The Holy Grail of Innovation: It Takes an Ensemble to Achieve Inspired Creativity

Improvisation Isn’t Just Thinking on Your Feet

Now, I know I told you that any particular improv isn’t rehearsed, but you can prepare for being spontaneous—and that’s a kind of rehearsal. Actors most certainly engage extensively in this kind of preparation. And this is what business managers often don’t understand—that being spontaneous does not mean thinking on your feet and coming up with stuff out of nowhere, with no background or context. Improvisation isn’t just making it up as you go along or winging it. Rather, spontaneity in improvisation means being well versed in a domain and the principles of improvisation, so when called upon, you can take what you know and use it creatively in the moment.

The essence of creative spontaneity isn’t the ideas that come out, but the moment in response to which they come out. The ideas themselves come from the preparation. Though there isn’t a script for an improvisation, there most certainly is a foundation on which actors spontaneously build their dialogue.

To build your team’s foundation, you must first understand the rules of improv and follow them. These rules are pretty simple and center on what it takes to become and work as an ensemble. You must do the following:

• Communicate with each other. This includes both verbal and nonverbal communication. Communication is a two-way street.
• Work together collaboratively and support each other—no matter what.
• Build trust by coming to know each other.
• Adopt accept, agree, and add as your motto—otherwise known as Yes, and—when improvising in response to ideas other team members throw at you.

When improvising, your team needs to understand the domain you’re working in. There just isn’t any getting away from that fact. The reason an ensemble works so well is that it comprises people whose knowledge you can rely on—one person doesn’t have to know everything. This is also why it’s best to have a multidisciplinary team, so you can take advantage of people’s different insights, perspectives, and knowledge.

For spontaneity, the best toolbox a team can draw upon is having lots of different inputs. So stimulate your minds through constant exposure to varied content and experiences, in analogous and related domains. It’s all helpful. Any artist always looks for stimulation and inspiration from every source and genre available. Read, listen, see, and generally be aware all the time, so you can absorb as much input as possible.

If you’ve done a good job of building up your toolbox, recombining and reincorporating all of these inputs will be easy. Improvisation may feel like chaos at times—like things are coming out of nowhere—but that’s not actually the case. Great ideas almost always come from taking pieces and parts of existing ideas and reassembling them in new ways to serve new purposes. And a good storyline—or a workflow or taskflow in business—reincorporates things you’ve already discussed.

Finally, iterating on or playing with different ideas—or even exploring variations on a theme—helps you push forward your team’s best new ideas and eliminate what doesn’t work. In the end, you can create a wonderfully innovative idea by putting together all of the pieces that work well together. On the other hand, you’ll learn from your failures, with the result that you may discover new ideas you never would have had if you hadn’t given yourself a chance to try again.

What Does It Mean to Be an Ensemble?

An ensemble is more than just a team of people who get thrown together to complete a particular task. It is a group of people who have developed their relationships and tools together over time, so they can work together effectively, as a cohesive group, and achieve a successful outcome. This doesn’t happen overnight, but it can happen quickly when you commit to spending time together and focus on building the ensemble.

The most important qualities of an ensemble are collaboration and trust. This means the individuals in the group know and respect one another. It also means you never leave anyone stranded in the moment—which might occur if you neither accept nor add to someone else’s ideas or if you’re not all fully present and aware in the moment, so you can jump in when you’re needed. Part of collaboration means, in addition to paying attention in the present, you also get to know your team members and learn their nonverbal gestures and cues. This helps you know when and how you can support and add to their ideas. The members of an ensemble know when they can rely on one another, because they’re aware of what the others know, what their skills are, and how they work. Unless your ensemble’s group dynamic is strong, you’ll never be able to improvise together creatively.

Building a Shared Language

One of the most fascinating things about an ensemble is that, over time, it’s members naturally build a shared language—comprising words, phrases, gestures, and experiences that encapsulate their common world experience. This shared language becomes a critical factor in the kind of improvisation that leads to innovation. A shared language is the key thing you can rely on and fall back on in moments of spontaneity with your ensemble. And it is what makes improvisation fast, smooth, and seamless.

Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about. If I walked up to your team and asked for some Spanish carpets to store some papers in, you would probably look at me like I was crazy. But I recently worked with a team for whom this term was an important communication clarifier. It also happened to be a funny joke.

In a short time, this team had managed to become a true ensemble—all while overcoming the additional obstacle of having to talk to each other in what was for many of them a nonnative language. The members of the ensemble were from several different countries and used English as their common language. To this group, Spanish carpets meant folders. This term came to be when someone tried to ask for folders, when the group was in Spain—the location where the group was then gathered. There was some confusion, because in Spanish, the word for folders is carpetas. I think you can see for yourself how we started referring to folders as Spanish carpets.

This joke—a little bit of shared language—not only built camaraderie, but also became critical in keeping communication moving smoothly. We now had a shared reference point anyone could call upon at any moment, and the whole group would understand. Shared language doesn’t have to be verbal; it can include gestures and shared experiences the group has had together.

Ensembles frequently develop these kinds of communication shortcuts and shared references, which are imperceptible to everyone outside the ensemble. And this is the stuff from which great improvisations arise. By using shared language, you can instantly make apparent to the whole ensemble what you are thinking and where you are going—without anyone outside the ensemble realizing it. To the audience, it seems like there are no clues at all. This is just one way in which the ensemble recombines and reincorporates what it already knows.

The Secret Behind the Magic Isn’t Such a Secret After All

As I said earlier, spontaneity—and, therefore, innovation—doesn’t come out of nowhere. It actually does take preparation. But with this preparation and practice, spontaneity becomes possible. This doesn’t mean the idea of being spontaneous and innovative might still not be a scary prospect for people.

As an actress myself, the prospect of having to improvise is still one of the things I dread most, because I know I’ve improvised successfully only with groups of people who work like an ensemble. But when I rely on the rules and foundations of improv, I find, over and over again, that it works. If you look carefully, you’ll see how, time after time, I use improv in the writing of this column. When people ask me how I come up with my ideas, the answer seems obvious to me. I constantly pay attention to inputs for inspiration, and I reuse, reincorporate, and expand on thoughts and concepts I’ve talked about before.

The more you practice and work at building your team into an ensemble, the more improvisation and, therefore, innovation, will happen. And you’ll truly understand why it takes an ensemble, not just a team, to achieve the inspired creativity that innovation requires. Don’t ever again be fooled into thinking it’s magic! There’s really no secret to improv. With practice, anyone can learn the principles of improvisation, and any team has the potential to become a true ensemble. You can do it, too! 

Reference

Dusya, Vera, and Mary Crossan. “Improvisation and Innovative Performance in Teams.” Organization Science, Vol. 16, No. 3, May–June 2005.