I prefer to not be in the spot light. In fact if you can create an absence of light, I wouldn't mind hanging out there. Knowing this about myself, it is no wonder that I tend to really hate the game of charades. Not only is it unpredictable, but I am standing up in front of people at the same time. This is not a good combination.
Now take this idea of charades; how many of you remember the game show “Who's Line is it Anyway?”? I thought the show was super funny, but it mostly made me sweat a lot. That's a ton of unpredictable, and it's on TV! No thank you!
That being said, I think there is quite a bit to learn from the idea of improv. Most of us can tell when it isn't working quite right. All you have to do is watch that episode of The Office when they follow Michael Scott to his improv class and his answer to every scene is to pull out a gun. Scene over.
In the world of production, we are faced with situations all the time where we need to respond in the moment; where we have to make a choice whether the “scene” continues or it ends right there. In the local church, we are trying to pull off something relatively new every seven days, which means we are brainstorming about new ideas non-stop. In these environments, are we helping move things along or are we following Michael Scott's example and pulling out a gun?
Let's take a look at a couple of essential components to the practice of improv and apply them to our context.
Accept Every Offer
In improv, the idea is for each person to respond to what just happened. Not with a gun, and not with a question that just puts it into the other person's court again. The gun ends the scene and the question makes the other person do all the work.
Since God wired the technical artist to figure out how to get things done, we tend to go into “solution mode” the minute we hear a new idea. Many times, this is perceived as pulling out a gun or just putting the burden back on the other person.
So how do we handle this? If we're designed as technical artists to operate a certain way, are we trying to become something we aren't? How are we supposed to figure out how to make something work if we can't start picking it apart and point out all the flaws?
Well, one place we can start is to respond to each new idea with our reaction to the idea itself. To communicate that you like the idea or even to encourage the person for how much work they put into it or pointing out all the great components to the idea. These are all better places to start than “That will never work.”
I'm not suggesting that you lie or that you make something up, but from a creative standpoint, it is very difficult to come up with new and creative ideas, and whether it seems this way or not, your creative people are putting themselves way out there every time they present a new idea. They are opening themselves up to being laughed at or ridiculed.
They are also opening themselves up to collaborating with you. In most of our churches, ideas can't happen without a significant role being played by production. The creative team knows this, and that is why they feel compelled to share their ideas. Are you making it easy for them or do they dread meeting with you?
At a certain point, it's time to get down to how to actually get the idea into reality. At its heart, collaboration is a partnership, much like improv. Improv doesn't work if one person is always dominant or if one of the partners is floundering. And we can't just respond to ideas with warm fuzzy sayings. We need this thing to go somewhere; we need to dig into the details and figure out how get the idea to happen.
I've met so many church tech people that respond with a “no” at every idea. Or “it can't be done.” These are classic examples of a great way to stop collaboration from happening and shutting the whole thing down. It isn't bad when an idea isn't doable, but we need to show up with solutions. We need to be problem-solvers, not just problem-pointer-outers. Instead of the phrase “That will never work,” what if we tried “How can we make this work?”. While this is a question, it is helping us move the scene along.
Make Your Partner Look Good
Going back to the rules of improv, the second big idea is to always make your partner look good. As I said before, if only one person looks good, pretty soon the improv scene is going to collapse on itself.
When we are talking about collaborating with creative artists, the idea is to start figuring out ways that the idea can work. When we are in brainstorming mode, it is easy to start solving the problem within our current reality, instead of opening up the possibilities and throwing out any option that will help the idea become real. It could be renting more gear or hiring people. It could be tweaking the idea slightly to fit inside the gear and people we have. But what if we thought outside our normal box?
Over the years, I've been kicked out of so many brainstorming meetings because of my inability to deal with this idea of improv. After a while, I realized that most of the first ideas never actually happened. As we dug into them more, we figured out it wasn't exactly the right idea or just not the right timing. From a production standpoint, we need to figure out constructive ways to brainstorm the execution of an idea without just shooting down the idea.
If God designed the body of Christ for us to work together, and I believe he did, we are in this together. It might be an oversimplified way of saying it, but “making your partner look good” is about combining our gifts and talents together with others to create the best thing possible. Not only should the starting point be one of trying our best to make someone's idea amazing, but it should also involve trusting that the person with the idea wants the same for us.
When I was younger, for whatever reason, I used to think that the creative team knew they were asking me to do crazy impossible things. What typically happened was that I would either shoot down the idea immediately, or just suck it up and get it done. As a result, I would not accept any offer, and I didn't really care to make my partners look good, and I assumed they felt the same. This is barren ground for collaboration.
In the same way improv requires mutual trust, so does collaboration. If you don't trust each other, it is very difficult to put yourself out there. The reality is that the creative arts team is designed to imagine new ideas and we are made to help make them a reality. We are designed to work in partnership together. If we hope to create life-changing moments through the fusion of the creative and technical arts, it will require us to accept every offer and to make our partners look good.
1.What your initial response to a new idea? Is this helping or hurting collaboration?
2.Think of a situation where collaboration broke down. How could you have responded differently to create a different outcome?
