What's the Difference Between Improv and Other Team Building Activities?

Thinking about booking an improv workshop for your team, but not sure how it stacks up against an escape room, a ropes course, or a good old fashioned trivia night? This post is for you!

"What's the difference between improv and other team building activities," I get asked some version of this question all the time. Usually it sounds like, "We did an escape room last year, so why would we do improv?"

I don't really hear that as an objection. I hear it as a sign that improv's value for teams is still a bit of a mystery to the person asking the question.

Which makes sense. Improv is popular enough that everyone has an idea of what it is (thank you, Whose Line Is It Anyway?), but esoteric enough that most people don't know why it's so good for building trust, collaboration, communication, listening, and being present. Basically, all the skills that make strong teams strong.

Now of course, I run The Radical Agreement Project (RA), an improv team building company, so I'm not exactly a neutral party. But I also spent over a decade working in sales in Corporate America, so I've seen team building events from both sides. Here's what I've learned.

The Short Answer

Most team building activities are built for fun. Improv is built for teams.

Escape rooms, ropes courses, trivia nights, and bowling are all great ways to spend an afternoon with your coworkers. You laugh, you make memories, and you find out who gets weirdly competitive about trivia (if I'm there, it is me). But none of them come with a philosophy about how to treat the people standing next to you.

Improv does.

The art form was constructed with a goal in mind: that groups of performers be able to create something together, on the spot, with no plan and no safety net. Everything at improv's core, from Yes And to There Are No Mistakes, is about having each other's back. That's the difference, and it's why the team building lessons from an improv workshop stick around a lot longer than the lessons of other activities.

Because improv has actual lessons.

Coworkers playing an improv game that teaches them important lessons about collaboration while creating memorable shared moments they won't forget.

Escape Rooms Were Built for Fun

Let's start with the escape room, since it's the one I hear about most.

You get locked in a mad scientist's laboratory, or an Indiana Jones style temple, or a murder mystery mansion, and you solve little puzzles until you get out. It's campy. It's fun.

That's exactly what it was designed to be, and I mean that as a compliment.

But escape rooms weren't built for building stronger teams. They weren't built around the idea that everybody has each other's back. I've done my fair share of them, and I've never once gotten feedback from the room about how to support the people playing with me.

That's because there are no underlying principles about how to behave toward your teammates in an escpape room. Find the key, crack the code, beat the clock. If one player pushes another out of the way to hit a button just before the timer goes off, fine.

In fact, when I've done escape rooms, a lot of the time the team divides and conquers. One person works a combination lock, someone else digs through a bookshelf for new clues, and a third person stares at a cipher in the corner like it owes them money. That's efficient!

It's also just a bunch of people working near each other instead of with each other.

The same is true of ropes courses, trivia challenges, and game show style events. They're fun, and they're bonding, because doing something unusual together builds memories. But none of them come from the same philosophical background that improv does.

Nobody walks out of trivia night with a better way to run a meeting.

Improv Was Built for Ensembles

Improv comes from a completely different place.

When improv comedy emerged in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, at places like The Compass Players and Second City in Chicago, it was built for groups of performers to create scenes together. The ensemble wasn't a nice bonus. It was the whole point.

That's why improv training comes with a set of maxims for how to treat your scene partners. A few of the big ones:

• Yes And: accept what your teammate offers, then build on it.

• Treat your teammates like poets and geniuses: assume every idea they bring is brilliant, and act accordingly.

• There are no mistakes: anything that happens in a scene is a gift you can use.

Say you finish an improv show and someone from the audience comes up to you and says, "Wow, you were my favorite. You were the funniest person up there."

In improv we're taught that means you did a bad job.

If instead they say, "Wow, your team is so funny! You're so lucky you get to work with such smart, funny people," then you did a good job. In improv, you're trying to make the people on stage with you look good.

Now flip that. You finally escape the mad scientist's laboratory, and someone says, "Wow, Roger, you solved the most puzzles the fastest!" Well, Roger did exactly what he was supposed to do. Nice work, Roger.

And that's the difference in a nutshell.

What That Looks Like in a Real Workshop

Here's an example from a workshop I led recently for a small advertising agency here in Virginia Beach.

Before the session, the owner told me her team lacked confidence. People wouldn't contribute to client projects. Instead, two A players made about 90% of all the contributions while everyone else stayed out of their way.

So I asked her the obvious question: did that mean the rest of the team wasn't as talented as those two? She said no. When she hired them, she had every reason to expect everyone would be a fantastic contributor.

And of course, some people are stronger at certain things than others. Maybe those two A players really were exceptional. But that doesn't make everyone else's contributions unimportant.

Once the workshop got going, the picture got clearer. The people who weren't A players were very worried about making mistakes. The A players were confident their ideas would be valuable and saw themselves as leaders.

And that's great! We want people to behave that way at work. We just don't want 2 out of 10 people behaving that way.

We want 10 out of 10.

So early on, we played games that hammer home the idea that in improv, mistakes don't exist. We played Yes And Conversations, ABC Bodies, and Environment Charades. Environment Charades is the one that broke through.

The Double Catcher

In Environment Charades, players come into a playing area one at a time, each miming a complimentary activity. If the first person is washing dishes, maybe the second is drying them. As more people join, the group figures out where everyone is.

A kitchen in a private home? A restaurant? A school cafeteria?

It's a hard game, and people make "mistakes" in it constantly. So when the agency team was hesitant, I told them about one of my favorite moments ever in this game. It happened while I was teaching an advanced class at UCB.

One person stepped out swinging a baseball bat. The next person was pitching to them. Makes sense.

A third came out and crouched behind the batter as the catcher. Then a fourth person rushed out and crouched behind the pitcher glove extended.

A second catcher.

Everybody in the room leaned back. We all clocked it. It was a mistake.

Now, on most teams, at most companies, this is where somebody says, "Okay, that's a dead end. Let's start over." But these were improvisers, so instead they dug in. They insisted the fourth player was right, and they were going to prove it.

A first baseman came out, and a catcher crouched behind them. Then an outfielder, and a catcher behind the outfielder. A fan in the stands, and a catcher behind the fan. A peanut vendor, and yes, a catcher behind the peanut vendor.

In the end we were looking at a bery risk averse baseball game. They really didn't want to lose a baseball.

It was hilarious. And it only happened because nobody pointed a finger at player four. Instead of treating that move like a mistake, the whole class got behind it and lifted it up.

No one is losing a baseball thrown at this peanut vendor.

Who Actually Changed

After I told that story, the whole room loosened up and started playing much more freely. You might assume the story unlocked the shy folks. I don't think that's really what happened.

I think it unlocked the two A players.

They wanted their colleagues contributing. Which makes a lot of sense, right? If you're doing 90% of the work, oof. That's a lot.

You want your teammates carrying an even share so your day isn't so hard. So the A players started backing other people's ideas, building on them, and making everyone feel included. They were the ones who made it safe for the rest of the team to play.

That's something an escape room can't do. In an escape room, the A players solve the puzzles. In an improv workshop, the A players learn to make everyone else look good.

What You Take Back to the Office

Here's the real test of any team building event: what happens on Monday morning?

This is where improv pulls the furthest ahead, and for the same reason it's different in the first place. Improv workshops are undergirded by a philosophy that makes teams better, and a philosophy is something you can take with you.

I hear this from clients all the time: "We're still saying Yes And to each other." Years later! When things get tense, or they get stuck in some unnecessary dispute, somebody says it and they work their way through.

It's not magic. It's a shared language for supporting each other.

Escape rooms, bowling alleys, and cooking classes don't give you one. And I'm not saying there's nothing great about them for team building. They are all unique experiences, and they're all inherently team building because you're making memories together.

But improv is unique and builds memories too. You're just building them while thinking about how to communicate, collaborate, and really listen.

Two birds, one stone.

So What's the Difference Between Improv and Other Team Building Activities?

If you want a fun afternoon, book the escape room! You'll have a great time.

But if you want the skills you learned to stick, try improv. It was built for ensembles from the very beginning, and the lessons come home with you.

Want to see what that looks like for your team? Take a look at our corporate improv workshops.

And now I'm curious. What's the best (or worst) team building activity you've ever done, and did anything from it actually stick? Let me know in the comments!