How often do you hear "we tried that, that won't work"?
Your team members are awesome, cooperating to deliver consistent results while working mostly independently. They accomplish their regular goals and check in with colleagues periodically to report progress and receive new inputs. This usually works fine and everything is running smoothly.
But, could you be accomplishing even more if your team was better at leveraging all of their unique strengths and skills as a unified team? And, what do you do when you are challenged to stretch your revenue target by 15% or capitalize on a major opportunity like growing into a new market?
That's where your team needs to progress beyond mere cooperation to accomplish goals that are beyond the ordinary.
That's when you need to practice spirited collaboration.
If like most of our clients, your team is stuck in "cooperation mode" and you are ready to see how improv's "Yes! And..." mindset can bring spirited collaboration to your workplace, we want to help you accomplish this.
"Teams in today's workplace are less likely to share knowledge freely, to learn from one another, to shift workloads flexibly to break up unexpected bottlenecks, to help one another complete jobs and meet deadlines, and to share resources—in other words, to collaborate."
True collaboration leverages a team's combined resources, ideas, and talents to achieve ambitious results. That is exactly what we do each time we step on stage to create "something wonderful right away." When your team learns to collaborate like an improv team, you will experience:
How It Works
In this workshop, we don't teach your team to create comedy. We teach some of the skills we use to improvise entire comedy shows on the spot out of nothing so your team can collaborate to create "100 new ideas before lunch."
Prepare
In every workshop we teach, we create a learning lab environment where every participant feels supported and able to take risks.
Since learning happens best when we are just slightly out of our comfort zones, our facilitators constantly monitor the comfort level for each person in the room and ensure they find success just outside of their comfort zone. We pay close attention to introverts and help create space for them in a room of extroverts.
No one is expected or encouraged to be funny, but everyone will be laughing a lot - and everyone loves to laugh.
Play
Exercises are introduced at various levels of difficulty, concentration, and risk-taking so we can start at a comfortable level and quickly adjust to meet the team where they are currently at.
Each exercise has a few simple rules plus a point of concentration. Just like basketball or any other team sport, the point of concentration is a single focus the group shares towards achieving a goal, just like getting a ball in a basket as many times as possible within a time limit.
In this workshop, we focus on exercises designed to get everyone collaborating to solve challenges and create new ideas at the same high level of an improv ensemble. Participants will practice brainstorming, supporting ideas, adding value, and seeing ideas from unique perspectives.
Apply
Most importantly, after each game, we spend ample time debriefing the experience and applying it to real-world challenges or goals.
Our facilitators aren’t just actors or comedians, they have real experience in business and are highly adept at helping participants discover connections between the skills each game builds and their everyday work lives.
Our facilitators are talented improvisers and teachers with a wealth of experience in other fields such as business, law, marketing, and leadership.
Meet Our Team
Our Spirited Collaboration Seminars create high-performing collaborative teams.
This is for teams that need to collaborate at a high-level to achieve ambitious results. It’s usually booked by team leaders that know they haven’t fully tapped into the divergent strengths of their entire team and are ready to experience improv's "Yes! And..." mindset at work.
Learning Outcomes
We'll train your team members to rise to each major challenge as a collaborative team. In just a few short (and fun) hours, they will learn to:
Spirited Collaboration is usually taught as a half-day workshop or two 2-hour workshops. Workshops can be held at our North Park area training center or at your office or retreat location.
We highly recommended that your group complete our Communication Tune-up Workshop before jumping into Spirited Collaboration. We also offer a 2-hour team building workshop called Connect + Humor. We offer a package discount for two or more workshops.
We also create customized programs for companies, conferences, and retreats as well as keynote presentations and corporate entertainment. Contact us for a free consultation.
Our workshops aren't for everyone.
While everyone can benefit from practicing improvisation for business (and life), our programs are best for organizations that recognize they have untapped talent amongst them and with more spirited collaboration and fresh challenges will be more engaged at work and accomplish more amazing things together for the business.
We partner with companies that value a culture of idea sharing and risk taking and know that “culture eats strategy for lunch.” These companies don’t settle for “the way we’ve always done it” and are constantly looking for innovative ways to adapt to the changing business landscape. If this is you, we want to work with you to help you achieve every “stretch goal” you’ve set and increase your bottom line using the power of improvisation for business.
Improvisation truly challenges people to be authentic, vulnerable, and participate fully in the team activity. And, that's what we'll bring to your team.