PART 1: Improv makes you a better decision maker.
Imagine all hell is breaking loose. Someone yells out, “All hell is breaking loose, what should we do?!” You hear a series of panicked “I don’t know, I don’t know!” then, breaking through the cacophony, you say, “We could try [anything really]” All heads are going to turn to you. Because you’re now the leader.
Leaders are the people who make decisions, and in turn, others look to to make those decisions. Especially under pressure.
So if you’re in management, or want to be, and you want to hone your decision making skills in moments of pressure, improv can help. Because improv is essentially just a series of decisions.
Imagine you walk out onto an empty stage with another person. You need to build a world out of imagination and show it to the audience. Where are you? Who are you? What are you doing? All decisions that need to be made pretty quickly. How do we know each other, how do we feel about each other, how many wings does a squirrel dragon have…? In improv, there are infinite options, so you’ve gotta choose wisely. And by wisely, I mean, just make a choice!
Let’s say the scene starts with the other character saying to you, “Is that a new cape?”
You have a couple seconds to shake off the fact that you’re not actually wearing a cape in real life and accept the new reality being proposed, then decide some of the following:
Why are you wearing a new cape? Is it to impress the other character? Job interview? Laundry day?
Are you a superhero, or just fashionable?
Is it new as in brand new, or just new to their character seeing you in it?
Did you buy it, or make it, or a combination of both?
What’s the difference from your old cape if you had to describe it?
Who would ask you that? How do you know each other?
Did they sound curious? Impressed? Disappointed?
How much does them liking it matter to you?
There might be moments where you might think, “I don’t know.” But you do know, because you’re the one creating the world. Just like in life, you just make a choice, then make it work.
In conclusion, if you want to practice decision making, a key leadership skill, yeah, you should definitely try improv.