By Gary Hirsch, co founder of On Your Feet

Introduction
Here is a tongue twister: Can an improv-for-business, business use improv to run its business?

At On Your Feet that is our hope.

OYF is a network of individuals that uses improv as a tool for organizational consulting, training, and teaching. We are a group of improv actors, illustrators, anthropologists, marketing and advertising folks, filmmakers, small business experts, frustrated mailmen, and even someone from the government defense sector.

We all have different places we call home: Portland, Madrid, Dublin, and the traffic jam on the M4 entering London.

Some of our clients include Nike, Intel, Orange Telecommunications, Starbucks. Some are not so immediately high status, but equally interesting - clients such as a group of Irish middle school children, probation officers, and Zen monks (one could argue that in the grand scheme of things they are much higher in status than any of the big brand clients).

That is who we are. The reason you might want to keep reading however isn’t because of who we are, who we work with, or even what we do. Rather it is how we try to organize ourselves to do what we do.

On Your Feet attempts to organize itself using a small number of deliberately placed pieces of structure. Our hope is to allow for maximum creativity, trust and freedom with as few “rules” as possible. Not unlike a piece of improvisation.

This article will make visible a few pieces of our working structure so you might gain perspective on your own internal workings. Even if what we do seems ridiculous (we have had that reaction) it might serve as a stimulus and provoke you to consider how you organize yourself or organization.

There are three prominent points of structure in On Your Feet. These three points create the freedom that allows us to evolve. Without them we probably would not grow. And probably just as quickly chaos would ensue.

A little context

For the first two years that On Your Feet was doing business, we couldn’t decide what we were.

The two bald guys with glasses that came up with the idea lived on opposite sides of the globe - Portland, Oregon, and Madrid, Spain. We first met to discuss a t-shirt and ended up creating an improv-based offsite in Tempe Arizona with a bunch of British and Australians for a Chicago ad agency (that is how things seem to happen around here).

The reaction to the first piece of work was overwhelmingly positive. We were rehired, and suddenly found ourselves behaving like a business, but were we really? Both Rob and I had a knee jerk aversion to the idea of behaving like a business. Rob had spent a great deal of time working with and being immersed in big business, and I avoided the environment entirely. Rules, hierarchy, red tape-we equated this to behaving like a business and we wanted no part of that.

A few years earlier I had ventured up to Calgary to work with Keith Johnstone (my friends got so sick of me quoting him that they bought me a t-shirt that read “ KEITH SAYS…..” to save me from saying the phrase at the beginning of every sentence.) His thoughts about the destructiveness of the public education system were still fresh in my mind. His recipe for the best teaching was to do whatever your own teachers told you not to do.

So back at On Your Feet we started to look for ways to be a business but not behave like one. In the beginning we wouldn’t admit we were a business at all. When I would describe who we were to potential clients the word organization would somehow get stuck in my throat.

As we gained more experience our behavior developed as well. Most businesses claim to be experts and unique, so we said we were still learning and what makes us unique wasn’t what we did (since there are a whole bunch of you out there using improv in business as well), it was who we were, and how that affected what we did.

At the same time our clients needed to hear language that fit their world. They needed 10-second elevator descriptions. They needed to know how we could help them make or save money. They needed brochures, websites, fee structures, and assistance in internal selling. In a nutshell they needed to deal with a business.

The other reality was financial. We realized that money mattered. Having enough of it allowed us the freedom to support our families and do want we wanted to do. So we did the thing that businesses do, sort of. We put down on paper why we were doing what we did. Some call it a mission statement, or developing an identity.

We titled our stack of paper Reasons Why We Exist. It was developed over a six-month period with the help of highly paid consultants that positioned us in the best possible light to our potential clients… just kidding.

Actually some of us got together and put a metaphorical stake in the ground. We tried to find a way to articulate our thoughts about the work and give others in the network a structure (yes, structure again) to use in finding their own relationship to the work.

In the document we have three sections. The first is a purpose section, which is unashamedly philosophical and says things like:

"We are proud to say we have no fixed idea of what On Your Feet will look like in the future. We expect the organization to change and metamorphose often, if not constantly. We aren’t worried about that; we know that with living systems there is never a right answer, not even for one particular moment. And anyway, it would get dull otherwise".

The second section is one that tries to capture some of our beliefs and says things like:

"Human society is undergoing a dramatic transformation. Or if it isn’t, it darned well should be. Life is creative. People are alive, therefore people are creative. Mostly."

The third section is made up of stories of possible (and impossible) futures for the organization. None of them are necessarily the desired outcome. They are not vision statements. They explore our dreams, questions and fears:

"There is a crisis at the U.N. It seems that the world is on the brink of all-out war. But wait, who is this entering the chamber from the wings? It is the Masked Improviser! 'All right,' he screams, above the fray. 'Everyone form a circle.' "

"…we are invited to work on a project for Levis. We start internally but end up training kids in inner city areas to run improv sessions with their friends."

"What we do now is a full scale intervention. We study the organization, spending time with them, working alongside them, observing how they work. A typical project may take anything up to six months' full time work."

One of the most important parts of the document is our measures of business success, which go beyond monetary indicators and measure success in terms of learning.

As our client list began to grow we tried to stay true to our desire to count learning as a currency of value. We found some companies ready to leap into learning with us, and others that wanted guarantees, controlled outcomes, and predictable results. One lesson during this period was learning how to say no: no to work that was not interesting, took away from other interesting work, and even if it paid well was low on potential learning.

As more collaborators came into the network, we found ourselves facing questions that any organization would face, even an organization resisting calling itself an organization. Questions like: who gets paid, and how much? What are the rules for the division of money, who belongs to the organization and what does that mean? Who is in charge, and ultimately responsible?

In most organizations there are a set of guidelines or rules (in some well designed handbook) to help answer these questions. But for us a set of specific rules that tried to foresee every possible scenario didn’t hold up to our beliefs.

So a group of the most involved collaborators got together to try and answer some of these questions at a fabulously funky venue, an old elementary school that has been converted into a hotel and microbrewery. The first thing we did was exchange what we have now dubbed as our Gives and Gets. Each individual collaborator creates a list of what he/she is willing to give to the creation of the network (the give) and what they want to get from the network (the get). Some illustrations appear in the right hand column.

At this gathering we built on the future stories thus continuing to make visible our individual and collective desires and fears. We also got closer to figuring out what we are. Exactly what that is is hard to define, so we decided not to spend much time or energy trying. Nailing things tends to kill them (or at least injure them). We resolved that people are at liberty to call it a collaboration, company, business, group, organization (or whatever) as they wish.

In the end we proposed three points of structure that the co-founders, would want (At least for the time being) to have implemented over the workings of the (yes I can now say it) organization. I stated earlier these are deliberately broad so they are not tailored to any seen or unforeseen scenario. They are based on trust and belief in self-managed relationships. They force the individuals involved to work at creating and maintaining these relationships without tight rules and guidelines.

Structure

There are three points of structure that govern On Your Feet:

1. Everyone in the network is responsible for themselves and their relationships. As part of On Your Feet, people are free to create what they want, offer what they want and block what they want - without reference to any authority or control. With freedom, comes responsibility. So if I do something that impacts others, positively or negatively, I am responsible for that and the effect on my relationships. It means talking a lot, frequently broaching uncomfortable subjects (like money) and trusting each other. It also means trusting yourself to do what you want - and to challenge others when what they do affects you.

It is amazing how well this has worked. All of us have a heightened attentiveness and permission to voice our pleasure and displeasure. There are no set rules. If another collaborator wants to do a job without either of the two founders they are free to do. It is my responsibility to say something if I don’t like it, and it is the other collaborator’s responsibility to manage their relationship with me. It all may sound a bit pie in the sky, but because we have slowly gotten use to having the tough conversations the communication is amazingly clear.

2. The identity and who is invited to join are controlled, currently by the founders. Without some of notion of what a thing looks like and where it stops there is no thing. On Your Feet can be something because it has an identity and a boundary. The identity is the name, the website, graphics, and the logo. The boundary is the people. Whether something is On Your Feet or not depends on who is involved, and what they are doing.

For On Your Feet to grow creatively, the identity and the boundary need to be limited. This limitation gives rise to the freedom described in the first point of structure. Without it, there is chaos. However only the identity and the boundary (i.e. who joins the adventure) are subject to control. This sets up a hierarchy. The founders are at the bottom of the hierarchy (not the top). So they take responsibility and control at that level and only at that level. Once someone has joined they get the same freedoms and responsibility as everyone else.

Again this has worked amazingly well. The identity has become part of what excites clients. The diversity of options and freedom for the collaborators is what creates good work.

3. A percentage from our fees is made to pay for common goods, such as web design, kit, promotion, etc. We are a low-to-no overhead company. We have offices in London, Madrid, and Portland. These are in home offices devoted not only OYF work but to personal projects and other endeavors that feed the network with ideas and learning. It doesn't take much to keep us going. The percentage off of each job pretty much covers it and with that allows us the freedom to do what we want (get together on the Oregon coast, buy everyone shoes, etc.) versus doing something to pay for the office space.

Final thoughts

These may not feel like much of a structure, but it is a structure. It is a structure as the rules of an improv game are a structure. A structure where there is room for freedom, creativity, evolution, and for changing the structure itself. It isn’t inherently supportive i.e. there is no guarantee of support or no support system. It is very open. It places the emphasis on intimacy not systems (a huge challenge, since we are so geographically spread out). Finally it is not efficient (i.e. there will be many wasted efforts). However, this is true in all complex systems, and waste becomes food (for new ideas, relationships, learning). So, in the end we accept inefficiency as a trade for deeper relationships.

So there is a little insight into our experiment as an improv organization (not only using improv as a method of working with clients but with each other). If you have gotten this far this it may have raised more questions then it has answered. Our structure raises questions for us all the time. So we pick up the phone, e-mail, get on a plane, meet in a café and try to find the next, more interesting question. Ultimately this leads to stronger and more intimate internal and external relationships while still trying to be an organization without behaving like one.

Special thanks to Robert Poynton, Julie Huffaker, and Brad Robertson for their direct and indirect input to this article.

You can contact Gary Hirsch at gary@oyf.com