Manufacturing Boldness - Episode 1: Playing Your Way to Better Human Connection
Playing Your Way to Better Human Connection
In this first episode, Bolder Company Founders - Ellen Feldman-Ornato and Jenny Drescher - introduce their listeners to the magic of Applied Improvisation. Unlike theatrical improvisation (ala “Whose Line is it Anyway?”) Applied Improvisation is “the art and science of iteratively making things happen, one tiny step at a time.”
Have you ever been in a conversation and gotten lost? Using improvisation skills that Ellen and Jenny highlight will help improve your listening and communication so that you can connect more fully and track with your conversation partners.
Listen in to understand how applying the skills, mindsets & practices of applied improvisation can help you find more laughter, ease and confidence in your workplace and life.
Episode 1 Transcript
Ellen 0:03
Hi, and welcome to Manufacturing Boldness, a podcast that puts people in the center of production. We’re your hosts, Ellen Feldman Ornato and Jenny Drescher.
Jenny 0:15
I love that we get to talk about what we're talking about. It's very meta.
Ellen 0:20
Right.
Jenny 0:21
So, just before we started recording today, Ellen and I were talking about this whole notion of why improvisation matters in manufacturing. And I feel like, there's a baseline that we should set for our listeners, which is … what the heck do we mean when we're talking about improvisation.
Ellen 0:42
I think that's a great idea.
Jenny 0:44
I love what you're saying about the role of improvisation and manufacturing. So for our listeners, improvisation is not a “night at the improv.” It's not about comedy; it is the art and science of iteratively making things happen one tiny step at a time. So you can certainly see this as the most, you know, most popular example is probably the TV show, “Whose Line Is It Anyway”, which is all about people making funny things on the spot. And there's no knowing what direction it's going to go. But what people really probably don't realize is that what makes that possible is a fundamental group of skills, and mindsets and practices, and skills that actually allow for that. So some of the most popular things that people hear about are the “Yes, And” principal.
And some of the other skills that people may not think about so obviously are listening, that listening is a vital component of improvisation. Because if you're my scene partner, I need to listen really, really carefully to what you're putting out there on stage so that I can respond to it. And if I miss a beat, if I don't hear what you say, then I'm going to be at sea and our scene, and then, where do we go from there?
Ellen 2:12
And particularly for the organizations that we work with, this flexibility is also key. When you're on stage, right? The willingness to if your scene partner says something that causes the entire trajectory of the scene to change, the ability and willingness to flex into what that person said, and go along with them, as opposed to trying to change it back to what you want. Right? Or offer another suggestion over the top of that one, which just confuses everyone, including your audience, right? And then the spontaneity the willingness to come out of left field and say, what occurs to you, without the voice in your head, judging it so much that you sit quietly, and it never comes out.
Jenny 3:06
You mean like your headitor?
Ellen 3:08
Yes, your headitor! A friend of ours came up with that term, and we love it dearly. You know, it's that, we're fond of saying if you've got 10 people in a room, and only two people are talking, why are the other 10 people there? Right, if you're trying to have a collaborative meeting, and two people dominate the conversation so much, there's an absence of space sharing. And there's also an absence sometimes of the willingness to be spontaneous, or put an idea out there before it's complete. Which is something we see a lot with the more technical folks that we work with. Right? So what is improv? What are the gifts that improv gives us that help people to, to loosen up their grip on their own willingness?
Jenny 3:52
So I'm actually I'm going to, I'm going to back away from that question because here's where you just made my little pea brain go, which is understanding what is what improvisation is as a whole. Which is, it really is something that we all do all the time.
Ellen 4:15
All the day every day.
Jenny 4:15
Right. So I want to just I want to address that directly. Because I think that one of the things we see sometimes when we go into organizations is we, if we make the mistake right up front of telling a group of people that they're going to be learning by doing improvisation, everybody immediately crawls into their head,
Ellen 4:25
Right.
Jenny 4:27
They think, oh my god, I have to do comedy. You're gonna make me act like a chicken and I'm gonna look stupid. And we have so we learn not to do that because that's not what improvisation is.
Ellen 4:41
Right?
Jenny 4:41
You are improvising every minute of every day. I am improvising every minute of every day. We sometimes like to say, if you woke up with a script next to your bed, we need to have a much more serious conversation because you have bigger problems in your life. So you know, we all have these core skills. This is what I really dig about improvisation as a skill set is that improvisation is based in we must always be listening to other humans, we must always be following that spontaneous thing that comes up for us. We do it every day all the time. In terms of the, deciding what is my next little move, right? We do that every minute of every day. Right? And then there's I mean, the yes, and principle, we could go on and on and on about that for hours. What I'll tell our listeners is that yes, and principle is broad. It is often deeply misunderstood. And it is hotly debated in improvisation circles. We are members of an organization called the Applied Improvisation Network. It's a global network of practitioners of applying improvisation in nontheatrical
Ellen 6:12
Correct.
Jenny 4:41
Contexts, such as business. So at the Bolder Company, we focus our work in improvisation in manufacturing, and in architecture, engineering, construction very often. So we'd like to apply improvisation in technical fields because it's a great skill set. So.
Ellen 6:15
I want to add one other thing.
Jenny 6:16
Yeah.
Ellen 6:16
Which is humor, levity, joy, the connection that happens when people play together, instead of working on getting better. That it's, it's such a noticeable difference. And improvisation gives us the gift of putting people into exercises with each other, where laughter is the byproduct. It's not intentional, but you can't not laugh when somebody throws an imaginary wet cat your way. Right. And so what that creates is people failing together, people succeeding together, people laughing together. And the electronic the electromagnetic field that happens when people are playing in that way, I think, is what shifts people out of fear and into engagement.
Jenny 7:09
Yeah
Ellen 7:10
Right.
Jenny 7:11
So if we take that notion that you just said, right, where, say, we've, we've, we've got a relationship, we've worked on, not worked on, we've played our way to a better connection as humans through practices and skill-building and mindset building. Then if I'm in a meeting with you, and we need to innovate on a production line, because something's getting bogged down, then if we've been doing that plaything together, we have a lighter relationship, which means we're going to hear each other better when it comes to opposing points of view about what the heck is bogging down that production line,
Ellen 7:52
Right.
Jenny 7:53
We've seen this,
Ellen 7:54
Endless times.
Jenny 7:55
On any number of occasions, as I'm thinking now about the client that we have. It's an innovation team. It's an engineering innovation team. And one of the things they were not doing in their group was they were not speaking up when somebody was making a mistake.
Ellen 8:12
Right.
Jenny 8:13
That and it was a critical mistake. So they weren't bringing those mistakes up to each other on the team while they were trying to innovate on processes and products. Like how does that help innovate, it sort of actually does the opposite. It puts a big old kibosh, you know, right in the middle of innovation, if you can't speak up and say what you actually think in that moment, if you can't say, you brought me this prototype, and this whole chunk of that prototype is not working.
Ellen 8:40
Right.
Jenny 8:41
Right. And so what I dig about your comment is that there's room through practicing improvisation to get more comfortable saying what's there?
Ellen 8:56
Yes.
Jenny 8:57
And being able to say it in a way that is not heavy, not burdensome, not painful, or even, like, it doesn't even have to be a conflict.
Ellen 9:06
Right.
Jenny 9:07
If we do it well,
Ellen 9:08
Right. Right.
Jenny 9:10
Yeah.
Ellen 9:11
Because that willingness to engage spontaneously to say, something's bogging down here, can we just have like, let's have a really candid conversation about what I think is happening, and I want to hear what you think is happening,
Jenny 9:23
Right.
Ellen 9:23
Which takes it out of the realm of blame and shame, which we see so often.
Jenny 9:27
Yep.
Ellen 9:28
Blame and shame cause shut down.
Jenny 9:29
Yep.
Ellen 9:30
Guaranteed.
Jenny 9:31
Yep.
Ellen 9:32
Right. It puts people in their most primal state of being. You got your hand caught in the cookie jar way of reacting to something, versus the inquiry and curiosity, which is where you get to when you practice playing together enough. When we work with people in the medical field, we say it creates connective tissue between people so that they have a foundational relationship so that when the stuff hits the fan, they have a relationship with the person where they can just acknowledge the stuff on the fan, instead of the fear about talking to the person about the stuff on the fan, or right or blaming the other person for the stuff on the fan or not looking at the stuff on the fan, because the stuff on the fan means I'll have to waste time having this conversation with the other person. I mean, it just puts us in a much better place from a relational standpoint, to be able to innovate and also to deal with things when they don't go well.
Jenny 10:27
Right.
Ellen 10:27
So both sides of the equation.
Jenny 10:29
Right,
Ellen 10:29
Right.
Jenny 10:30
So I would like to, to be of service to our listeners today by offering them something that they can do that is improvisational in nature that will help them to try on the stuff that we've been talking about in terms of why does improvisation matter in manufacturing? Because that's not a question anybody's asking, right. But our listeners theoretically are all working in manufacturing environments at all levels. And you know, so our goal is to be able to help them and to be able to help them feel more powerful and have mindsets, approaches, practices and skills that they can walk away with, even if it's just a single nugget.
Ellen 11:13
Yes.
Jenny 11:13
So by way of that, if I wanted to pull from the sky, something that one of our manufacturing listeners could use today. Based on this conversation, I would say experiment with spontaneity. And playfulness though, like not the whole improvisation
Ellen 11:44
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no yeah.
Jenny 11:44
Shebang. But just like one thing to try on today
Ellen 11:48
Yup.
Jenny 11:48
Is what would be one way today that I can be spontaneous and playful?
Ellen 11:53
Yep.
Hey, thanks for listening. You know, we want you to go from thinking to being and doing so take what you learned today and apply it. Try it. Practice. You can find us on all the social media, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram too. If you want to be notified of when our next episode drops, simply visit theboldercompany.com to learn more. Manufacturing Boldness is recorded at The Content Lab at West Hartford Coworking editing, production, and promotion by The Small Business Collective.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai