Creating scenarios based on limited, but specific information. Generating ideas or solutions quickly. Listening closely to other people. Accepting what you’re given. Making sure you don’t deny people their voice or views. These are all aspects of improvised comedy, something that I’ve recently found out that I have a real and genuine passion for.
How did this come about? A little under a year ago I decided to enrol on the The Maydays beginners improvised comedy course ‘just to give it a try for a giggle’. It’s not stand up – it’s improvising and creating scenes on the spot, with a limited input from the audience (if any). I’ve got so sucked into this wonderful art that I am now half way through my fourth course, six live shows down and planning on starting a 10 week improvised singing course in April. It’s provided me with an amazing forum to unleash my creative side and has also provided me with a set of invaluable skills that are not only good on stage, but also in business.
Drawing on my own experiences, there’s four things I’d like to share with you about how my improvised comedy transfers to the workplace in my life.
Confidence.
My confidence has increased massively. I can think of a key example of how this shows. Some time back I was called at short notice to attend what was meant to be an informal meeting with two client contacts in a government department. Upon arrival, I was alerted that the format had changed, and we had 10 people present, from different areas of the government and department of health and that I was expected to lead the meeting from the perspective of the site build. Two years ago, I would have struggled and had a fair bout of nerves trying to present ‘on demand’ to this group of people, however I felt confident, took a deep breath and the meeting was a great success with a wonderfull project being spawned afterwards. I put this down to the many situations posed to me in improv where I have had to ‘jump in the deep end’ either on stage or with people I do not know and had to be confident in my surroundings to be able to perform to the best of my ability.
Creativity.
Improv has inspired and rejuvenated the creative aspect of my mind and has it bubbling like it hasn’t for a long time. I’m much more confident in putting forward ideas for pitch materials, attending brainstorms and getting actively involved. I find I’m thinking differently about how I might present and run workshop style sessions. It’s generally made me think more creatively and made me want to get involved in the more creative activities that happen around me in and around work.
Listening & Trust.
Improv forces you to listen very carefully and trust what you are given. You’re given a set of specific words, themes, locations or circumstances (much like a problem a client may have) and you are forced to respond in a way that acknowledges and builds on the inputs you’ve been given, not reject them. If someone needs a sock, there’s no point giving them a shoe. I know in myself and in my day to day work that I am consciously trying to listen to people more, respond more appropriately, and trust what I’m told, as opposed to responding in an ad hoc or generic manner.
Teamwork and interpersonal skills.
Improv definitely grows your interpersonal skills and builds your ability to function as part of a team. In improv, we refer to this as the ‘group mind’ – which is the idea that if you are closely aligned with the people around you, you will inherently and sub-consciously strive to achieve the same goal. I’m sure I don’t need to explain how massively beneficial this is in the day to day workings in a busy agency!
So there it is – my four key takings from Impovised Comedy and how it can benefit you in your working life (and your personal life?). If you think this is cool, and want to learn more about the awesomeness that is improv, there’s a few places online I reccomend:
- Check out Peter Day’s ‘‘What can business leaders learn from rock musicians and improvisational comedians?’ Radio 4 show. There’s some fascinating insights in there and I highly recommend that people have a listen. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00p944k
- Contact The Maydays – they run business workshops as well as general improvised comedy courses
- Ping me a question, via email or twitter or come to one of my improv gigs (also listed on my twitter account)
I’d be keen to hear if anyone out there has any experience of improv, or has an ‘extra curricular’ passion that whilst not immediately obvious, benefits the work they do on a day to day basis?
I look forward to hearing from you!
Matt
Matt wrote this on 22.02.10 – 6 comments
It's filed in the Blogging, Brighton, Business, Funny, Interesting, NixonMcInnes box
While idly experimenting with the newfangled, real-time Twitter Streaming API yesterday, I decided to have a little bit of fun, to try and make life a little more interesting! In the interests of innovation and openness, I thought I would take some time out to share these experiments with you…
Read more…
Steve wrote this on 07.01.10 – 7 comments
It's filed in the Development, Funny, twitter box
As the self-appointed Christmas king of NixonMcInnes, I wanted to let you know what we’re doing over the festive break. As a team, we’re largely taking some well-earned holiday after what has been a brilliant year; moving offices, hiring several new team members and working with super clients. 2010 is going to be an even bigger year for us, and the industry as a whole as more and more people wake up to power of digital and the implications of living in a networked world. As an agency we’re keen to remain at the forefront of innovation, bringing cool stuff to our clients and keeping ourselves excited by never becoming complacent, and a proper mulled-wine fueled break will enable us to hit the ground running in January.
Read more…
Ross wrote this on 22.12.09 – 1 comment
It's filed in the Funny, NixonMcInnes, Off topic box
Yesterday started like any other day at NixonMcInnes; Will was running the ever popular Measurement Camp when he was suddenly pulled aside by our friends at Hotwire and asked if he would like to provide comment on the breaking news that Facebook had decided to change their terms of service and implement an ‘irrevocable’ licence to do exactly what they want with your content. Facebook have now returned to their previous terms of use after tens of thousands of users said it breached their right to privacy. Controversial eh? So controversial that the BBC picked up on the story and invited Will to comment. We naturally, jumped at the opportunity, it’s not every day you get to be on the BBC after all. 15 minutes of fame at last.
So Will had to leave Measurement Camp early (apologies to all of those in attendance and thanks to those who were left to wrap up the morning session) and was whisked over to Television Centre in White City where he was interviewed for the BBC lunchtime news.
Back in Brighton, the NixonMcInnes office and various members of the Twitter community eagerly waited to watch him on the TV.
Check out the Twitter chatter that’s been going on; NB this content is liklely to be out of date in a couple of weeks time.
Such an exciting and memorable day, we simply had to shout about it.
We are very proud of our Will, well done and many thanks goes out to Robin Wilson at McCann Erickson for the lead and to Hotwire for securing the opportunitty and organising Will on the day.
View Will’s stellar performance.
Ruth wrote this on 19.02.09 – 3 comments
It's filed in the Funny, Interesting, Marketing, NixonMcInnes, Press, Social networks, User generated content, Web technology box
Here in the heart of the NM engine room, or the dev-den as we like to call it, we love to celebrate the most pointless of events, and this week sees the Unix timestamp (the number of seconds elapsed since midnight January 1st 1970) reach 1234567890!
This fantastic event will occur on Friday 13th 2009 at 23:31:30 UTC, it’s not a particularly significant time or date but it’s interesting and fun nonetheless. As we love to celebrate things like this we have knocked up a Ruby script that will update a Twitter account, letting you know exactly how far off this historic milestone we are, so you can celebrate with us!
Follow @utcwatch to get in on the action (or visit www.coolepochcountdown.com to watch the event unravel in real-time). Also check out Wikipedia if you’d like to know more about the Unix timestamp.
Thanks to Flickr user totalAldo for the image.
Edward wrote this on 12.02.09 – 6 comments
It's filed in the Development, Funny, Interesting, Internet, NixonMcInnes, Off topic, Strategy box
Something nice we like to do when a site launches (along with sending our lovely clients booze) is to send them a set of MOO cards, well it is de riguer right? It’s a wonderful way for our clients to promote all their hard work (and ours) and a really nice way for us to say thanks for working with us – talk about an integrated communications campaign.
Joshua wrote this on 27.08.08 – 7 comments
It's filed in the Design, Free things, Funny, Interesting, Marketing box
Subversion (or SVN to its friends) is the software that the developers here at NixonMcInnes use to track the source code that they write. Each time some code is written or changed, it is ‘committed’ to SVN for safe keeping. Well the big excitement here is that we’re fast approaching the 10,000th code commit to SVN. I’m sure you’ll join us in cherishing this important milestone. As Steve emailed to the team this morning:
Hi techies
As I’m sure you are all only too aware, our 10,000th SVN commit is now imminent! These are exciting times!
We are all no doubt waiting with baited breath to see who will commit the coveted 10,000th revision! Fortunately, my friends, we can all follow the event, as it unravels, right here: http://twitter.com/devden
A lot of hard work has gone into these 10000 commits, so, what say we have a couple of beers to celebrate this momentous occasion? It will have to be on the day of the 10,000th commit which, of course, could be any day now! It goes without saying; there will be a prize for the proud new owner of revision 10000 and, who knows, maybe even a small consolation prize for the hapless soul left clutching revision 9999.
Good luck everyone!
Steve
Tom wrote this on 03.06.08 – 10 comments
It's filed in the Development, Funny, NixonMcInnes box
I think this just about sums up the fear some organisations have about UGC:
[Found via ffffound]
Tom wrote this on 17.04.08 – 4 comments
It's filed in the Funny, User generated content box
