THE REVELATIONARY POWER OF IMPROV.
Working Paper No. 8
Jonathan (Joe) Howard is a planner.
He worked at Saatchi & Saatchi in London, when I was one of the ECDs there, and then at AMV BBDO.
He sees his life as being in two parts.
His life before improv.
And his life after.
Because, while he was at Saatchi, he got the chance to do a workshop with Neil Mullarkey, a Comedy Store regular and a blackbelt in the art of improv.
Unfortunately, I missed out on this exciting opportunity.
It was an initiative organised by Joe to help develop ideas for a re-pitch for one of the most important clients.
And its impact on Joe himself was cathartic.
We won the pitch, and then I lost touch with him for some time after he went to AMV.
We reconnected when I moved up to become Regional CD across EMEA at Saatchi, with the remit to improve the work across forty offices.
MEET KEITH.
One lunchtime, in a bookshop which specialises in plays and theatre craft, near the agency, my eyes were drawn to a book called ‘Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre’ by Keith Johnstone.
If ever a book on a shelf jumped out at me, it was this one. I read it on holiday, and it was fascinating.
Keith Johnstone was one of the pioneers of improvisational theatre, and the chapters in his book on developing spontaneity and narrative skills seemed particularly relevant to what we have to do every day.
I thought, had I known about all this as a young creative, I would have found work far less stressful, had so much more fun, and been much more prolific.
(And indeed, it has been helpful to me ever since.)
So I started to think about a training course for the juniors across my region that would incorporate some of the exercises that Keith Johnstone described.
And that’s when - completely coincidentally - someone told me that Joe was now not just a planner, but also an improv coach.
He had been so inspired by his first experience, that he had done every other related workshop and course that he could. Including one with the Keith Johnstone himself, and another at the legendary Second City Theatre in Chicago, home of improv in the US.
He had subsequently brought Keith back to the UK from Canada, for the first time in 30 years, to run a workshop. And Keith had given Joe the licence to produce an improv show ‘Theatresports’, a format he had invented, which then became the basis for a popular TV show ‘Whose line is it anyway?’.
Joe’s background in successful creative agencies, and now this, made him the perfect partner. And together, we created a three-day creative training workshop, which we called Ideas Academy. A combination of role-playing and storytelling games and exercises, and short, intense ideation sessions on a live brief (with which I had already been experimenting in creative hot houses with the more senior teams), in which they could practice their new skills.
It was designed to raise energy, positivity, confidence and creative ambition, and give the participants some simple, practical techniques to think faster and more freely.
The same techniques that theatrical improvisers use so impressively and effortlessly on stage to create unrehearsed, entertaining scenarios at speed, as we watch them.
I call it ‘working to the deadline of now’.
YES...AND.
One of these techniques is called ‘Yes...and’.
(It’s so useful, a whole book has been written about it: ‘Yes And’ by Kelly Leonard and Tom Yorton, from the corporate training side of the theatre in Chicago mentioned above.)
This involves saying ‘Yes’ to every idea suggested by someone else, whether it seems promising or not, and building on it. Instead of saying ‘Yes, but...’ and blocking it.
In advertising, as positive as we are, we do much more of the latter than we may think we do. ‘Yes, but... it’s been done before.’ ‘Yes, but...they’d never buy that’.
And indeed, of course, we don’t have to actually say the words ‘Yes, but...’ to convey ‘Yes, but...’. There are plenty of other words.
A ‘Yes, but...’ may not even be verbal: a dismissive look can do as much damage.
‘Yes...and’ is about suspending judgement. (That can come later.) Improvisers talk about treating an idea from someone else as a gift. Accept that gift, and see where it takes you. And it will take you, much, much further. And there is a game that we played in our workshops that demonstrated this.
As you can imagine, this was all huge fun, and extremely helpful.
(For some of our young participants, it was a cathartic experience, just as it was for Joe: one of them actually gave up the anti-depressants he had been prescribed, so uplifted was he by the vortex of positive energy that we created.)
The junior creatives took their skills back to their agencies and shared them with their colleagues, and one by one their agencies started to create better work, with some great results at the festivals.
It was all so useful, in fact, that we eventually ended up running these workshops across the world for those at all levels, from all departments, and all Publicis agency brands, together – up to sixty people at a time.
Including the planners.
After all, a planner’s job is to take everything that is known about a product, its consumers and potential consumers, unearthing new information in the process, distil it all down to that one thing that will motivate ........AND then find a way to express that in a way that will excite the creative team. In other words, to create inspiration.
The best planners I worked with were creative people too. Some of the best briefs I worked on as a creative actually contained the creative idea. And on several occasions, the proposition on the brief became the end line, because we couldn’t think of a better one.
So, the best thing I can advise you here at the University of Planning is to be creative. Better still, get Joe to help you, and everyone in your agency too. The more creative everyone is in every department at every level, the more likely that agency will perform at peak..
MEET JOE.
Here’s Joe talking about having an audacious mindset, the art of chutzpah.
Joe is our Director of Fun and Games at BLITZWORKS and a fundamental element of our own BLITZCRAFT training workshops. But he does lots of other things too.
And if you are at the stage of creating a future for yourself, I can promise you that there is no better guide.