 You're a little faint, Kay, but I think you said you were feeling better. So I hope that's what you said. Retcovering from the leg injuries, yes. Hello, Frank Buzz. Hello, Jane. And hello, Sloane. My new friend, Sloane. Hi, Sloane in the chat. Good to see you all with lots of L's in hello. So we're going to start in a moment. And I'm encouraging everyone to put your microphones on mute for the moment. Kat will invite people in along the way to either jump in audibly or to jump in on chat, perhaps in some other method like being visibly. And it's my pleasure to welcome everyone to this AIN webinar. We're doing a series of webinars on specific topics. This is one of those. We're also doing a series of webinars that are 60-minute social drop-ins. The next one of those is on Friday of this week. And it's two hours earlier than this one. So whatever time it is for you now, it's two hours earlier on Friday, where we can talk about anything anyone wants to talk about. Today, though, we're going to be discussing and learning about designing an applied improvisation training session. And it's my pleasure to welcome Kat to lead us on this session. Kat. Good morning, afternoon, or evening to you, whatever the case might be. Angelina would like to talk about Kat's. And I would like to open with exactly that question. What would you like to talk about is my opening question for you. So you'll see on the next slide what my thoughts are about what I have to offer to you around this topic of designing training programs using AI. That's the circle of possibility for today that we've honed in on. But within that context, I'd love to take just 90 seconds or so and hear from you, shout it out, or top it into the chat. What kinds of programs most of you are doing that you're interested in designing for? What kinds of issues you're having around designing AI that you'd love to address? And or what are your desired outcomes for the next 90 minutes or so that we have to get in 87 minutes? So, Ramey, leadership and communication workshops, great. What else? Great, so some of you are working with technical people around collaboration and leadership. What are some of the questions you have or issues that you'd like to know more about addressing in terms of how to design or? I don't think so. I think I got everything out of tune. I'm just going to have a quick look over. How to introduce exercises, great. Developing content for technical order, equity and inclusion. Ah, interesting. Team and coaching, great. So I'm seeing a lot of stuff around actual content and how to pick activities for that content and things about cross cultures and nationalities. So I'm making up that that's about how to target content to a specific audience and differentiate across different audiences. And then Kay is asking about how to structure a session. Ooh, and about incorporating remote attendees and large groups, so where there's more than just a circle for an activity, more on content and also something like having a huge program and working for very senior leadership and working in the moment to design things, demonstrating the value. OK, great, so that's a lot. So let's see how much of that we can get done in the 85 minutes that we have now. Here's what I was thinking. Let's see how it tracks to what you were looking for and how much we can get to. So there are some key design questions that I think if we start with, we're on a good solid footing when we start to think about any program with any content at all. So I thought I'd offer you these sort of foundational questions that I think are helpful to ask when you're starting to design a program. A framework to think about what types of activities you're going to do, and I think that can relate to really any content at all and any audience. And your questions about things like going across different cultures or different nationalities, I think, can link to both of these first two things, both in terms of the key questions that we're asking, but also what kinds of activities I want to employ. I thought we'd talk about debriefing, and I also just heard from you that you want to talk about setting up activities. So we can really talk about all three phases of activities if we have some time. Sort of how do you set them up? What are some things to think about when you're setting them up? What are some things to think about when you're running them? And then how do you debrief them, which also then links to how do you really frame the value of an activity? I would love to not spend all of the time just talking, but to really have some of this time be you getting to apply and practice applying what we're talking about to your own stuff and see how it feels and what challenges you run into when you're putting it into practice so we can discuss that. And we'll see what else might come to mind as we go. So how does that feel or sound just at a very high level when I spray it? Does it feel like we're on point? And yes, I'll send you all these slides later. Great. Sounds like we're kind of on track. All right, so let's dive in. So here are the key questions that we start with when we're thinking about a program. And a lot of these I need to discuss explicitly with my clients. This is an iterative process, and as much as I can involve the actual client in the room having these conversations with me, the better. So the first is, what is the desired performance outcome? Or put another way, what is it that I or they, my client, wants people to be able to do differently at the end of the training session? This is very explicitly a question about what do we want them to be able to do differently? Not what do I want them to feel or what do I want them to know? But what do I want them to be able to do differently? And in the context of organizational professional training, it's usually some kind of job performance that I want them to be able to do differently. That's not always true in any training in life. But even if it's a non-job related session, there should be something that you want them to be able to do. It could be as simple as I want them to try out this behavior in a conversation with someone else. It could be I want them to interact with their clients differently. I want them to run a meeting differently. I want them to have different conversations with their direct reports. But there should be some behavioral, some different behavior that you want people to be engaging in that you can name or probably the person who's hiring you and paying you money isn't feeling like they should be hiring you and paying you money if you're in an organizational professional setting. How does that feel or sound? What questions or comments or sarcastic remarks do you have about that? So think about your training or context and give me an example of a desired performance outcome that might be true for you and your training. So you want people to learn to share outlook using collaborative collaboration technology to generate more creative ideas. Great, loud, to share out loud. Great, great, to get along better, to create abrasion, disagreeing for common perfect, to be able to talk to each other, to delegate more often and more effectively. That's great. I want people to actually delegate more often. That's something that you can measure, right? Like you could count, are you actually delegating more effectively and here are the measures of what more effectively looks like you could probably articulate them. I'm sure you could, right? And we can go layer by layer, right? So these are great senses and you could probably articulate the behaviors lower and lower. Okay, great. The second question is who is my audience? The more you know about who your audience is, the more you're gonna be able to target, you're gonna have to design to your audience. So if I want them to give feedback in a way that can be received and my audience is kindergarten teachers, I have to design a program for kindergarten teachers who are gonna be giving feedback to kindergartners. That might be a different program than if I'm designing a program for CEOs or people who are managing, reporting to CEOs. Maybe it's exactly the same, I don't know. Kindergarteners and CEOs are similar constituencies, but who your audience is matters in terms of what the content is, right? So you need to know who your audience is. Another thing about this question is there is never one audience, right? So there's not only are there many, many individuals in the room, but then there are the people that they are then going to have to go out and interact with or report to and engage with. So who is your audience or your audience is in the room? We could spend a lot of time on this question, but some things to think about are what do they already know? What are their assumptions? What is their life experience? This is where your question comes in about like what's their cultural norms? What are they, so I'll give you an example here. One of the things to think about is when we talk about this question, this improv principle of failure and a relationship to failure, embracing failure or celebrating failure or experimenting with failure or playing with failure, however you like to say that. If I'm in a room, if I have an audience for whom that is a completely new concept and they're absolute perfectionists who are highly competitive and only reward winning and success, then how I present that idea and what they need from that idea is gonna be very different from if I'm working in a Silicon Valley culture where failing forward and celebrating failure is the water that they swim in and then maybe it's not so helpful a concept, right? And what they need is to look at that in a nuanced way and maybe the Paul Zed version of like, really do we wanna celebrate failure is more helpful. So, and there you go, Paul can't even let me stand to have the example. So, you understand, right? So talk to me about who is my audience. Give me some examples of who your audience is and how that might inform what you're doing. Intact teams, medical students, after-school program staff. So let's take a look at intact teams. The difference between designing a program for an intact team versus an audience of people who don't know each other. Some of the things that right away I'm gonna start to think about when I design a program is if I'm working with a group of people who are, let's say I'm doing presentation skills, the content is the same content, right? For an intact team as it is for a public workshop. And it would be possible for me to not at all think about the fact that it's an intact team versus a public workshop because I'm just talking about presentation skills and on the surface of it, the fact that it's an intact team shouldn't matter. But if I really think about it in terms of the design, there's a whole bunch of stuff at the beginning of the program that should look different in terms of developing safety and comfort and having people get to know each other and introduce themselves to the group that I'm gonna wanna do at a public workshop that I don't have to do with an intact team. For example, if you have a group of teams with mixed level of seniority and experience, what am I gonna have to do in the room that's going to address perhaps those dynamics and that level of hierarchy that may have nothing to do with the actual content of what we're doing, but it's gonna be the dynamics in the room that I'm gonna have to think about managing or that's also an opportunity to teach concepts and shifts mindsets that is an offer in the room that I have to think about. All right. So that's question number two. Question number three, what is in it for this audience to do what I want them to do? Right? So here's what I want them to do. What's in it for them to do that thing that I want them to do or to make the shift that I want them to make given who they are and what it is we want them to do? Why should they in their mind? Why should they care what's in it for them? And given that, what is my key message or the moral of my story? It's where those two things meet, what we want them to do differently and who they are and what they care about that sort of becomes the moral of the story of this training for these people. And then and only then when you know all of that, can you really come up with what is sort of the stuff of the workshop? What is the knowledge and skill and mindsets that these particular people need in this moment which becomes the agenda or the flow of the workshop? So Kay, I love your comments. So Kay's saying that it seems that the goal of the participants in the room might be different than the goal of the decision maker who hires you. And I would say it's not only possible, it's almost in my experience, it's almost always true to some extent. Even if the decision maker has the best intentions and is the most keyed in, there will be some gap between the person that I've spoken to and the prep that I've done ahead of time and then actually being in the room with the actual individuals in the room because we're human beings, right? And we're different. So no matter what, I always try to start with some kind of calibration in the room, some kind of intro needs assessment sort of warm up activity where I hear from the participants in the room and at each point along the way, every activity I try to do some kind of, both in the setup, not always in the setup because sometimes there's value in having the experience first and then just debriefing afterwards but certainly in the debrief, some kind of check in about where people are coming from, how it's landing with them, what it means to them, how it relates back to their work and their objectives. Because yeah, the participants in the room are not always, their needs and desires and preferences and goals are not always aligned with the organizational goals and are not always aligned, let alone the stakeholder who hired me. And I think my job is to sort of calibrate, I feel like part of it's a balancing act, right? I have to juggle both of those things where am I not a certain responsibility of the person who hired me? Once I'm in the room, I also have a responsibility of the participants in the room. Hopefully they're aligned enough that I can serve both masters. How does that feel? Yeah. What comes up for you around these questions? Say more about your question, Greg, with that translate into an activity. You can talk if you want to, if that's easy for you. There you go. Can you hear me now? Yeah. So just, so you're in a class, you're in a room, there's this thing in the room which is the people paying you and the people in the room might not necessarily be in alignment. So I'm just thinking there's an activity that could involve story or creation that kind of bridges that a little bit. Yeah. And Chris, and Chris Gianna's also asking about fun ways to create need assessment. So let me see if I can answer both of those questions. My favorite need assessment activity right at the start of a workshop is a tiagi game which I think he calls the hello game which goes like this. You divide the group into subgroups usually with a group of somewhere from, I don't know, if you've got 10 to 25 people in that range it's usually four or five groups and you give each subgroup a question that they are responsible for answering. So the questions might be if the, let's say the topic is general communication skills or conflict or teamwork. One question might be, what are your communication strengths individually? What are your communication strengths? And group number one is responsible for that question. Group number two is responsible for the question what are your communication challenges or weaknesses? Group number three's question would be what type of communication issues come up, typically come up for you that you'd like to find ways to address? Group number four might have the question give us some examples of brilliant communication strategies that you've witnessed or experienced. And then group number five, I might give the question what are your desired outcomes for today? What would put a big smile on your face at the end of the day and say today was worth it? So those are the five groups and the questions they're responsible for. And then I say, okay, here's what you're gonna do. In your subgroups, you're gonna have one minute to plan a strategy. How are you gonna gather answers to these questions from everyone in the room? I'm then gonna give you three minutes concurrently all at the same time to gather your data, your information from everyone in the room. You're then gonna have three minutes back in your subgroups to analyze that data that you just gathered and prepare a presentation. And then each group, not concurrently, will have one minute to present their findings to the group. So as you can imagine, it's sort of chaotic, right? Everybody's walking around, pulling each other, blah, blah, blah, and then they present their findings. You can, you get lots of information about the group from the group. Everybody's had a chance to sort of talk to everybody else. They've worked in teams already. And you've both gotten a huge amount of content, plus you could if you wanted. And depending on how long I have and what the point of the day is, you could also debrief the process of doing that activity for an hour and a half just on its own. So that's one of my, thank you, Paul, just linked you to Tiagi's website and that Hello Game. They get one minute with their group to plan a strategy. It doesn't, they don't need longer than that because as soon as they start to interact, their strategy's gone out the window usually. Usually what happens is they say, okay, they assign one member of their group to go to each other group. And then of course that doesn't work because all the other groups have done the same thing and it's chaos. So part of the debrief becomes like, how do you deal with chaos? How do you deal with not having enough time? How do you deal when your plans go out the window? And they get great results even without a plan, even with feeling like they're dealing with chaos, even with feeling like they don't have good process, which is wonderful debrief is usually what happens. Right, it's very meta. And it's improvised, it's improv. So you both get the content that you need. And then again, and this is when we talk about debrief, we can talk about this, but depending on what your goal is or what the workshop is about, you can sort of steer the debrief towards that. So if we're talking about presentation skills, I debrief their presentations in terms of what did you love about the presentation? If it's about communication skills, you can talk about how was it to work in your group. If it's about leadership or status, you can talk about who took control or who's voice was heard in the groups when you were preparing your presentations. You know, who led and who followed and how did that go? I mean, you really could debrief the activity for, you know, deeply or not, or you could just get the needs from the group if you wanted. So that's one idea of it. In terms of your question, Greg, about when the needs of the organization and the needs of the participants in the room are misaligned, there are levels of that as well. Because again, even the participants are not a homogenous one entity, right? Each individual in the room may have different perceptions and different needs. And I think what's important is to model as the facilitator what we believe and what we're asking people to do, which is deep listening and being present and yes, ending the offers in the room. So if people are feeling like something we're doing isn't of value to them or rejecting it or it doesn't make sense to them, then that's okay, we can yes and that. It's okay to say, tell me more about that. And they say, well, I thought this mirror game was stupid and I didn't feel connected to my partner and I just felt stupid. And you can go like, okay, great, tell me more about how you felt stupid. Anybody else feel like that? Awesome. Great, how's that like real life? And there's something to build with there too. So I think that there can be value for sometimes when organizations hires to come and do things, the people in the room feel like prisoners and they don't feel like it's aligned with their work goals and what they're being asked to do. And there are two possibilities. One is they're right and what we're doing with them isn't aligned with their needs and it's a waste of their time in which case we need to be respectful of that and they have a right to be resistant. The other is we're teaching valuable universal skills and if we're listening to them, they will make connections and they will find the place where it's useful to them even if it's not where the people who hired us thought it was useful to them and then they'll be satisfied. Right, training is being done to them. Here's my favorite example of this. I was hired once to do a keynote and workshop for some airline ticket agent employees. This was back when airlines had remote ticket agents that were like in malls and things before you could do it all online. And they said, we have a program in the morning, some things we have to talk about in the morning but come at lunchtime and then you'll do your keynote and your workshop after lunch on improv for team building. And I said, okay. And I come at lunch and I said, how did the morning go? And the guy said, great. We told them all that we're shutting down all the remote ticket offices so they're all gonna be laid off within the year. But they took it well. So go do your improv stuff on team building. And I was like, oh great. That's great. You just laid everybody off and now you're gonna do like team building with them. Like that's disrespectful and dishonorable and like what the fuck. But you know what? Improv is still really valuable to them as individuals because they're gonna have to go on job interviews and they're gonna have to support each other and they're gonna, authenticity and good communication skills. And there's all sorts of ways that can be a value to them. So that's what I did. I offered it to them and I said, here you go in that context and people got it. You can hear sort of more about that story on the, I have a little TEDx talk where I talk about sort of how I got out of that one but right, exactly navigating change. So exactly right, exactly right. I'm sure you could all come up with ways of sort of getting out of it. But the point is it doesn't, if you're yes, ending what's in the room, even if it's not what the powers that be thought was gonna happen, it can work. All right, so are we good here? Shall we move on? Yes, let's. So once you have answers to all those questions, then as I say that it comes time to say, okay, now what am I gonna build? So given question number five here, which is what knowledge, skills and mindsets then do people need, what am I gonna build? Then you can say things like, what activities are going to address those knowledge skills and mindsets? Which ones are gonna flow best together? What's gonna be the structure of the pieces? So let's talk a little bit about that. Whoops. So I've been throwing these words around knowledge, skills and mindsets. What do I actually mean by that? So knowledge, let's define our terms for a minute, is simply information. So it's knowledge if you could read it in a book and get it. So for example, DiBono's six hats, the definition of his six hats is just knowledge. If anybody doesn't know what I'm talking about, he says there are different thinking styles or sort of ways to approach things and he has six different colored hats. And he says, if you're engaging, different hats are useful in different ways. So I think I'm not gonna get them all right now, but so help me, anyone who has them off the bat or wants to look them up, maybe Paul will link to DiBono's six hats for us. But I'll use sort of as the improvisers, we tend to talk to people about not blocking, for example, or never saying no, but sometimes you wanna wear a black hat, which is the sort of critical thinking, really being analytical for one of the better words, shooting holes in people's ideas. Thank you, Sloan. So that will, sometimes that's a very useful hat. The reason that people have embraced us as improvisers is because that tended to be, especially in business settings, an overused hat, right? Another hat, I wanna say it's the green hat, is the hat that we as improvisers often are telling people to wear, which is the creative idea generation hat where we're saying, don't censor yourself, just generate a lot of ideas, try to be spontaneous and so that's a different hat that can be very useful at times, right? So, but the idea is that you have all these different hats. Anyway, that's knowledge. You can go, you can click on the link that Sloan shared and then you know what those are. Doesn't mean you can necessarily be great at thinking in all of those different styles, but you now know what DiBono's six hats are and you can impress people by rattling them off if you spent a few minutes memorizing them. One of the reasons, by the way, that I think that what we do is so valuable in the world is because a lot of training is just knowledge transfer. And when we say things like improv is the gym, what we are saying is really we're practicing or exercising muscles or developing skills as opposed to just transferring knowledge. Skill is something that requires practice like playing the violin or running, right? So if it's a muscle, if it's a skill, it's something that you couldn't just read it in a book and then be able to do it, right? Listening is a skill. So you can read all the books in the world about being a good listener. It doesn't actually make you a better listener. And finally, mindset. So a mindset is an attitude or a belief and for example, competition improves performance and one of the things that training can do, theoretically, is shift mindsets. So I think my stance with all of this is simply that when we are bringing AI into training, really I think any good training has to acknowledge that it's all three of these things that we may be trying to do and we have to be able to distinguish is this, if there's a gap between what people are doing now and what I want them to be doing when I'm done, is it a knowledge gap? Is it a skill gap or is it a mindset gap? If it's a skill gap, by the way, they're not going to necessarily, I'm not gonna be able to close the skill gap necessarily in an hour or a day. People might get a little practice and get a little better but they're gonna need to do it over time. I can teach them how to practice. They're gonna need to practice over time. You don't go to the gym, get on a stair master and then you're in shape but I can give them a practice to continue. But I have to know, is this knowledge that I'm shifting? Is it a skill that I'm teaching them how they will be able to develop over time or is it a mindset that I wanna shift? Clear, questions? And then given that, there are different kinds, improv can address all three of those things and there are different kinds of improv activities, activities generally not just improv activities but since we're talking about AI. There are different kinds of activities that can address all of those three things. So if you're trying to shift knowledge and use applied improv to help transfer knowledge, we would call that frame games. So you're helping, you've been hired just to use improv to liven up some training for retail staff at Marshall's, right? And you want to help them learn what the inventory is and you're gonna do it using sound ball where people throw, they just throw the ball back and forth with the different skew numbers of the items or you play category die with the rules of like what you do when a customer wants to return something. So you're using improv games as frame games like you would use Jeopardy or Family Feud but the content is an improv content, it's customer content. Role play is actually a frame game, right? The frame of the game is the same but it's client content put into the frame of the improv activity. So role play is actually probably the most robust frame game that we do but I just gave you two other examples. Paul's asking if we want to do other things such as reach a decision, is that something other than training? I think it is, I think reaching a decision is other than training. We can talk about it and I think a lot of these principles apply but I don't think it's training. Does that feel right to everybody else? It does to me, yeah. I think that the categories you've covered are the things that make sense for training and there's lots of other things that we do that a but or sit close to or even overlap training, there's a facilitation where we can do other things with a group, for example, reach decisions and much else. Absolutely, absolutely. Really important distinction. Yeah, it makes me want to talk about all of that but I'm not going to right now because I think we're talking about training, right? I think that was the frame of what we're absolutely talking about, okay, good, all right. The first one I'm highlighting is to give us a more constrained area to focus on even though there's lots of other things that we could go into. Hugely many other things and we should. So let's do that next time. Next time. So knowledge equals frame games. Skills, if I want to build skills, there's a whole huge body of riches that improvisers have come up with that we were calling exercises. And this is what we were just talking about before in terms of improv being the gym. So people talk about listening, people talk about presence, as if you're developing leadership or communication or teamwork, right? All of these things that people say are so important in business, right? But everybody talks about and people don't know how to exercise or develop. Improvisers have been developing and exercising these muscles forever. And this is where the treasure trove of deliciousness comes from. These are exercises. So these are things like, well, you tell me, what are some exercises that are skills? These are things, these are think games where you could play them over and over and over again where you learned them on your first day of improv class, you're still doing them 30 years later and they're just as useful and they're just as great like going to the gym and getting on the treadmill. Mirror exercise, great. Word at a time, red ball, whoosh, yes. Exactly right. They exercise our spontaneity. They're like doing scales, right? They're like doing bar in ballet, right? All of that stuff, great. Those are exercises, yep, all of it. The final category, and this is sort of the core of like when people come in and say, teach us improv for business, a lot of it is this. This is sort of the heart of a lot of what we do. The third category is shifting people's mindsets and the type of activity is a jolt. Now, I wanna say right now, there's overlap, especially, there's overlap, so the same game can be used depending on your intention in all three of these categories, there's a lot of overlap, especially between the exercises and jolts because often people will have mindset shifts from doing the exercises, but it's a jolt if you get a sort of aha moment and it usually is a jolt the first time you do it. So a jolt is an activity, yes, absolutely, activities could be in all three categories, but a jolt is an activity that you are introducing for the purpose of shifting a mindset. There are also activities that you only would do once because once you've done them, the jolt is sort of over. So I'll give you an example of that. Some of you I'm sure know this activity, the 300 year, 300 year conversation activity. So person A plays a person from 300 years ago, person B plays a person from today, and the person from today's task is to pitch to the person from 300 years ago a modern day object. So it could be a cell phone or a microwave and you're gonna put yourself in the mindset of someone from 300 years ago, I'm gonna try to, time traveler, you call it, right? So I'm gonna try to pitch to you a microwave oven and you can make up what's gonna happen, right? I'm gonna discover that there's all sorts of jargon that you don't understand. I'm gonna discover that I get lost trying to explain things that aren't important for you to value what I'm trying to talk about. I'm gonna understand that I don't even understand what I'm talking about. I'm gonna understand that I have to frame things in terms of what you value, right? There's all sorts of lessons. I'm gonna understand that I'm taking responsibility for the communication rather than just blaming you and calling you an idiot. There's all sorts of things I'm gonna understand about empathy and good communication in terms of framing about your needs and all sorts of things that are then translatable back to oh, in real life, there's these gaps and, right? They're hugely translatable, but there's no reason to ever do that again, right? It's not an exercise really. I mean, it could be, I suppose an exercise. I could get better at that, but really it's a jolt. We're giving it to people and then I go like, oh, wow, look at all the gaps in my real life with my client. I'm using all this jargon. No wonder they don't understand me. Oh yeah, I have to remember that. So if we then go back to our five questions and then we say, so what knowledge? Ah, yay, you're welcome, Catherine. So what knowledge does my audience need to have? What skills do I wanna develop? What mindsets do I need to shift? What order does that need to happen in, right? Like maybe first I need to shift their mindset, that they need to understand that listening is really important and super hard. Then I need to give them some knowledge about what good listening is and then I'm gonna have them practice listening and then I can build my listening curriculum, for example. Yes, so Frank, so that 300 year conversation was one of an example of jolt. A jolt means to shock you or, right? A jolt is like, boom, a shock or a wake up moment. Thank you, Leslie. So the 300 year old conversation is like, ah-ha, like an epiphany. Another jolt might be when we do the mirror game, which is definitely an exercise if you're doing it over time and as practice. Often when we do the mirror game for the first time, I'll have people start doing the mirror exercise and then many, many people will, as the person leading, they'll go move very fast or they'll, yes, Tiagi has many jolts. He is a king of jolts. Well, they'll do a mirror very fast and then I'll say, stop. I'll say, this is not a fake your partner out exercise. It's not about being clever and it's not about having a good idea. People go, oh, right, and they laugh and I'll say, please go slow. So there's a jolt built into the beginning of that even though it's an exercise. And often the first time people do it, there's part of it is a mindset shift that it's about leading so your partner can follow as opposed to leading being about having the best idea. Sun and moon, also known as enemy defender, is a great jolt. What is the jolt, Patrick, that you pull from it? Do you want to share? I don't know if you can talk if you want. I've unmuted you, Patrick, so you can talk if you'd like to. Oh, you muted me. I was double muted. Are you hearing now? We are. Okay, cool. Sun and moon, some people call it triangles. Oh. A quick explanation of the game is participants are in a circle. You ask them to secretly pick two people to be their sun and moon. And then when you say go or start, they must go as fast as they can to become equidistant between their sun and moon. The challenges for them, of course, is that their sun and moon are moving to become equidistant with everyone else. And so utter chaos erupts and all sorts of exciting stuff happens. Sometimes groups snap into place, but very, very seldom, certainly less than 10% of the time. I then run a second round in which I changed the goal from getting to be equidistant to simply moving toward it is the goal. If you are moving toward equidistance, you're achieving the goal. And I ask people to move in baby steps in slow motion. And the surprising thing is in about half of the time that we spent on round one, they achieve equidistance, even though it wasn't the goal. And then, of course, we debrief on how did that happen? How did you feel in the, how'd you feel in the second round compared to the first round? Why did that happen? And by slowing down somewhat, people are able to think more strategically. They're able to be more cognizant of others, more careful with others and consider it. They're able to recognize all of the connections that the first one's too frenetic to recognize. There are about four or five other potential smaller jolts, but most of it is slow down just a little bit and you're gonna actually achieve more. That's a jolt. Thank you. Here's another example. The yes and versus yes, but party planning game is a jolt, right? It's not an exercise. You're not having people practice, say yes, but. So I think everybody knows, but the activity is, right? You have people plan a party. Say we're gonna plan a party together and I want every sentence to start with the words yes, but. So I say you have an unlimited budget. You can go anywhere in the world. You guys are the decision makers and say, so it might sound like let's have the party in Hawaii. Yes, but Hawaii is so far away from us in New York. Yes, but we can charter a plane. Yes, but some people don't like to fly. Yes, but we can give them drugs so they don't mind and they sleep the whole time. Yes, but that's horrible and illegal, right? And then the next person says, okay, and you say, oh, what happened? And we say, well, we didn't get anywhere. We didn't build anything. There was no party, right? And then you say, okay, let's do it again, where we say yes and you build with the idea before, right? And then people say, let's have a party in Hawaii. Yes, and we could charter a jet. Yes, and if people don't like to fly, we could also go by, you know, covered wagon. Yes, and we'll have the party all along the way. So if it takes months, we'll be happy the whole time. Yes, and right? So that's a jolt, right? They're not practicing yes anding. They're not practicing yes, but it's about, aha, look what happens when we block versus when we build. Then you go on to all sorts of other yes and activities that are exercises where you're actually practicing how to yes and. In the muscle, got it? And we're having some conversation about attack defender, which is a similar version to triangles. It's more, attack defender is more like a jolt because there's not a skill. It's even more jolty because it's just about like, oh, look what happens in terms of sort of systemic rules of something affecting the group. So that's another thing. All right, so before we go to debriefing, would people like a little bit of time to think about their own content and try to apply some of these principles? We can do this in two ways. One is we can have a volunteer say, here's something I'm thinking about and I can work with you here sort of fishbowl style to see if we can design something or we can move into small, into subgroups and have you all work together. There's obviously benefits to both ways. I'm not sure we'll have, you might have time to do both. Why don't we do this? I just said I was gonna ask you and I'm not going to, I'm gonna make a suggestion. Why don't we spend maybe like seven minutes with me doing fishbowl and then I'll send you into some breakout groups to work together. I think we have time to do both. Sound good? Oh, we can't go into groups Paul? Maybe we can't. I can't see the control for it at the moment but I've looked for it while we're talking about things. Well, let's start with that. Does someone have a, who wants to be my volunteer? Does someone have a program they want to some help with? I will talk if nobody else is. Is that Greg? This is Greg Frick, it's yeah. Yeah. So I'm very new to all this. So my work with Microsoft Technologies is a product called Microsoft Teams. You could do meetings like this and you can also have chat messages. And so change management is important for rolling out products successfully. And then I intuitively feel that, well, improv is life. So then improv is part of the process by which human beings start to shift toward a collaborative mindset where they share out loud and they think to themselves how they build something. And so that's, so I wanna looking for that niche in this sort of community of technical people that work with these products to deliver this message. I don't know that anybody else is. So it's a great opportunity. Great. I'm just grabbing my notes. Yeah. Okay. Great. So I envision sort of sessions where I deliver a session and I solicit interactivity from the participants of the session that would be in person. And then there's also the possibility of workshops where an organization is challenged with adopting sort of collaboration technology that's a little bit more agile. But when they go to adopt it, what happens is people are, they don't know if it's safe to talk out loud. They don't know if it's a big risk. So the risk of being out loud in the workplace is not, maybe it's not exactly like doing improv, but it's not totally dissimilar. Like they don't wanna stand up on stage and say, I don't know this answer to this thing. And I think everybody thinks I should know this answer, but so I don't wanna say that out loud. But if you don't say it out loud, we don't get any better and the organization isn't sort of the innovative machine. I will stop talking about it. Well, that's great. So let's go back to our five questions. Well, first, let me ask you even some logistical questions before this. Do you have some, a specific program design that you know of yet? Do you have some logistical parameters for something that you wanna design at this point? I was shooting for the fall but I just gave a session last weekend in Portland at a group, at a group. So, and it was a small, fairly small event. But I think it went well. I think one of the participants was jolted. Other people were happily engaged with a new way of talking about this stuff. Great. So let's just go through the questions. So what is your desired outcome? And I heard some of it in what you just said, but let's be really explicit. What do you want people to be able to do differently? What are the behaviors that you want them to be able to do differently when they come out of a program that you would do, assuming that you're gonna do a program? So one audience would be people that are attending these conferences that are interested in this technology and adoption and working differently. The other audience would be clients who are in the process of adopting the technology. So there's a slightly different. So for the second audience, people who are adopting the technology, organizations that are adopting it, the outcome would be that, A, the organization has to do some soul searching. Like they may say they want people to share out loud, but really it's a minefield. Like what exactly are you allowed to say and to whom? Right, so are there higher considerations, that kind of thing? So it would be kind of alignment with sort of leadership or management about how safe is it in the organization? And then the audience would be the people that are gonna be using these tools. And I'm talking about, so the outcome would be that they would, rather than sending an email one-to-one or doing a chat message one-to-one, they'd be able to determine that this actually belongs in an out loud conversation that we can all learn from and benefit from. And in alignment with that is also the idea that when we create assets or files, that we put them in a place, that's not one off shared, but that's shared with this general audience. So people that are identified as the team. So I heard people are having more out loud conversations and sharing files more broadly. And the discernment, right? Because if you try to do it, what you realize is oh, there are things that should be one-to-one and there are things that should be out loud, you find yourself in the middle of one realizing it should be the other. So there's an element of discernment that you want people to get, which leads me to think that there's a practice component here. Yeah, and they're able to distinguish and discern. Yeah. Just to note, there's a little bit of a sideline, but to sort of to Paul's point, it feels like my impulse would be there's some facilitation here, not just training. Like when you talk about getting buy-in from senior management and getting them to be really clear about are they really bought in here and what do they really want in terms of these behaviors and being discerning about when and how. There are ways in which that's, to me that feels like facilitation with a group as much as it is training. Does that resonate for you? Yes. And then coming out of that, you might say, ah, okay, we're clear on what it is we really want people to do and where there are knowledge and skills and mindset gaps that we can then train on. That sounds right. That sounds exactly right. Cause it would be sort of the governance or the how do you achieve the sort of organizational outcomes might be, here's our best practices for doing this kind of thing. But in order to get there, what I wouldn't want to do is to train workers to say things out loud and then have management saying, who are these idiots, right? I wouldn't want them to feel that they were undercut or they just got walked off a plank or something. I mean, I think for everyone, I think this is a really, really important point. Just because we have a hammer, doesn't mean that everything's a nail. And I think that's important for us when we think about designing, training at a lot of different levels. It's true at the applied improvisation level just because we have applied improvisation, which is this wonderful glorious thing, doesn't mean that every training issue should be addressed with applied improvisation, right? But it's also true at the training level just because we're trainers, those of us who are trainers, which I'm assuming those of us on the call are, doesn't mean that every intervention in an organization is a training intervention, right? And it moves back to what we started talking about at the beginning of the call. If participants are in the room feeling resistant or like prisoners, it may be because the issues in the organization are not issues that should be addressed with training. For example, if you have salespeople who are in the room and they aren't meeting their quotas because the product is a product that their customers don't want or because it keeps getting changed all the time or it's just bad and the competition's product is better, then training them on sales communication isn't gonna help and the salespeople in the room might resent the fact that the organization is saying you need sales communication training, for example. So to link back to what we're talking about here, if the organization is conflicted or unclear about what they really want people to do, then training them on certain skills and behaviors is, could backfire, right? Yes, the writing is down. So let's make some assumptions for the sake of the activity. Let's assume that the organization has decided that they do in fact want people to have more out loud conversations that we have, my experiences, for example, I'm in a lot of situations where it's actually increasing, where I am in a room of people where the group tends to default to being quiet and not wanting to speak up because my sense is they feel like why would I put myself out there and say something? There's nothing in it for me. Like the risk of speaking up and saying something is I'll look stupid. I'll get in the middle of something. The leader has their idea anyway and I'll either be right and everybody, like there's no upside for me in speaking up and there's a significant downside risk. And that's the mindset. Does that resonate? Yeah, okay. So, and anyone can chime in. So let's say we have an audience like that. We want them to have more conversations out loud. Let's look at question number three. What might be in it for them to do what we want them to do? Career advancement, yep, and recognition, yep. So if in fact, leaders or people at the next level in order to get ahead in this organization, that's what you have to do is take this, right? To get ahead is do that, then that's a message that we can get in. Actually being heard and valued, yep. The discovery of a new way of being, right? It actually can feel good. Like if you actually feel like you can show up and people will recognize it and you can discover a new performance, that can feel good. What I love about what you're saying, Kay, is sometimes if you give people the experience of that and they can see that it feels good after the fact, they can go like, oh, wow, that felt great. Even if they don't believe it can, yep. There might be some personal and family ways that you wanna be able to speak up and be seen even if you're not motivated at work. You might be able to help someone else and you might value that. Bill's saying culture and inclusion. Can you say more, Bill, about culture and inclusion, about when I say what's in it for them and you say culture and inclusion? Can you say something about that? Sure. We hear you now. Oh, you can hear me? Yeah. Oh, okay, cool. Yeah, just the positive benefits of a good culture. You know, everyone wants to belong to a tribe if you'll excuse the expression. And I think there's good motivation in presenting it in that light as well. That I might feel like I can help other people or that we are all in together or... Right, right. Just the whole culture of team and making sure that we're addressing the aspect of culture because sometimes it's a negative in some places. So breaking down the silos and making sure that we're looking at it as something that's gonna benefit everyone. Great. And it becomes reciprocal. Yeah, so yeah, right. So we want it to be a good culture. And then I'm hearing people say, we don't want to be alone. We want to belong and be loved and valued. So on some level, even though there's like this, like, you know, sort of like, oh, it feels risky. It feels like it's way easier for me to just sit here. There's this other side that I'm hearing like, we also want to engage. We want to be seen and recognized. We want to be part of a more positive culture. We don't want to just be like, you know, the teenager sitting in the back of the room going like, I'm not, you know, like I don't... There's something else that we believe people want to feel seen and heard and engaged and supportive of their peers in life, right? And to be loved and valued. So, okay. So, given that, if you were gonna say, Greg, a key message for bringing improv forth, what do you think it could be? Right? Ah, okay. So, and I think Angelina is really important, is saying something really important. Like, the risk has to be warranted, right? Like, we can't, like, Angel is asking the question, like, is it worth it? And it, if it is, then it isn't, right? So, this is why, this is where we started, I think, Angelina, when I said, like, you have to have the facilitated meeting first, right? If you have a situation where the organization isn't really clear that they want this behavior and they're not really supporting it, and then you do this training to say that it, you know, we're gonna train people to have open conversations and to share, but we don't really want that behavior and we're gonna punish it, then it's gonna backfire, right? That's not a training issue, right? That's a culture issue. So, we're gonna assume that the organization means it and that they're supporting it, because otherwise, I think, yeah, cool. So, assuming that that's authentically true, we're now going in and we're saying, right, right. So, trust, exactly right. So, part of what we need to do is develop that and say, how do we create this culture of trust? How do we create the culture of trust? And then how do we follow through on that? How do we start from a place of saying we're gonna trust each other? And then how do we reward? How do we encourage, exercise and reward the behaviors that we want? So, moving on. What activities, well, let's go here. What knowledge, skills and mindsets do we think improv or AI might bring to the table in the context of what we've been talking about? Where might we wanna start? I think, like you said, I mean, it sounds like the facilitation or the mindset or the jolt stuff happens early on to find out if this is what it looks like when people trust. This is what it looks like when people share our loud. It sometimes is messy. You might be uncomfortable. And I think that also speaks to diversity and inclusion is, yeah, yeah, when we include people, when we listen to people that have different ideas that are from different places, we sometimes feel uncomfortable. That's what it looks like to go off in this direction. Do you really wanna do that? I think you should, but do you really want to? Beautiful. What I love about that is, first of all, shifting, introducing this idea of being comfortable being uncomfortable. But if we, the first mindset shift we might wanna make or jolt that we wanna have is, it's not gonna be comfortable all the time and it's okay. So what activity might you wanna start with that's a jolt around that? That might be a great part to start. So anyone, shout it out. What are some activities or some, what are some jolts? Some activities, some jolt activities that you might wanna start with to introduce the concept of being comfortable being uncomfortable and taking risks is a good thing. Sound of motion. I'm a tree. I'm coming. Slide show. Go. We start with, to introduce this concept, we do one, two, three. One, two, three, clap, stomp, snap. Do y'all know that game? Word ball, I'm seeing. Danish clap, yes, crystal says. So for anybody who doesn't, it's you put people in pairs, you have them, you say just count as fast as you can back and forth. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, right? And if you make a mistake, you just go, woo, and start again. And we have them do that for just a couple of minutes. So we say, find a new partner now, instead of saying two, you're gonna clap, right? And then we have them search partners again, maybe if we have enough time and we say now instead of three, you're gonna stomp. So it'll be one stomp, one stomp. And people make huge amounts of mistakes and they're laughing and we say, and then we debrief around sort of engaging with each other and failing good naturedly and sort of being in it together. And then we teach the circus bow around and frame it very specifically around the willingness to try something that you're not good at. And if you feel uncomfortable or silly, just put your hands over your hand and say, woohoo. I failed, I feel silly, I feel uncomfortable and that we give you a round of applause and introduce the idea of like, if we're doing everything that we know how to do and we're comfortable with it, then we're not stretching and growing. We do a little speech about, expanding your performance range and however we do it. And that's how we start. So the first conversation is about this idea of being comfortable, being uncomfortable, the same way when you go to a gym, you're sweating and if you're not sweating and you're not uncomfortable, you're not getting a workout but that you get to calibrate, like is it good uncomfortable or you're having a heart attack and you shouldn't be having a heart attack and you shouldn't be pulling muscles, right? You're in charge of that, you know your body but you should be breaking a sweat because if you're not, then you're wasting your time. So that's how we do it. You've got 20 other ideas there. So you've taught the jolt about taking the risk. What might be a next thing that, so now let's say you've done whatever you've done, it could be one activity, it could be four activities, you could spend 15 minutes, you could spend an hour, you could spend a day honestly, right? I think most of us spent years. We're just so like put in a relatable story, like this is what it looks like. Here's an example. Yes. The risk and the reward, maybe with vulnerability is in there. It might have been stories that you've learned from your customer in some early phrase that you have permission to bring in or it could be another story. Beautiful, and what I love, Greg, about what you're saying is it doesn't all have to be just AI activities, right? So one of the things that you just talked about was you said, here's an activity or an experience, you can debrief the activity, you can share a story or an example, you can also then talk about application. So how does this look in real life or what are you gonna do with this? And maybe let's go here now because I see you don't have that much time. So we'll come back now to the design, but before we do that, if you're debriefing an activity, here's a look at a way to sort of model for debriefing. We even talked about setting up activities too, I know that came up at the beginning. But one way to think about debriefing the activity is to say I don't know where improv is the gym came from. We've been saying it for a long time and we own the URL right now and it's our tagline for our podcast, but I can't guarantee that we made it up. I might have stolen it from somewhere without knowing it. So if I did and you find it somewhere, let me know and I'll attribute it. When we debrief, there are really three parts of a debrief. Tiagi has six debrief questions, but here are the three, we've sort of collapsed them into three main things. The first is what happened in the debrief and that's exploring the actual experience of what happened in the room and the activity. The second is the learning, what did you learn from what happened? And the third is how are you willing to apply that back on the job or in life? So that's how you debrief. And that can be specifically in terms of the activity and then what you were talking about, Greg, in terms of like hear some other example stories is a great way to sort of expand the learning and the application part. So if you do those three parts, then the application part is great transition into here's another example or the learning part is a great, here's another story to explicate the learning and the how will you apply is a great way to actually move them into like write down some things that you wanna commit to doing back on the job or just make a connection for me. What does this have to do with your life or how do you see this? So give me an example of like what you wanna do differently or something that you might say that you would have thought, I'm just gonna do this in a direct message or one-on-one email that now I'm thinking I might send to the whole group. Any thoughts or questions about debriefing? I like, I was just thinking about the story spine and how that's also seems like, oh, once upon a time and then listen to one day and because of that kind of working through that with examples like that might actually be a way for people to make up a story that's kind of like related to their work environment. It could be sales, it could be product and then trying to see if that will help join the application to the feeling and experience stuff. Absolutely. So if we go back here, if we've shifted their mindset and now they're saying, yes, I get it. I'm willing to take a risk. I feel like I can trust my folks. I get the value of being more open but I don't know how to do it. I'm still nervous. I still feel shy. I still sit in the moment and I'm like, oh, so how am I gonna build the skill or the muscle of speaking up? I'm willing to be comfortable being uncomfortable but I still don't know what I'm gonna do. So I say, okay, well, let's exercise the muscle of speaking up more or taking a risk or supporting my partner, focusing on my partner instead of myself so that I can help them do it or what are the skills that you feel like then you're gonna have to offer to people? Speaking up in smaller close groups first, great. What is it gonna take? What are the skills that we need to help people build so that they're gonna be able to have more out loud conversations? Let's break down some of the actual skills. What do they need to be able to do to be discerning about what conversations to have and then to be able to have them more out loud? So you're asking? Yep. We have two more minutes on this. So just like list them quickly. Like what's a skill or two? I made a mistake. Great. I could have done this better. What would you do? Here's what I did. Like that explanation, no obfuscation or hiding, just hey, I did this, what do you think? Great. So let's just take that as one example. So let's say here's what I did to be able to explain and share their experience. Like from beginning to end, like here's what happened and why and maybe use the story spine for that. So say, I'm gonna teach you a storytelling tool to help you capture your experience and be able to articulate it in a way that has meaning for you and meaning for other people in a way that makes it coherent and you feel comfortable sharing it. And I'm gonna give you a tool for that. It's called the story spine. That's actually knowledge that you're giving them. It's a tool that's knowledge that they could go right away, I have this. I'm better at something now because I have knowledge and then it's a skill that they can practice using. Got it? Yes. Awesome. All right. So we have five minutes left. Look at that, comfortable being a comfortable boot. We have five minutes left. The only thing, we talked about that. The only thing here is this is six steps of presentation prep. My only point here is that this is mostly what we talked about, steps one and two. Don't prep any slides until way after you've done anything. I think most of us know that. So that's all that says. Story spine is right there for you. That's me. I'll send you my slides. What questions do you have for our last five minutes or so? Kay has some good advice about the voices in your head. That's a whole other skill that we can work on about capturing them and hearing them and then turning down the volume on them. Let Paul know if you wanna be unmuted, shouted out or you can unmute yourself if you've got that control visible, which most of you will have. Time for one or two questions. Dan O'Connor and Jeff Katzman wrote a book called Life Unscripted that Greg Frick is recommending. Recommending it's great. They also did an interview of a shameless plug on our podcast, Dare to be Human, which you can listen to. They great interview with them. Also, Kaitlyn McClure and Teresa. Judek did an interview with us and many of your other applied improv colleagues have been on and will be in on the future. So please give a listen. Again, that's called Dare to be Human. It's all about applying improv and other things to real life. How do we measure the return on investment of a program? And how much do we mention improv activities in a proposal? These are, these are holy. Well, the first one is the holy grail question, right? How do you mention the return on investment of a program? I think, yeah. I think it's difficult because there's a lot of noise in the system. And there's lots and lots and lots and lots written about measuring training. There's different levels of measurement, right? So you can measure at the end in terms of smiley sheets. You can measure, you know, a month out and ask, you know, again, in terms of self-reporting surveys, you can mention, you know, you can test people's behavior changes after a certain amount of time. Again, self-reported or in terms of 360 measurements of their behavior after, you know, whatever a month or six months. And then you can measure, you know, bottom-line organizational performance. How much impact we have on actual organizational performance is a question. And it's about, you know, the impact we have is also about how much our intervention is scaled, a half-day workshop or a one-day workshop against, you know, bottom-line performance of an organization is hard to measure. There's a lot of noise in the system. Kirkpatrick, exactly. So it's hard. Smiley sheets or surveys are not very accurate measures of actual value. They are good measures of whether people like the facilitator and the experience, but that is not the same as whether they learned something or got value or will shift their behavior. But it, you know, can't hurt to get feedback, I suppose, except that it can hurt because sometimes it's the opposite of what you're measuring. So one thing to maybe add, thinking about it as an applied improvisation consultant when you're talking about evaluation with an organization or client is to ask how do they do that with anything else that they're bringing in by way of training or interventions and to use the same for us. There's nothing special or different in terms of applied improvisation when it comes to evaluation. That's right. That's right. Kat, concluding remarks that you would like to make. You know, in some ways, I like what you just said, Paul. A lot of what we're talking about is not different for applied improv than it is for any other training intervention. I think what makes improv special, I love that we were looking at this phrase, improv is the gym, because I think what is delicious about what we have to offer is that we have this collective body of exercises, of activities, exercises and jolts and some frame games that have been organically developed by a collection of humans across the globe over decades and decades, if not centuries, that is a well that can be drawn from and applied, however we want to apply it, to whatever ends. And this is really about being conscious about our intention and just the way we can be more conscious about our individual performance. This is just one way to be conscious about how and why we're applying it. But everything else that we talked about is really just about good instructional design and facilitation practice. So go off and enjoy and serve well. And I'd love to hear how it goes and I'm available. Call me. Thanks very much, Kat. Thank you everyone for participating, coming along and listening, joining in, putting in your chat and your questions. There's going to be more AIM webinars on topics and there's also going to be 60-minute drop-in social webinars where we can chat about anything that's on anyone's mind. And the next one of those is this Friday, two hours earlier than this one. They'll all get mentioned in newsletters that come out from AIM and posted on the Facebook groups. We have every intention of making this recording available. Meanwhile, thanks again and goodbye to everyone. We're going to close the meeting now.