Improv Games For Agility
At first glance, a curriculum designed to focus on improv games for agility feels like a natural fit, as improv itself is often associated with quick thinking, situational nimbleness, being light on your feet, etc… And it is true that many improv games lend themselves to agility training. At the same time, so much of agility is dependent on listening, a totally different skill.
After all, if you aren’t sure what’s going on around you, how can you really adjust to it?
That can be a difficult dynamic to explain to clients sometimes. Whenever I work with a client who wants an improv workshop at their office, I always offer to build the curriculum in collaboration with them, allowing for their input, feedback and even direction. So when a client asks for a workshop on agility (or quick thinking) they can be a little surprised when 40% of the exercises I pick emphasize listening (which I have written about before here).
That’s why I was relieved when a Minneapolis networking group reached out about a workshop for their community focused on agility AND listening. Makes my life easy! And it made for quite a memorable event.
What follows is the curriculum I built for that workshop in particular. Each exercise is hyper-linked to a facilitator's guide that includes clear instructions for how to run the exercise and common takeaways an instructor should highlight.
Some of them have been thoroughly discussed in earlier posts, and for that reason won’t be further explored here. But there are a number of new games (at least new to The Radical Agreement blog) included here specifically for agility and listening, which I will do a slightly deeper dive on following the curriculum.
I should note, there were 40 people in attendance for this event. My general rule of thumb is that the maximum number of students per instructor should cap at 20 (and 16 is even better). So for this event I had myself and a second instructor run concurrent workshops.
In this format I prefer to start with everyone in the same room, have the lead instructor do a quick intro explaining why improv is being used to address that day’s focus and then lead the entire group in a very brief exercise so the experience begins with everyone participating in the same activity. After that the group splits into two breakout rooms where they work with their individual instructor for 90-100 minutes, ultimately returning to the original room for a final exercise. This way everyone experiences the same exercises and enjoys a sense of communal experience while also benefiting from a lower student / teacher ratio.
Improv Workshop For Listening & Agility - Two Hour Duration
Intro - 5 Minutes - Whenever running an improv workshop in a professional setting, you want to start by acknowledging the elephant in the room: Just why is it that a clown is advising a team of highly accomplished professionals on how to polish their professional soft skills? I think the Why Improv? page does a pretty good job of explaining why the origin of improv lends itself to this type of training and I often use the history summarized there as the introduction for applied improv workshops in any format. But you (if you were leading an improv workshop at work, or even just an improv icebreaker game) could use something else, so long as you set participants at ease by assuring them the workshop really will have application to their work life.
Intro Communal Exercise
Simple Conversations - 10 Minutes - This is one of the newer exercises that I’ll discuss below, but essentially you get everyone into very simple improv scenes that allow them to feel funny and successful without taking extraordinary risks. Then at the very end you anoint everyone as improvisers before sending them to their breakout rooms. I normally say something like, “And now with the power invested in me as an improv teacher, I anoint you all as beginner improvisers, go and be funny.” And people seem to like that.
Travel To Breakout Rooms - 5 minutes
Ice Breaker/Warm Up Exercises - 15 Minutes - 2 out of these 4 - Badada, Zombie Rescue Game, Pass The Face, Gibberish Dictionary - Of these four go to warm-ups I selected Pass The Face and Badada. Both of these games reward acting on instinct rather than planning your next move, so they are good fits for an agility workshop. They are also fairly simple to run, so if you are looking for an ice breaker yourself, you might give one of them a shot.
Main Workshop:
Yes And Point - 10 Minutes - For Staying In The Moment, Agility. This is such a great game for agility because it challenges people to really be present, to be aware of what is going on around them, not what they were planning for or hoped for. A form of listening, really. I’ve written about it extensively before in the post about improv for sales (scroll about halfway down the page), but if you haven’t read about it previously I suggest clicking into the facilitator guide and spending some time with it.
Questions Only -10 Minutes - I made a note for me and the other instructor to skip this one for time if running slow. It is a good, fun, silly game great for agility, but since it wasn’t a centerpiece of the workshop, I won’t focus on it here. Good to use in an improv based sales workshop.
The Clapping Game - 10 Minutes - A fantastic game that parallels communication through awareness. Read more here.
YES AND Conversations - 10 Minutes - Great for team building and communication, this is the most ubiquitous game among corporate improv workshops.
One Word Story - 10 Minutes - Again, a great game when focusing on agility skills, but again a game that came with the caveat, skip if running behind schedule.
Freeze Frame - 20 Minutes - A classic short form improv game Freeze Frame, or Freeze Tag or sometimes just Freeze is fantastic for agility and listening too. We ran the game all at once in pairs, a la Yes And Conversations. If we thought the group was ready for something more performative we were ready to run it in its classic backline format, but neither of us thought that..
Travel Back To Main Room - 5 minutes
Final Exercise
World’s Best Coach - 15 Minutes - Often used in sales workshops this game is great for agility, listening and perfect as a final exercise for a large group as it feels like a theatrical comedic performance and allows for everyone to participate simultaneously as much or as little as they like.
Exercise Reserve
Whenever I build a curriculum I add one or two exercises to be used in case the workshop runs fast and you need another focus specific game. In this instance I added Fortunately / Unfortunately (a really storytelling game perfect for thinking about agility) and Environment Charades (which I have written about before).
EXERCISE DEEP DIVES
I’ve chosen three exercises I haven’t written about before to explore more thoroughly.
Intro Communal Exercise - This was the simple intro played with the entire group of participants at the beginning of the event when running concurrent workshops.
Improv is a lot easier than people sometimes fear. Essentially improv requires performers to rely on their own instincts and experiences while pretending to be under fictional circumstances. You can introduce people to this truth very easily by pairing them up and asking them to engage in two fictional conversations.
In the first conversation they simply discuss what they had for breakfast. That’s all. No embellishment, no fantastic lies, if you skipped breakfast that day, you just say that.
Allow participants to have that conversation for a minute or two.
Then you switch partners and have a second conversation, maybe a discussion about their favorite hobbies and again you instruct them to be completely honest. No lies, no embellishments, but here is the twist: This time they should mime an activity while having the honest conversation without ever acknowledging their, or their conversion partner’s, activity.
In this way you pair the truth with a fiction.
Once both conversations are completed tell the room that what just did is 95% of what all good improvisers do. They relied on their own experiences and held a conversation as themselves while pretending to be under fictional circumstances. Congratulate them, give them my hokey line about the being anointed (which will probably be received with a laugh) and move on to the next exercise.
A way to think of this game is as an improv specific ice breaker.
Freeze Frame - This game is perhaps the most popular game performed at short form improv theaters.
Players engage in a series of conversations that begin in odd physical positions. The goal is to hold a conversation that explains at the outset why they are in said positions. In order to lower performance stress, I had everyone pair up, adopt a striking pose with their eyes closed and then I would haver them start all their scenes simultaneously once I counted to three.
On three they would open their eyes and begin a conversation that would explain the odd positions they find themselves in.
This game is perfect for thinking about and honing agility as there is no way to prepare and the poses tend to be so surprising that every conversation begins in a low grade state of emergency. Players are forced to trust their instincts and adapt quickly.
Professional theaters will typically play this game with 2 players performing while everyone else watches. But that causes too much stress for a corporate improv class. So if you were to give this game a try at work, I urge you to use the format described here.
Fortunately / Unfortunately - A simple storytelling game that asks players to contribute the next line of the story. The trick is that each line needs to start with either the word “Fortunately” or “Unfortunately”. Tell players to alternate between the words so that a positive statement is always followed by a negative one.
This game works particularly well when addressing agility because:
The alternating directions of the story mean you cannot prepare a few turns before your own.
The conceit of the game requires players to link their sentence to what came directly before. That means they will need to listen well and adjust quickly.
And there you have it. A thorough improv for agility curriculum with lots of sample exercises and a few deep dives. Hope you find this helpful!
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