough to respond to the situation at hand. Often, you create new opportunity just by responding in a new way—in negotiations, partnerships, even personal relationships.
Surprise injects a sense of possibility into the equation (done in the positive.) But not too much surprise, and with a keen understanding of the context.
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Yes, AND...
Improv improves collaboration and innovation. With ‘yes, AND,’ improvisation liberates the leader and creator in us. The kind of person a top organization would hire is based on characteristics that typically don’t show up on a resume.
These qualities are ‘the ability to process on the fly,’ a ‘willingness to relinquish power,’ ‘ease with creating space for others to contribute,’ and ‘individuals who can learn from failure.’
Based on its many benefits, improvisation is increasingly an ‘on demand’ skill. It applies to several company systems to help lower employee churn, increase experimentation, collaborate, and change direction.
Trust in our imagination builds a spirit of respect, fun, joyful, and engaging relationships, which lead to shared truths. We increase our energy when we’re being creative.
Sometimes the best meetings and connections are not even planned. How many times in a day do you have unscripted moments? You bring to bear your knowledge and experience to figure out what might be obvious in retrospect.
Talk can change our lives, listening can make them better. A story passed on from person to person may get closer to reality. Many perspectives enrich it.
Business is very much about what people can do together. If you think about the purpose-idea that is at the foundation of a company, then it’s how that purpose is expressed and how it comes to life as the ideas get done through interactions.
Companies with big egos have a hard time here. But it is by far more productive to participate in something that’s happening than to try to control how it should happen. Community building and facilitation go hand-in-hard with improvisation skills.
Intuitive understanding of status
Status is a thing humans always try to figure out. Accomplished actors, directors, and playwrights are people with an intuitive understanding of the status transactions that govern human relationships.
“I decided just before my ninth birthday not to believe anything the grown ups said. And the next day I decided to always see if the opposite could be true. I think it changed my life I’ve been doing it ever since. And it taught me to be looking for the obvious not the clever. The obvious is really your true self, the clever is the imitation of someone else.”
Keith Johnstone (1933-2023)
Keith Johnstone became involved with the theater in 1956. His book on Impro is about spontaneity training for all purposes. In the chapter on status he talks about the value of humility in learning and teaching.
Space and status are related. For example, women are supposed to take as little space as possible, physically—when we sit down we cross our legs, while men sprawl. Social media reinforced the status of celebrities and powerful people. There’s a relationship between status and power.
Johnstone says improvisation is more like a sport, he believes clarity is in the mind. So I was curious about his thoughts on sanity because of its connection to energy:
“Sanity is actually a pretense, a way we learn to behave. We keep this pretense up because we don’t want to be rejected by other people—and being classified insane is to be shut out of the group in a very complete way.
Most people I meet are secretly convinced that they’re a little crazier than the average person. People understand the energy necessary to maintain their own shields, but not the energy expended by other people. They understand that their own sanity is a performance, but when confronted by other people they confuse the person with the role.
Sanity has nothing directly to do with the way you think. It’s a matter of presenting yourself as safe.”
Regardless of what you think about a book published in 1979, it will help you think differently. Learning to be warm and spontaneous could be lifesaving. To me, ‘the obvious is really your true self,’ while ‘the clever is an imitation of someone else’ is life-changing.
The best ideas come from variation
And not from being ‘always on.’ As Johnstone says in the video above, Robin Williams was always on, and he definitely was outside the box. Which made work with him a challenge. Improvisation is about being in the box.
I’m passionate about rest, restoring, and recreation because they build on this concept. Robert Poynton lives off grid in rural Spain, 3km outside a small town you most likely don’t know.
He’s the author who stated that you’re not your ‘to do’ list. Do Pause is for all who are obsessed with filling every minute of their day. To create the conditions where good things can happen is more powerful than trying to control events or people.
In Everything’s an Offer Poynton explains how the practices of improvisation can help you make more with what you have, using less effort, less energy and fewer resources (and decrease difficulty and stress.)
If we remembered that everything is an offer would we behave differently? We can accept what we observe around us and use it, and we can block it. As long as we do either one deliberately, not out of habit—agency.
Accept, or block: either is useful as it invites you to understand the consequences and to figure out what serves your purpose.
Life can and is beautiful in the random or shuffle mode. I grew up in a house where everything was recycled, up-cycled, and re-utilized. It’s a kind of thinking that opens up opportunity to observe and see ways to re-use things—boxes were my favorite.
A few passages that explain better the core thought and practice:
“The heart of this practice can be summed up in six words: let go, notice more, use everything.”
[...]
“Seeing a world full of offers feels very different from seeing a world full of problems. Problems are something you want to get rid of, whereas an offer is something you can take and use.”
[...]
“Nonetheless it is important to understand that seeing everything as an offer is not about looking on the bright side. In Monty Python’s Life of Brian people break into song as they are being crucified, happily intoning, ‘Always look on the bright side of life.’
This is not what I mean by seeing everything as an offer. Looking on the bright side is a kind of judgment and, as we will explore in Chapter 8, part of the improviser’s practice is to stay out of judgment (i.e., to try and avoid premature decisions about what is good or bad.)”
[...]
“Seeing everything as an offer does not require you to see the loss of your job, your dog or your grandfather’s antique wristwatch as a good thing—it just asks you to look at the reality you face, ugly or otherwise, and ask yourself the question ‘What is here that I can use?’
An offer is not nice or nasty, prickly or cuddly; someone falling asleep in your presentation, a pay raise or a broken leg are all offers in equal measure. The only question the practice leads to is ‘What do I want to do with this?’”
Improvisation is a tool to be present to opportunity. To be willing to flex, adapt, and adjust to what you have, rather than wishing you had something else.
“Be changed by what you hear”
During my talks, I’m in conversation with the people in the room. There are usually 3-5 people who connect with their body. Facial expressions, and also how they sit. This connection transforms the stories I share.
I found the act of noticing what’s going on in the room very powerful. It improved my tempo and delivery. That’s why at the end I usually have a long line of people who say they feel energized and enthusiastic about the talk. I met amazing colleagues this way.
This is more challenging to do on video. The mind-body connection gets lost in the fractional delays of video feeds. Presence is hard to recreate in the absence of face-to-face. But the effort to connect can suggest you other ways to compensate.
Improvisation is the ultimate tool for allowing things to emerge. It’s a skill based on humility and acceptance. A high tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity opens the door for something interesting to happen.
The part where you go off-script—that’s agency.
References:
Johnstone, Keith, Impro: Improvisation and the Theater (Routledge; 1st edition, 1987)
Poynton, Robert, Do Pause: You are not a To Do list. (The Do Book Co., 2019)
Poynton, Robert, Everything’s an Offer (On Your Feet; First Edition, 2008)