This article is written by Benjamin Miller, Law and Policy Officer Charities Directorate Canada Revenue Agency.

Improvisational theatre, or “improv”, is theatre in which the performance is unplanned.

I did improv competitively for 4 years in the Canadian Improv Games, co-coaching in my last year. I have found that what makes a “successful” improv artist, beyond all the techniques and practice, is a certain ethos. I have found that that same ethos helps policy makers too.

Think about it. Your audience (a Minister, perhaps) doesn’t give you a script, but rather a broad, often vague, suggestion of what they want. You may know who the players are both inside and outside of your “team”, but you have no idea what specifically they are going to say.

That’s really all it takes to do improv. So, for fun, and to spark some thought, I would like to share some fundamentals of my understanding of the improv ethos with you, and how I think it could help foster more open and innovative policymaking.

Yes, and…

The first and best-known rule of improv is to never say “no” but rather say “yes, and…”. You might be thinking to yourself, “It’s all well and good to let a scene go anywhere if there are no real-world consequences, but policymakers must often say no!”

The improv artist knows that you can take the task seriously without taking yourself too seriously

That is true, but before you say “no”, consider that saying “yes, and…” is in fact crucial to effective brainstorming and to test ideas.

Saying “no” undermines a brainstorm. “No” can always come later. If you find yourself in a brainstorming or exploratory meeting, recognise that your mission is to say “yes”. Not only is it your mission to affirm, but to add or build on existing ideas so that they are the strongest they can be before they get rejected. This helps ensure that:

  • Ideas do not fall prey to knee-jerk prejudices,
  • Everybody feels their ideas got a fair shake,
  • People are not discouraged from sharing their ideas for fear of rejection, and
  • You have drawn out all the implications of an idea before rejecting it.

Bad jokes are the heart of improv

As a coach, I often found people felt they could not do improv because they were afraid to make a fool of themselves. People associate “making a fool of yourself” with a sense of failure. In improv, nothing could be further from the truth. What separates improv artists from everyone else is not the ability to tell good jokes, but a willingness to tell bad ones. Without a willingness to fall flat, no new jokes would be possible, and only safe reliable jokes would be tried.

This is not something a person is born with. When people come together in a community with a willingness to tell bad jokes, the social cost of doing so goes down. Improv is not just an individual ethos, it is a communal ethos.

You might be thinking this is okay when you act for yourself, but not possible when you act for the government. Yet it has been foundational to modern bureaucracies that public servants be shielded from public responsibility. There is a spark of improv here that creates the space in which open and innovative policy making can happen. This spark, however, is stifled when we are afraid of our colleagues’ judgment, of being wrong, or appearing foolish. The improv artist knows that you can take the task seriously without taking yourself too seriously. When teams internalise this, uninhibited conversation can happen.

Start with the need

When an improv artist is off-scene, they are constantly scanning the scene and listening for cues that signal needs. For instance, if one actor asks another, “Let’s go watch the latest Godzilla movie”, that is a cue for someone to run in and sell tickets, usher them into the theatre, or even be Godzilla. A good improv artist knows how to recognise the hidden requests in every statement or gesture.

When an improv artist is off-scene, they are constantly scanning the scene and listening for cues that signal needs

All information a policy maker encounters may disclose a public need whether or not the author knows it. Indeed, the one expressing the feedback (perhaps even harsh criticism) may not even know themselves the need they are expressing. Training oneself to always look and listen for needs is the first step to filling them.

It’s not your scene!

Perhaps most importantly, a good improv artist knows when it is not their scene. Nothing is worse than watching two actors with two different ideas for a scene duke it out to try to make the story go their way. Each actor could be individually hilarious and they could both have great ideas for a scene, but if one does not yield, both visions will be lost.

This is perhaps the most crucial insight improv has to offer policy making, since policy making is in essence the art of balancing competing visions, needs, or interest. You may worry that such an attitude will yield too much to those less willing to yield. Ultimately, it will be the culture of the team, in which each player is ready to cede to the vision of the one who “initiated” the scene that will police any rogue actors hogging the spotlight.

At the end of the day, good improv, like good policymaking, is about humility. After all, whose policy is it anyway? — Benjamin Miller

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