Use the benefits of improvisation to improve professional performance. This is the simple (but far from simplistic) concept of ImprO2, an atypical training organisation aimed at executives, managers and employees of companies of different sizes and sectors.
A training method based on theatrical improvisation is the choice of Aude and David Diano, the founders of ImprO2, who created a new working tool. The method is aimed at managers, executives, managers or employees of companies of various sizes and sectors, and allows participants, based on their strengths, to develop new performance keys and new soft skills. More than classical improvisation, each improvisation exercise was thought out to allow us to work concretely on listening, acceptance, boldness, managing the relationship to error or usefulness to the other.
“Improv is a social game, it makes us enter into a relationship with the other, but above all in a fruitful relationship with the other through Acceptance, Listening, Involvement, Openness and Utility,” explain Aude and David Diano in their book Explore your talents recently published by ESF Sciences Humaines. Their agile method, based on the foundations of theatrical improvisation, allows them to learn to adapt by managing the unexpected and change. But beyond that, it is also an innovative method to develop or reinforce, individually or in groups, essential behavioural qualities in the turbulent world we are currently in.
At the level of a team, a department or even a subsidiary, the ImprO2 method makes it possible to work on motivation and commitment, to facilitate the implementation of a new corporate culture or to change practices. Individually, this method allows managers and executives to develop their management and negotiation skills, but also to gain in efficiency and better manage the relationship to workload, for example.
Why does it work? Probably because theatrical improvisation is not an exercise that is played alone but is on the contrary a discipline where interaction with others dominates. “In an improvisation no one exists independently of others and context. The key is precisely to adapt quickly to others, to the context, by managing the tempo and the unexpected to put all this at the service of a common stage,” Amaëlle Staron, actress consultant of the Lyon branch of ImprO2, explained at the last CFO Diner organized by DAF Magazine, before going on to put it into practice. At first taken aback, the assembly quickly took to the game with enthusiasm. Several times the bursts of laughter were heard without preventing the Daf present (they will recognize themselves) from showing themselves collectively brilliant!