Improv
My 12 year old daughter has been participating for several weeks now in an improvisational acting class. I did not know much about improv except the obvious bits all of us “non-actors” know… no script, have to think on your feet, have to be really brilliant etc. Well it was eye opening to me to hear the science and process behind improv and I was really inspired to observe the similarities between the 5 rules of imrov and the rules of any productive brainstorming session.
This is a nice post on the 5 rules of improv, probably there are many articles such as this, I did not find it particuarly remakable except it appeared relatively high in Google search results:
http://improvencyclopedia.org/references//5_Basic_Improv_Rules.html
I won’t go into each, but as you read these you could easily see the parallels to basic brainstorming:
- Don’t deny.
- Don’t ask open ended questions (okay, maybe this does not fit well as a brainstorming rule?).
- You don’t have to be funny (in the case of brainstorming perhaps replace “funny” with “brilliant”.
- You can look good if you make your partner look good (good listening, pivot from or build on good ideas).
- Tell a story (keep on track, bring the good ideas back to the theme/task).
Christopher Roge
Faster Than Light
christopher@roge.me
