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  If you can’t beat ’em, improv Adventurous firms try a think-on-your-feet creative approach
The president of the Portland Trail Blazers bobs up and down with his teeth bucked and his paws beneath his chin, chanting, “Bunny bunny bunny bunny bunny.” From his flowing locks to his polished shoes, 6-foot-4 Steve Patterson looks like he’s serious about it. Standing with Patterson in a circle are the NBA franchise’s sales staff, mostly guys in khakis, with white T-shirts under crisp shirts, lots of hair product and chunky watches. It’s 9 a.m., and the group is gathered in a rented room in McMenamins Kennedy School as part of the Trail Blazers’ plan to fix the brand. (“Blazers,” which smacks of arson, blunts and hellfire, is out; “Trail Blazers,” which is all about the pioneer spirit, and the fact that 52 percent of Portlanders moved here in the last 10 years, is in.) “The brand is not going to get fixed because we traded Rasheed Wallace,” Patterson says. “It’ll be when we have individual relationships with our customers,” along the lines of Starbucks or Les Schwab Tires. It turns out the secret weapon for breaking old patterns of behavior is comedy. Or rather, “improv,” which is improvisational comedy that gets fewer laughs. Gary Hirsch and Brad Robertson, two of the 11 partners in On Your Feet: Improv for Business, introduce the game Bunny Bunny. It’s an icebreaker to get the sleepy, possibly nervous sales staff on their feet. Tension mounts during the lengthy preamble. Robertson says, “You’re probably feeling two emotions right now: fear and dread.” Hirsch gets a muted laugh when he chimes in, “But the doors are locked!” At this point before the game, Patterson is actually warming up, loosening his arms like a pro ball player. Michele O’Hara from the brand consultancy Nerve talks enthusiastically about the game. Hirsch assures the room that nobody will die, and nobody will be asked to sing. First, the rules Bunny Bunny consists of one person making like a bunny while those on either side of him raise their hands above his head and do the ears. After a few seconds the bunny “throws” the responsibility across the circle to another potential rabbit, who must take up the chant without missing a beat. As soon as Hirsch mentions that this is an elimination game, the guys stand up straight and try to take in the rules. They see the big boss Patterson, who has done this seven times before and has never made it to the final three, getting his game face on, and they want in. By the time the game is over people are giggly and elated, and ready to see what’s next. The On Your Feet guys break out the easel pads and ask what it took to play Bunny Bunny well. They soon have a list: concentration, teamwork, breaking down walls, enthusiasm, alertness, risk-taking, listening, confidence. “This would be a good list for collaborating well at any level,” says Hirsch, and the penny drops. Do odd stuff. Make lists of new ideas. Apply lists. Time for triage On Your Feet formed in 1997 when Hirsch, a veteran improv performer and the artist responsible for “Upstream Downtown,” the fish sculptures on the parking structure at Southwest Third Avenue and Morrison Street, met Rob Poynton, who now heads the firm’s office in Madrid, Spain (there’s also one in London and Dublin, Ireland). Among the things they offer are “meeting triage” (when meetings are counterproductive), “high-performance ideation” exercises for creative people (e.g., coming up with character ideas for a Warner Bros. animation), and advice on how to communicate in presentations. One golden rule is to accept all offers — to say “yes, and … ” To do this you observe the other person carefully and respond to, rather than “block,” their suggestions. “One client, the director of the Hong Kong office of Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising, said: ‘This is great! I realize I block 80 percent of the time. After this I’m gonna block 70 percent!’ ” Robertson says. “He was really psyched about that.” Improv people refer to the rules they use for making things up as “forms.” At a performance by Brainwaves, a comedy improv group that shares members with On Your Feet, the audience supplies props and random lines of dialogue that the actors have to use. On a recent Thursday evening in the back of an Old Town gallery, Brainwaves are full of beans and having a great time, despite there being only 12 in the audience. Afterward Mame Pelletier explains that improv is not a rehearsal for something else. They do it because they love the freedom. “I’d do it in front of two people,” she says. “In fact, we have.” One word, and another Another form is the Word at a Time story, in which successive people make up a story using just one word each. In their office on the Eastbank Commerce Center, Hirsch, Robertson and Julie Huffaker, a cultural anthropologist, demonstrate it, coming up with this: “Once there were three big kings these kings lived in a castle made of stone the stone was soft and porous when it rained the stone leaked badly … ” Robertson explains, “If I really wanted to drive my agenda and wanted it to be about kings who made all the rules, I’d keep trying to bring it back to that.” When they do it with businesspeople they inevitably get someone who uses words like “rototiller” and “abalone” in order to get noticed, while other people complain that they always got stuck with “the,” “and” and “is.” The point is teamwork. “In business, people often all want it to go their individual way, and in the end the final product is mush,” Hirsch says. They have a complex theory of comedy, tested on clients such as Disney, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Wieden & Kennedy and others, which includes a list of what really makes an audience laugh: 1. Performers who really want to physically be where they are. 2. Watching people cooperate (here’s an idea, fill in the rest). Longtime Blazer fan Robertson says it can be as beautiful as a no-look pass. 3. Performers who are happy and willing to embrace a mistake. Listen up Tina Foster, senior vice president and region manager at U.S. Bank, used On Your Feet to get 150 branch managers thinking about how they communicate. Managers were asked to talk to their neighbor as if they were fit and well, and then sick and feeble. “The idea is to accept what’s given to you in terms of the communication, not to be waiting to talk, but to actually listen,” Foster says. U.S. Bank employees also learned to say “advance” and “color” during meetings, when they need to hurry someone along or get more detail. Scott Dawson, dean of the School of Business Administration at Portland State University, has taught a seminar there with Hirsch called “Improv and Business Communication.” Last week they used improv to run orientations for students in the master of business administration program. “It’s to get (students) comfortable with each other and let some guards down, so they are further along in the relationship before they start the program,” he says, adding that PSU was a pioneer in using improv along with Stanford and Duke universities. “Some of the execs don’t want to do this, but if you’re going to be a leader of a group you don’t exorcise yourself from the group.” This is why Patterson attends all the Trail Blazer improv meetings, which will include the players nearer the season’s start. And while he might take a few messages on his BlackBerry, he sees them through to the end. Come playoff season we’ll see who’s laughing.
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