The Interesting Stuff
theatre games to help immigrant children assimilate into American life. As she noticed how these games helped people get back in touch with their creativity, she started to focus more on this. And her son, Paul Sills, took this a step further by co-founding a theatre company utilising these games and inventing some more. This company eventually morphed into The Second City, which has been the breeding ground for numerous comedy actors such as Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, John Belushi, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Dan Aykroyd, Mike Myers, and many many more. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Keith Johnstone was developing games to help his actors become more spontaneous and creative. He created concepts around status and blocking, and an improv form he called TheatreSports. This has since gone all around the world, and was the inspiration for the TV show Whose Line Is It Anyway? with its merry band players including Josie Lawrence, Paul Merton, Tony Slattery, Ryan Stiles and Colin Mochrie.
What is Improvisation?
JULY 2025
Human beings are natural improvisers. Life is rarely scripted and so we have evolved the ability improvise. We do it all the time and have combined it with our imaginations for the purposes of entertainment ever since the first cave dwellers sat around the fire telling stories. Improvisation as an art form arrived in the 16th century with Commedia Dell'Arte. Here we had a groups of actors roaming Europe from town to town performing plays whose scenarios and characters were broadly decided but where the dialogue and action were made up on the spot.
Sadly, this form of entertainment fell out of favour as theatre became more structured and elitist. Until, that is, the 1930's when a woman called Viola Spolin started making up
And now, although Whose Line is no longer being made in the UK, we have an improvised musical in the West End, Showstopper!, a touring improvised comedy based on the novels of Jane Austen, Austentatious, as well numerous clubs both large and small offering totally made up, on the spot entertainment for all. Interest in improv is flourishing, as is the awareness that the techniques of improv can help in many areas of our lives.
How Playfulness Builds Adaptability
AUGUST 2025
In a climate of AI disruption, global uncertainty, and cultural shifts, companies don’t need perfection. They need people who can pivot, improvise, and respond in real time.
And according to McKinsey and Company research, only 16% of business leader respondents feel that their organisations are well prepared to “anticipate and react to external shocks and disruption” (The State of Organizations, 2023).
So what happens when a team lacks adaptability? Often, we see them freezing in the face of uncertainty; or they tend to default to laying blame on others. Teams can operate too independently without sharing information - the silo mentality - or waste time on perfectionism. All of which can result in burnout.
But what does adaptability really mean?
It is much more than just tolerance for change. An adaptable individual/ team/ organisation has the qualities of emotional resilience, creative problem-solving, open-mindedness, as well as the ability to learn and unlearn.
And why is this important? Because we are seeing unprecedented and rapid change in a mass conglomeration of politics, economics, culture, climate and technology. It is a challenge to stay apace, and yet we must. With AI, automation, remote and hybrid work, rising uncertainty and burnout, there is an urgency to adapt while, at the same time, ensuring the well-being of your teams.
But how is this achieved? By focusing more on soft skills, especially emotional intelligence, collaboration and of course, adaptability. The practical strategies an organisation can take to develop these soft skills in their employees are building psychological safety, rewarding learning and risk-taking, and using experiential learning such as improv.
Which is where The Serious Fun Group can make a real difference. For example, in one of our in-person improv workshops, a team leader realised they were unintentionally shutting down ideas by trying to ‘fix’ them too quickly. Through exercises such as “Yes,…and”, the team learned to pause, listen and co-create solutions. Yes,… and this was a small shift with a big impact!
So the question is, are you creating space for your team to practice adaptability before the real-world pressures hit?