We’re All Improvising

April 5, 2020 — 26 Days after WHO Declares COVID-19 a Pandemic

This morning I had a rare 30 minutes to myself: no Zoom meetings, no webinars, no conference calls, no emergency brainstorming.

So I decided to clean up my email inbox.

As I went back day by day and then week by week, I caught myself thinking, “March 5th, what an innocent time that was.”

Ironically, that day started with a call from a new contact I was introduced to at Zoom to talk about ways in which my company, The Second City, might work with this burgeoning remote conferencing service.

Fortuitous timing.

After that, a working session with our partners at Thrive Global for a new culture program we’d been developing; lunch with two brand new hires; two afternoon meetings downtown; a quick dinner break at Roots in Piper’s Alley; and then a live taping of my podcast at The Second City Training Center. I remember one of the audience members couldn’t stop sneezing and insisted on shaking our hands after the taping. We knew enough at that simpler, more gentle time, to run to the bathroom and wash our hands. But we had no idea what we were truly in for. 

Right now, we’re all improvising.

And in my work, that means we are turning a 60-year-old live entertainment and education company into a virtual entertainment and education company.

The Second City has become a 60-year-old start up.

But what this means for all of us is that we are all working script-less. So we need to mine the toolkit of an improviser.

We need to say “yes, and” rather than “no” or “yes, but,” as a way to create an abundance of ideas and options; we need to operate with an ensemble mindset where all of us are better than one of us; and we need to see all obstacles as gifts, as we rapidly experiment to discover what works and what doesn’t in this new environment.

We need to play the scene we’re in, not the scene we want to be in.

Let’s not pretend this isn’t hard. It is. But let’s also not pretend that things were going so great before the global pandemic. And I’m not just talking about the national political conversation (which has become lethally tribal), I’m talking about the way we work: the many ways in which we don’t listen, we don’t support, and we don’t allow for the kind or risk and failure that is the antidote to the kinds of mistakes that can kill a business. 

We needed to be better improvisers then. We need to be significantly better improvisers now. 

Three weeks ago, The Second City Training Center hosted a few writing classes online.

As of today, our entire program has moved to virtual delivery and we have retained 85% of our students; we are still working with our corporate clients to move our workshops and entertainment programs to be distant-led. We even found a hidden benefit, as companies can invite way more employees across the company to attend; and last night we announced that we would deliver our first live improv show via Zoom. We had 150 reservations last night.

By this morning, we were up to 2,000. 

The Second City created a new virtual business in about 16 working days. 

We’re improvising. 

Now it’s your turn.

—Kelly Leonard, Executive Director, Learning and Applied Improvisation at Second City Works

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