Improvising over the phone.

I recently volunteered to facilitate my work team in an idea generating session. I have done a fair amount of facilitation before and felt comfortable that I could help us achieve our goals.

Well never one to miss the opportunity to spread the word about the use of Improv techniques I decided to use a couple of standard warm ups to create an atmosphere of creativity, cooperation and listening.

Then the news came in that as well as the five people that would be at our office near DC there would be two others in an office near Chicago as well as three others in their own home offices across the country.

I looked at the games I had in mind they were One word story and Yes-Because-And (a version of the familiar Yes-And that requires a middle justification phrase- shown to me by Michelle James). How well would they work over conference call? Who knows?
Well I do now so read on to find out..

Undaunted I went ahead and planned my session. (fools rush in…etc)

The results were mixed.
I found that one word story bombed. The problem with most of the teleconferencing systems that I have used is that they all work by effectively ‘muting’ each of the lines while there is nothing coming in on them and then boosting the sound from them when they hear a noise coming in. If the only sound that does come is one word then usually that is pretty much lost as the ‘mute’ is still on for the first moments of the word, which is enough to kill it. However all was not lost. I was also using a web-based presentation that allowed me to type on my keyboard and let all the participants see what was typed. I just started typing the sentences that were created. This dealt with some of the issues and also gave the participants on the phone a chance to see if I had heard their words and repeat them if they it was clear that I didn’t. All in all this is not something I would do again.

Yes-Because-And was much better. As each participant had a flow of words themselves the problem of the sound not ‘unmuting’ fast enough was not an issue. Especially as we all knew that the first word they said was ‘YES’ The ‘story’ that we told using this was strong and funny and as far as I can tell helped people get into the right frame of mind for the tasks ahead. In fact the story became about the task we were facing and how we were going to approach it. I would definitely recommend this as one to try regardless of the geography.

Alan

Posted by Alan Montague on February 8, 2006 01:06 PM in Improv at work
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