Claudia Dot

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 energy maintaining...

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 they're building...

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 the same in your...