Improv, Agile and Responding to Change

BISH BOSH, ZIP ZAP ZOP, samurai shouts and pointing at things and calling them different fruits.

It might sound strange, but for 2 months (pre-covid) this was a typical warmup for a weekly class for our small group of fellow improv students. 

Why did I take part?

Many of us will associate improvisation with acting, or a comedy show where contestants compete to create hilarious scenarios based on a single word/topic - think ‘Whose line is it anyway?’ … Hold up, before we go any further, let me assure you that I have no intention of doing either… yet! 

For me, it was a chance to explore some of own ideas, my own limitations and assumptions about how I bring my whole self to serve teams/organisations. As well as the associated benefits one is likely to gain around presenting, running workshops, using techniques with teams etc, there have been real moments of personal reflection for me. I’m hoping to be able to share some of these with you.

One of these has been around planning. 

"Responding to change, over following a plan” (Agile Manifesto 2001)

We’ll have heard many debates about the lack of planning, or too much planning, or the right/wrong type of planning that happens in and around Agile. So what about the responding to change bit, how does that tend to pan out?

In the improv group we will often play games or act out scenarios with a brief intro setting the scene and what we’re going to do at a very high level. Someone will then offer up a starting scene/dialogue and you wait your turn, or look for an opportunity to engage. This is in real time, you may never have imagined this scenario before or this may even be a scenario you're very familiar with and can call upon actual examples.

It's easy here for the mind to run ahead and create plans for what witty thing you're going to say, what character you’re going to play etc and how your performance is going to lead to spontaneous applause! Then your group starts and within 20 seconds the activity/discussion has gone somewhere completely unexpected and the beautiful lines fit for Broadway that you’ve authored are of no use. My experiences of buying bread from the shop have little reference point when I'm asked to treat the shop assistant as a genius and they're asked to treat me as speaking an alien language! Uh oh.

At this stage, do you complain about how you hadn’t planned for this, do you regret not bring able to remember the names of clouds or find a 7th word that rhymes with ’share', do you freeze and stutter, do you let the fear of looking like a failure overcome you, or do you find someway of dealing with the unexpected change and moving forward? 

Just like the improv group, if we’re in a team, we’ll undoubtedly find times where we have to deal with unexpected change. It’s at this moment that as coaches/change leaders/scrum masters etc that we get to see how well we personally handle ‘responding to change, over following a plan’. 

Do we find we need to stop/start (sometimes this might be the right thing), or are we able to maintain a flow? Can we find a way through the tough moments, by being adaptive, looking at what’s being presented to us and changing direction according to where the team is taking things? Are we able to maintain a positive/growth based mindset and let new ideas emerge, or do feel like we’ve lost control and freeze until we can find a fixed model that we want to apply. 

These kind of games got me wondering just how prepared we are for responding to change? I say this not to judge but as a broad reflection of how we may respond to change, when we’re the ones facing it. How well do I respond to change, what are my patterns of thought and behaviour that either support or hinder my ability to work through unexpected challenges.

I'd invite you all to ask yourselves similar questions. If you're looking for a 'safe space' within which to experience unexpected change I'd recommend giving improv a go!

For me, I can’t wait to do further sessions once lockdown has eased up as I really did get a lot out of it, and I look forward to sharing more reflections with you all. 

Inderjit

PS - It's also a lot of fun!