 Well, I stand before you as a tenured faculty at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, convinced of actually, it does exactly that. So I want to tell you my story. It starts in 2011. I was invited to an interdisciplinary brainstorming program at, in Boston, I spent two days working with a variety of people from a variety of different disciplines working on really wicked problems like how the heck do you get medical professionals to actually wash their hands the way they're supposed to. And before we started doing anything, the leader got us all up and we did 45 minutes of improv games, variety of games, yes stand, et cetera, but it wasn't the games that made the impact on me. It was what the leader said afterwards. He said, look, we're here to be brainstorming, to think outside the box, to come up with new ideas, to not block each other's ideas. Yes, and works radical acceptance. And radical acceptance is a required mindset for what we want to be doing right now. And it was that link that's what stuck with me, the idea that I needed to be in a particular mindset to achieve my own goals. I came back from that workshop, excited about improv, I took a bunch of improv classes, learned short form games, liked them all, loved a few. The ones I loved were the ones that I could see connections to my identity as a faculty member, where I could see the connection to building collaborations with people who are different from me, navigating the status hierarchies of academia, and we have plenty of our share of status hierarchies in academia, and being persuasive and convincing when I wanted to reach out to my students or at a conference. So as I've become interested in using improv to teach communication skills, I build this idea of game skill links into the way in which I introduce it with academic audiences. We call it, my colleagues and I at Michigan, we call this scaffolding, and this is a term that I've heard many times here already at this A&M conference, but the way in which we think about it involves pre-exercise questions that focus on motivation. What is it that the audience already cares about that we're going to be connecting to? And then post-exercise reflections that cognitively and explicitly build that link. I want to give you a couple examples. First is a game I recently published about last year in the journal Science Communication, which is an adaptation of Half-Life or a scene replay called Half-Life Your Message. It's a message prioritization exercise in which, instead of trying to cram the scene into shorter and shorter time intervals, you have the speaker talk for 60 seconds about their topic, and then immediately, without reflection, without planning, do it again in 30. And then immediately, without reflection, do it again in 15. And then when we get going, we push them to eight. Now, pre-exercise, before we have them do this, I ask them, when does it matter to have one point? The eyes go up, well, wait a second, I want to be clear about what my main point is in my grant and I want to be clear about what my main point is when I'm doing my elevator speech or when I'm trying to get the lecture clear to my students. And so that motivation gets there. And then we go through the exercise and they do this. The natural tendency of academics is to focus on, did I get the right thing? Did I say the right thing? But that's not where we go. The post-exercise reflection is focused on, what did you learn as you were doing it? And they always say things like, I learned I started in completely the wrong place. I learned that I didn't get to the point until five seconds before the end. I learned that I wasn't even talking about the thing that most matters to me. And that discovery is the takeaway from them. It's not where they ended up. It's the idea that in three minutes, literally, they could work that exercise, that mindset of message prioritization. And if they don't like where they ended up, they can do it again. Second exercise that I often use with academic audiences is instant expert, which I got exposed to through Brian Palermo's chapter in the book Connection. Now, it's not hard to convince academics that doing question and answer is a skill they need to work on, but most academics think about question and answer as being about do you know the answer, the content. I want them to be thinking about this from the standpoint of themselves as a presenter. So when I introduce instant expert, I always demo at first. And I talk about, I go through and they give me, I'm the world's expert in how birthlies cause hurricanes or whatever. And I run it for five minutes and take question and answer. And then I pause and I ask them, did I look like I was an expert? And they all go, yeah, you look great. You really knew what you were doing. And I say, you know, I don't know a single thing about this. So what did I do? What behaviors did I do? How did I move? What did I do with my voice or my body? And that's the pre-exercise question that I really want to get at. Because it shifts them out of the content space and shifts them to thinking about what are they doing when they present. Then we run the exercise in small groups. Then after each round, the conversation becomes, what did you do? Did you like what you did? What did you want to be doing? And so it becomes the shift from being an effective presenter is about being the expert. To being an effective presenter is about embodying expertise, embodying the way you want to be carrying yourself. And that often is an eye-opener for the students and for the faculty who I work with. Now, this idea of scaffolded improv is in some sense more structured than what I've seen here at this conference. It really focuses on being very explicit and cognitive about why we are doing this and what the takeaway is. But my experience is that that linkage is what they hold on to. And that's the value that they get through this process. So I don't want to take ownership of this. Obviously the idea of scaffolding improv is an idea that's been here for many years and will continue to be here. I also own a debt to my colleague Dr. Elise Auerbach who is at the University of Michigan's Office of Academic Innovation. She was a person who really worked with me from a science communication standpoint to think about how do we take this game of half-life and shape it into something that would be palatable and really exciting for an academic audience. But I leave you with this. I try as much as possible as an academic, as a scientist, trying to convince others that communication skills are an important part of what it means to be a scientist and an academic. That it's not just about the game. It's not just about the experience. With this audience at least, you have to build that link. So they then see how doing improv is the solution to the problem that they already care about. Thank you.