• Team and Community Building • Creative Thinking • Innovation • Product Development

• New Solution Finding • Change Management  • Idea Generation • Vision & Strategy Development

• Jumpstarting Inspiration • Risk Taking • Innovative Culture • Organizational Storytelling

Improv and Inspiration • Raises energy, alertness and positive feelings • Engages & integrates different parts of the brain & body • Unleashes an aliveness only found in the  moment • Increases self awareness and expands self concept • Becomes self motivating because it’s fun • Awakens & focuses previously dormant creative potential • Generates edge-of-your-seat excitement	Improv and Ideation • Creates new neural pathways and releases endorphins • Fosters the ability to think on your feet & under pressure • Develops confidence in navigating the unknown • Generate more novel ideas in a shorter amount of time • Develops flexible thinking • Activates the imagination in new and surprising ways • Expands the "playing field" of the mind
Improv and Innovation • Enables more risk taking and spontaneous behaviors • Shakes people out of traditional ways of doing things • Increases ability to add to other’s ideas in inventive ways • Challenges assumptions • Breaks habitual patterns of thinking, being, and doing • Fosters experimentation without fear of failure • Allows new patterns, directions & prototypes to emerge	Improv and the Creative Team/Culture • Instantly equalizes every member of the group • Breaks down barriers quickly and non-threateningly • Sets the stage for ongoing generative co-creation • Increases trust between team/group/org. members • Fosters thinking in terms of OURS. “Look what WE did!” • Enhances the skill of supporting; giving and receiving • Engages the whole person & whole team

Michelle's Improv Story I have studied and practiced improv since 1996. I’ve experienced short-form, long-form, and "tornado" form improv, and performed full-length, completely improvised plays for from 2001 to 2010. Each week, a unique and different play emerged from our troupe of 4 or 5. When it worked, it looked like magic. Our audience would say, "That HAD to be scripted." It wasn’t. But when it didn't, they'd say, "That looked hard." It was. I became fascinated by what mades improv work. What creates peak level creativity in our group and others? What allows a coherent, sense-making structure to emerge from nothing but a location? Why did it work sometimes and not as well at others? I discovered it was all about being present, committing to the good of the whole and adhering to the improv principles and "ways of being" (i.e., Make everyone else look good and Yes And). If the improvisers adhered to certain ways of being, creativity would skyrocket. And so would the coherence of the play. The brain is naturally a meaning making system, and I observed a self-organized logic that would show up in the better plays that was lacking in the others. The more in-the-moment the performers would stay (in other words, getting out of our own way), and the more supportive of their team, the more coherent and organized the play would be. I became a serious student of improv theory - reading the seminal books in the field and observing the patterns in my group and other groups. I soon recognized the connections between adhering to the principles of improvisational theater in a performance and being able to adapt, create and improvise effectively in the work place. The same principles that allow a performing group to create a 90-minute play out of nothing but a location are the same principles that allow groups, teams, and organizations to solve problems in new ways and reach peak levels of creativity and innovative thinking, and become a more cohesive team. The principles are the container that allow individuals to innovate and the self-organizing creativity of a group to get to the next level. Passionate about the transformative power of improv outside of the performance setting, I teamed up with other like-minded souls who do similar work and established Quantum Leap Business Improv.