Image by Clarita
Two clients are in partnerships that are so ‘dialed in’ that it doesn’t matter which partner I speak to regarding key decisions in their business. Where it matters they check in, and they seem instinctively to know which items matter. One is a very small business where the partners are the owner and an administrator, the other is a business with millions in annual sales with two owners.
While many businesses run successfully with ‘single point’ leadership, there is a very different feeling when the leadership is shared.
The two businesses are very different on many levels, two things they have in common stand out: the leaders in question seem more relaxed than many owners/managers I work with; and while not error-free, in both cases the businesses have seen steady growth with fewer crises.
Management is typically a solitary activity. This is unfortunate. There are few things as dynamic as a truly in-sync two-person team. Finding that right fit is as much nature as nurture, but when the teams click they can transform the experience of running a business.
It takes more than one improv game to take two people and forge them into a sustainable, dynamic team, but a 2-person game called Gibberish Expert does provide a few insights!
In improv, gibberish games are ones in which one or more of the characters speaks in a language they have made up.
In Gibberish Expert, the facilitator provides a ‘random’ topic. One player ‘lectures’ on the topic in gibberish while the other player translates.
The payoff in this game occurs when the two players create a positive feedback loop. The lecturer says a few lines in gibberish, using a lot of body language and para-language (the sounds we make like ‘hmm’ that are not words but still communicate something) to suggest content. The translator picks up on the cues and not only translates for the audience, but in translating, throws in some of her own ‘spin’. The lecturer in turn picks up on that and builds on it. The net result is that while the translator is ostensibly just translating, she is in fact actively contributing to the scene. When it is working at its best, each player feeds the other content, hints, and directions to keep building the scene.
One particularly fun pay-off is when the translator translates a sound or gesture from the lecturer in a particular way. Then the lecturer picks up that connection and repeats the sound or gesture repeatedly throughout the scene. With each repetition both lecturer and translator play with inflection and meaning, creating unexpected twists and turns. It becomes like two good jazz artists trading riffs on just a few notes.
This game can be made increasingly challenging by having the players tell a story rather than do a lecture, or by doing full scenes with multiple ‘foreign speakers’ and translators (in a game called Foreign Movie).
Management & Communication Take-Homes
In debriefing this game with participants I include the following take-aways:
- It’s all about listening. Again. You may be starting to see a theme if you have been reading this series of articles. In order for this game to really fly, both players must listen to each other with total focus. If they fall into the trap of thinking out their next contribution while the other still has the spotlight, they miss cues and opportunities to build the scene. Worse, they miss cues the audience is picking up, which is a sure way to kill a scene.
- Make the other person look good. Not only is this one of my four rules, it is critical in this game. In this game, upstaging is not just bad form, it kills the scene. Both players have the responsibility to feed each other ideas and directions. This is not a competition like squash or tennis, this is a competition like an egg toss. The object is to lob great set-ups at your partner.
- Yes and… Each player’s primary job is to take what the other offers and build on it. This is a combination of numbers 1 & 2. Listen totally, pick up the cues, and take them one step further. When you fail to pick up a cue and run with it, it is as effective as blocking by saying ‘no’. When the lecturer stretches his arms far apart indicating something really big, and the translator says “… it was this small!” she gets a passing titter from the audience for being clever, but it’s a cheap laugh and the scene stops building. It’s not your job to be smarter or funnier than your partner, it’s your job to move the scene forward and build a pay-off for your audience with your partner.
- There is creative power in numbers. Often creation or design by committee can result in results that are ‘compromised’ in every sense. But when teams are really on the same page, and really listen, teams can be powerful creative forces. Don’t buy it? Just think Apple or jazz. In those environments great ideas build on each other, and bad ideas are considered collectively and discarded.
- You don’t have to do it alone. As I spelled out in the introduction, one of the things you see in great teams is a lower level of stress. Imagine doing this scene as the foreign expert alone. Unless you are a professional actor, the stress of coming up with the ‘story’, keeping the scene moving forward, finding those pay-offs for the audience, all while keeping the gibberish consistent and interesting, would be paralyzing. In this game, you just need to make a small contribution, and then listen while your partner develops it further. Between the two of you you create the scene one ‘low risk’ contribution at a time. The transfer of this to management situations is pretty easy to see.
Finding great partners is not easy. But the first and most important question is often not asked: am I a great partner? Improv games like this bring home the requirements of great partnership in a very real way.
Want to take the blah-blah-blah out of your next retreat or management seminar? To learn how an improv workshop with me can do that, contact me at clemens@clemensrettich.com. Improv takes great communication and management strategies, and makes them real and unforgettable.
