Return of Spontaneity School: A Third Set of Improv Games for the Classroom and Work Environment

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Over the last few years, this blog’s most-read post has been the original Spontaneity School: 10 Improv Games to Develop Courage, Compassion, and Creativity. Last year, we put together a sequel list to complement the first. With another year of travels and workshops under the belt, here’s a third list to draw from. Hopefully, you’ll find them both useful and fun!

For anyone looking to tap more meaning and purpose from any of these games, try running a debrief that includes some version of the following questions:

1. What did you notice?
2. How did you feel during the exercise? What was your emotional experience of it?
3. What does this have to do with what we’re trying to accomplish? How does it apply?
4. What can you do going forward to implement these insights?

All right. That should count as enough prep. Let’s get to the games themselves! (You can follow the links immediately below if you want to go directly to a particular game.)

1. 1-2-3 or Clap-Snap-Stomp
2. Random Acts of Kindness
3. Colombia Warm-Up
4. You Pattern(s)
5. Complementary Poses
6. “Yes, and” Picnic
7. Word-at-a-Time Customer Service Letter
8. Portkey
9. Clover

1. 1-2-3 or Clap-Snap-Stomp

This game lights opens up a fresh can of ready-to-learn. As such, it’s become my go-to for opening a class or workshop: good laughs, healthy challenge, and a reliably powerful kicker of an insight.

Have folks break into pairs, one partner facing the other. Their task is to count to three again and again, as fast as they can, alternating numbers. Partner A says “One,” Partner B says “Two,” and A finishes the triplet by saying “Three.” As soon as they’ve finished, they start again, this time B leading with “One” so the counting loops around in continuous fashion. After a minute or so, check in with players to see how that went. You’ll likely find folks surprised by how difficult the task proved.

After that first round, offer directions for the second: with the same partners as before, count back and forth again, but instead of saying “One,” participants should clap. Now, the sequence goes Clap-“Two”-“Three.” Invite players to register their reactions if they “fail” or make a mistake. What happens, specifically, in their bodies, faces, or thoughts? After this round, you’ll often find that your pairs struggled even more—the toggling between verbal and kinesthetic processing takes a bit more brain time for most.

The next round ups the ante even further: instead of saying “Two,” players now snap their fingers so the rhythm goes Clap-Snap-“Three.” Same partners, same task: alternate back and forth, going as quickly as possible. Before sending folks off, however, offer one other instruction. If a player makes a mistake—saying the wrong number, making the wrong gesture, taking too long or just getting generally flummoxed—they should raise both their hands above their head with a joyous release of “Woo Hoo!!!” (Yes, this is a simplified version of the classic improviser tribe’s Failure Bow or Circus Bow.) In a brief debrief after the round, make sure to ask what it was like to inject the Woo Hoo! into the proceedings. Most likely, you’ll find that it lightens the mood, adds laughter, and makes the mistakes kind of fun. And there’s good reason for that.

The fourth round makes the entire pattern kinesthetic, shifting all the way from “One-Two-Three” to Clap-Snap-Stomp. Here, the task becomes like a step routine, a rhythm to sink into. After giving directions but before sending the troupe off to try, ask them to tweak their Woo Hoo! practice as well. This time, when either partner messes up, both should break into the enthusiastic Woo Hoo!. After giving a good bit of time for the practice, again check in with the group. How was that? What did you notice? Usually—though not always—your pairs will find this easier than the previous two rounds. And the shared Woo Hoo! builds the feeling of partnership. Interesting.

As a final challenge, invite your pairs to go all the way back to the beginning to try their original “One-Two-Three” verbal sequence. Almost inevitably, folks find that they’re faster, more comfortable, and more connected—and they make fewer errors. This makes a great teaching moment: in just a few minutes, we have put ourselves through an honest challenge and we’ve achieved real growth without even realizing it. The metaphors for teaching and learning are plenty here. Feel free to dive in explicitly or just to nod in their direction. Either way, the exercise will hold its sturdy own.

Insider Tips:

• In each round, encourage folks to go even faster. We tend to slow down to keep ourselves safe and to do the job “correctly.” The point of this game is to get to that dangerous (and fun!) edge of imminent “failure.”
• Pay attention to posture and stance. As is almost always true, an athletic, engaged, and ready position should help a pair’s performance.
• When folks reveal that they’ve discovered a helpful pattern—I noticed early on that I could just concentrate on my responsibility as “1-3-2”—you can note how cleverly the mind looks for solutions to keep us safe. Honor that impulse and then encourage folks to put such ‘tricks’ on hold for the time being. Let them sink into the uncertainty.
• When you first introduce the “Woo Hoo!,” practice a few times with everyone together so they can work through any hesitation for the goofiness of it. Oh, everyone else is participating? I guess I can go there too.
• Invite participants to make eye contact with their partners and see if that changes the experience at all.

2. Random Acts of Kindness

This brand new game comes from the warm heart of fellow Applied Improvisor, Nat Tsolak. With your whole group in a circle, one person shares a random act of kindness that the person to their right offered at some point in the recent past. Nearly without fail, the story of the random act will bring a smile to the face of the person who offered the kindness—even though the story and act have been invented on the spot. As Nat has written, “This game is good for all levels, beginners and advanced, can build trust quickly within the group,…helps to build a group mind, helps with character creation, gift-giving, and the game itself is an act of kindness toward the other person and toward oneself.”

Insider Tips:

• Try having the storyteller speak to the group about the person or to the person directly and notice how each changes the tone or feeling.
• Remind folks about the importance of making it up—as in, I wouldn’t share something that I saw my neighbor actually do in real life. The conceit maintains a bit of personal privacy within the game’s palpable tenderness.
• As with Sound Ball, encourage folks to catch themselves if they start preparing. Invite them instead to listen wholeheartedly to each Random Act as the stories move around the circle and trust that what they need will be there when their turn arrives.
• If a storyteller struggles to come up with something, encourage them to look in the eyes of the person they’re speaking about. That simple connection can open new channels of inspiration.
• No need to make the acts impressive or clever or funny—the game isn’t a competition to see who can come up with the best story. Trust the power in mundane, everyday random acts of kindness.
• My mentor Patricia Ryan Madson suggests a lovely “yes, and” adaptation for the game: have the recipient of the story—the alleged kindness-doer—add to the telling with a short affirmation. Even when we’re making it up, it can be hard to hear our good deeds brought to light. Take care to ensure the additional words actually affirm (“Yes, I could see that the old woman really needed a hand.”) rather than diminish (“I knew I’d earn brownie points with the wife.”) the kindness of the act.

3. Colombia Warm-Up

I learned this great game from Shawn Kinley of the Loose Moose Theatre in Calgary, Alberta—and he learned it from a colleague in Colombia, South America. Paradoxically, it works well both for focusing attention and for building multi-channel awareness.

Have your group form pairs, one partner facing the other. One partner, the first leader, makes a gesture or takes a posture and holds it. Tell folks that you, as a facilitator, will establish a rhythm by clapping. With each subsequent clap, the leader should take a new position—and the follower should take the leader’s previous position. Both move at the same time and then hold their respective “new” positions. After a while with that leader-follower pairing, ask folks to switch roles and then play again.

For a second iteration, switch to a verbal version of the game. Here, the leader starts an improvised story. See if they can relax about having to create a “good” story—the quality isn’t really the point. Instead, with each rhythmic clap, the leader says the next word of the story. As with the kinesthetic version, the follower follows along, one word behind the story teller. When the leader says, “Once,” the follower waits. When the leader says “upon,” the follower says “Once.” And so on. Make sure to give the first follower a chance to lead as well.

For the brain melting piece de resistance, you can play both versions…simultaneously. One person leads the gestures while following the words. The other person leads the words while following the gestures. It takes great concentration and effort—or maybe it takes relaxing into a different kind of intelligence than we normally use. Either way, when pairs find the sweet spot of shared flow, even for a few moments, it creates strong feelings of accomplishment. And the ‘mistakes’ along the way prove great fun as well.

Insider Tips:

• As the pace-setter, make sure to start slow and steady so folks get the idea of the game. Once they get the hang of it, you can slowly increase the tempo.
• If the follower finds themselves in synch with the leader—those mirror neurons can take over!—just invite them to pause to reestablish the one-behind lag without being too hard on themselves.
• Encourage the leader to challenge the follower by playing with their full range of possible movements. Go high, go low. Try big, try small. Make funny or emotional faces. Be bold.

4. You Pattern(s)

This pattern game takes a while to set up but proves well worth the wait, challenging the group’s attention muscles and bringing to light waves of insight for communication in chaotic settings.

Start with the group standing in a circle. Explain that you’ll be forming a pattern in the group that will include each person once before returning back to you. Gesture directly at someone else in the group—an open hand comes across as less aggressive than a finger point—and say “You.” That person then gestures to someone else and says the same “You.” Those who have received the “you” already should keep their non-pointing hand on their heart or on top of their head to show they’ve already been included. Eventually the pattern comes back to you, the facilitator.

Once the pattern is complete, review the pattern—each person pointing to the same person they did when the pattern was established—a few times to make sure the group has it well remembered. Experiment with starting a few simultaneous runs through the pattern so the group has three or four “you”s operating at once. Pause to debrief as necessary.

OK. So that’s the first pattern. Next, get a suggestion for a new category that has plenty of options to it (“animals,” “breakfast cereals,” “types of shoe” or something similar). This time, establish a new pattern where each person adds a different example of something in that category while pointing to a new person—not the person they pointed to during the “you” pattern. If animals were the category, we might hear “Iguana,” then “ocelot,” “seahorse,” “duck,” “leopard,” “owl,” “tortoise,” “honey badger,” “coyote,” “scorpion,” and “peacock.” Again, folks should indicate in some way that they’ve already been selected for the pattern.

As with the first, you can review the new pattern to make sure the group has it down, initiating a few concurrent cycles. Once the group has demonstrated mastery there, reintroduce the “You” pattern and see if you can get that successfully running with the new pattern at the same time.

When the group has two patterns down, establish a third with a new category—again, with folks pointing to another different person—and see if you can get all three going at once.

Insider Tips:

• The first time through, recommend that folks pay careful attention who they send the “you” to and whom they receive it from.
• If the group “drops” a pattern—you find that it has simply disappeared—you can simply reinitiate that pattern or, maybe more valuably, explore with the group why and how patterns get dropped. That conversation often proves fruitful for exploring a crucial component to the game. Your job as a sender is not just to put your message out there, it’s to make sure it was received.
• Feel free to make the game even more challenging by adding even more patterns, establishing one pattern by throwing a koosh or other soft object, or by having people mill about the room. Or maybe you do one pattern silently. For an even crazier experience, add in a Go! Pattern.  Get creative and see what happens!

5. Complementary Poses

A super-simple exercise, but an important one as a lead-in to many other games like I Am a Tree or Build a Machine. One person, anyone, starts in the middle of a group circle and strikes a pose, any pose. A second person comes into the middle to take and hold a complementary pose. They could match the person in the middle, mirror them, or create a mini-story snapshot with the addition—again, anything’s valid. The first person then says “Thank you” to the second and someone new comes in to offer a complementary pose to the one left behind. Person #2 then says “Thank you” to person #3 and the game continues on from there.

Insider Tips:

• Make sure the “Thank you” stays sincere and warm-hearted rather than sarcastic or dismissive.
• Encourage folks to follow their impulses here—poses need not be funny, clever, cute, or original. Be average. They can even step into the circle before they even know what they’re going to do, letting their momentum of commitment lead them to the complementary pose they eventually take.

6. “Yes, and” Picnic

This game offers a guttural glimpse at the power of saying yes to our partner’s offers. I usually do this in pairs as well, though it could work fine in groups of three as well. After determining who will start, the first partner makes a suggestion for a picnic. Partner #2 responds by saying “No…,” making sure to offer a reason why they can’t or won’t do what Partner #1 recommended. (As with the “thank you” in complementary poses, it helps to keep the “no” here pleasant. It’s not dismissive or angry in response to the idea, it’s just that there’s a reason why it won’t work.) Then Partner #2 offers their own suggestion and Partner #1 responds with a “no” of their own, again with an explanation. Allow the pair to go back and forth a at least three times before pausing to debrief how the planning went.

For the second round, have the partners wipe the slate clean so they’re planning an entirely different picnic. This time, rather than starting with “no,” they should start each response with the words “Yes, but…” After a partner explains the “but,” they make their own suggestion for the picnic.

In a third round, have each partner start every offering after the first with “Yes, and.” See if they can have what they add be specifically related to whatever suggestion just came through. So rather than responding to “Let’s bring our guitars to the waterfront” with “Yes, and we can bring sandwiches,” they might offer “Yes, and we can bring microphones and an amplifier as well.”

Even a short debrief will almost always draw out the greater joy, stronger connection, and more imaginative creativity that comes from working in the lsat mode. As Keith Johnstone proffers, “Those who say yes are rewarded by the adventures they have. Those who say no are rewarded by the safety they attain.”

Insider Tips:

• Most folks get absolutely nowhere with their picnic plans in the first round. They might make a touch of progress in the second, but often feel even worse because they’re hearing the “yes” but not feeling its full power. The “yes, and” round then provides a huge surge in energy and laughter as people start to make fantastical progress on their interesting picnics. That said, make sure all the way through to acknowledge whatever experience people are having—it’s not always predictable.
• If you have time and want to explore the concept even further, you can try a fourth round where each partner starts with “What I like about that idea is…____________, and….” This keeps the “yes, and” momentum going while also helping folks see that the literal words matter less than the looking for something positive to build on and then doing that building.

7. Word-at-a-Time Customer Service Letter—This is a simple standby improv exercise but a powerful one for helping practice the principles of listening well, making your partner look good, and saying ‘yes, and.’ Working in twos and speaking aloud, have each pair write a customer service letter, alternating to contributions one word at a time. Once the letter feels done, they should “sign” it with a name and then write a return letter back from the customer service department.

Encourage game players to simply trust the obvious when listening for the next word. If they’re really paying attention to their partner—rather than trying to control or plan ahead—the next word will likely be right there.

Insider Tips:

• The faster folks go, the easier it becomes because the letter starts to sound more natural.
• To that end, recommend that players use a regular speaking tone of voice rather…than…opting…for…one…robotic…word…at…a…time.
• Encourage participants to monitor their own inclination to maintain control over the outcome of the letter and to instead surf the wave of the uncertainty as it heads toward the shore of a completed letter.

8. Portkey

This has become one of my favorite improv exercises, a great way to develop confidence in one’s access to images and ideas, to sharpen eye for detailed locations, and to connect players with each other. It’s also a slower, quieter game that can be used as a healthy balance to more vocal, upbeat experiences.

The game’s name traces back to the Harry Potter books where a portkey was an everyday object that, when touched by wizards, would transport them away from the Muggle world off to Hogwarts or some other location in the wizarding world.

Sitting in a circle, get a suggestion for an everyday object. Iron. Wristwatch. Bowling ball. Dining room table. Sneaker. Or something, anything, like that. That object will likely trigger a memory for someone. That person then starts the round by repeating the name of the object with “…takes me to…” and describes the location from their past where they see that object. For example, I might say “Iron takes me to the dining room of our apartment growing up in Providence, Rhode Island, where the ironing board opened up from a little mini-closet in the wall.”

Once that person has identified the location, they describe it as well as they can in detail: “We had a circular butcher block table with four metal legs that fanned out from a stainless steel center post. The wall-to-wall carpet was an olive/lime color, a tight weave that stayed close to the floor. There were no doors in the room but three passageways, one that went into the narrow kitchen, one that went to the bathroom and bedrooms, and one that opened up to the hardwood floor living room. Two second-floor windows faced across to the apartment building next door.” That person closes that turn by taking one of the objects they identified in their location and passing that along to the next person. Here, I might say “I give ‘carpet’ to Dominic.” And then Dominic would say “Carpet takes me to…” and begin the process again.

The purist version of the game sticks only to a strict description of the physical locale. Look around. What’s in that space? What colors, textures, sizes and elements? Who’s there? Adhering to this intention really develops the ability to “see” locations on stage and helps improvisors trust their own sense of what might be around them at any moment. It also takes less time.

A second version welcomes in a bit of story with each location. In the example above, I might have added, “Around the corner in the kitchen was where we one time accidentally left a chicken cooking in the oven when we went away and when we came back home later that afternoon, the whole place had been filled with smoke–the burnt chicken smell made us cough for weeks.” This version weaves a group together well as you create mini-snapshots, moments of meaning you wouldn’t otherwise think to share with each other.

Insider Tips:

• Have the object take you to an actual memory, not something made up.
• Remind folks they don’t need to work hard or wait for an “interesting” location or “clever” story. There’s a profundity in the mundane that emerges. We learn a great deal about each other from the neutral snapshots we rarely ever share.
• It doesn’t matter if the object itself shows up in the new location, only that it takes you to that specific location. When someone mentioned “iron,” most might think of a steam iron for removing wrinkles. But the word could have taken me to railroad tracks behind my house or to a football field where my brother and I mimicked the Pittsburgh Steelers Iron Curtain defense of the mid 1970’s.
• If you use the story version, keep an eye out for the tendency for the stories to keep elongating. That can take more time than you’d like and get away from a more pleasurable rhythm of using the portkey effect. One way to encourage shorter stories is to remind folks that they don’t have to provide background or explanation. They can concentrate on describing the location.
• With the second version, you can also use the exercise as way to explore components of effective story-telling. Which stories were listeners most moved by? Which scenes held the group’s attention? What components do the more riveting stories share in common? And so on. If you use this approach, do take care so that it doesn’t become a competitive “who told the best story?” evaluation—that can seal off the good connections the game has just generated. (Thanks to Lainey Forman for this use of Portkey!)

9. Clover

This word association exercise claims the top spot in my friend and colleague Pam Victor’s pantheon of go-tos. It has a Zen-like meditative quality and breeds so much of what makes improv great: relaxed readiness, simple contribution, and an ongoing faith in the game’s unfolding.  In some ways, it’s similar to the game Convergence, but it’s a bit more subdued and naturally egalitarian.

With the group in a circle, get a suggestion for a noun. When someone responds (let’s say with “camera”), the whole group repeats that word in unison: “Camera!” The person to the left or right of the originator then generates a second word based on the first, like “snapshot.” The next person in the circle word-associates with that new word (with “snapshot,” not “camera”), doing their best to let go of any echo from the original word. Here, one could generate “moment” and that would clearly be free from “camera.” “Instagram” might still have some trace of it. And that’s fine. “GoPro,” on the other hand, would still be sticking to “camera” rather than responding to “snapshot.” One way to help is to prompt a person to silently start with “When I hear ‘snapshot’ it makes me think of…”

Eventually, the goal—though it remains loosely held—is to circle back around to the original word. It can take a while but it will happen. Ideally, the momentum becomes obvious enough that the whole group could say the original word in unison. Once the word association returns back to “camera,” start a second round with that same word and then, eventually, a third.

Insider Tips:

• Help folks see that the word association need not be clever, provocative, or funny. It’s simply what comes logically and naturally to mind in response to the immediately previous word.
• Though there are no ‘wrong’ answers to offer, less-right answers might include a created joke, a non-sequitur, or a forced lurch toward the original word. Go for the natural extension of the word that came before.
• See if you can model the unhurried, effortless discovery that the game’s going for and coach folks away from lurching too quickly toward the first word. Admittedly, there’s a paradox here: you’re returning to the origin without trying to return to the origin. Pam calls it “skating the razor’s edge of non-doing,” going for “that eye-brightening sensation of recognition and natural association, which is quite different [from] an external, exerted force.” That sounds right to me.
• Encourage participants to notice if they start judging their own (or others’) words as “good” or “bad.” Oftentimes, the words that seem like missteps or misdirections can take the game on a delightful side jaunt or can get you back home in an unpredictable way. It’s all good. Or, more accurately, it’s all what it is.

Good luck and have fun with these games–let us know how it goes!

If you want to check out the first list of Spontaneity School games, you can go here.
For the second list, try this link.