Accept every offer

TL;TR: Improvisation theater can teach us some tricks about how better collaborate and communicate with people. I try to explain that below but you’d better watch the explanation of Randy Nelson, ex-Pixar.

Something I find fascinating and I ask myself is why some people seem to get stuck forever with work, whereas others keep making progress. And, related, why some people collaborate better/more with colleagues than others?

We can observe what experts in making progress and collaboration do. I’ve recently been acquainted with actors of improvisation theater, or improv for short. They can develop full plays with many actors just from a starting idea, with no script whatsoever. The secret? Partly art, partly science, akin to musical improvisation, it comprises several techniques and tricks. But every improv practitioner will insist on one thing: never say no. Or, as mentioned by Randy Nelson in the presentation below: accept every offer¹.

Consider a fictitious improvised scene with 2 actors:

Actor A: “Hey dude! Long time no see you! Wanna grab a cup of coffee and catch up?”

Actor B: “No, thanks, I wouldn’t ever have coffee with you!”

No matter how comical it might seem, Actor B has said “no” to Actor A, and they’ll have a hard time going forward with the improvisation. Good improvisers might be able to pull themselves out from such a road block, but the common wisdom in improv is that Actor B should have “accepted” Actor A’s “offer” to keep the play going forward, potentially adding something else:

Actor A: “Hey dude! Long time no see you! Wanna grab a cup of coffee and catch up?”

Actor B: “Sure! I have so many things to tell you! The last weeks were crazy: I’ve married someone, had a child, divorced…”

A negation often starts with “no” or “but”. But (sic! 🤦) there are other subtle ways we can negate or reject someone’s offer:

Actor A: “Hey dude! Long time no see you! Wanna grab a cup of coffee and catch up?”

Actor B: “Who are you?”

Here Actor B is rejecting Actor A’s offer, again, no matter how comical it might seem, by radically changing the subject. Once you are aware of negations/rejections, you start seeing them everywhere, also at work:

• When getting style corrections in a document for internal circulation and of little importance.
• When getting suggestions about a piece of work, not being clear whether they improve anything.
• Discussing in detail the semantics of something that was written or said, instead of doing a charitable interpretation or focusing on the important parts.
• Using straw man arguments or similar without the corresponding data or an explanation. Or using other fallacies. For example, in software engineering, that could be “performance” or “clean code” kind of arguments.

More often than not, pride, fear and other feelings, or a lack of empathy at the moment, don’t allow us to see the value of the ideas of the other side. To make the situation worse, people will get stuck and repeat themselves forever if they don’t feel acknowledged². Indeed, I found that saying “yes, you’re correct, <explanation of my non-fulfilled expectation>”, asking questions and listening, to be more effective and smart than rejecting an idea upfront (no matter how bad I know it is).

PS: in the spirit of improvisation, I didn’t check the correctness of this text with my improv acquaintances, only with the spellchecker :)

PS2: on the improv subject, I enjoyed a lot the book “Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre” by Keith Johnstone (Ed. Methuen Drama). I looked up the actual title of the book and I was sad to learn that the author passed away a couple of days ago. He can go in peace, his legacy is huge.