Meeting A Client’s Expectations With Improv

I am a recovering micromanager, especially when it comes to my client’s events. I used to put up a big fight whenever a client wanted to do something I thought was a bad idea. I called this “Critical Problem Solving” but really it was just being a scaredy cat.

That doesn’t mean my fears were unwarranted. A pitfall first time clients fall into is “springing” an improv workshop on them. I show up to discover everyone just found out they were going to be doing improv because their manager thought it would be funny. It has notes of a scene from The Office, this pitfall does.

So whenever clients confide in me that their workshop will double as a prank, I always caution against. But over time I have learned that the really persistent pranksters are going to pull the prank no matter what I say. So why not make the best of it?

Here’s a good example.

Two years ago around the height of the covid lockdowns I went and taught a team building workshop that had a sub goal of also addressing a little bit of creativity skills. This was for a satellite office of a very larger advertising agency based in London. Anyway, this satellite office was in Washington DC and it was a small team about 12 to 15 professionals or so. 

And they wanted to do the workshop at their offices but on the Roof Garden. 

And I was a little wary of that because they were in a legitimate skyscraper and you know the wind can be  a little more active the higher up you get and I’d had problems before doing any kind of improv related activity outside. It can be a little dicey for a variety of reasons. 

But the client convinced me that this wasn’t a big problem because right next to the outdoor roof gardens was an air conditioned, very clean and welcoming modern meeting space. You could get inside this space easily from the roof gardens so I could continue the workshop inside if for some reason the outside gardens were proving to be unsuitable. 

On the day of the workshop I got to the gardens and oh my goodness I’m so glad that we ended up doing the workshop there. There was no wind. It was a very calm day, beautiful skies and the garden itself had these giant almost Roman columns that framed a playing area with benches on the outside. 

It was such a delightfully idyllic space to do an improv workshop in, everyone had a really wonderful time. So I guess the point of this article is just to say you always want to go into an improv workshop for a work event with your eyes open on elements that could ruin the event. 

And certainly hosting an event outside without a backup plan is very problematic, but as long as you have that backup plan, going for an ideal solution is not a bad idea. It’s a fun one and it worked out great in this instance. In fact this event is probably the reason RA does so much work in DC to this day.

I remember the next day I drove a few hours into Pennsylvania to delight a college campus with the antics of Paranormal Comedy. Between the two events, improv was able to provide a lot laughs and a lot of fun.

That might not have been true if I had given into my inner fear monger.  I might have quashed the roof garden idea at the outset and then gotten the workshop shoved into a windowless break room. Thank goodness I didn’t.

Terry Withers