No Script Required: How Improv Builds Better HR Leaders

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Dave Collins: It's not about agreeing to everything. It's about gathering more information. And that's the skill that is really fun to work with executives, because the light bulb goes on and they realize — just like on an improv stage — everything you need on stage in a show exists within your partner.

Monique: HR doesn't always happen in neat, well-planned moments. Sometimes it's messy, unpredictable, and completely unscripted. And while employees are burnt out from the pace, managers are being asked to lead through the stress without a playbook, which raises the question: How do you respond in the moment when there is no script?

Welcome to this special live recording of Honest HR, where we turn real issues facing today's HR departments into honest conversations with actionable insights. I'm your host, Monique Akanbi. Let's get honest.

In improv, there's one rule that changes everything — a theatrical exercise known as "yes, and..." In HR, it's usually more like, "It depends." So what if borrowing a few techniques from the improv stage could actually make us better decision-makers, stronger communicators, and more confident under pressure?

Today, we're joined by my new friend, Dave Collins, founder and CEO of Oak and Reeds, who has spent over 20 years combining the unexpected worlds of change management consulting and improvisational comedy. Welcome to Honest HR, Dave.

Dave Collins: Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Monique: Dave, you've built your career on what seems like an unlikely combination — change management consulting and improv comedy. What led you to discover these two worlds actually complement each other perfectly?

Dave Collins: I got my start as a change management consultant, and we were doing workplace strategy change management, which was basically designing new offices and then helping people move into them — federal agencies, tech companies. It boiled down a lot to, "We're going to take away your private offices, put you in an open plan, and give you lots more places to be collaborative and meet." And people didn't always love that.

What I learned in facilitating those conversations, those workshops, those meetings, is that I was helping guide people through uncertainty. And it was the same thing I was doing on stage, because I've been doing improv since high school — training people to get up on stage and deal with uncertainty in the moment with a clear set of tools.

Improv isn't just completely making it all up. You have a certain set of tools you go back to again and again that help you deal with, "Oh, my goodness, I don't know what's going to happen next. I can't plan it."

Monique: That's interesting. I can definitely see the connection to change and dealing with change. And for me, the comedy piece — I always say you have to laugh to stop from crying, right? So how do you reframe improv from that sense of unpreparedness to more of a strategic tool for professional decision-making?

Dave Collins: In improv, I think there's a common misconception. The thing about improv is it looks like it's completely chaotic. But really, there are three core tools at play. Everyone on stage is trained to notice everything — that's really the "yes" part in "yes, and." "Yes" is really just, "I heard what you're saying, and I picked up on all the fine details."

Improvisers are incredible listeners. They notice the tiniest facial expression, a little pause, a little moment of uncertainty — whatever that is, they pick up on it. And then the "and" is really just about doing more of that, going further with whatever that thought is.

As a leader, what I train people in my workshops is: if you train yourself to pause and notice everything your people are doing, the next step becomes really obvious. Instead of trying to think through steps seven, eight, nine, 10 in your head, you're just focused on what's in front of you. The next step will reveal itself — that's really the "and."

As leaders, we often get tied up with needing 10 different backup plans that almost never get executed, because the reality in front of you shifts before they're even relevant.

Monique: When I practiced HR, it was more like I planned my day, and then my day planned me. So I can definitely see the connection. And I love that you called out that those who do improv are very good listeners — which is such a valuable skill in the workplace. And the "and" is more about being curious, being able to dig deeper. Yes?

Dave Collins: Exactly. One of the pushbacks I get a lot when I introduce improv as a leadership tool is, "Well, I can't just say yes to everything. You're telling me we have to use this concept of yes, and — I'm not Amy Poehler, I'm not Stephen Colbert. I'm not on stage saying yes to everything and going with the flow."

But it's not about agreeing to everything. It's about gathering more information. And that's the skill that is really fun to work with executives on, because the light bulb goes on. They realize that — just like on an improv stage — everything you need in a show exists within your partner. So if you have that mindset, you don't have to do that much work on stage. Everything you need is coming from your partner, as long as you pay attention.

Monique: And you're referencing the stage, but I'm also thinking about the workplace — we're pretty much on stage there too. We don't always realize who's watching us. So I can definitely see that parallel. With so many employees experiencing change fatigue, how does rethinking our relationship with failure help HR professionals build confidence in those high-pressure situations?

Dave Collins: It's a great question, and this is where my background in change management and improv really started to come together. You can look at any study — Gartner, Deloitte, anyone examining change fatigue — and you'll find that most leaders, especially people managers in the middle, are struggling with fatigue and with the ability to lead teams through constant change.

It's not the '90s anymore. There's not one change and then two quarters of business as usual. As one of my clients called it, it's permanent white water — we're always in the middle of the rapids.

I think it's really important to reframe change fatigue not as a strategic problem — like we need more change consultants, more Gantt charts, more schedules. It's an emotional intelligence problem. It's about arming individuals with the capacity to understand how their brains and bodies react under uncertainty, and to know what to ask for in terms of support.

Monique: So how do you balance change — because there's change for the sake of changing, which I think causes a lot of fatigue — versus change that is necessary? My rule is, if something changes, I give it 24 hours to settle, because the likelihood of it changing again within that time is pretty high. In terms of balancing that fatigue and using the emotional intelligence you talked about, how do you help people manage that?

Dave Collins: The example I always give is that change fatigue, at its core, is usually the pressure to be good at something too early. It's the pressure that, as a leader, I have to be fully on board and be an expert, because everyone's looking to me to be perfect at something I'm actually a beginner at.

And something that improvisation teaches everyone — whether you're a 30-year veteran or learning for the first time — is to lower the perceived cost of failure, to make making mistakes feel lower stakes. I actually want to teach a tool for that right now. Do you mind standing up? I'm going to make you stand up maybe two or three more times. This is one of my favorite tools, and I teach it at the beginning. It's called the failure bow.

In a workshop, any time you make a mistake — instead of getting nervous, upset, or frustrated, or wanting to walk out and check your phone — I encourage everyone to celebrate mistakes. Any time you make a mistake, I challenge everyone to put their arms out as wide as they can, scream out, "I failed," take a big, ridiculous-looking bow, and then give yourself a little round of applause.

We can all do this together so we all feel weird and awkward for the very first time. Let's do it on the count of three. Ready? Arms out, "I failed," big bow. One, two, three.

Monique: I failed.

Dave Collins: I failed. Big, ridiculous-looking bow. Give yourself a round of applause. Amazing.

The point is learning by doing, learning through trial and error — fail fast, whatever catchphrase you want to use. Improvisers know that mistakes are gifts. Mistakes are how we learn. Mistakes are really just practice, and practice is just a series of controlled mistakes.

If you can get your mind there, change doesn't feel so scary, because you know you're going to have to make some public mistakes while learning something new. And you don't have to fear what that will change in others' perceptions of you.

Monique: Can you walk us through a specific scenario where an HR leader might use failure reframing during a difficult employee conversation or an organizational change initiative?

Dave Collins: Round of applause — who loves giving constructive feedback? Just a couple of hands. Those are my people.

I teach feedback a lot. Constructive, challenging feedback conversations are one of those really important examples. I'll coach managers on how to give feedback all the time, and usually there are all these stories in a manager's head: "My direct report is just going to freak out when I give them this feedback. They're going to melt down. They're going to get upset." All of this catastrophizing.

What I coach them to do is: plan your talking points, know what you're going to say, and start giving the feedback — but know that whatever reaction you get is probably not something you anticipated. So it's training people to understand that preparation is still really important, but once you hit the ground running, you should be prepared for anything.

Don't stick to a rehearsed line when the reality of the conversation has completely changed. That's where the difference lies — preparing to read a script is less helpful than preparing and expecting the unexpected, expecting that you're going to have to improvise. Look at the person, read the room, listen to what they're saying. You'll know what to do next. You have to trust yourself there.

Monique: So having that emotional intelligence.

Dave Collins: Bingo.

Monique: We've referenced the "yes, and" principle quite a bit, which is central to improv. How does this translate to HR situations where you genuinely disagree with an idea or need to deliver difficult feedback?

Dave Collins: One of the important things to teach about "yes, and" is that it doesn't have to come out of your mouth literally as, "Yes, and here's what I think next." It doesn't have to be robotic like that.

There are a lot of ways to "yes, and" in a way that's more natural and still gets at the idea of: I want to validate what you're saying and go further with the conversation. One line you could use is, instead of saying "yes," just say, "Tell me more about that." All you're doing is inviting them to keep talking. It gives you more opportunity to listen and more information about what they're saying.

And the "and" can be just saying, "I hear what you're saying. I'm going to reflect that back, and I'm going to give you some extra context that explains why maybe what you want can't be done — but it's connected to what you just said." Instead of just saying, "Yep, I heard you, but here are 10 reasons no." It's a slightly different way to have those hard conversations — validating, going deeper with their needs, and still holding the line.

Monique: Thanks for sharing that. So what's the difference between being spontaneous and being unprepared? And where do you see leaders misuse these ideas — for example, mistaking flexibility for a lack of structure or discipline?

Dave Collins: You always have to have structure. It's a both/and situation. There are going to be parts of your business that are very structured and sequential for a reason. I am not saying everything has to be, "We're going to go with the flow in the moment." Compliance issues, onboarding, legal challenges — those all have a process, and you follow that process.

The quote I always like is from a great improv teacher named Keith Johnstone. He talks about the difference between saying yes and no: those who say yes are rewarded by the adventures they have, and those who say no are rewarded by the safety they attain.

So look at a situation and ask: What do I need here? What does the team, what does the organization need? Do we need adventure, innovation, creativity, energy, and surprise — or do we need safety? In a lot of cases, we do need safety. Work is a place where things need to be as expected as possible sometimes.

Evaluate the situation and then choose an approach. Don't just go with instinct, because oftentimes we'll default to "no" out of reaction rather than deliberate choice.

Monique: It's good to think of "no" as safety rather than rejection, because "no" is so often associated with rejection. I love reframing it that way. So for the HR professionals in the audience who want to start implementing these techniques immediately, what's the first thing they should try by tomorrow morning?

Dave Collins: One of the simplest things they can do is what I call the pause. You're in a conversation — maybe it's heated, maybe it's confusing, maybe it's not going in a direction you want. Pausing for two seconds before you share your thoughts does wonders for the quality of your conversation.

It gives you the opportunity to listen for more. Did they finish talking? Is there an opportunity to say, "Tell me more about X or Y," or, "Can you explain that in a little more detail?" It's the improviser's muscle of: I need as much information as possible. Everything I need to know is in my partner, in the person I'm talking with.

Then it gives you an opportunity to collect your thoughts — what's going to be the "and"? And specifically, you get to determine what direction the conversation goes in. How do you want to steer it? Take that pause, gather your thoughts, see if you need more information, and then move forward — rather than jumping straight to, "What's my next thing to say?"

Monique: I can see the tension there — the desire to have answers, to be the go-to person, and the challenge of pausing. Because we want to be able to respond right away.

Dave Collins: We want to be seen as experts. And back to that earlier thought around change and emotional intelligence — we want to have the answers, we want to be respected. Those are all really important things for HR and people leaders.

But our secret superpower is our empathy and our emotional intelligence. If you don't give yourself a chance for your brain to let that superpower click into a conversation, you can easily go into solutions mode — which on stage in improv we call steamrolling. That's where your scene partner just directs the conversation: "I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this." No space for anyone else to add anything or change the ideas. And it's no fun for people on stage, and it's no fun for the audience either, because that back and forth is what makes things interesting and rich.

Monique: So how can organizations measure the impact of incorporating improvisational techniques into their HR strategies?

Dave Collins: This is a hard one. As a training consultant working on what are traditionally seen as power skills — the ability to listen, the ability to communicate — it's hard to measure how good of a listener someone is or how comfortable they are with uncertainty.

The direction I think to go in is to try to measure psychological safety in your organization. There are a lot of tools for that — you can pick your approach. But that is an area where, when you implement this type of thinking and encourage your leaders to behave with a "yes, and" mindset, it spikes psychological safety scores. People feel comfortable learning in public and making good-natured mistakes in service of getting better at something.

Take AI, for example. People are trying new projects, and maybe they don't work. Maybe they build an agent and it sends a strange message to a customer — they're upset about it, but they're trying to implement a new tool. If you respond by saying, "You made a mistake, you embarrassed the company," that's not a way to build safety and experimentation. You have to create sandboxes for people to make mistakes.

Google has done a ton of great research on psychological safety and how it's tied to team, product, and leadership outcomes. Google's Project Oxygen is a great case study — they published all their data and looked at what makes their thousands of people managers effective or not. Psychological safety is right there at the top.

And these are all ways to actually practice psychological safety, rather than just putting it in your values and posting it on a conference room wall and saying, "This is a psychologically safe place to work."

Monique: So let's say I go back to my workplace after attending a conference like this and tell my leaders, "We need to do more improvisation." In its simplest terms, how would you define or explain incorporating improvisational techniques into day-to-day interactions?

Dave Collins: First, there are so many opportunities to train executives and leaders. Think about your next offsite, your next training program, your next opportunity to carve out a little time for development. If you hear the words "change fatigue," "psychological safety needs improvement," "we need to be more innovative," or "we're struggling with AI implementation" — there's an opportunity to ask: What are the actual skills and muscles, metaphorically speaking, that we need to practice?

Improvisation training is step one for a lot of those clear outcomes my clients are looking for right now. We're grasping at straws as an HR world to figure out what the solution is. And it's not another video class. You have to get up and do this stuff. You can't just learn it by staring at a screen.

Monique: So for the HR professionals who might worry that encouraging spontaneity could lead to compliance issues or inconsistent messaging, how would you address those concerns?

Dave Collins: It's a real concern. I want to be really specific with my language here. I have not found many leaders who are saying, "We want less spontaneity." Spontaneity is generally encouraged in the workplace. What we don't want are people who are freewheeling and breaking rules — and again, back to that safety issue.

It's a both/and. There are situations that call for safety, and there are situations that call for adventure. Be really clear with your teams about why certain situations have compliance rules and regulations — and those are not the opportunities for spontaneity. But here are the opportunities, and here is what we're looking for.

And I want to be really clear: an improvisational mindset doesn't mean you don't prepare. That's the big misconception. It doesn't mean you don't research, validate ideas, or test things. It doesn't mean you don't have plans. It just means you're not stuck to the plan when the reality of the situation has changed, and sticking to the rehearsed thing is actually less helpful than reading the situation and adjusting.

Monique: I love that — improvisation doesn't mean you don't plan and prepare. So how do you balance spontaneity with last-minute requests? Because HR never gets those, right?

Dave Collins: Never. How do we balance it with last-minute requests? One important thing to remember is that HR gets requests at all hours of the day from all levels of the organization, and they all have varying levels of importance and urgency.

Monique: Everything's a priority. Everything is needed yesterday.

Dave Collins: Everything is needed yesterday. Everything is a 10 out of 10. This is on fire.

Here's the thing: you get to determine how important and urgent something is for you and the HR function. Others don't get to determine that for you. This is an old-school tool — the Eisenhower Matrix. Rating things on how urgent and how important they are to you, and triaging accordingly.

When we stay in order-taking mode as HR leaders, we lose the ability to be powerful, strategic leaders, because we're constantly in response mode. The ability to say, "I understand you think this is a 10 out of 10 — I'm going to get to this on Friday, because here are the things that are actually more important right now," and being able to explain it — that's a hard conversation sometimes, but it's about protecting your boundaries. And that's not an improv answer. It's a strategic one.

Monique: Which is needed in our world. So what's the biggest mistake you see organizations make when trying to become more adaptable and flexible?

Dave Collins: My favorite version of this is the all-hands meeting where the CEO comes on stage with a beautifully crafted slide and says, "Our plan for this quarter is we're going to be agile, unpredictable, and innovative. Now, here are my 30 PowerPoint slides explaining how we're going to do that." And people just look around thinking, "What do you even mean?"

All of this takes practice. It takes dedicated time for people to get comfortable thinking on their feet, listening deeply, and building on the ideas of others. I teach that through workshops. You can teach it yourselves too — carving out time for people to have 30-minute groups of three where they brainstorm ideas with no set agenda other than, "We're going to walk out of here with two things we want to explore more deeply."

Time and practice are how you get there, not C-level strategic imperatives with no change in people's day-to-day habits. And usually that means you have to take stuff off people's plates. There needs to be time for unstructured idea generation and practice. Google used to have the 20% rule, which they've moved away from, and it's hurt the organization. Non-outcome-enforced practice is how you learn — just like learning an instrument or a language. You make a ton of mistakes, and you gain expertise that way.

Monique: We're living in a time with a lot of remote and hybrid employees. How do you see improvisation incorporated in that context?

Dave Collins: It's a tough question. I have done classic improv for the stage on Zoom, and it doesn't do it for me. It's not the same experience, because as human beings, we're hardwired to enjoy in-person communication. We can pick up on so much more — body language, tone, that little moment when someone looks away and rolls their eyes. That's a flashing red light that tells me, "Okay, we're not on the same page here." And that's all unconscious.

Zoom or Teams or whatever platform you're using — it flattens all that information. And it becomes energy-intensive to listen more. Listening to someone talk for five minutes on Zoom takes a lot more energy than having a conversation over coffee. It's a completely different experience.

So understanding and acknowledging that — if you're spending seven hours a day in Zoom meetings, your emotional intelligence battery is going to be at zero % by 11:00 AM. You're not going to have the desire to listen deeply or build on ideas, because you're tired and have no recharge time.

Monique: That's not a lot of direct solutions, but it is genuinely helpful because it reframes my thinking. I always say — even when we attend sessions or conversations — you don't always have to walk away with direct answers. If it reframes your thinking or makes you see something differently, that's a solution in itself.

Dave Collins: And something that can really help — it's not the most exciting thing in the world — is intentional meeting design when you're using virtual tools. I'm a big proponent of getting people to do something at least every seven minutes. If I'm doing a workshop or a meeting and I'm not having everyone on the call do something every seven minutes, I know I'm going to lose them. I'm going to lose them to their phones, their email, whatever else is on that screen. I'm competing with literally everything on the screen in front of their face.

As adults learning, we have to be practicing in the moment. Even in a team meeting — have a quick, "On a scale of one to five, how much do you agree with what I just said? Put it in the chat." Or, "I just presented a new idea — let's go to breakouts, talk with a partner for four minutes, and come back and put your top two ideas in the chat." Different moments of interaction that require a little more planning, but not that much more, to get people doing things in the meeting rather than just sitting and listening. Because that's where it gets exhausting.

Monique: Thank you so much, Dave, for joining us for this episode of Honest HR. And thank you to our live audience — give yourselves a round of applause.

That's going to do it for this episode of Honest HR. We'll catch you next time.

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