5 reasons improvisation is more important than ever

13 Dec 5 reasons improvisation is more important than ever

At the Nursery, we believe that creative collaboration is a natural, human activity. It is both productive and fun, and always has been. But why is it so important in the current market? What makes improv an essential skill in the 2020’s? Here are five reasons why taking improv training with your team will give you skills that you need right now. 

1 – The world is changing at breakneck speed. Improv can help you adapt

It is now a full time job to keep up with new technologies and market changes. It can feel like by the time you have mastered or understood anything, it is already obsolete. Hiding under your duvet is not going to work, so improv helps you to learn how to learn, to get comfortable with discomfort, embrace novelty and remain calm as everything changes around you.

2 – Robots are coming for your jobs. Improv will make you a human that cannot be replaced. 

It is often repeated that workers will now have five or six in the course of our careers and the gig economy means many of us may have several at the same time. Plus, as AI gets more and more sophisticated, more and more types of jobs will disappear. Just as robots took the repetitive physical jobs of factories, AI will take the repetitive information jobs of offices. Improv keeps you agile and creative, responding in ways that robots can’t. Many of the jobs we will have are not even invented yet!

3 – The service economy is king. Improv can help you communicate.

In 2018, the service economy accounted for 81% of jobs and 83% of economic output in the UK. That’s most people, most of the time. And every service job is a human job, with the key skills being the ability to connect and empathise with other people in order to give them the best experience. The collaboration at the core of improv teaches you to see things from different perspectives and learn to collaborate to give people the most positive experience possible. 

4 – Our attention is under threat. Improv can help you focus. 

The more information we have available, the more we are convinced that we are reading the wrong thing, that the really useful and interesting tweet is just past the end of the page. Whether you believe that our attention spans are getting shorter, or we are just getting better at hacking them, the best minds in the world now spend a lot of their time trying to catch and keep our attention. This threatens the sustained attention that we need to make deep, original work happen. Improv teaches you to make choices and stick to them, focussing your attention in one place and keeping it there. Take back control of your attention!

5 – Humans are best when they connect

Individual humans are smart, but we even smarter when we are collaborative. In a globally connected world, functional networks will win over genius individuals. Because there is a difference between a connected world and a sensitive world; we can talk to anyone we want to, but we must remember to also have the empathy to hear them and work with them. Genius is shared, especially when human knowledge is complex. 

And as a bonus…

6 – Fun builds teams together

Improv is just great fun. And when people have fun together, they form strong, complex bonds which lead to easier, more productive working environments and create resilience you need when things get tough. Laughter is not frivolous. It is powerful. 

To book a free consultation with one of our trainers and find out how improv can help you and your team, email jules@thenurserytheatre.com.