What Second City Improv Can Teach Advisors

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One common attribute of successful business leaders is their ability to improvise, to be able to make something out of nothing. Hi everyone, I'm Steve Sandusky for Barron's Advisor, and welcome to Actionable Intelligence. My guest today is Kelly Leonard. Kelly is the executive director of Insights and Applied Improvisation for the Second City in Chicago. During his more than 30 years with the company, He has produced hundreds of original shows with talent such as Stephen Colbert, Tina Fey, Keegan-Michael Key, Seth Meyers, and Amy Poehler. Kelly and I discuss how to apply the concepts of improvisation to the workplace. And I think you're going to discover, like I did, that the world of comedy and improvisation can teach us many lessons about thriving in the workplace, being more human, and getting along better with our friends and colleagues. So let's get started with Kelly Leonard. Kelly, I've heard you say that improvisation is yoga for your social skills. So what does that mean?

It's a nice little phrase. Essentially, yoga is a practice and improvisation is a practice. Yoga is done sort of individually. I know you're often in a room, but you're, you know, it's not noisy. Improvisation is. It exists inside noise. It exists inside groups. Another way of saying this is improvisation is human being practice. And the thing that's so powerful about this is that we have decades of research from neuroscience, from behavioral science, from behavioral economics, positive psychology, that show us that human beings make decisions irrationally, without logic, emotionally. And what improvisation is essentially is an antidote to the worst impulses that exist inside human behavior.

Now, is improvisation something that goes back to the ancient Greeks, or is this more of a new concept that was invented more in recent times?

Improvisation has always existed in inside elements of storytelling and theater, but modern improvisation was really— the roots of that are with a woman by the name of Viola Spolin, who worked as a social worker at Jane Addams Hull House in the '20s and the '30s. And her job was to better assimilate the immigrant children coming into her care. So she created all these games, these exercises that had the children collaborate and empathize. A lot of the games were in gibberish or in silence 'cause the kids didn't always share language, but she knew that communication is much more than just words. And so these games were really powerful tools to help these kids sort of enter into this new world. They were also fun and funny. And Viola's son, Paul Sills, who was studying at the University of Chicago, loved these games. And he taught them to his friends, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, among others. They formed the first improvisational theater in America in 1955, which was called the Compass Players. That morphed into the Second City by 1959. The Compass just did improvised scenarios. Second City takes improvisation and then uses those to craft scenes and sketches and full comic reviews.

And then you and your co-author wrote a book called Yes, And. So tell me about the book. How did that come about? And how did you think about trying to codify these concepts of improvisation and put them in the form of a book that then could be used by people in the workplace?

We've been doing this for so long. There are so many rich, great stories, both from the stage and from offstage, and then with our clients. So we started calling some clients like Major League Baseball, who's been a longtime client. We're like, can we tell the story of how we work with you? And they're like, yeah, absolutely, let us just sign off on it. So I mean, it's not easy writing a book. It was a lot of work, but we got it done. And for me, that was a major tipping point because From 1992 to 2015, when the book was released, I had been producing the theater. So I was hiring people like Steve Carell and Stephen Colbert and Tina Fey and Amy Poehler and producing all the shows. And I did other stuff at the theater as well, but I really decided after writing the book, like, okay, my first part of my career was all about improvisation onstage. Now let's see what I can do with improvisation offstage. So since 2015, I have been, you know, exploring and building out programs that not only tie improvisation to workplaces, but also to things like caregiving and social justice, education.

In the book, you talk about these 7 elements of improv. The first one here, and the title of the book is "Yes, And." And I also find it interesting that this concept of improv is this idea of making something out of nothing. Yet here we are, we've got these kind of rules of the road. So is that kind of a juxtaposition there, or?

It isn't. Creativity, thrives inside constraints. And there's a great story, a non-Second City story, that I love to tell that sort of shows this. The jazz pianist Keith Jarrett is an amazing both classical and jazz musician, and his most famous record is called the Köln Concert, and it was a live concert that he did in Germany. What happened that day though is he showed up to the concert hall and the piano that he had was terrible. The pedals really didn't work very well. The ends of the keyboard were not usable, and he refused to go on. And this teenager who had booked the concert was like begging him. It was sold out. And he basically said, okay, here's the deal. You need to record this. I want this recorded perfectly, because I'm going to play, and then I'm going to send this out to every other venue to show them what happens when, you know, I get a crappy piano. Well, he goes on, and he realizes that he's got to play the middle of the keyboard, which which is the most melodic sort of area. He has to pound on the pedals, which became a signature aspect of Jarrett's style. And it became the best-selling solo piano jazz album in the history of the field. And he's improvising. When you improvise, you are aided by having these sort of boxes that are around you and these sort of rules and ideas. There's great freedom inside this stuff, but it's not chaos and it's not winging it. It is a practice. And what we do is, you think about this in the concept of sports. You know, professional sports stars, superstars, play catch before the game. They know that that's an important idea of like, you know, skilling their arm to move in a certain way. And yet in business, millions of dollars are on the line daily. And how many people are practicing their pitch? How many people are literally practicing their pitch? Improvisation does that. It is working on your listening, your eye contact, your status inside a room. How to better read people. We think we can read people, we're actually not very good at it, but improvisation gives you kind of a practice in being more skilled in that area. It's less a juxtaposition and more of a sort of acknowledgement that what we know is that working sort of from nothing does require some rules of the road to be effective. And that's what our work does.

So let's talk about some of these 7 elements. So the first one is yes, and. From a practical standpoint, how do we apply that?

So Second City creates a couple new shows every, every year, and our process takes about 12 weeks. The first 3 to 4 weeks, we are applying the yes and principle, which means every idea that someone comes up with, we say yes to it and we, we build on it because we want to work from an abundance of ideas, even if they sound crazy, even if they seem impractical. Your job is to yes and every idea. So it's like rapid prototyping. So at the end of that 4 weeks, you now have, I don't know, 100 different pieces of ideas, content, scenes, songs, and you start culling down from there. Okay, let's take this to the business world. If your job is to create a new marketing slogan, a new product, whatever, the way you're gonna get to the best material is by an abundance of ideas from many different voices. There's a lot of academic evidence that diversity inside teams is a very, very good thing, because it allows for really interesting ideas to mesh and collide and dots to be connected. So just think about it in a brainstorming meeting. Use the first 10 minutes to yes and every idea. Because when people get said no to, they stop contributing and they don't bring their best ideas to the table for fear that someone's gonna think that they're dumb or they're gonna look bad. Yes and is like an affirmation. Yes, great. Tell me your idea. Great, great, great. Put them all on the whiteboard. And then from there, when the best idea emerges, no one feels bad because they all had their stuff, their ideas vetted and heard and acted upon. And we got to, you know, the best idea that we all sort of contributed to together. This myth in business of the sole creative is so damaging and continues to be today, which is like none of these great inventions were done by one person. Thomas Edison had a team of people who were working on all of these different ideas. And I guarantee you it's the same with Elon Musk. They're just egomaniacs who want to act like, you know, they had all the great ideas.

Now, the second one that I really want to explore here too is this idea of the ensemble. And I know Second City is an ensemble, but how do you differentiate between an ensemble and a team?

So we've all heard the phrase, your team is only as good as its weakest member. We actually don't believe that when you think in terms of ensemble. In an ensemble, your team is only as good as its ability to compensate for its weakest member, because one of us at any given time is going to be the weakest member. We're not all good at everything. So ensembles acknowledge that. So, you know, again, sports metaphor, you aren't going to just have leadoff hitters. You're not just going to have sluggers. You need the speedy guy up top who maybe doesn't hit as hard as the guy who's hitting fourth. So same in teams at work. You want to populate it with people who have different skill sets that then can mesh. And an ensemble, it's a very powerful way to think because it requires you to be deeply others-focused. Before we go on stage for a show, before we do a keynote or a workshop, our group always says, "Got your back," and touches your back if we're allowed to do that. That is an affirmation that I'm going to take care of you. My job is to take care of you, and if your job is to take care of me, we're good. And that creates a kind of fearlessness inside the group. It creates what Amy Edmondson from Harvard refers to as psychological safety, which when Google did their Project Aristotle, which was a 2-year project to find what made teams most successful, the number one thing was a sense of psychological safety, that it was okay to make mistakes and it's okay to fail because we all do. And you gain resilience if you're working at a place where people acknowledge that and that's good and keep going. That's one of also the worst things in business is this idea that you're not going to make mistakes. It is a fact that we get it wrong more than we get it right across all human activity. And to act as if that is somehow not true in business, it's problematic at the least.

So you're in Chicago. I suspect you are probably a Chicago Bulls fan.

I am.

So if you look back in the glory days of the Bulls with Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, would you view them as a team as an ensemble, and then when Jordan left and Pippen left and there were some lean years in there, how do you kind of think about the idea of the team versus the superstar and what happened there?

Well, yeah, thank you for bringing this up. So first of all, if you've read any of Phil Jackson's work, he talks a lot about improvisation, but he's talking about it from like a jazz and Grateful Dead sort of world, which is very similar in music to what it is in theater. So he was definitely building ensemble. And here's the proof: they didn't win when it was just Jordan and the backups. They won when they became an ensemble. You had Dennis Rodman, who was very good at one thing. That guy could not shoot a free throw to save his life, but he rebounded and hustled like crazy. And that was great because they had Scottie who was going to score, and Michael was going to score, Craig Hodges was going to score from the outside. So they very much operated like that. And Steve Kerr, huge Second City fan, comes every time they're in town and brings, brings the team. So Steph Curry has done the improv set at Second City. He brought that to his coaching, very much sort of this improvisational mindset. So just watch the way they started, like, they passed the ball to a space on the floor that the human would then occupy, which is a very sort of improvisational thing of like, let's be in flow. Let's sort of figure out what our flow is and trust that that person is gonna go to the spot where they're going to be. So yeah, I think, you know, many, many great sports teams are operating in improvisation. And by the way, we've worked with the NBA in addition to Major League Baseball. We've worked with the NHL teaching players improvisational skills for both their work, you know, on the ice, on the court, on the field, but also off dealing with all the stuff that they have to deal with, with fans and relatives and that sort of thing.

As we're trying to build out our team in a business setting, for example, how should we be thinking about filling out each of these different roles so that if one of them leaves, the whole thing doesn't fall apart. And I think that's what you're getting at here with the ensemble.

Look at the history of Second City. We train up these young talent that no one knows their names, and then they leave, and then they become famous, and we're still here. So, so you would think, like, like, what are you doing? Why, why are you letting Tina Fey leave? Why are you letting Stephen Colbert leave? It's like, because I'm making space for the next Tina Fey and the next Stephen Colbert, because the ensemble is more powerful than the individual. So the ensemble is guided by all these things that we're talking about. The idea of making your partner look good, that all of us are better than one of us. And you have a skilled person enter into that space and allow them to sort of contribute in a positive way. They are gonna skill up. They're made stronger by the people who are around them. So it's really kind of an amazing, I often say what's interesting about Second City is we are a theater that is guided by this ensemble philosophy, and all we do is produce individual stars. There's something to that. There has to be something to that. And I think it's this idea that when we focus in on our individual performers too much, we are losing what's at the essence of an organization, which is its groups of people rather than, you know, just individual people. And we're all different, you know, and you can celebrate those differences inside a group. That's You know, one of the great problems we have in society right now is that we can't seem to speak through our differences, and it is to our national detriment. It is not positive for anyone. I don't care where you sit on the political spectrum. Human beings are human beings, and if we don't see the humanity in each other, how do we do this? How do we make things function? And I think we're seeing writ large how it doesn't function. That's not good.

So we've got to leave our ego at the door as well. So if we're going to function in this ensemble, we can't feel like, well, we've got to be the I've got to be the alpha male and take charge of everything.

Yeah, I mean, I'm a big fan of servant leadership. We have a term when we talk about leadership here called "follow the follower," which came out of Iles Bolen. And it's very tied to Peter Drucker's management theories, which is that you are going to lead at times and you're going to follow at times, no matter what station you are in the business. So, you know, I'm now the old guy here. I used to be the youngest person. I was 26 when I started producing. I'm now in my 50s, and I'm the older. Spectrum. And I am not technology-minded. I do okay, but that is not my forte, but I have other skills. And so my boss is very enlightened. She's like, you know, let's focus on what you're good at, not what you're not good at. That doesn't make any sense because other people are good at that. And so let's take advantage of your knowledge of history and your knowledge of academic thought. And so, you know, that's going to exist across an organization, which means your people aren't widgets. Getting to know your people, what makes them tick, what provides meaning and purpose for them. That's what great leaders do, because what great leaders are really doing is setting everyone else up for success. We talked about Phil Jackson earlier. That's what he was great at. He was great at building these teams. He did it in Chicago. He did it in LA with very famous superstars that he found a way that they acted as ensembles and not just individual superstars. And Popovich does that too. The humility of those superstars when they were working inside those systems was amazing. And just the results are right there. And you see that fall apart when the leader is no longer there. That often happens.

So Second City is a business. Now you guys are a for-profit business, is that correct?

Yep.

And I would imagine you've got some kind of hierarchy. So how are you as a for-profit business implementing this idea of the ensemble, follow the follower, and some of these other improv concepts here?

I got to admit, it's not easy. This stuff works. It's dynamite on stage. It is much harder to operate. It's really doable at the team level. So when you have individual teams, and we work a lot with the individual teams and organizations, and it's, it's very effective, all this stuff. But if you don't have essentially ownership or main leadership that's bought into this idea, it's not going to cascade throughout the organization. What we're finding, a lot of our clients come to us for leadership training, but the kind of leadership training they want us to do is what I refer to as leadership at every level. They're approaching their organization as empowering individuals in teams to have more autonomy. There's elements of design thinking and there's elements of agile that are at play here. It's a thread that runs through, through all of our work that we do and they do. But it really is recognizing what the literature says, what the evidence says, which is, you know, people operate more effectively when they're more autonomous, when they understand the purpose of a business. I always loved that story of John Kennedy walking through NASA and he saw a janitor sweeping up the floor and he goes, "What do you do here?" And the janitor said, "I help put a man on the moon." So he understood the purpose. We just got bought by this wonderful private equity firm, and their very first time coming to Chicago, because we're still in the midst of this pandemic, we were closed down. And so we had a group meeting, distanced, you know, that sort of thing. And I was taking them on a tour through the building, and my colleague Abby bent down and picked up a piece of trash and threw it out in the trash can. And later, I was like a week later, they were like, that was the moment we knew this was a good team. She just assumed it was her job to pick up that piece of trash and didn't even mention it. And it was like, I love that story because I was like, yep, that's So at Second City, when we are effective, and we haven't always been, we really haven't always been, we are right now. I love our team. And our team is very much, how do we hold each other accountable? So my boss, the other day, we started to set up these meetings every other week just to sort of check in. And I've been here much longer than she has. And, you know, but her first thing with me is like, where do you feel stuck? 'Cause I'm here to help you get unstuck. And I'm like, if that's not servant leadership, that is exactly, I felt so affirmed out of that. And I was stuck in a couple areas and I just, I hadn't had, boss in a long time who entered the conversation with the— there's a great phrase I love to use, which is replace blame with curiosity. A lot of times I've had bosses who would like move right to like, here are the 5 things that I see that are wrong. Instead, what we're doing now is let's focus on the 5 things that are right and build from there. And if stuff's wrong, let's figure out why it is. No shame, no blame, and let's fix it. And that's just a better way to work.

Sounds like she's a good listener.

She's a very good listener. Yep.

Which is one of your 7 elements of improv.

Yeah, because listening's hard, man. We should not take it for granted. So we have an exercise that we do, and I love to do it because it teaches people who maybe think they're really great listeners that maybe they're not that so much. And the exercise is called Last Word. And there's really just one rule. If we're having a conversation, the rule is that each of us needs to start our sentence with the last word the other person spoke. It is hard. If you try this, it's hard, because what we normally do is we think we're getting the gist of what someone's saying. So we start calculating our smart response maybe midway through. When you're improvising on stage, you can't do that because the last piece of information you're getting could be crucial to what you're going to do next in the scene. You have to completely focus on what the other person is saying. That is not how we live our lives, certainly not our work lives, and I don't think our home lives either. So when you apply that level of listening, that level of attention, it's very powerful for both people. Or whatever group you're in. To be fully seen and fully heard scratches like the hugest itch that human beings have. For the receiver, it's amazing 'cause you're being seen and heard. And for the leader, you are gonna gain trust. You're gonna gain more information, all the things you need to turn your people into peak performers. Listening is huge.

Well, when I came across that as I was doing some research on you, I thought, I'm going to ask Kelly if he's okay if we do the last word exercise as part of our conversation here. So if you're game, why don't we do that for maybe the next couple, 3 questions and see where this goes. And if it doesn't work, we can always edit it out.

Okay, let's go for it.

All right. So you talked earlier about failure and the importance of creating a safe space, I guess you could say, for failure. And I think you guys have— I read somewhere you said you have a failure methodology. So how do you think about failure both from the creative aspect on the stage and then also in the business world?

The world is made up of failure after failure. If you go in for a performance review and you failed 70% of the time in your job, you probably think you're gonna get fired. If a major league ballplayer goes to meet with his coach and he's only hit the ball 30% of the time is a 300-hitter. That's, that's a very good, that's a very good percentage. So apply that to our daily lives. We at Second City have the structure of our stages is it's a two-act scripted review. There might be some improv in there, but the third act, which is late at night, which is free, anyone can come off the street and see this thing, is improvised. And that's where we're making it up, and that's where we're developing ideas for the next show. And what's key is the context. What we're not saying is that, you know, businesses should be constantly failing. What we're saying is is that businesses should be constantly succeeding. And the way to do that is to give opportunity for low-stake failure. This happens when manufacturing all the time. This is why you're prototyping different products. Not everything you do is going to work. So get your hands dirty, try some stuff out. This is why 3D printers are great and things like that. This doesn't need to be hugely expensive, but it gives you an opportunity to play with these ideas. And in our context, it's, it's that it's late at night and it's free. And the actors often change out of their nicer clothes and into less close. So everyone gets it. Everyone gets that this thing's going to be a little bit risky, and the audience loves it because they're, they're seeing this incredible creativity. Not all of it works, but when it does, that's kind of remarkable.

Remarkable. And when I think of Second City, I think it's remarkable that you guys have succeeded for, what, 60 years or so, somewhere in that neighborhood, with this ensemble that you talked about a little bit earlier. And you mentioned that there's been some difficult times along the way. And one of the things I'm also kind of interested in along this idea is With the concept of failure, I would imagine you guys have a high-performance environment as well because you're on stage, you've had people that have gone on to have amazing careers outside of Second City. So how do you maintain this high-performance culture but also with an understanding that we're going to fall flat on our face sometimes?

Sometimes we do. Sometimes we fall flat on our face, and that's why we succeed because we have created an environment where young talent is encouraged to take protected risk, where they are encouraged to share their true voice, where they are given great autonomy, and they are well trained. We have a training center where almost all of these people have emanated from, which is a years-long program where they have really not only built up their skills at doing this work, which they continue to do even when they're on the stage. There's still a lot of workshop sessions, but they've also played a lot of scrimmages. You know, Chicago has been renowned as this incredible theater town with all these little black box theaters in addition to the big theaters like Steppenwolf and Goodman and Second City. And the talent that we draw on is performing every weekend in front of real audiences because this is a theater town. People go out to see this stuff. So that level of training and practice and then the environment that they get put in is the recipe for great peak performers. And we have proven that over time, starting with like Alan Arkin and Joan Rivers and Bill Murray and John Candy. I mean, that alumni list is— nothing exists like that in the American theater. Nothing exists like that. And it continues to this day. If you look at the cast of Saturday Night Live and people like Keegan-Michael Key and, you know, Jason Sudeikis and all this great talent that was here 10 years ago. They don't become overnight sensations, many of them. I mean, Steve Carell worked here for 9 years before he got his, his shot and was on The Daily Show. But that just, that just meant that he was even more prepared by the time that he did get his break, that he could just excel in everything he did. The other thing that's interesting when you look at a lot of the Second City alumni is that they end up forming great ensembles themselves. So you think about The Office, you think about Parks and Rec, you think about 30 Rock, right? You know, these are all ensemble-based shows that, you know, became like huge massive hits, and they were populated with not just 1 or 2 Second City people. There's usually like 4 or 5 in the cast and 3 on the writing team and a couple people producing. So I think it's because of our dedication to acknowledging that failure happens, creating a context in which That can happen low stakes, and then that in turn leads to peak performance.

Performance is certainly something that Second City is well known for, and you mentioned all these great names of people that have gone on to have stellar careers. Have there been people who just could not perform in the ensemble function where they really needed to be the star, and the environment that they tried to apply their craft in at Second City didn't work?

Work?

I—

the hard thing is yes. The hard thing is I'm going to answer yes and then not tell you who that is. Let me put it this way: a couple of the people who ended up really not functioning well at Second City ended up having terrific careers in stand-up comedy. They were much better performing by themselves. Oh, I can say one of them, which is Joan Rivers. Joan Rivers talked about how she did not have a good time at Second City, and she didn't work well in teams. She worked well by her, herself. But immensely talented. No one gets to one of our main ensembles, one of our resident stages, who's not immensely talented, and very few flame out. Very, very few. There's a lot that you don't— there's a lot who aren't household names but are likely working in New York or LA on TV shows or films, or, you know, they're in the industry, they're just behind the scenes. A lot of them end up being writers.

Writers, they're certainly a key part of this whole process here. Now, I know you've got a lot of different tools and exercises that you have people go through. So, you know, the yes and is maybe an exercise. I think there's another one I've heard you talk about before where you don't say no the entire day. So tell me about that exercise and how does that apply? Do you use that in business settings?

Settings, business settings are a great place to try this out. I don't recommend this as an ongoing practice. It's not practical, but I think it's a really fun experiment for a day. I think about the exercise you and I are doing right now. It's not easy. The last one was really tough for me to sort of figure out how I was gonna, you know, channel work and all that. But it doesn't matter that it wasn't perfect. It's that we are doing this thing together and we're trying our best. Our tendency to say no, it's a default setting. And it's often a good one. We have our defaults to protect us from getting eaten by lions. But in modern society, there's not a lot of lions roaming around the streets of Chicago, but this impulse to say no is still there out of fear. So the idea of you both becoming aware of where you normally say no— because if you're not doing it for an entire day, you are going to realize, like, how many times that was going to be your, you know, your default move. So first, your realization that you default to that is important. And then your ability to upturn that. It's essentially an idea that's called divergent thinking. You know, human beings really enjoy their patterns. They like when it looks like A, B, and C all fit together, but it's rarely the case that that's actually what's going on. And so divergent thinkers, which really are our innovators, you know, our geniuses, our innovators, our creative sect, are people who look at the world and sort of go, hmm, maybe what's actually happening here isn't what looks like it's happening. Maybe there's subtext. Maybe if I connect these two unrelated things, something cool is going to happen. And that is sometimes upsetting and uncomfortable, but improvisational practice makes you comfortable with being uncomfortable. And it allows you again to take, take risks that you might not take otherwise. This isn't for every job inside an organization. Sometimes just like the reports need to be written and the numbers need to be the numbers. But if there are instances where you need people to use their creative brains and you need them to quote unquote think outside the box. Recognize that a lot of people aren't trained that way and that our educational systems drive a lot of that stuff out of us through standardized testing and other things. So the way you win at school is not really reflective of the way that you succeed in, in the business world. And many schools are figuring this out right now and are recognizing they're going to need to change because higher ed is in danger of being seriously disrupted.

Disrupted. Well, we know that's happening all over the business world here. And when you mentioned here talking about trying to, you know, not say no during the course of the day, I think maybe one place to start is at home, you know, with our personal relationships. Maybe just try and say yes for a full day in our personal relationships and see how that goes. That might make some improvements.

Improvements, absolutely. So I have had maybe the most success in applying improvisation as a parent and a spouse. So, and my kids took improv classes because my wife has worked here longer than I have, and she ran our training center for years. And when the kids were little and they would fight in the back of the car, she would play improv games with them. Like, there's a game called One Word Story where you tell a story one word at a time. And my son Nick was always very good at it. My daughter Nora was not, and she would just say, like, the word would come to her when it was clearly supposed to be like a 'the' or an 'and' and she'd say hippopotamus, but then, you know, she'd lose the game because it didn't make any sense and she wanted to win the game. So over time, she kind of learned that there is a place for someone to say the and and that's just as important as, you know, a flashy adjective or adverb. So playing the games in terms of fostering better collaboration and communication, more engagement. You say no to your kids, like, constantly. That is a default. And honestly, most of the time it's warranted, but there is, power in allowing for space of exploration around, like, I remember one time Nora wanted a raise. She must've been like 11. And rather than say no, we said yes. And explain to us why you deserve it and how you think this would be applied. And so that night before we went to bed, she came in and did a PowerPoint, putting up air quotes because it was sheets of construction paper that she would turn around, which was the whole sort of like display of why she should get a raise. And we gave it to her. We were like, this is very good work. What you just did was very good work. And it was like, she got what she wanted and we got to see her be really creative. And that's also setting her up for success later. I mean, when she recognizes like, oh, if I want something, I might have to explain it to someone and maybe I should learn that skill.

Well, I think we can stop the last word exercise because that's hard. Yeah, it is hard. We did it for a few minutes. We did it. Yes. Yeah. So appreciate you rolling with me on that one. Now, in recent years, Second City has established a partnership with the University of Chicago Booth School. And I think you call it the Second Science Project. And it looks like you're doing some really interesting things with behavioral psychology, behavioral economics, and how that's applying to some of the things that you're doing at Second City. So tell me more about what you're doing there and what are some findings that apply to the business world?

Yeah, this is a wonderful project that I co-lead with my friend Heather Caruso, who's now the Associate Dean of Diversity and Inclusion at UCLA. But for 4 years, we had this project going at the University of Chicago, and now we're working with a variety of academic institutions. And we're really blending the worlds of improvisation and behavioral science. So one of the first projects that we worked on was we first explored this idea around yes and. Is there literature and evidence to support this concept? And indeed, immediately there was. There is plenty of science that backs that up. But the scholars had a question for us, which is, okay, how do you yes and if you truly disagree with the person across from you? And so one of our early explorations was, okay, let's, let's go research. So the scholars went back and looked at what evidence exists, and we started cooking up exercises that might, you know, lend itself to a discovery here. And we actually collaborated and found one. And the idea is a build-off of "yes, and." So if I essentially disagree with you over something, political or otherwise, but we need to stay inside conversation, the cue, the words, the idea, the mindset that will allow you to do that is what we refer to as "thank you because." So we disagree on something. I hear this information. My first response is to thank you for sharing that information. Why is that important? That's important because it puts you in a place of gratitude. Both of us. I'm thanking you for sharing the information. You feel a sense of gratitude for being thanked. But the next thing is crucial, which is the because. I have to find something in what you just said that I agree with and acknowledge that before sharing my point of view. To explain this, I use like vaccines. You know, I believe in vaccines, and I'm not a fan of people who are anti-vaccine. However, if I were in a conversation with you and I needed to stay in that conversation and you're anti-vaccine and you've got kids, I'd say, "Thank you, because I know like me, you love your children so much that you don't want them hurt by the vaccine. Same thing with me. I don't want to be hurt by not getting the vaccine. So we are, we are in fierce agreement on that. There's just this difference." That will keep us going. And we actually have a paper coming out next year because we've run this now thousands and thousands of people. And not only is it effective when both parties do the "thank you because," the reason the paper got delayed is because we want to do the same amount of study on individuals who only one person I said, thank you, because— still effective. So that's just one example of a phenomenon that really happened in this lab.

We all feel like our world today is more polarized than it's ever been. And of course, it's the only world we know. We don't know what it was 200 years ago, but it sure feels polarized. And I like this idea of if you can't say yes, and to something that you just vehemently disagree with, at least you can have some gratitude for them sharing it. Like you say, it keeps the dialogue going, which I think is important.

Yeah, look, there are absolutely systemic inequities. There are huge societal problems that, that I don't think we should ignore. Improvisation is not going to solve those necessarily. Some people think they will, but what it will solve is our moment-to-moment interactions as human being to human being. I often say meaning is made in moments. Our workday, our success, all that relies on the interactions that we have every single day. And so if we can get better at those, at those interactions, human-to-human moments, we are going to improve our lives and we're going to improve the lives of others.

So I've got a few short statements here, and these are things that I've either heard you say, or these might be things that were in your book, and I'd love for you to make a comment on them. So one of them is, bring a brick, not a cathedral.

Yeah, I love that one. So the idea there is when you're walking into a room, for a group activity, and you really want the group, as we said before, diverse voices, different ideas. That's what makes things great. If you walk in with your cathedral designed in your mind already, you're not building anything with this group. You're building alone. But if you come in with your great idea, seemingly great idea, and allow another great idea to exist on top of that, and then allow another great idea to come in, it's going to look different. It might end up being a house. It might end up being a cathedral. But what it is, is going to have all these different inputs and More inputs from more sort of diverse areas of thought will give you better designed anything, whether it's a product or a marketing slogan or a comedy show. And you just gotta be reminded that a lot of times we come in with our fully formed thoughts and that turns our ears off to hearing maybe there's a better idea in the room.

The next one is respect, don't revere.

When we revere, we are resistant to change. When we are reverent, we stop looking for the mistake that's in front of us. Second City is such a great example of this, and I love this institution, but this institution has been far from perfect for many, many years. I'm gonna give you an example that just happened. So like many institutions, we came under the sort of social justice microscope, and a lot of people, because we're very high profile, wrote about us in the news, and sort of like, we had to sort of come to the reckoning of like, okay, what is it about our history that maybe wasn't respectful or wasn't enlightened. And someone had mentioned, one of the kids mentioned in one of our calls, the art on the walls at Second City. So we have lots of drawings and lots of photos of alumni and shows and ensembles. And so my friend John Carr and I, John's our executive producer, I said, let's do our art audit the other day. So we started walking around the hallways and I've worked here for over 30 years. I was seeing things that I had seen, you know, thousands if not millions of times, that I just was like, oh, that's really racist. Like, there's a white person dressed up, not in blackface, but close. And like, I am not for censorship. I am for respect. And there is imagery. There's a classic one was there is a caricature, and it was Dan Castellaneta, who's Homer Simpson, but he is Hitler. And in the scene, it was not like a pro-Hitler scene, But you coming off the street and just seeing a picture of Hitler without any context, it was a great example of like, I revered this institution. And because I did so, I wasn't allowing myself to see stuff that was problematic, to say the least. Better I respect the institution and recognize that there's areas where we can improve.

Another one here that I'd love you to comment on is read the room.

That's something that people don't do enough, which is every room you go into is different, which means you need to modulate your behavior to the room. So that's both like who's in the room, that's where the room is. Ron Heifetz is a Harvard leadership professor, and he talks about this, this idea that leaders need to switch back and forth from the balcony to the dance floor, from the balcony to the dance floor. And I love that because it's about reading the room. It's like the only way I'm going to learn about what's really going on here and be a force for good and to, you know, get my team to be peak performers is if I both can zoom out and zoom in so that I can understand the room I'm in. And when I'm in the room, I want people to behave as they're behaving. So I have to lower my status. And then sometimes I got to be on the balcony. I got to zoom out. I got to take a leadership, make some decisions that are going to affect everyone. And I shall say this, like one of the professors we work with at the University of Chicago is Nick Epley. And he has a ton of research that shows that we overestimate our ability to read each other kind of wildly. And I actually saw this in action. He was observing a class that my wife was teaching. They did a game, an exercise where two people speaking gibberish had a translator in front of them and would translate the words they were saying. And afterwards, before anyone spoke, Nick said, can I ask you, do you think you were actually understanding what the other person was saying? And they're like, yeah, they both were like, we kind of got the gist of it. And then they had each other say what they were actually thinking. And it was nowhere near. Anywhere close. So yes, read the room, but also understand your ability to read the room is maybe not as great as you think it is.

Well, how can we improve that skill then? Is there something we can do to be better at reading the room, better at reading people's facial cues?

Yeah, A, if you're a person who has high status in an organization and you're speaking to someone who has lower status, you can physically make yourself smaller, you can speak less. Asking a lot of questions is a real good thing. Here's another thing that if you've got high status over someone but you want to build a bond with them, ask them for advice. That's the thing that not enough people in high-status positions recognize. I heard this phrase once where they said, "A leader's whispers are screams." So the ability for a leader to go up to someone and go, "I want to get your advice on something," can unleash their confidence. So yeah, and there's exercises that we teach inside organizations that, you know, be aware of your language, be aware of belittling language that you might not be aware of, be aware of your status. Ask a lot of questions. And it's a muscle. These are all muscles that we have that we just need to practice with, and they get better over time, but they atrophy if we don't. That's the yoga social skills aspect of improv, is it's a practice. It's not a one-and-done. If you want to be good at this, it's something you have to tend to on a daily basis, really.

I think we've come full circle with the yoga for social skills. Yeah, we started out with bookended, so I think that's a great place to wrap up. Well, Kelly, if people If people want to get in touch with you, I know your organization does a lot of work in the business world. So tell us, how can people get in touch with you and the organization if they want to work with you?

Come to our website, secondcity.com, and there's places to email us there. You can also find me on LinkedIn or follow me on Twitter.

My key takeaway from my conversation with Kelly is to think about your organization as an ensemble, not just a team. We've all heard the old saying, saying that your team is only as good as your weakest member. Well, Kelly changes that and says you're only as good as your ability to compensate for your weakest member. And let's face it, at some point, each of us is going to be that weakest member. And we want to know that the rest of the ensemble has our back. All right, that's all for today. Make sure that you like and share this podcast through your favorite social platforms. And For more great podcasts, visit us at barons.com/podcast. Take care and be safe.

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