Around this time
last year, my old improv team, the Stage Monkeys San Diego (SMSD),
celebrated our 5 year anniversary. It was an amazing milestone for a
team that started doing longform in San Diego when no one else was
doing it, and when most people didn't even have faith that it could
be done. Now this team isn't celebrating a six year anniversary this
year, because about eight months ago it died out. This doesn't come
as a true surprise – most improv teams don't last more than a few
months, so a team that runs for 5 years is really like 50 in improv
years.
Why do improv teams
die out? Well there are obvious reasons: people get too busy, lose
interest, better teams take all the slots, or the work becoming
sloppy or careless are the commonly espoused reasons. But these
aren't causes of teams falling apart, they're the symptoms. The
center of the circle that connects all of those things is commitment.
Commitment is the currency that all teams spend, and when the bank
account runs low, that's when teams dissipate.
Where does the
commitment come from? It's a product of each team member – the
member's make periodic deposits into the group's commitment bank
account and these deposits must be made routinely. An account cannot
survive on debits alone. Okay so great, teams need commitment from
team members, which is great, but surely we've all been part of teams
where everyone says how committed they are to a group or a project or
a team, and those teams are usually the first ones to expire. True
deposits are made from sacrifice, and all teams periodically require
it.
This isn't virgin or
animal sacrifice, it's a sacrifice of time. We don't often think of
time as something that we spend in this way but it is, and time is
the one thing we can never get back. You can only spend it once,
and on only one thing at a time. What we choose to spend our time is
a critical consideration and one that shouldn't be taken lightly,
ever. (This coincidentally, is a good life lesson as well as a good
improv lesson). No doubt you've had some people on your teams that
seem un-committed; they show up for practices (usually) and shows
(usually), but they seem generally absent from the team (symptoms may
include: being on phone constantly, leaving early, showing up late,
etc.). In game theory, these people are referred to as “free
riders” or, to use the movie title, “easy riders”. All teams
can suffer a certain percentage of these people will with no serious
ill will and no fatal effects. But every easy rider needs someone
else to make sacrifices on their behalf, because they are not making
deposits and are enjoying the withdrawals.
Every successful
team will be made of people making equivalent sacrifices for each
other. You'll often hear these people refer to their teammates as
“brothers”, “sisters”, or “families”. Everyone on the
team is making periodic deposits into the team's account – making
those sacrifices of time for the sake of the group. In an ideal
world, everyone is making equivalent deposits, just since it is the
duty of every person to make it happen; “many hands make light
work”. Jane Jacobs' “The Life and Death of Great American
Cities” essentially summarizes that neighborhoods (read: improv
teams) fail because the people who populate them fail to actually
“live” in them. Neighborhoods populated only by people “just
passing through” are ones that are destined to perish. Successful
teams (really successful ones) have everyone fully dedicating their
time to each other continuously (making many deposits gives you more
money to spend).
Some teams and their
members refer to things like “team bonding time”, which for all
intents and purposes is equivalent to the phrase “quality time”.
This is a clichéd idiom with a basic underlying premise – that it
is possible to “plan instances of extraordinary candor, plot
episodes of exquisite tenderness, engineer intimacy in an appointed
hour” [1]. Despite a lot of training, workshops, books, and blogs
(like this one!) all dedicated to the principles of improvisation –
namely that it requires patience, finesse, and being present – we
are continually intoxicated by the promise “capturing lightning in
a bottle”. More specifically, we assume that capturing said
lighting means that we can force a storm to come rather than
understanding that sometimes we will catch lighting, but mostly we
only catch sparks that we will have to grow into lightning. In
general though, there is no substitute for physical presence. All
the promises, practices, and “group hangs” make no difference
when members are unwilling or unable to dedicated (read: sacrifice)
time to each other. Time is, and always will be the most valuable
asset we can ever have and give to each other.
[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/06/opinion/sunday/frank-bruni-the-myth-of-quality-time.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage®ion=CColumn&module=MostEmailed&version=Full&src=me&WT.nav=MostEmailed&_r=0
