Even though communication is a huge part of being a faculty member, getting busy faculty to think doing improv is worth their time is hard. What broke through for me was when another academic taught 'Yes, And' before a 2-day brainstorming retreat, saying explicitly 'Yes, And' works radical acceptance, and radical acceptance is essential to constructive brainstorming. Improv connects to my faculty identity through specific game-skill links, and I try to build such links whenever I use improv with academic audiences. My Michigan colleagues and I talk about this idea in terms of scaffolding: pre-exercise questions that focus academics’ attention on communication problems they already care about, paired with post-exercise reflections on how each specific improv exercise works specific skills that the audience sees as needed to solve those pre-existing problems. I’ll talk about 2 examples that we use constantly with academics: Half-Life Your Message (see our paper in Science Communication in 2018) and Instant Expert (from Brian Palermo’s chapter in the book Connection). Both my personal improv journey and our experience at Michigan suggests that this approach increases academic audiences’ receptivity to improv (which is often scary to them) and provides them with actionable takeaways for their future use. 2019 AIN World Conference in Stony Brook
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