We all improvise every day.
None of us goes through life with a script telling us what to do, and we don’t want one either.
We like to connect with others, share ideas, take a few risks, learn and make decisions as we go.
It’s a rational response to the predicament of life. The map is not the territory. A plan never survives contact with the enemy. We never know exactly what will happen next. So we just keep on feeling our way through it moment by moment.
In other words: life demands that we improvise.
To be honest with you, I’m not sure improvisation is the quite the right word. It has baggage from theatre and TV – but without it we don’t have a term for this commitment to being present and alive to what’s actually happening around us.
Being responsive is a contender. Jill Bernard defines improv as a ‘highly refined system of observing, connecting and responding’ and I think that’s a useful insight.
Mindfulness is another candidate for this missing word. The link to presence and self-awareness is clear but I think it comes short because it carries a sense of passivity and detachment.
My friend Belina Raffy uses the phrase intentional improvisation. I think that’s a really great way of seeing it. When we hold the intention of improvising with life as it happens it shifts our value system towards listening, accepting, sharing control and using everything to achieve our goals.
In this sense we improvise to fulfil our plans and expectations, using maps and guides as proxies for reality, and rolling our sleeves up for a full-contact engagement to get the kind of results we want.
The origin of the word improvise is from the Latin ‘providere‘ to make preparation for and it’s derivative ‘improvisus‘ meaning unforeseen. I sometimes say that no-one is better prepared than an improviser. This usually get a laugh but it’s actually close to the truth – people who are willing to perform on stage (or fully engage in every moment of life) have honed and applied their ability to listen, co-operate, negotiate, persuade and a hundred other things. The improvisers I perform with spend 100s of hours a year working on their skills and mindset, and many become teachers to really dive deep.
When we improvise in a conversation it means listening fully to what the other person is communicating visually, vocally and verbally and responding to them on all those levels. When a conversation is based on intentional improvisation creates endless potential for being seen, heard and understood and is pregnant with possibility. Which is very different to duelling monologues you get when people remain siloed within their rigid frames of reference.
This may all feel a long way from improvisation on the stage which can often feel light and playful. But there’s a crucial similarity between onstage and offstage improvisation: anyone who is improvising intentionally is trying to achieve a goal. More than that they are using every muscle, fibre, synapse and resource they can get hold of to reach that goal.
American psychologist Robert Sternberg defines intelligence as ‘Goal-oriented adaptive behaviour’ and that fits well with this view of improvisation. Perhaps intelligence is the word I am looking for, although it feels meshed into an anthropocentric worldview where intelligence is individualised. In my view improvisation is a form of applied collective intelligence.
Improvisers have goals for the style, content, tone and impact of a show. So when people perform in an improv comedy night their goal is to entertain the audience and make them laugh. When it’s a theatrical improv ensemble their goal is to create an emotional story with realistic characters (and some moments of laughter to support dramatic tension). In both these styles of improv we get there by improvising intentionally; that is by listening, accepting, sharing control and using everything.
It’s the same for any group of people who want to achieve anything they have to improvise with each other to engage with the moment-to-moment, day-by-day, month-by-month reality of their situation.
We all use our ability to improvise every day and yet we rarely take the time to develop it. That’s why I think the idea of intentional improvisation is so useful – it shines a light on this ability as a practice or a craft that we can learn about, practice, get better at and use to pursue our biggest, boldest goals.
Image Kathleen Macgregor, Unsplash
