S7 #8 Nobody has the script: What Improv teaches leaders about working without certainty

[00:00:00] INTRO: Welcome to The Power of Digital Policy, a show that helps digital marketers, online communications directors, and others throughout the organization balance out risks and opportunities created by using digital channels. Here's your host, Kristina Podnar

[00:00:20] KRISTINA: We spend a lot of time talking about how AI will make organizations faster, more efficient, and more automated. But there's another side of this that I think gets far less attention. The more dynamic our systems become, the less likely it is that leaders will have a perfect playbook for what happens next. And that raises an interesting question. While organizations are investing heavily in tech designed to create more certainty, should they also be investing in people's ability to operate when certainty simply isn't available? Our guest today, Mary Lemmer, comes at the question from a fascinating direction, which is improvisation.

Mary works at the intersection of improv, leadership, communication, and organizational behavior, and I wanted us to hear from her and learn what improv can teach us about uncertainty, adaptability, and leading in an increasingly AI-enabled world. Mary, welcome to The Power of Digital Policy.

[00:01:16] MARY: Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to talk about this topic. It is on my mind every day. I am someone who is a big fan of AI. I use it every day, and also there's what's known as AI of applied improvisation, which is also a piece that is a huge piece of this, and excited to dive in and talk more about it.

[00:01:40] KRISTINA: Awesome. Well, let's take a step back to ground zero just for a second, which is when most people hear the word improv, they think usually comedy, spontaneity, usually lots of laughter. They imagine a stage, which is all fair, I suppose. But what are they missing when that's the definition they walk into improv with?

[00:02:01] MARY: Yeah, I, I think improv has a little bit of a PR problem with this, and I... to, to quote one of the, the main principles of improv, yes, and. It is all of those things. Improv is fantastic for generating ideas and comedic content, and it's funny, and its training has produced some of the, the greatest comedians and performers of all time. And also, it is a practice for getting comfortable with being uncomfortable and a practice for figuring things out when there's not a script and adapting to changing circumstances, building trust as you figure it out together, communicating clearly, making decisions with limited information.

So all the things that we learn on stage as improvisers are things we have to deal with off stage as humans, and increasingly so in a world that now has more noticeable change and uncertainty and situations outside of our control that have always been the case. We've never been in control. There's always uncertainty and change, but it's so visible to us now, and so we can look to the folks that are pros at navigating this or have a training methodology. And when we combine those improv techniques with some neuroscience, behavioral science, and just how the human psyche and mind and body work, it's pretty potent for supporting people through change, uncertainty, and the unknown.

[00:03:38] KRISTINA: Mentioned really two things or two keywords I guess stood out to me about what you just said, which is comfortable, and uncertainty. Is there a difference between being comfortable with uncertainty and actually being skilled at operating within it?

[00:03:55] MARY: Yes you can be both. I tell people, I have a book coming out called How to Handle Anything, and I tell people it's a lot easier to write a book called How to Handle Anything than to actually handle anything. Like, even with the tools, you still have to use the tools. But just like any form of training, right? If you wanna be a great piano player, you gotta practice the piano. If you wanna speak Spanish fluently, you gotta practice Spanish, and that's the same with navigating uncertainty and being able to adapt when things change or navigate without a script. Applied improv or very specifically and intentionally designed improv can be a training ground so that when the stakes are low, you practice in that improvised environment, so you can train your nervous system and the responses so that when the stakes are high, you're already trained, right? You've already practiced free throws in practice so that when you get into the national championship, you're ready. You can handle all the pressure and the high stakes because you've practiced the muscle movement. You have the mental focus, and it puts you in a place to be able to handle that a little bit better

[00:05:02] KRISTINA: I'm wondering where trust really enters that conversation for people, and what within the corporate world needs to happen so that folks can have that freedom to be innovative and to create and improvise as necessary, and yet still have that accountability maybe that comes from governance, which is a real thing in my governance and policy world.

[00:05:23] MARY: Yeah. Wow. Like, I mean, how much time do we have, right? Like, this is, Yeah, I mean I know. It's-- I mean, organizations ultimately are designed to reduce uncertainty, right? But the world keeps producing it. So the question doesn't become whether you can eliminate it, it's whether your people can have the capacity to respond to it effectively when it arrives, and that does involve trust and psychological safety, and, organizations need that predictability to operate. Budgets, forecasts, KPIs, processes, performance reviews, like all these systems exist for good reasons, the systems, the structure. The problem is when predictability stops being a useful operating mechanism and becomes the definition of competence, and I think that's where this, like, ability for people to maybe make mistakes or not know or try something new is in somewhat conflict when, when companies use the system and the predictable operating machine to also leak into what they expect for human behavior.

And people then learn they get rewarded for having the answer, hitting the plan, not making mistakes, and not surprising anyone. But innovation requires the opposite. Growth requires the opposite. You have to try something new before you know whether it will work, you have to change direction when you get new information, and you have to be willing to look wrong. But when those things aren't supported in an organization, people start to put their guard up and not take risks. So it's like we tell people to innovate and, and try new things and grow, but then we evaluate them on how well they predicted the outcome. So, inadvertently, I think many organizations have accidentally made experimentation feel like failure because of these l-little things that add up that erode trust to try something new because people are just operating within the system that has been designed for them, which is, hit your marks, perform, predictably, do the thing, run the system.

So we've, we've gotten really good at building environments where we rarely practice being in uncertainty and trying new things. And so it's understandable why organizations have become this and optimizing for efficiency. You know how to do something, you it, you create the process, the playbook, and that all works until the environment changes. And so that's where, really training people and working within your company to set things in place that do actually foster that trust and encourage trying new things, where maybe that's rewarded and incentivized in a way that also respects the systems and the processes that need to be there. Because we've gotten really great and sophisticated at training people for the expected, like here's what you do when things are all going According to plan. But we spend much less time training, preparing for the, them for what happens when the expected doesn't happen. And that's, those are the moments where trust can really be fostered and built because that's when things aren't going well, that's how you, when you really see people show up, and you have this opportunity to work through it together, and that itself builds trust. But when people are, yeah, incentivized and rewarded for not taking those risks, and they've seen that if they try something new, it, it maybe doesn't even get rewarded, it may actually get dinged, then people are just gonna show up in a way that keeps them safe in that organization

[00:08:55] KRISTINA: How do you break that cycle when you work with organizations or when people call you up, ring, ring, and saying, "Mary, we're having this problem," right? "I think we, we could do much better." Like, w- are there some really basic things you point people to or, you know, how do you get people unstuck?

[00:09:11] MARY: Yeah. It's so much of it is a little bit nuanced depending on the specific situation the company's dealing with, but I can say generally it's like something has shaken up. Usually it's like there's a reorg, there's layoffs, there's some big organizational change and then people start to kind of feel a little nervous. They don't know what's happening. They're maybe worried about their own job. In this day and age, like AI has replaced some of them. Like, "Is it coming for me next?" So there's fear that develops, right? And fear erodes trust. And so then it's like, okay, what can we do to rebuild that trust? And it's a whole team approach, right? I've, I've gotten calls where someone's like, "It's this one person. We just need to fix this one person." I'm like, "Look, I can work with one person, but if that one person changes behaviors and grows individually and then they go back into an environment where it pulls out those same behaviors, it's not..." Like, the environment makes a huge difference, and when people come together to work on this stuff together, that in itself builds trust, builds collaboration and communication. So I think overall, what... the, the main thing is, , communicate together. , Figure out a solution together. Get all in the same room. Whether you're bringing in someone from the outside, like myself, who's, an expert at, at dealing with those companies, or you're gonna do something yourself or what- or find someone else, it can't happen in silos. Like, it really has to be something where people are all in the room. They get to hear and have their questions answered. They get to see each other as humans and, and work through some things together to rebuild that trust. And and I, I did something once for a, a Fortune 100 company where they were going through some of this, and we spent a whole day, and we did some very specific activities. We had a fireside chat with the, the leader of this, big team within this global company. And it allowed people... it was designed to allow people to not only build trust with each other and rebuild some of that psychological safety, but also learn new ways of working with each other, through this change, right? And, and that gives the people the tools. It expands their capacity for what's possible when they have new tools, and they learn those new tools together, and they practice those new tools together

[00:11:36] KRISTINA: Which is interesting, I think, because there's this narrative that, tools like AI will remove friction and uncertainty from work, which is odd in a way to think about, right? Because uncertainty, we get back to predictability, and predictability can be good, but you also lose then creativity and innovation. So I suspect the opposite may also be true, which is, it may remove some routine work, but again, kind of create entirely new kinds of uncertainty. And I'm wondering, do you see it that way? Do you see organizations kind of heading down that path?

[00:12:09] MARY: You can't get rid of uncertainty, right? You can just better be with it and navigate it, and that's where maybe there's something at an organizational level where when you just accept it, when you actually embrace it, which is also part of, the improv philosophy is, like, accept the scene you're in. Accept the reality of the scene you're in. Because then you can actually do something. It's kind of like... I mean, I've been an entrepreneur for most of my career. I started a business when I was a teenager, and I- That's, what kind of led me into finding these tools, because I struggled with uncertainty, right? Something would break. I had a gelato business. The gelato case would break, and then gelato's melted everywhere. I have to accept the reality that the gelato case is broken in order to address that problem. Now, that's a very small example of this, but when we look at, like, on a big kind of more high-level view of uncertainty, if you accept uncertainty is inevitable as an organization, and instead of trying to fight it and trying to control for it, you work together to find ways to navigate that while creating better systems and governance and policies to help operate in an environment of uncertainty. That's working with reality versus fighting reality.

[00:13:29] KRISTINA: So what does that look like in a tangible environment? Can you give an example of an organization maybe that wasn't doing that so well and then transitioned into really taking that uncertainty and maybe embracing it, whether it's uncertainty around technology or just the business predicament or, a gelato case breaking?

[00:13:48] MARY: Yeah. Yeah. I worked with an organization that they had-- kind of problem they came to me with was, "Look, we have some really smart people here," It was a startup, right? So there's a lot of uncertainty in startups. And this was a funded startup, and they had resources and whatnot, but even then, you're building the plane as you fly it, so there's inherently a lot of s- uncertainty with that. And part of the problem that can happen, as we've talked about, is when people become afraid to bring something up because of how the system is built within the organization that rewards knowing the answer and finding the answer and having predictability. They realize like, we're, we're like, we're bly- we're building this plane as we fly it, but we we know where the plane's generally going. We don't know everything we need, but people aren't telling us when something's broken on the plane, and we're not getting enough information from different departments that's gonna help us uncertainty, right? And so we did a day-long session, and there's some, there's like some principles, right? Just like companies have values and guiding principles that we adopted to say, okay, they're, take everything as a gift. Even if it's like that's one of our, our main tenets, right? Whether it's, a mistake or could be seen as a mistake or something hard to hear or something's broken, all of that is in service of building this plane as we fly it, right? We need to have that information. So reframing that for everyone and having that reminder, and then practicing what that looks like, right? And and so there's like a series of actual activities and prompts that we go through to really practice this mindset together again. And then it's being reminded, that's now that has to... after that one day, how do we keep this reinforced, right? They wrote it on their wall. It was, they had something to hold each other accountable to. So if someone was like, seemingly holding something back, they now have the trust with each other and the, the language to say, "Hey, Jill, it sounds like something's on your mind." Now, we did a fun game with that where we put a a stuffed element, a elephant, a plush elephant in the conference room so that someone could say, I spot an elephant in the room. What's not being said here?" Because it makes it kind of fun, it doesn't make it feel as scary when you have a shared way and a shared way of handling these things, and a shared way of bringing things up in, in a world that's uncertain, in a team, in a company that's uncertain. So that's, a tangible, here's the problem, here's, what we designed for that. You have to design little... Just like we design systems and processes to deal with KPIs and sales metrics and budgets, we have to have a process for people, and a process for, and, and little rituals as a team to reinforce the things to reinforce the things that are important to us as a company, right? 'Cause you can't just say it once and then be like, "Cool, we're good." You have to practice it, and you have to do it together so that you have that shared accountability, and you have that shared language so that someone has the trust to say, "I can bring this up with someone if I notice it." And then, of course, you have to figure out how to bring that into your onboarding and with new people, right? To get them aligned on, hey, it's okay to, to say, like, "Hey, this is broken." Like, we need that. It's okay to make... We see mistakes and we see trying things as a gift because we're trying to build this plane as we fly it, and if we don't have that information, the plane might fall apart.

[00:17:37] KRISTINA: It seems to me like a lot of that starts with leaders and leadership, but how can a leader communicate, I guess, uncertainty without undermining confidence? Because that seems like a little bit of a juggling act sometimes.

[00:17:49] MARY: Yeah. It's, that is a huge juggling act. Like, how do you balance the vulnerability of not knowing as a leader with also instilling confidence in the people that work for you that you can lead?

[00:18:04] KRISTINA: Especially, like you said, when you don't know the answer, right? You could be in a startup and you're trying to fly the plane and build it- ... and service it.

[00:18:10] MARY: Yeah. Yeah, and I think, and I've seen great examples of this, and, and I've seen poor examples of this, and I've been a great example of it and I've also been a poor example of it myself, in my own leadership. The thing that it comes down to for a leader is your own nervous system regulation, right? Because you can be vulnerable and confident at the same time. And I think the accepting that polarity of like I cannot know what's going to happen and also have confidence that we can figure it out can and should coexist, right? Because that's, that is a powerful combination when a leader has enough humility to say, "I'm not actually sure about this, but I know we can figure it out." I think like if we work with this person, and having a vision for how we figure it out or having some ability to empower the team to figure it out versus the opposite of that is full meltdown, "Oh my God, this is horrible." I'm like, crying in an elevator and there's no kind of intentional plan or confidence showing there too. So that's to me the balance of, like, if you can regulate yourself as a leader and have some tools to in the moment say, "Oh, wow, like this, this news shocked me. I need to take a beat. I need to, process this a little bit. And then I need to be able to communicate with my team that, 'Hey, this is happening. I'm not sure where this is going, but I know..." That the leader has done the work to be in a position of strength and confidence even amidst the unknowing. And that time from kind of reaction to getting to that place becomes, like, what's in the leader's toolkit? How quickly are they able to move through that to get to the place from being able, I can hold the uncertainty and the confidence we can make it through, and have that confidence to distill to my team, like, very quickly.

[00:20:21] KRISTINA: Are there some improv tricks that people can use to keep uncertainty from becoming paralysis?

[00:20:27] MARY: Oof. Yes and the, the big one is pausing, and taking, like, taking a beat just on a, like, practical level of what someone can do. We do this on stage, right? Just like really taking it in of, like, what's going on and noticing how I feel. When we slow down the scene, obviously improv happens quite fast, but when you, when you slow down that scene and you really break it down, it's like, okay, someone just did this. How does that affect me? Notice it, notice it how it feels in my body. What character choice am I going to make? Because between the kind of stimulus and the reaction, and the response, and an improviser is processing that really fast, right? There's a stimulus, there's a reaction, the response, and sometimes the reaction is the same as the response, and oftentimes it is because we're, like, acting in real time. But when we break that down and we use these tools intentionally, we say, "Okay, there's a stimulus. What's my reaction? Hmm." I get to make a choice here. What response do I wanna make? And we get to do that with our own thoughts, the stories we tell ourselves. Like, we are story-making machines. So if something happens, I get to receive that. I can notice my initial response, because my initial response is informed by my own stuff, right? Stuff I've experienced before, the stories I've held before, my nervous system responses of things.

So we are improvisers and actors in our own lives, and if we can do that as a leader, use that way of thinking about it as a leader to say, "Okay, something happened. It's gonna affect me some way. Let me notice it. Let me decipher, like, how do I wanna respond in this moment?" I get to make a character choice. I can choose to respond to this angry, shut down, defensively, excited, joyful, grateful. So then if we put this back to our example of someone bringing up, like a, a difficult thing or something's broken. So if someone comes to me as a leader and they're like, "Hey," like, "the thing we built and we shipped yesterday, it's, like, broken and our customers are saying they can't use it," that, that might be, like, big news to me as a leader, and I- my initial response might be, like, really frustrated or upset. And sure, I could respond in that way, but that's gonna have an impact on that other person. So I get to make the choice to say, "Okay, I'm like, "Thank you for bringing that up to me. I'm really glad that you shared that with me. Let's figure out a plan to address that." And that is, like, something that can be practiced with a leader, right? So that that initial reaction, my frustration, my anger that the thing is broken, doesn't have to be my response. We can do that with ourself, but it's really helpful to do within our teams and with groups because then we get... It's, it's easy to figure this stuff up in our head, but as soon as we go into a situation, it can activate our nervous system, and that reaction becomes the response.

[00:23:44] KRISTINA: You started to talk a little bit about what does "yes, and" actually require from people and what you can actually do with it and what does it invite, but I'm wondering how that starts to work with, day-to-day employees who are actively having to kind of listen, but also maybe they're just being given things that they don't get a choice about responding to, right? Have this pilot stood up in 20 days when you know it's not gonna happen or it can't happen or it's gonna kill you if you try to make it happen, right? Because you have to m- meet maybe a deadline, et cetera. So you're being given something where maybe you don't have a choice. Does improv help, and how does that work with a "yes, and"?

[00:24:28] MARY: Yeah. I, I've lived that, so I, I know so closely what it's like to be told to do something that you don't agree with, and you see it's kind of pointless, and yet it's your job. So yes and in that scenario might look like, okay, yes is acknowledging the reality of the scene you're in, what has been given to you, what has been bestowed upon you the acceptance of that. You don't have to agree with it. You have to accept that that's the reality, right? Your boss brought you something to do that you don't agree with or don't even see actually being followed through with. The and is your response to it, right? I can say, "Yes, I see this is, like, the reality," and, I don't agree with it, and I still get to make a choice here of how I respond in this moment. I can choose multiple things. Like, can go to my boss and ask some clarifying questions. I can say, "Can you tell me, like, why we're doing this? Like, what your intent is behind this to help me understand." I can share my concerns. I can say to my boss, "Hey, when you bring me stuff that doesn't have a particular tangible use, it makes me feel like I'm wasting my time." So that we can have a dialogue about it, 'cause my boss may be completely unaware that that's how it comes across, right? The and could just be like, "I'm gonna do it. It's my job, and I'm gonna just deal with it," and that's a choice I get to make. I could also make an and and be like, "I quit. I'm tired of this," so there is some, there is some choice in the matter. I think... And I think that's what's very empowering about the principle of yes and, because I think where yes and gets misinterpreted is the yes gets interpreted as agreeing to something bec- and by acknowledging it, you're ingre- agreeing to it or even endorsing it. But that's not the case at all. Yes could just be like, "I see this here. I see that this is happening. Here's how it affects me. Here's how I see it, and here's what I'm gonna do about it." And it's like acknowledging and then adding to the situation. So to me, yes and is one of the most empowering things you can adopt as a leader or an individual contributor because it gives you some power back, right? To say, "Okay, like, I can't change the fact that my boss brought me this thing that I think is a waste of my time, but I can't control that. But I can acknowledge it and then control how I respond in that moment."

[00:27:04] KRISTINA: So the yes and brings me to a really important question, we've done a optional lightning round, where you kind of- Ooh ... have to do a yes and improvisation. Are you up for it?

[00:27:14] MARY: Oh, absolutely. Yes and.

[00:27:16] KRISTINA: I can't think of a better person to do this with, so all right. I'm gonna ask you some questions, and let's go for it.

[00:27:22] MARY: Okay.

[00:27:23] KRISTINA: Tell me a leadership behavior you wish would disappear.

[00:27:29] MARY: Ooh avoidance of hard things. Hmm.

[00:27:34] KRISTINA: A word organizations use too much based on your experience.

[00:27:40] MARY: Synergize.

[00:27:42] KRISTINA: Oh, I like that. A skill we underestimate.

[00:27:48] MARY: Silence

[00:27:51] KRISTINA: Something improv taught you that surprised you And listening,

[00:27:53] MARY: I guess

[00:27:54] KRISTINA: Yep, silence and listening. Okay

[00:27:55] MARY: Oh, sorry. That last one cut out. What did

[00:27:57] KRISTINA: something- Something improv taught you that surprised you

[00:28:01] MARY: Ooh, ah, so many things. Oh, that I have trouble expressing anger

[00:28:11] KRISTINA: Interesting. One thing that leaders should practice this week.

[00:28:18] MARY: Active listening. Listening fully to what someone is saying before you start to formulate your own response. And if you want a trick for how to do that, we use a technique called first word, last word in improv, where you have to use the last word your partner says as your first word. So if you said, "Today I'm going to the gym," I would have to start my sentence with gym. Like, "Gym rats are everywhere in Los Angeles," right? So you don't have to literally do that, but if you want to practice active listening, you can practice listening for that last word before you start to formulate your own thought, as if you had to start your next sentence with someone's last word, because it forces us to fully listen to someone before we start to think through what we are gonna say next

[00:29:05] KRISTINA: Next time we talk, I'm gonna go through a different set of questions with you as a result of listening to you and taking on that tip.

Mary, I love the idea that really adaptability is not the absence of structure, and that uncertainty is not necessarily something organizations can or maybe should even engineer away. So I love that we've had this conversation today. I think that as AI changes the way that work happens, knowing especially how to listen, as you pointed out but also knowing how to respond, and thinking through how do we exercise judgment, and how do we move forward without a perfect script, 'cause we're not gonna have it, right? It may become not just- Yeah ... one of the most important skills that an organization can have, but also that we can personally have. So thank you so much for joining us- ... and giving us a very different way to think about what it means to prepare ourselves, to prepare our teams, and really to prepare our organizations for what comes next, because nobody has a crystal ball but we can improvise.

[00:30:05] MARY: Exactly. We can't plan the future, but we can learn to improvise.

[00:30:11] KRISTINA: I love it. Well, thanks so much for your time today, Mary, and thanks to everybody for listening. We will talk again in our next conversation, so stay tuned.

[00:30:18] OUTRO: Thank you for joining The Power of Digital Policy. To get access to policy checklists, detailed information on policies, and other helpful resources, head over to thepowerofdigitalpolicy.com. If you get a moment, please leave a review on iTunes to help your digital colleagues find out about the podcast.

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