What Improv Taught Me About Running a Business (That an MBA Never Could)
I have started several businesses. I have taken Dale Carnegie training. I went through Sandler sales. I spent years as a technology consultant helping organizations restructure from the inside out. None of it taught me what I learned in my first improv class at UCB East.
That might sound like a punch line. It is not.
Improv is built on a principle that sounds simple and turns out to be one of the hardest things to actually do: yes, and. You accept what your scene partner offers — you do not block it, you do not redirect it, you do not correct it — and then you build on it. Whatever they hand you, you take it and add to it.
What “yes, and” actually means in a business context
In business, we are trained to evaluate, critique, and optimize. Someone brings an idea into the room and before it has finished landing, we are already scanning for what is wrong with it. That reflex kills more good ideas than bad strategy ever has.
“Yes, and” does not mean agreeing with everything. It means engaging with what is there before you decide what to add or change. It means creating the conditions where people feel safe enough to offer the thing they are not sure about yet — because that is usually where the best ideas are hiding.
The idea your team member almost did not say is almost always the most interesting one. Your job as a leader is to make it safe enough for them to say it.
I use improv frameworks in workshops with business teams specifically because they bypass the ego in a way that straight facilitation cannot. When people are playing, they stop defending their position. They start building.
The other thing improv teaches: recovery
In improv, there are no mistakes — only choices that lead somewhere unexpected. The skill is not avoiding the wrong choice. The skill is what you do next. You accept the unexpected outcome and build from it, the same way you build from anything else.
Entrepreneurship works exactly the same way. The plan never survives contact with reality intact. The question is not whether you will face something you did not anticipate. The question is how fast you can shift from “this is not what I planned” to “okay, what do we have to work with here?”
That shift — from rigidity to adaptability, from control to creativity — is learnable. It is a skill. And practicing it in a low-stakes environment, like a workshop or a scene, builds the muscle for when the stakes are real.
One thing to try this week
The next time someone on your team brings you an idea — especially an unformed one, especially one you are already skeptical of — try saying “yes, and” before you say anything else. Not as permission. Not as agreement. Just as engagement. See where it goes for two minutes before you evaluate.
You might be surprised what you find at the end of those two minutes.
If you want to bring this kind of thinking into your team or your business, let us talk. I run workshops on exactly this.