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Every group of people trying to do something together eventually faces a choice between two operating systems. The first is the management model. You've seen it in every committee, board, and club you've ever joined. There's a strategic plan, a meeting agenda with time stamps, a succession chart, a membership drive template, and a binder of bylaws that gets updated once a decade. It's safe, legible, and predictable. It's also why most community organizations spend their energ

I've learned that one of the most humbling and beautiful things about improv is that you carry gifts you don't even know you're holding until someone else reaches for them. Here's how it usually happens for me. I step onstage, I make an offer, something small, maybe just a look or a word or the way I hold my body in a certain space. I think I know what I'm doing. I have a vague sense of where the scene might go. And then my scene partner takes what I gave them and suddenly th

The improv insight that'll change how you see office downtime. Here's the thing about improv shows that most audiences never see. The real magic doesn't happen on stage. It happens in the wings, in the green room, in that two-minute pocket between scenes where a performer leans over and whispers "hey, what if we try this on the next beat?" That off-stage moment, the one with no audience, no pressure, no script, that's where the best ideas actually surface. And it's exactly th

Here's something I've noticed teaching improv workshops, people can do beautiful two-person scenes all day but put five of them on stage together and suddenly it's a traffic jam. We spend so much time on duos that group scenes become this mysterious thing nobody quite taught us how to handle. The truth is they work differently and once you get the hang of them they're some of the most fun you can have on stage. The single most useful thing I can tell you about group scenes is

Every good improv scene has an invisible referee. Not a person in the scene telling people what to do, but a shared understanding between the players of what counts. Think about it. In a pickup basketball game nobody stops to check the rulebook, but everyone knows when a shot matters and when someone traveled. That knowing is the referee, and it lives in the room, not in any one player. I've been thinking about this after reading Will Hines's latest piece on intentionality ve

For years I talked about commitment in improv as a performance thing. Commit harder, go bigger, don’t bail on your choice. All true. But I was framing it wrong. I was framing it as courage when really it’s something much more specific. It’s trust. The Unspoken Agreement Every improv scene starts with a silent contract. I’m going to offer something real and I need you to treat it like it matters. And I’ll do the same for you. That only works if both people actually follow thro

There's a moment in every improv show where the audience forgets it's not scripted. The scene is moving, the characters are alive, the story is landing clean. It looks like magic, like pure spontaneous creation flowing out of nothing. And that's exactly what the audience is supposed to think. But anyone who's ever actually done improv knows the truth. What looks like beautiful chaos on stage is held together by very specific frameworks. Beat patterns. Game moves. Status trans

I've been doing improv long enough to know that most people think it's just about being funny on the spot. And sure, there's some of that. But the real magic of a great improv set isn't spontaneity, it's structure. The same way a jazz musician needs to know the rules before they can break them, an improviser needs a framework to build something that lands. So here's how I think about putting together a successful improv set, and more importantly, how that same process can hel

Your scene partner is standing three feet away, waiting. The audience is watching. You have no idea who you are, where you are, or what\'s happening. Your brain offers you a premise: maybe we\'re zookeepers, it suggests, or astronauts, or estranged siblings at a funeral. That\'s the trap. The moment you reach for an invented premise, you\'ve stopped looking at the one person who can tell you everything you need to know. The most powerful way to start a scene is to notice what

My wife has ADHD. And I've taught enough improv classes over the years to know she's not alone in the room. A lot of the adults who show up to learn improv are walking in with brains that move different, and they don't always know that what they're looking for is a structure that finally fits how they think instead of fighting it. So when Chris Gethard's guest column landed in my inbox the other day, one line hit harder than the rest. He said improv unlocks ADHD in kids. He w

I was working with a student who had a big presentation coming up, the kind where the room goes quiet and every pair of eyes locks onto you like a heat-seeking missile. She told me her strategy was to "turn into someone else," a professional version of herself who didn't get nervous and knew all the answers. A mask, essentially. The kind we all reach for when the stakes feel high. Here's the thing about masks, though. They crack. Play the character, not the caricature The imp

I watched two improvisers walk on stage last week. The first one had an idea, you could see it in her eyes, that little plan she was carrying: I'm going to be a flight attendant, and the scene is an airplane. She opened with it. The second player accepted it, but the whole thing felt flat. The offers were polite but thin and the scene ended politely four minutes later with a weak button and a relieved audience. The second pair walked out and one of them just looked at the oth

You're standing at a door. On the other side's something high stakes, a presentation, a first date, a difficult conversation, a stage. And in that moment before you walk through, you have a choice. You can walk through as a mask, a polished performance of who you think they want to see, or you can walk through as yourself, just a little bit bigger than usual. Those are the two doors. Every improv scene starts the same way. Two people step onto a stage with nothing, and the fi

The Paradox You Feel First You can master chess, you can master guitar or public speaking or surgical technique, and each of those has a plateau, a point where the marginal gains shrink to almost nothing and you're just maintaining what you already know. Improv doesn't have one. The better you get at it, the more possibility you see, and that's not a poetic accident, it's structural, built into the very thing improv asks you to do. Convergence and the Infinite Pivot Most skil

There's a misunderstanding at the center of how most people think about improv, and it took me a long time to put words to it so I'll try now. The misunderstanding is that improv is about making things up. You get on stage and you invent a character, a voice, a personality, a whole person who doesn't exist. The audience laughs at the invention and the cleverness of it. That's the story we tell ourselves about what's happening, and it's almost entirely wrong. What's actually h

The Moment It Clicks There's a moment in every improv workshop where someone gets hit with the truth, the realization that they've been told to "listen harder" for years but no one ever stopped to explain that listening is only half the equation. And then they play Freeze Tag from the back line, and they understand. How Freeze Tag Works If you've never played Freeze Tag (it's a warm up game you'll find in most improv programs), here's how it works. Two players are on stage do

You're on stage your scene partner says something and you have to decide in a split second: do you go with it or do you push past it? Most of the time you know you should go with it but it feels like giving up your idea. What you're really doing though is listening. Not the kind of listening where you wait for your turn to talk but the kind that actually changes you in the middle of a scene. Not all listening is the same. There's a spectrum from the obvious adjustments everyo

Here's the scene: you're waiting for a text back, the message was delivered, and the little checkmarks have been staring at you for twenty-three minutes. In that time you've written the entire next act of your life, they're mad, they lost their phone, they finally realized what a disaster you are, they're composing the perfect goodbye paragraph. You've rehearsed your counter-argument, your defense, your dignified exit. You've narrated the breakup, the makeup, the awkward sile

You've been on stage your whole life, you just didn't know it. That sounds like a line from an improv warm-up or maybe a philosophy class you slept through in college, but I mean it literally. Every single day you walk out your front door and you step into a scene that's already started, one with set pieces and supporting characters and plot twists you never saw coming, and the only question is whether you're going to play your part on autopilot or actually show up for it. I

There's a concept from UCB training that I keep coming back to, even though I've never set foot in their building. Not yet, anyway. But their philosophy adds useful depth to my own, so I pay attention. The idea: find the unusual thing in your scene. The bank robber who cares more about the tellers' feelings than the money. The doctor who's afraid of blood. That one offbeat detail that makes the scene play. "Unusual" is vague on purpose. It's whatever you notice as unexpected.