 applied improvisation network. Lisa Jolly kicked it off with this request. Good morning. I'm having a bit of a block coming up with a name for my workshops. Do you find that the word improv scares some people away because they associate it with comedy? I just got some feedback expressing that very thing and I'm realizing I have to tread lightly with the very people who could benefit most from it. Thoughts and Diane Johnson Kettering jumped in. I have gotten the same feedback or they compare it to what they see Michael Scott do on the office. Now, while the word improv may be an accurate label for a genre of entertainment, mostly comedic with making up stuff on stage, comedy and incompetent winging it are both undesirable connotations for our field of applied improvisation. If we do want to bring valuable ideas and practices to a wider context of organizations and people's lives, we don't want a notoriously dreadful manager as our touchstone. So it's useful to make distinctions here. And I propose improv for the art form and improvisation for the principles and practices that inform the art. And these will be the same principles and practices that also underpin all other arenas of improvisation such as jazz, dance, sports, coaching, cooking, and as we now know, professional, personal and social development. It's quite common for abbreviations to come to mean something different from their original longer forms. Rehab, for example, has drifted away from rehabilitation. Hood has detached from neighborhood. The world does seem in practice to be separating the two along the lines I'm proposing. Practitioners of improv generally use the word to mean the theatrical forms, and they make little comment about stretching the term to cover the wider uses. And at the same time in the more academic literature, improvisation is the more used term to discuss their studies when they're addressing concepts of what musicians leaders and other people are up to when they're improvising. And of course, it's identifying a shared set of concepts that makes it possible for us to cultivate a field called applied improvisation. This original question in the Facebook discussion, carefully considering what to call the workshop or training is indicative of second wave thinking in improv of second wave thinking in applied improvisation. And this talk is about the three waves. And the three waves of applied improvisation take us through wave one, theater, wave two, workshop-based applications, and wave three, a wider range of creative explorations. As AIN has grown as a network over the past 20 years, we've quite properly been refining our concepts and offers. In wave one of applied improvisation, we simply learn how to do improv, theatrical improv, in one or more of its various forms, short form or long form, more or less comedic. In rehearsal rooms, the teacher's teaches how to do it on stage, and onto the stage we go, or we don't. Along the way, we may notice or be pointed towards various parallels with work or pick up useful life lessons. Adverts for these kinds of programs or classes say, you'll learn how to do improv, which will be valuable for you, whether or not you go on stage. Your insights and the skills you develop are often valuable byproducts of the primary purpose of putting on theater. Wave two builds on the classic insight that people often have of, I'm learning about more than theater here. It's when we deliberately seek and articulate the learning from improvisation. In current practice, these are usually lessons from the theater strands of improvisation, as those are the most accessible and well formulated, but they could equally derive from music or dance. Workshop and conference sessions typically include many of the same activities as in the wave one theater workshops, but with this extra view of applying it principally offstage as part of our personal development or professional training. Enter titles, including words like confidence, creativity, working better as a team. Often these workshops don't even include the word improvisation in their descriptions. The focus is on the results that improvisation can produce. And if we move from wave one to wave two as personal practitioners, we discover that some of the tips that are handy shortcuts for creating an onstage instant drama, for example, say yes to everything, are less applicable and more problematic in other contexts. When to say yes and when to say no becomes a really good debrief topic. Similarly, ways of getting actors to be more relaxed, allegedly, such as applaud mistakes and embrace failure, do not transfer well to the more consequential worlds of children riding bicycles on roads or adults piloting passenger blades. The teachers have work to do either to redefine or rescue these terms, to be honest enough to point out their limitations, that they're safe only in low stakes environments, for example, or preferably to adapt and come up with better formulations that more closely match improvisations, universal principles, to say things that resonate with truth in more contexts. What should we be saying about mistakes and failure when we wisely teach children about bicycles, roads, homework, social relationships, and all the other circumstances in which mistakes of various significance may occur? Those would probably be the best things to be saying or not saying, as the answer may be to say very little, as appropriate risk is a more fruitful avenue, in an improv class. What's happened in improv has tended to be the other way around, advice which is okay only in specifically low stakes situations gets offered in higher stakes applications, and then the teacher feels committed to justifying it. The transition to wave three is more complex and varied. Wave three is characterized by taking a plausible sounding improvisational principle, let's say, embrace uncertainty and testing it in offstage experiences and environments. Wave three events may include workshops, but the practice of the improvisation goes beyond this single workshop and it's explored in life settings. The quest, for example, by Del Close and updated since by Jeannie Lamb and Joey Nervig, and Street Wisdom, developed by David Pearl, are good examples of wave three improvisation. For an individual participant, these events consist of exploring an improvisational mindset in public spaces, noticing, reflecting on, and then perhaps discussing what happens. By creating and participating in wave three experiences, we discover what is and is not improvisational, without any reference to theatrical forms or performance. In particular, first they remove from the equation any of the elements of being watched. And that in turn takes away the pressure to be funny, or interesting, or anything else for the benefit of an audience. Second, it removes anything to do with being in a role other than yourself. Both of those elements are unsurprisingly present in many of the typical wave two workshop activities, residual, though non-improvisational aspects of the theatrical origins of wave one improvisation. A wave three improvisation consultant author might be, look, the world has changed with a pandemic. We've all had to depart from the plan and adapt to new circumstances, and these continue to evolve daily. Let's start a project in which we work with you to rethink your organization. In the Facebook discussion, Jean Sheridan reminded us that we didn't all learn improvisation under the name of improvisation or improv. She said, I was introduced to many of these games and activities through my outdoor leadership training, and then through various experiential education programs. I don't ever remember the word improv being used. We refer to them as icebreakers and experiential activities or exercises used to help solidify a concept. While it may be fine to consider applied improvisation as a bundle of games, exercises or activities and some loosely related concepts that we can draw on in the service of experiential learning programs, that seems to me to sell short the magic and the potential of our field. It's worth remembering that the theatrical strands of improvisation themselves derived from education, social work and training in direct line from the work of Neva Boyd and Viola Spolin. Keith Johnston, too, who eventually became a theatrical practitioner, began his innovative thinking in education and migrated to theater via script writing rather than performing. What if we started from the idea that everybody improvises every day in conversations and daily activities that are to a greater or lesser extent unscripted? It's all perfectly natural, even mundane. You don't need an expert to get you started. It's a common human ability. Without getting into hard and fast definitions, improvisation involves adaptability, a here and now use of whatever is currently available to take a new action in response to a challenge. And it's always in a particular context, such as improvising an answer in an interview, a kick of an awkward football, making a meal from whatever's in the larder when visitors arrive unannounced. And it's always improvisation in contrast to the prepared answer, the rehearsed sports move, the planned meal with a fixed recipe. So those are the three waves I'd like to present to you, and we can move into perhaps some discussion of how those waves relate to us and our own activities.