In the 1980s, The Walt Disney Company rebranded its Disney Parks engineers as \u201cimagineers,\u201d and I think \u201cinstructional imagineering\u201d would be a great rebranding of instructional design (if not for the copyright issue) because I often feel that the work I do is closer to engineering than design. Instructional designers are problem-solvers, but the work we do is not just problem-solving. It\u2019s creative problem-solving, with each new project having new and specific challenges that often need a little imagination to solve\u2013and a little improvisation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The history of the pedagogy of improvisation is traced back to the work of two women, Neva Boyd and Viola Spolin, working in Chicago in the 20s and 30s<\/a>. Boyd was a sociologist doing social work with poor immigrant communities at Hull House. She published a theory of play<\/a> based on her work, which highlighted the positive socialization skills learned by children during games, and theatre or storytelling games in particular. Spolin was a student of Boyd\u2019s, and developed a full drama pedagogy inspired by Boyd\u2019s theories for her own teaching practice. Spolin\u2019s son, Paul Sills, grew up in this environment and was one of the founders of The Second City in 1959.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2015, Kelly Leonard and Tom Yorton from The Second City published Yes, And: H<\/em><\/a>ow Improvisation Reverses “No, But” Thinking and Improves Creativity and Collaboration–Lessons from The Second City<\/em><\/a>, which was when I first learned about the workplace applications of improvisational comedy. There are a lot of videos and articles out there that also demonstrate improvisational comedy gamers as teambuilding exercises, but what I liked about The Second City’s approach is that it’s not just about the games. In 2018, Kelly Leonard and Anne Libera gave a presentation at Recode’s Code Conference on how the principles of improv can help foster better communication in the workplace. The presentation is just under twenty minutes, but it\u2019s filled with insights from the very start, one of my favorites being, \u201cImprovisation is practice in being unpracticed, which is how we all walk through the world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n