Improv for Teams
Presence Under Pressure
Presence Under Pressure is an improv workshop for teams, taught as communication skills rather than performance. Nobody is asked to be funny and nobody performs for an audience. Teams practice accepting an offer, building on what a colleague hands them, and handling the questions and changes of plan they didn’t prepare for.
Nobody is asked to be funny and nobody performs for an audience. Improv is just the fastest way I know to rehearse the unscripted parts of your job.
Most of your working day is unscripted. The question you didn’t expect. The idea a colleague half-finishes and hands to you. The meeting that goes somewhere other than the agenda. None of that is a presentation problem, and no amount of preparing slides helps with it.
Improvisers train for exactly this, and they train three things. Accept the offer rather than blocking it. Yes, and, which means build on what you were given instead of replacing it with your own idea. And make the other person look good, which turns out to be the whole trick of a room that works.
Those are meeting skills, collaboration skills, and leadership skills.
“If you can play a rhyming toaster in a circle of strangers, you can share the thing you’ve been working on with a room of your peers.”
Harvard Business Review on why this works
The three things improvisers actually practice.
Take what you’re given
Blocking is the instinct. Someone offers an idea and you explain why it won’t work. Accepting first costs nothing and changes what the room is willing to say next.
Build, don’t replace
The difference between adding to someone’s idea and swapping in your own. Most meetings are a slow series of quiet replacements, which is why nothing compounds.
The whole trick
Improvisers are taught that their job is the other person, which is what lets a group get somewhere in an hour instead of circling.
The things people ask first.
Do I have to be funny?
No. Nobody is asked to be funny and nobody performs for an audience. The exercises are deliberately low stakes, which is the point: you get the reps without anything riding on them.
What does this teach that a presentation workshop doesn’t?
A presentation workshop is about the thing you prepared. This is about everything you didn’t. The unexpected question, the half-finished idea someone hands you, the meeting that goes somewhere else entirely. That’s most of the working day, and it’s the part nobody trains for.
How is this different from Hooked from Hello?
Hooked from Hello is about your message: building it, structuring it, delivering it. This one is about other people’s, and what you do with what they give you. Teams often take this one second, though nervous speakers sometimes find it easier to start here.
Book Presence Under Pressure for your team.
Tell me who the team is and what you want them doing differently. I build the session around those answers, and then read the room on the day.