Improv games are used in team workshops to improve collaboration and facilitate healthy team dynamics. The skills you practice when you participate in improv games are the exact skills you need to participate as a contributing member of a healthy team.
This blog will briefly look at the final improv skill: NON-VERBAL COMMUNICATION!
Whenever I use theatre to work with communication, I work with what I call ‘alignment between script and subtext’. If you want to communicate authentically and you want it to mean something, you cannot afford incongruence between what you say and what people eventually hear. The difference between what you say and what people hear, is subtext – a.k.a. non-verbal communication. It is not only body language, facial expressions and tone of voice, it is the complete non-verbal expression that accompanies your message: all of your body; all of your face; and all of your voice. Most importantly, it’s what you are feeling about what you’re saying while you’re saying it. Your subtext will come through, if your internal and external messages are misaligned your body will cheat on you … because the body CANNOT LIE.
When we use improv to practice this skill, we focus on a principle called “show, don’t tell”. This is a fun way to start seeing the impact and power of non-verbal expression during communication. Another application in improv is the focus on status and how status shows up in relationships and dynamics. Status easily becomes an unspeakable in teams. The simple reason for this is: status means position and position means power.
When I work with improv with a systems psychodynamics lens, I like to refer to authorization. This is part of how people ‘show up’ in their role on a team. How do you authorize yourself? How are you authorized by your team? All these intangible concepts – status, positioning, power, authorization – has a very real impact on team dynamics and, ultimately, team health.
Improv is a way to engage with the non-verbal, the unspoken, but still the collective knowing, that governs so much of a team’s functioning and behaviour.