Case Study: Inclusion Workshop.
Using improvisation to foster inclusive environments.
Set Up.
Participants enter the room - empty other than a chair for each participant, arranged in a semi-circle. Facilitators onsite begin the workshop with some ground rules to establish an environment of non-judgment where each participant has the space to engage in and reflect on their own experience. The rest of the session involves a series of exercises - sometimes in pairs, sometimes in trios or small groups, sometimes as one large group. The instructions for each exercise are easy to understand but often challenging to execute. Typically there is laughter throughout, lots of conversation and sometimes a high five at the end. Facilitators then elicit reactions to the improv experience and begin to make connections to how those same skills and insights can be used to establish a more inclusive environment. What follows is a conversation among participants about how the insights can be applied to their worlds, specifically.
Exercises
Building on a canon of time-tested improv games developed over the past half a century or more, facilitators use these constructs to springboard into important conversations. Let’s give an example. In groups of 4-6, participants are asked to tell a story one-word-at-a-time, going clockwise around the circle with each person contributing the next word in the sentence. After a few minutes, facilitators prompt participants to finish up their stories and reflect on what they needed to do to be successful in the exercise. As it turns out, this particular exercise pulls together a number if different skills critical to both improvisation and collaboration in general. Participants must listen closely to what has been said, use a “Yes And” mentality to build on what has preceded them, and let go of their preconceived notion of where they thought the story was going in order look for the possibilities of where it could go. Moreover, this exercise also highlights a key underlying question that lies at the foundation of inclusive environments: When and how is my voice needed? Sometimes it is my responsibility to contribute a huge, creative word, like “circumnavigate” and sometimes it is my responsibility to contribute a support word like “of,” “and,” or “the.” If any one of us fails to act in the best interest of the ensemble, the entire sentence (and story) can fall apart. In the exercise, the stakes are low, and that is very much by design - the worst that can happen is that the story stops making sense. But the experience tees up a very important conversation about stepping up and stepping back - being mindful about how much you are contributing to a conversation and how much space you are taking up in a room. It opens the path towards better self-awareness in a way that diffuses defensiveness and invites self-reflection.
Fostering Inclusion.
Each workshop is tailored to its specific audience during the planning process but, for reference, here are some key insights frequently covered during Inclusion sessions.
Inclusion as a Proactive Endeavor: Inclusion is commonly misunderstood as the absence of malice. There is often a sense that “we are nice people” equates to an inclusive environment. But productive inclusion takes actual effort - you must actively seek to understand differences and work to establish infrastructure that allows for these differences to co-exist and complement one another. A truly inclusive environment takes time, resources, and a certain amount of trial and error in order to be effective.
Empathetic Intake: One of the very practical skills that needs practice when fostering inclusive environments is empathetic intake of information. We must get good at the skill of engaging with curiosity rather than judgement and responding with vulnerability so that we can understand points of view different from our own. Studies suggest that we are not nearly as good at understanding one another as we think we are and this miscommunication is often at the heart of disagreements turning into arguments. Furthermore, very broadly, power impedes empathy so if our goal is to create an inclusive culture, the more power we wield in any given dynamic, the more we must self-guard against the erosion of empathy.
Appreciating Differences: We often connect and forge bonds through sameness - the things we have in common. If we are both fans of a particular sport or hobby, we intuitively begin to connect to one another through that shared experience or point of view. Even in times of distress, we often hear leaders talk about how there is much more that we share than that which divides us. The connections we make due to sameness are intuitive, often the default, and a wonderful pathway towards collaboration and inclusion. Equally valuable, however, yet far less intuitive and not at all the default, is investing energy in understanding and appreciating the very things that make us different. This active appreciation of difference simply does not happen often and is a missed opportunity to help forge stronger teams through more diverse representation and more opportunity for complementarity.
Positive Sum Games: One of the reasons that appreciation of difference is so useful is that it opens the door to the possibility of positive sum games. Positive sum games are situations in which both parties benefit from the interaction. In contrast to zero sum games where, in order for me to win, you must lose and vice-versa (e.g. competitions), or negative sum games wherein we both lose in the interaction (e.g. war), positive sum games allow us to invest authentically and meaningfully in each others’ success. But because positive sum games are often not the default, we frequently fail to notice when we are presented with one simply because we assumed a zero sum game instead. Training ourselves to be on the look out for positive sum games also drives us more towards truly inclusive environments where everyone benefits from the diversity that is in the room.
Why Improv?
There are many serious and necessarily uncomfortable conversations that must take place in any space that wants to foster greater Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. It is not our goal to make light of or diminish the needed intensity of these conversations in any way. What we find, though, is that often people enter into these potentially difficult conversations without the tools to navigate them which can leave the culture worse off for having had the interaction to begin with. Because we are surfacing these skills in the low stakes context of improvisation, it offers us the opportunity to introduce these skills in a way that is digestible by participants so that when they then need to have these higher stakes conversations, they are equipped with some tools to do so in a productive way.