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Improv and Agile
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Improv and Agile

June Kim

president of Agile Consulting

2013/2/27

I have been interested in Improv and Agile for a quite while[1] and inevitably I found a way to merge these two interests in practice.  Improv has been particularly useful for agile coaches and team leaders, but also for team members, as you will see below.

Here are a few brief notes on what I have discovered and practiced so far.

1. Social Skill and Improv

In most domains, if our understanding of a problem doesn't incorporate its politics, economics, sociology, pedagogy, and/or psychology, we might be too naive seeing it as a puzzle rather than a complex problem, hence success in theory but failure in reality.

Social skills become very important in Agile because we are dealing with complex problems and its success largely depends upon the social structure of the organization and social skills of the members. Every practice in Agile (as well as in all other software development methodologies) should be supported by social actions to be successful.

However, there are very few, if any, ways to deliberately practice our social skills in our work.

Here comes the Improv.

Now I'll give you an example to demonstrate why agile method practices require social skills, even for practices that  people think they are purely technical: Test Driven Development (TDD) in the Agile Software Development

People usually have an illusion that to do TDD well, you only need to do TDD well. But TDD doesn’t happen in an island. You always have people to interact with while doing TDD.  So in addition to doing the mechanics of TDD well, you need to add the right social skills for doing it successfully.

In the past, when I taught TDD, people had a hard time doing TDD after they went back to their workplace because I didn’t teach them necessary and supportive social skills — for example, asking about requirements to the planner, asking questions on technical problems to senior members, resolving conflict (not only in the source code) with team members, persuading other people about the merits of TDD, and so on.

What they practiced in the classroom is working on simple problems without any real social context. Yet they believe they can do TDD. So many problems they didn't expect occurs once they come back to their work.

There is always a social interaction when doing agile practices and to do the practice well in reality you need social skills accompanied with the technical skills.

So I use Improv when I teach any kind of practices in Agile.

2. Why Improv?

Then why Improv? Why is it good for practicing social skills? I can give you at least three points.

We basically all have mirror neurons, which make us share what others are feeling by just watching them, and hence we can learn anything.  (Thanks to these neurons we could learn anything when we were young).

However, the degree that one can activate and utilize their mirror neurons in this learning varies greatly. For those who have difficulty using their mirror neurons, you can practice. Yet when doing so,  there is always the risk of failure.

Luckily, in the realm of Improvisation, failure is the norm and expected. It is much safer to fail in Improv than in real life.

During Improv, you practice expressing what you are feeling, and you practice observing and interpreting people’s signals and then guessing their feelings, and intentions. Then you get feedback in a psychologically safe environment.

Using Improv and with a little bit of role-setting in the beginning, we can set up and play within both hard and easy situations. In doing this, we discover something we didn’t expect and learn from it.

One key point is unexpected learning. There is something called deliberation.

You are conducting a hiring interview and asks a question "When the teamwork is poor and people have relationship problems, what should you do?" The interviewee tries to give you seemingly correct answer as if she were in a school test for ethics or leadership.

However, her actual behavior might be far from the answer. This is the real problem. This is because the question induced the interviewee's deliberation in answering it. She constructed the answer. She faked it.

Yet in Improv, it is very hard to deliberate. If you do that, it will cut the flow and stop the show. It may make the show predictable and dull. You are required to wing it.

What you do in an Improv situation is closer to what you would do in a real situation similar to that Improv situation. Surprisingly, you uncover more of your real behaviors in Improv. You can't hide it.

Therefore, you have more chance to see and practice your real behaviors for some important situations. How many times you practice answering to socially challenging situations doesn't matter to how you behave in the real situation, but how many times you practice Improv in socially challenging situations does matter.

In my class, I ask a simple question. First I give them a concrete scenario and I ask, "The project manager requests you to do the task in 1 week instead of 3 weeks, which you originally estimated as 3 weeks; what will you do?" The student confidently gives me an answer right away, "I will persuade the manager". Okay. Then I continue, "Now, try me". I start Improvising as a manager role. The student's response is usually surprise and silence. She tells me that it's because she'd never thought about how she would articulate it in detail. Sometimes, I continue to ask, "Which channel are you going to choose, email, phone, or face-to-face?" Then I accordingly Improv as the student chooses the channel. As always, the student is surprised how much she didn't think about the details and how much it differs from what she thought in the first place.

When she answered, "I'll persuade the manager", there are millions of ways trying persuading the manager. Yet, she gave it a name (persuade the manager) and stopped thinking further.

Another thing is embodied cognition. Recent brain researchers tell us there is more relationship between our body and how our brain works than we thought before.

According to the recent research done by Amy Cuddy, for example, if you reach out your arms wide open, your stress hormone, cortisol, decreases and if you go in to a hiring interview after posing it for 5 minutes, you get higher score. There are similar researches in this field. If you sit on a softer chair, your attitude becomes softer and you are more easily persuaded. How much you like warm water (for taking shower or drinking) is significantly correlated to how much you feel lonely. Whether you held a warm cup or cold cup before a decision making influences you a lot. The surprising research results are endless.

So reading a text about how you should behave under a certain situation is different from you actually doing it. The latter influences your body and brain more. So if you practice a social situation while actively enacting it with your body, it is more likely that you learn better and you influence your brain more.

So Improv has three advantages for practicing social skills : safe failure, realism in behavior, and embodied cognition.

So does practicing Improv actually improve the social skills? Do we have enough direct evidences? Not yet. This area hasn't been researched much, but there are some promising evidences. Research has shown that actors usually seem to have greater empathic skills. Moreover, according to Thalia Goldstein, a psychologist at Yale, practicing acting -- with some improv style practices -- actually improves empathic accuracy[2].

Empathic accuracy, which is different from sympathy, is the "ability to understand another's frame of reference and the conviction that is worthwhile to do so … the opposite of empathy is the imposition of one's own perspective[3]".

It has been shown[4] that therapist's empathic accuracy is "the single best predictor of success in addiction therapy". There are many researches on the benefits and importance of empathic accuracy in professional and daily settings[5].

One would not debate on whether empathic accuracy is an important, if not the most, social skill.

Therefore, we can say practicing Improv may be an effective way of improving one's social skills[6].

3. Prototyping and Improv

As we all know, in Agile, prototyping is very important. Improv is a wonderful way to enhance our normal prototyping performance to a whole new level.

There is a lot to say about this, but I promised to be brief here, so I’ll give you just a short case story.

There were four founders who were preparing for a new venture. They had been researching for more than a couple of months to develop a new product using Kinect technology. Their confidence in the product idea was quite strong.

Now I asked them to do a short Improv with that product as if the product had been fully developed and deployed at the expected site. I emphasized that we should do Improv beginning from “before using the product” (for example, how the need arises) and until “after using the product” (for example, how they share their experience with the product with other people), so that we could walk through the whole cycle.

After about 10 mins of warm up exercises with Improv, they jumped into their own Improv, without any script, but just with a given situation they they thought fit with their product.

Their improv lasted about 10 or 15 mins. We finished it. Nobody spoke a word. Silence.

They dropped that idea right there, just after a 10 mins of Improv -- an idea which they had been preparing for a couple of months.

That is the power of using Improv in prototyping. They learn something unexpected, and moreover it's from a quite real context. You have to flesh out many social context and every detail while Improving; however, you could just give a tag, for example "the persona called David starts using the product", and stop thinking about it when just discussing(as I mentioned above in the "persuading" story).

I have conducted “Improv for Prototyping in Agile projects” workshops several times and I put an exercise activity at the end using what they learned. They are all surprised with the learning from Improv as a prototyping tool.

4. Improv for Scrum Meeting

One exercise I want my students do is give them 20 or so agile practices and let them categorize them into two piles : technical and social. If you don’t like having to choose between these two, I let you pile into three categories : technical, social, and ambiguous.

After this, I compare the different results among groups. I ask them to explore the social bases of every practice. Is there any practice that will still work once the team's trust is broken? There is a tendency for  people to select some specific practices as "more" social. Scrum meeting is one of them.

I recommend doing Improv for both technical-as-most-people-believe and social-as-most-people-believe. I will give you one example of Improv exercise for Scrum meeting.

First of all, I give Improv introduction and let them be accustomed to Improv.

Now people form into groups. They start discussing about "words they heard or spoke in the Scrum meeting that made the meeting better or worse". They have to write it down on index cards and collect experiences. Caution : It should be based on real experiences not speculation.

Then they pile up the cards facing down and shuffle them. One person picks up a card from the pile and doesn't tell others what it is. He should use that line at some point in the meeting Improv. They start Improv for a Scrum meeting. Other people might not know when the person who picked up the card used the line from the card.

Some variations:

  1. There is a facilitator and she can hide who picked up the card from the rest of the people.
  2. Or everyone in the group can pick up a card and use that line during the meeting.
  3. For beginners, the card person can start his line first and all others can start responding it.

After this Improv, people talk about what they did, how they as a team experienced, how they felt, and what the influence of that line was, and so on.

One interesting point I usually find from this activity is the words they thought would help Scrum meeting when writing down on the card actually worked out 180 degrees.

People get insights about social interactions and Scrum meetings, and more importantly they learn a lot about themselves.

Even though I used Scrum meeting as a starting situation for the Improv here, Improv in general can help build up important social skills : active listening, social sense-making (interpreting the social situation and making a story out of it), mind-reading, self-expressing, riding the social flow, social dynamics, and so on.

Proofread and Edited by Andrea Chiou


[1] I have practiced and helped others doing agile since 2000. I have been interested in Improv for many years as well, have performed as an Improv actor in an improv troupe for a few times, have lead Improv workshops for various people from IT professionals to therapists working at courts. My main focus in Improv has been not its performing or comedic aspects but its benefits with regards to social skills.

[2] I have also done some researches in this area. It seems like people's empathic accuracy varies a lot -- some people's accuracy is worse than random probability. On the other hand some are amazingly high, even better than how accurately your spouse can guess your thoughts and feelings -- they are strangers to you, though.

[3] Miller, W. and Rollnick, S. (2013) Motivational Interviewing 3rd ed.

[4] Miller, W. (2013. February) Motivational Interviewing. Workshop conducted from Yonsei University, Seoul.

[5] I highly recommend reading Ickes' book on empathic accuracy: Ickes, W. (2003) Everyday Mind Reading

[6] However, mindlessly following Improv games out there wouldn't improve the social skills. It should be deliberately designed for that -- there are a particularly useful set of activities for that.