Improv Games and Entrusting Strangers

Idea 33 for 2025

A few weeks ago, I participated in a panel on moving from Potential to Performance for learning and development practitioners. One of the panelists spoke about the power of improv to build dialogue, empathy and relational engagement with team members.

Improv is not new to me, but I haven't 'done' improv in 20 years or so. Yet, two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend a professional development event held by NAAAP-Toronto. It's a network that I had recently joined and this was the first event that I was participating in. They were bringing in a veteran improv practitioner and facilitator named James Cheng, who actually was one of the people that I had 'done' improv with two decades ago!

It's as if the universe was telling me to leave the comfort of my home on a cool November night and go out and try improv again!

It's hard for me to easily capture what James had in store for us. Ostensibly, it was a night to improve our voice and confidence through a curated selection of improv games that lasted about two hours! So, it wasn't improv per se and yet it was improv as praxis to communicate more clearly authentically, to listen to each other know more attentively, to pay greater attention to our surroundings and notice changes, to learn each other's names more effectively and to spend an evening getting to know strangers.

I was amazed at how quickly I and others became immersed in these games, introduced ourselves to others over the course of various games that had us moving, talking, listening, observing, mirroring, and of course, clapping (IYKYK).

One of the most memorable moments of the evening was near the end. We had to narrate a story of who we were (at least that is what I recall) with a partner. Lo and behold, I somehow spun a vignette that spun 20 years, beginning with how I began improv as a way to reacquaint myself with Toronto, where I had grown up but had been away due to years of study and work. I went on how it led to meeting my future spouse, embarking on my career trajectory, from teaching to combining in leadership development, speaking, and more.

I was struck less by how I could encapsulate a twenty-year history in a matter of a hardly two. minutes. Rather, I was astounded by two things: first, my openness to share this with a complete stranger and second, the ability of that stranger to listen attentively and be able to recount the arc and events of my story with clarity and precision.

I shared these sentiments during the brief and it occured to me that the power of improv was to build our latent but available human skills in active listening, careful observation, willingness to trust strangers, and to engage in open dialogue with curiosity and interest. To me, it effectively pierced the bubble in which we travel, vigilant, fearful and guarded. In that moment, it reawakened me to the ability of improv, and perhaps improvisational activities more general, to build trust, engagement, and connection among disparate people, who by the end of the evening, were no longer strangers.