The Three Laws of Performance - The Improv Connection (Part 1)

[Jerry Kail]

(The following is an entry from my blog THE DAILY IMPROVISER - http://the-daily-improviser.blogspot.com/ )

I admit it: There are times when I wonder if my quest to build bridges between the worlds of improv and Organizational/Human Development isn’t just a bit quixotic. And then the world drops a connection into my lap that encourages me to keep tilting.

I had such an experience as I completed reading The Three Laws of Performance, by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan. In the next-to-last chapter, Zaffron and Logan address the topic of mastery, which they describe as the state in which there is “nothing between you and the thing you’re dealing with.”

Zaffron and Logan first describe the “nothing between” concept as comprising what I would label personal mastery, in which the time gap between your thoughts and your actions is narrowed to the point that thinking and acting seem to occur simultaneously – an effect akin to the flow state I’ve described elsewhere. They then describe the concept in terms of (again, my categorization) interpersonal mastery, in which your interaction with another person isn’t filtered through layers of assumptions, biases, and “unsaid but communicated” messages. Instead, the two of you (as Zaffron and Logan put it) “dance with events as they happen, altering how situations occur to you and [the other] on the fly…. Performance becomes elegant and graceful.”

Well, folks … that’s improv, and I can’t think of a better way to describe it. Onstage improvising is precisely about sweeping away all of those intervening “things between” thought and action – self-consciousness, attempts to control the scene, the desire to be clever, etc. – so that you can engage in a seamless dance with your onstage partners. Similarly, as Zaffron and Logan demonstrate, mastery for the Daily Improviser means putting “beliefs, expectations, hopes, fears about [a] situation … on the shelf so you are not looking through them at what is in front of you.” Instead, the master’s “commitment is to moving forward, to seeing the situation in a way that allows for elevated performance.”

But wait! In making their points about mastery, Zaffron and Logan proceed to draw even more directly from the well of improv – and that’s really the connection that was dropped into my lap. I’ll reveal that connection in my next post.