Compliance 6-Pack: Part 6-Make Your Partner Look Good

Yeah so all of these things if you've been following along they all fit together and these are just six of many lessons um from improvisation that we find interesting parallels to the compliance space.

And this is a pretty big one because when we're on stage, particularly if you have some funny people, you want to shine, right? You want to get your funny thing out there.

You want to nail that line.

You want to... you know, hit the home run and all those things.

But we find is that when that's closer to stand-up comedy, if you have a bunch of people just trying to get their funny stuff out there, the scenes, it dies because you're just competing with each other.

And improvisation is an ensemble art form where we're all trying to create something bigger and better that we could create by ourselves.

So the way we do that is we focus on our partners.

I've heard some people describe improvisation as the art of being others-focused, right? by putting your focus on your teammates, on your ensemble members, one, it lessens the anxiety that you have in your head.

Amy Poehler famously said, it's easier to be brave when you're not alone.

And what she meant is when you're going on stage and you're with a group of people that you trust, it's really easy to be creative.

And you know that if I'm focusing, Tom, if I'm focusing on you, Whatever you say, I've got your back.

You cannot fail, because whatever you say, I'm going to pick you back up.

And by doing that, it takes the weight off of me thinking about all the anxiety I have in my head.

By putting yourself in service of others, it literally relieves the weight off your head.

I'll give you a quick improv example before we get to the compliance space.

We do these improv workshops for compliance teams and legal teams.

where we talk about some of these lessons, word choice, body language, different ways to take these philosophies and apply that to being more helpful compliance professionals.

You'll maybe start off and you'll put everybody in a circle and we go, somebody go in the middle and strike a pose and somebody will do it.

You probably got a theater major in there somewhere.

Somebody will go in the middle and do something silly and everybody giggles.

And we're like, all right, well, if you're outside the circle, run and take their place and strike a pose.

And as you can imagine, with legal and compliance professionals, it's not many people go.

Like somebody will eventually go and there's nervous laughter.

And then there's quiet and somebody else might go.

It's real slow.