How the Antifragile Entrepreneur Can Improve With Improv (Part I)

(Part 1 of 3: Perseverance and resilience, self-confidence, and risk management.)

“How do you make God laugh? Make plans!”

This tiny maxim is at the core of how applying improv techniques to your life and your business will help make you an antifragile human. Of course, plans are crucial to the entrepreneur. But what happens when the plans go south? What do you do when life happens? Fold your tent and listen to the echoes of “I told you so” resound in the whistling winds and the babbling brooks? Or, worse, do you waste some more of your life, plunging forward on the same path, determined to wedge your square-peg plans into life’s round hole?

There is another way. In his piece “Teaching Entrepreneurship, Cultivating Antifragility”, Bill Aulet describes antifragile people as those who “grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors, and love adventure, risk and uncertainty.” To be antifragile is to be in a place where you can take the experiences that may break some entrepreneurs, you learn and grow from them, and you use them to reroute your plans. Improv is a way to get to that place; improv provides the skills you need to make an antifragile plan—an anti-plan. If you have ever seen an improv comedy troupe turn audience suggestions into a skit, you will have seen Bill’s list of antifragile characteristics in action. Using uncertainty or “resources that are not under [our] control,” after all, is the improv milieu.

At serious-improv.com, we nutshell that relationship with volatility, randomness, and disorder as “Embrace Surprise!” Drilling down past the belief that change is the one constant in life, you may discover that it is actually “surprise”—the realization that you have no idea what could happen to you at any moment. Surprise is the human condition; it is the punchline of the aforementioned divine comedy. Don’t just accept surprise. Embrace it. Use it. Enjoy it!

If you are determined to become an antifragile entrepreneur, you will learn and grow smarter and stronger from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. You will be on a stage, ready for whatever surprise comes your way as if it is a suggestion from the audience. Do you actually want a surprise? Maybe. After all, you have the skills and you are in a state of mind to turn surprise to your advantage, to prove to yourself and your audience that you can handle it, that you can gamify life.

Fragile comes from the same root as fracture—no surprise there if you have ever mailed something fragile. In the skills and accompanying exercises below, you will see that improv shows you how to bend so you won’t break.

Improvise comes from words meaning “unforeseen.” There it is in its root meaning—surprise. Unless you can foresee all the problems you will encounter as an entrepreneur—and you cannot—you will need to improvise. You will need to bend. That is the way to embrace disorder, randomness, volatility, and stress without you or your plans in a compound fracture.

In three articles we lay out the ways improv exercises and games can improve your entrepreneurial skills and make you an antifragile individual:

1. Perseverance and resilience, self-confidence, and risk management.
2. Opportunity recognition and assessment, resource leveraging, value creation and building networks;
3. Creative problem-solving and guerilla skills (the last one);

Many entrepreneurs like to “go it alone,” so much so that it is a virtual stereotype. We have worked with many who literally don’t trust anyone who knows something they don’t know. You can see how that is a dead-end inclination. The very essence of improvisation is group dynamics. Certainly, as with some whiz-bang closet inventors, improvisers can go it alone. At some point, though, entrepreneurs must bring in people who know something they don’t. So, the fact that improv exercises and games are group activities is a lesson in itself for many entrepreneurs.

Improv Skills

Virtually all improv games and exercises center around a few skills that are crucial not just to entrepreneurs but to any leadership position, and, indeed, to anyone in a team environment. Those skills are listening; not being afraid to fail; teamwork; flexibility; and self-confidence, to name a few. Again, if you have ever seen improv performed on television or live, you have witnessed those skills in action. Because of that, a good improv troupe is a microcosm of the perfect organization and one that accepts problems and turns them into “solutions” in minutes if not seconds.

Even the easiest and most fundamental exercise, “Yes, And…,” facilitates listening skills as well as the entrepreneurial skills of resilience and perseverance. One student starts with a simple statement, such as, “I hear it is going to rain tomorrow.” The next student must respond with “Yes, And…” and then add to the first statement, with something like, “We really need the rain.” Others then follow suit, always starting with, “Yes, And….”
Besides listening, the improvisers must be positive. “No” is not allowed. Neither is the usual “Yes, but….” As you can imagine, if an improv troupe is in the middle of trying to act out a story, they must go along with whatever is “handed” to them. Rejecting what your partner says—being negative—not only kills a good skit, it kills a relationship, an idea, and possibly the future of your business. Also, resilience and perseverance rely on the entrepreneur’s own positivity, not letting negativity and fear creep into his plans. The brilliant guru Seth Godin calls it the lizard brain, the deep inclination in all of us to let fear overcome us even when things are going perfectly. Positivity keeps that lizard brain quiet(er).

Since all of us are generally lousy at listening and most are afraid of public speaking, it makes you wonder if there is any actual communication going on at all. Obviously, crucial to improv is getting in front of people, the number-one fear in the world. To conquer that fear, we have our students start by making faces: scary faces, fearful faces, funny faces. Then, they make pirate faces or teenager faces with any accompanying line, such as, “Ayyy, matey,” or “Whateverrrrr!” The idea is “to get over yourself” or, in the words of Elsa, “Let it go!” Let go of your ego. Become someone else. There is no you; there is only a pirate or a teenager.

The Path to Self-Confidence

Along with letting go and not fearing failure, these exercises teach entrepreneurs to “embrace surprise” by encouraging each other to toss in a few curveballs. So, if they are all in a circle, telling stories one line at a time, a student can change things around and the next one in the circle must listen, accept the change, and immediately think of the next line in the changed story—no matter how silly or incongruous.

Dealing with surprise, as mentioned, then is not just the core of antifragility, it is the path to self-confidence, perhaps what many entrepreneurs have too much of, but definitely need. It also happens to be vital to understanding the essence of risk. Most of what we have presented above deals with accepting risk—dealing with the unknown, not fearing negative outcomes, being positive and resilient.

There are improv exercises that help with managing risk, too. Principally, creative roleplay helps students verbalize their understanding of the risks in a venture, particularly worst-case scenarios. This takes it out of the realm of imagined fears, which are almost always worse than what could actually happen. (Again, that nasty lizard brain.) We practice a mantra: So, what if…? Like Harry Potter saying Voldemort’s name out loud, stating our fears out loud, or, better yet, acting them out, not only makes us come to terms with them, we are forced to realize they are not as bad as we imagine.

Flexibility—the “How” of Improv and Antifragility

In the above discussion, we have been talking around one of the most crucial skills or, rather, characteristics, and that is flexibility. By definition, it is the opposite of fragility. It is clearly a metaphorical cousin to the aforementioned “bending,” but it is more. It is “how” you embrace surprise.

The improviser on stage is honor-bound to accept the twists and curves that his cohorts hand him and run with them. You would suppose it is clear that the entrepreneur in like manner manifests flexibility, ready to run with an anti-plan. Yet, so many entrepreneurs have a mentality of head down and go for the goal. After all, tenacity is one of those necessary ingredients for any enterprise. But, though they may see themselves as tenacious, they are fragile. When reality sets in and they are stopped or driven off course, they misapprehend it as defeat.

There are many exercises to increase flexibility, and we will discuss some of them when we get to creative problem-solving. Here are some elementary ones. In “One Word,” participants in a circle tell a story one word at a time. Sometimes, we let them each say two words at a time, not because we are in a hurry but because it is actually more difficult. A more enjoyable exercise, “Rumors,” starts with one person saying, “Did you hear about…” and then making something up, the more preposterous the better (particularly for surprise and flexibility). The next person must agree, of course, and add to it, saying, “Yes, I heard that. I also heard…” and making it more preposterous. The third person must add on to the second person’s story in like manner. The third person can then start another rumor, and so on.

Yet another exercise is called “Fortunately/Unfortunately,” and is often a welcome retreat from all that positivity. It is like “Yes, And…” in structure. The first person can make a statement that begins with “Fortunately….” The second person must react to that line with “Yes, but unfortunately…” and then continue with a contradictory and very fun negative response. But, this is improv, after all, so the third person brings it back around to “Yes, but fortunately…” contradicting the middle person. So, you may get something simple like: “Fortunately, I got a ride to work today;” “Yes, but unfortunately, we had a flat and there was no spare tire;” “Yes, but the flat was in front of the tire store and we got a free tire for being the 10,000th customer.” And on and on and on.

So, what is the lesson here? Go ahead and make plans. You must in order to succeed. But, in order for you and your plan to remain unbroken, employ the tactics that improv can bring you. Then, God won’t be the only one laughing.

Upcoming articles….stay tuned:

• Part 2: Opportunity recognition and assessment, resource leveraging, value creation and building networks;
• Part 3: Creative problem-solving and guerilla skills (the last one);