When you celebrate failure loudly enough, you stop fearing it.
In this episode, Lisa sits down with Dan Klein, improviser, Stanford lecturer, and master of helping people unlock creativity through play. Dan has spent two decades teaching improv at Stanford, and his work goes far beyond the stage—it’s about listening, adapting, and building something together in real time.
You’ll discover:
How celebrating failure (loudly and cheerfully) can transform teams
The “oh, good” principle: finding opportunity in whatever comes your way
Why your job is to make your partner look like a genius
How practicing flexibility in low-stakes moments prepares you for high-stakes life
Dan shares wisdom from improv legends Patricia Ryan Madson and Keith Johnstone, revealing how accepting offers—from others, from the world, and from yourself—creates connection and possibility. Whether it’s a mistake, an unexpected curveball, or just life throwing you something new, improvisers are trained to see it all as creative fuel.
This conversation is about building resilience, reducing loneliness, and designing a life where everyone wins. If you’ve ever wished you could get more comfortable with the unknown, Dan shows you how practice, presence, and generosity can change everything.
Links from the show:
Two books in Dan’s improv classes syllabus
Patricia Ryan, Improv Wisdom: Don’t Prepare, Just Show Up
Keith Johnstone, Impro Improvisation and the Theatre
More about Dan
Dan’s Stanford profile
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Lisa Kay Solomon: I’m Lisa Kay Solomon, and this is How We Future, where I talk to some of my favorite changemakers about shaping tomorrow starting today.
Today I sit down with Dan Klein, an improviser, Stanford lecturer, and longtime collaborator of mine in the world of futures and design. Dan has a gift for helping people unlock creativity through play, humor, and presence, and for showing that improv isn’t just about being funny on a stage, but it’s about listening, adapting, and building something together.
In our conversation, Dan shares how improv principles like “yes, and,” and “oh, good” can transform teams, why laughter is a sign of learning, and even how small shifts in perspective can make us more open to possibility. We also talk about how practicing flexibility, whether in a rehearsal room or a classroom, prepares us to face uncertainty with more confidence and joy. If you’ve ever wished you could get more comfortable with the unknown, this episode is full of insights you won’t want to miss. Let’s jump in with Dan Klein.
Lisa: Dan Klein, welcome. I’m so excited that you are here today, literally one of my favorite people on the planet, one of my favorite people to work with, one of my favorite people to experience life with. The fact that we are having this conversation today, already, I’m so happy.
Dan Klein: The feeling is absolutely mutual. I was so excited when you reached out, and I thought, “Oh, good, I get to talk to Lisa for a while.”
Lisa: We’re going to have a good time, and hopefully everyone listening is also going to see what I see, which is the magic of Dan Klein. Thank you so much for joining us.
Dan: Thank you.
Lisa: Dan, we’re talking on this podcast, How We Future, and I want to actually take us back to the past to start, because when I first met you, which is now about 15 years ago, you were running an executive program for Stanford on what you do, which I’m going to ask you to describe in a minute. It was one of those moments where it was like the before times and then the after times.
Dan: Oh, yes.
Lisa: It was so transformative to experience you helping others unleash their creativity and their sense of agency in the world. It was one of those moments where it was like, “Well, I’ve just got to figure out a way to work with this extraordinary individual.” For those of our friends here that are new to Dan Klein and what you do, can you talk about your work?
Dan: Absolutely. Oh, thank you, Lisa. That was a great moment for me too. I knew things would fork in a different direction after I met you, and we were able to start sharing our work together, which was so fun. I teach improvisation. That’s the way I got into all of this. I took an improv class. I thought, “Oh, this seems like it’d be worth pursuing for the rest of my life,” and so I dove in. Along the way, I taught classes. For 20 years now, I’ve been teaching beginning and intermediate, and advanced improv at Stanford University for undergraduates and graduate students and fellows around the university.
That work in and of itself, essentially, it’s a theater class. How do you get up on stage and make up a story in front of a live audience? Those skills are applicable in every domain. The more you do it, the more you realize, oh, there’s lots of people that can take advantage of these mindsets, these practices. Also, the space that we create in order for people to experience it, to explore and try out these different practices, the way that we can create that space is actually a valuable thing in lots of contexts.
It led me into teaching at the business school at Stanford, teaching at the d.school at Stanford, as well as every other department in the university. I’m very, very lucky. Every day I’m grateful that this practice has essentially shown me the world. I get to do this all over the planet, which is amazing. I’m mainly teaching. It seems to boil down to a few things right now. It’s creativity and collaboration and connection, but also communication. How do we convey our ideas? That seems to be a really important thread that improvisers have something to say about.
Lisa: I personally think that improv should be mandatory, literally mandatory. It’s like reading, writing, math, and improvisation because what I learned from you was that I was capable of responding creatively in the moment. It was almost like that Dorothy moment in The Wizard of Oz where it’s like it’s in you all along.
Dan: Exactly.
Lisa: You too can be creative in the moment. You don’t have to be perfect or expert. It was like a light switch went off. I agree with you. I think that that idea of creativity, collaboration, curiosity is another one about your partner. They’re just foundational skills that are critical, particularly in this moment when there’s so many unknowns and so much complexity. Our ability to navigate uncertainty in the moment, I think, is everything.
Dan: Yes. I owe my journey here to a gateway class and a particularly wise and talented and generous and supportive teacher, Patricia Ryan Madson. She was teaching that beginning improv class when I was an undergrad at Stanford almost 40 years ago. She has continued to be a great mentor and guide and champion and resource in this world. She wrote the book, Improv Wisdom, where she captured a lot of her thoughts and ideas and helped share them around the world. Every time I show up in a space, a space like this or with students, I get to carry those ideas.
It’s really helpful, actually. It’s one of the tools that I find is most useful in navigating the unknown is this realization that it’s not about me. I get so much more strength if I’m standing up for my partners or if I’m championing an idea that’s bigger than me, that’s outside of me. If I’m being self-serving or self-centered, that ego is the source of all the fear and pain and loss. Even when you’re feeling good, even when you’re feeling like, “Oh, I can do this,” it oftentimes is a self-centered inflation that people are hoping to pierce. Even that’s a risky overconfidence.
Lisa: There’s so much to unpack in that reflection. One is this idea of it’s not about you, it’s about the connection you have with your partner. I think that was one of the things as a longtime presenter, as a longtime classroom facilitator instructor, usually, you’re the one at the center, but improv is different than that. You’re not doing, as you’ve taught me, it’s not a monologue and you’re not trying to be the funniest person in the room. You’re trying to set your partner up for success.
Dan: That’s right.
Lisa: In doing that, it puts your attention towards that other person differently. Not I’m trying to one-up you, which is, I think, so much of our training is about how do you win, how to be the best, how do you stand out. This is about, no, your job is actually to be generous. Your job is to listen, and your job is together, create something that is not for you, is for others.
Dan: That’s right. Make your partner look good. Then one of the things that Keith Johnstone, who was Patricia Ryan Madson’s mentor, was a great-grandfather of modern improvisational theater, passed away last year at the age of 90. One of the things that he used to say is the mark of a great improviser, it’s not how many laughs you get, it’s not how many star moments you have on stage, it’s whether or not you are fun to play with. Do other people want to play with you? You’re good.
Lisa: Can you imagine if we had that as a metric? Are you fun to play with? It makes me think back again to that first moment where I met you. I remember saying to you after, I said, “Dan, what is the best phone call you can get from me?” What is going to make you so excited when I present an offer that you can’t help but say yes?
Dan: What did I say?
Lisa: You were in your generous self and you were like, “Oh, Lisa, something that’s interesting that might make a difference.” I just remember thinking, because at the time I was running a lot of leadership programs, and I thought, this is just going to be better with Dan. Then I remember we were doing these week-long programs together. At least I was moderating them, and they were about technology and the future, and they were scary. There was the pre-Dan era and then the post-Dan era.
I remember saying to the program designer, we have to get these participants in a different mode of learning at the very beginning. At the very beginning, we are setting conditions. We are having leaders from around the world that are coming here to Silicon Valley to learn about the future. They’re either going to be in fight or flight mode, or we can prime them differently and get them excited to learn from each other and the conditions of the room. I said, “You need to bring in Dan Klein.” I think that was one of the best offers.
Dan: I am so grateful. I don’t know that I would have had the insight that that was what was needed. For you to see that, and now I get to see it all the time, there’s a shift that you have to make with any group. We’re reading the room, we’re reading the dynamic. If their arms are crossed, metaphorically or literally, then we just have to uncross them. We have to figure out a way. It is indeed, it’s physical, it’s mental, it’s spiritual at some abstract level. We have to make sure that people are opened up and ready. You had that insight and instinct. I’m grateful that I could get to step in and discover what that would mean to provide that.
Lisa: I think that’s a great insight that when people cross their arms, they’re not trying to be jerks, they’re nervous. I think one of the things that makes you so extraordinary in your work is how empathetic you are to the nerves. That audience is not there to watch you fail. You haven’t yet built that trust that they can let go. Because again, so much of our training is about armor, protection, being right, being expert, and the way that you invite them to just really discover their fun, discover their humanity, discover what makes us unique and human is really extraordinary to see, and it could be a game changer.
Dan: Yes, Patricia used to say, your job, if you’re going to teach this work, is you have to make the room safe enough for people to take risks. That is your first charge. I think of it as almost a sacred responsibility. This is scary for everyone. I’m not an introvert myself. I have lots of introverts in my close circle, and I do my best to understand exactly where they’re coming from. I’m an extrovert, but I’m a shy extrovert. Like I’m not a life of the party kind of like bring it on. I love getting to have attention and it gives me energy, but I am very shy about it. A lot of these tools and techniques I recognize are actually a great way to help with that.
Lisa: One of the reasons why I love this work is because I think it allows you just picking up on what you said to do some internal reflection and growth. Like, “Oh, I can show up differently. I’m not set in a box. I can take the information I’m getting and perceive it differently and do something different with it,” and externally, you’re helping others feel that too. It’s this relationship between my ability to be resilient and my ability to create something new, which has its own flywheel benefit of feeling better.
The thing about it is, going back to Patricia Ryan’s point about learning how to be present in that moment, is that I think that’s the ultimate secret weapon in a time of growing complexity and change. There’s so much we can’t control. If we learn how to navigate our own being in that because we’ve practiced it in a safe place, then that will give us strength to show up regardless of the circumstances.
Dan: I think, honestly, when we first talked about this conversation and thinking about the future and how we future, I think, what do we bring? How do I show up? What did I learn from this that I get to bring into everyday life? In a sense, it’s this oh, good principle. Whatever comes your way, there is a way that you can say, “Oh, good,” to that thing. That’s what improvisers have to do. When we’re on stage, it’s imaginary. Things go right. Things go “wrong.”
Improvisers get excited when things go wrong because it’s a new opportunity, and we say, “Oh, good,” and we see what can happen. It turns out that that’s actually true in many ways in life as well. I’m not saying that everything that happens is good. There are things we want to avoid, for sure. There will be bad things that happen, no matter what we do, and we have a choice of how we respond to them. That’s what I find most useful for me. Sometimes bad things happen, for sure, and sometimes I get thrown, no doubt. I think, “I shouldn’t have said that,” or, “No, how did we get this way?” I have all the normal reactions, but I have another option sometimes.
Lisa: I love that. I feel like options have value foundationally. If you can create them, if you can see them. I love that framing, oh, good. Besides you, my mentor in improv, I like to learn from others who I know have had improv training. One of my favorites, of course, is Stephen Colbert, who famously did a lot of work at Second City. If you watch how he interviews and how he shows up, you can see that improv training coming up. He never makes his interviewee feel bad, look bad, even if he’s getting something thrown.
I don’t think we spend enough time learning that practice of how to find the oh, good, even in the unexpected curveball. I just want to say one thing that I remember hearing from him, which is interesting to think about in this moment of where he is in his show. I remember him talking about the conversation he would have with his producer about what he could and couldn’t do on the show, because he was within a network and all the rest. He would have a conversation with a showrunner producer, and they would say something that he didn’t necessarily like.
He would say, “Do I have a choice in that?” If they said no, then he would say, “Then I love it.” I just think if we can see the constraint and be like, “Okay, I can get really pissed about that,” or I could be like, “Oh, oh, good, oh, good, what can I do around that?” I think one of the foundational trainings that I’ve seen you create for people, really experiences, is that visceral experience of when you are working with someone and they accept what you have to offer, and they block what you have to offer. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that as a foundational practice.
Dan: It is the foundation. There are things that happen on stage. In the Johnstone Theater tradition, we call them an offer. An offer might be something that your partner says to you. They might literally offer something. Would you like to go for pizza? An offer might be how they refer to you. They might say, “Hey, Dad,” and then their offer is that you’re their dad, or the offer might be about the environment. It might be, looks like rain. That would be an offer. Then you have two choices. You can either accept it or you can block it.
Accepting it would be to say, “Yes, I am your dad. Yes, it is about to rain. Yes, let’s get pizza,” or you could block it. You could say, “I don’t want pizza. I’ve never seen you before in my life. What are you talking about? It’s a perfectly clear day.” You could block in a lot of different ways. It’s a tricky choice sometimes, especially for beginners, because blocking can often be funny. We can get a laugh by shutting someone down. A lot of humor is based on blocking. We practice accepting and seeing what happens when we accept because we may get a laugh, but we’ll stop the story.
We’ll probably damage the connection. It’s a lot harder to connect when we’re blocking each other. We have to be agreeing on a whole different level to make sure that we can pull that off. The other thing that we learn as improvisers is the offer could be really explicit and obvious, but it’s anything that happens on stage. If someone walks out on stage and they trip, that’s an offer. If they mess up a line, if they call you by the wrong name, that’s an offer. Mistakes are gifts.
In fact, we train to get really excited when there’s mistakes because those are the most interesting offers. They’re the most organic. They’re the most creative in a sense because nobody was planning them. There’s other ways to think about it as well. I actually picked this up early on in my relationship with my wife, Michelle Darby. She was my director in a play. Soon after that, I taught her in an improv class. We were talking about offers. She said we learn how to accept other people’s offers first.
Then we learn how to, in a sense, accept the world’s offers, like the environmental thing. If the lights flicker in the middle of a show or someone’s cell phone goes off, that’s an offer. It doesn’t have to be on purpose. It can come from anywhere. What we’re really learning how to do is accept our own offers. That’s the shift. It’s easier to practice accepting other people’s offers because there’s no ego involved.
People get really good at this. They start to recognize that we’re blocking ourselves sometimes even before it comes to conscious awareness. Someone like Robin Williams was incredible at accepting his own offers. He was improvising off himself at lightning speed. Something would pop up, he’d say yes to that. Then it would lead to something else, which he’d say yes to on a whole another level. We’re not necessarily having to get all the way to that level, but to be able to do it a little bit is what we’re after.
Lisa: Such a powerful frame of self-acceptance and awareness, and also spirit of generosity for yourself and for others. Think about that. When we are looking for offers anywhere, lights flickering, a mistake made, we have to open up our peripheral vision. We have to be open to it. If we’re focused, narrow, won’t see it. I got to be right. I’m protecting myself. You’ll miss it.
You’ll miss all of those opportunities, which again, I think is why we need to create more practice time for this in this safe environment. We think about our young people right now that are self-censoring or learning how to filter, or so focused on not looking bad. They get no practice at not being perfect. That’s not life. I think that’s so powerful as a way of thinking about it.
Dan: The first thing that I do with most groups is get them to celebrate failure because it’s so fundamental to all of these, to creative collaboration, to connection, communication. I’m not saying that you’re supposed to fail all the time, but if we acknowledge that our normal reaction to failure is shrinking, is punishing ourselves, is to shut down and close off, even when it doesn’t matter, then we also realize what we’ve shut ourselves off from. If we can celebrate failure, not just accept it, but celebrate it over the top triumphantly, then things shift.
I’ve gotten to do this now for 20 years with students at Stanford. One of the first things that I tell them is your job in this class is to shoot for average and fail cheerfully, and they can’t believe it. That’s not what got them into that room. That’s not the message that they’ve been given all this time. I also think that whatever message they’ve been getting is not sustainable. I’ve been in this environment long enough. I’ve lived in the dorms with the students as well.
Not in 100% of the cases, but in too many cases, we’re on a collision course. This is an actual crisis, a mental health crisis. I don’t think it’s pressure that is being put on them by their parents. I think they’ve internalized this pressure in a way that it’s not sustainable. Shoot for average, fail cheerfully is a release valve. They can’t believe it when I first say it, and they laugh nervously. It usually takes 10 weeks and sometimes more, to crack the armor, to let them reveal the shielded protection.
Lisa: Absolutely. I find that they don’t really trust you when you say things like that. In my class, my version is, “This is not a problem-set class. I cannot dictate to you how you are going to get an A. This is a class for you to express yourself, to take creative risks.” In our class, Inventing the Future, keeping your future portfolio, an assignment that they’ve never heard of. Like you, there’s a group that says, “Oh my gosh, I’ve been waiting for this,” but they tend to be small. The other group is like, “Is this lady for real? Can I trust her?”
Then it’s our job to make sure we’re being consistent, that we actually mean what we say when we say those things, and that we’re not going to abandon them, that this isn’t a hoax. They’re so much trust building to bring back into their lives. Even I found particularly coming out of the pandemic and everything that went on during that period, they were really afraid to show up fully and really afraid to celebrate. The fact that you celebrate failure, they were just afraid that they were going to get judged.
I remember literally saying in my class one day, “Okay, we’re going to share good news. That’s the assignment right now.” I knew that one of my students had just won an NCAA championship. She was an athlete. She just won a championship. She was not saying anything. I said, “For example, hypothetically, if you won an NCAA championship--” There’s just all these layers and masks that I think this work breaks through in such a foundational way. I want to go back to celebrating failure because you do it a particular way. Again, we’re talking about those initial additions. Can you describe the exercise that you have your students do?
Dan: There’s an Augusto Boal exercise where you count to three back and forth with a partner. One, two, three, one, two, three. You go as fast as you can. It turns out that it’s way harder than you would think it is, and we mess up all the time. In the first round, I have people just do it, see how fast they can go. We get a lot of laughter as they make mistakes and realize this is way harder than we thought. Also, I emphasize that there’s nothing at stake.
If you mess up, nothing, there’s no punishment for that. All of the punishment is internal, in a sense. Then I invite people to notice what is your reaction to failure. In a low-stakes situation, high pressure but low stakes. By the way, I think that’s a lot of the improv exercises are well-designed activities that can be high-pressure, low-stakes, which I think is our great place to practice in. We start to notice we tighten up, we clinch, we flinch or wince, we cringe. We hide and protect ourselves in a way when we make a mistake.
Then I say, “All right, good. That’s good. That’s healthy. It’s safe and guarded, but it’s not open and resilient and resourceful. Let’s experiment. Let’s try the opposite. Next time you make a mistake, throw your hands in the air and celebrate.” Sometimes we say, “Ta-da,” which is very cheesy. Sometimes we say, “Woo-hoo,” or “I failed.” Whatever it is, it’s a big open gesture and an out loud exclamation. To make it harder every round that we do it, we change one of the numbers into a physicality.
In the first round, I’ll usually change the one into a clap. It goes two, three, two, three, and we celebrate when we fail. In future rounds, I make sure that people are celebrating together. If either of you mess up, you both celebrate. We replace the number two with a snap, and maybe we replace the number three with a stomping our foot. The first thing I like to do right after I finish that exercise is say, “How do you feel about your partner right now?” Because I get an exclamation of joy and support.
“They’re awesome. I love them.” They immediately say that out loud. I want to call that because there’s many values that celebrating failure can encourage. One of them is we’ll learn faster from our mistakes. We feel safer making mistakes so that we can learn and grow faster. As we talked about, mistakes are creative insights. We also get new creative opportunities if we’re paying attention to our mistakes. I honestly think, and this is from the years of doing theater, doing specifically improvisational theater, working at the d.school on creative projects, we bond over success really well, but we probably bond better over failure as long as we’re failing cheerfully without blame.
Failure without blame. That’s the gold standard. I get to do a lot of work these days at the business school with executive programs. Sometimes you and I are fortunate enough to be in the same programs, but sometimes there’ll be a one-week or a two-week or a six week program. If I get to be with them at the beginning and the end, that’s my favorite thing right now, is to feel how the group has shifted and come together in a different way. I want to provide every opportunity for them to be able to do that.
Lisa: Dan, it’s so beautiful. It’s so generous. I think so much of our society has set us up to be this false dichotomy of a zero-sum game. If you win, I lose. Here you are saying, no, there’s a different game. This is this infinite game. Life is an infinite game. It’s chopped up. In finite games, it’s somebody else designed. There’s another approach. It’s almost like the Jedi. There’s another way. The other way is to fail cheerfully together, to learn together, to create together where everybody wins, you win, your partner wins, the people watching you win. When you’ve had that experience, everything else feels crappy.
I think that’s the other part why we work so well together, where you’re creating these conditions where high pressure, low stakes, so you can feel something. Then I’m trying to facilitate conditions that allow us to apply that towards the future. Hey, if this felt good, now notice why someone else is making you feel bad. What are they getting from making you feel bad? How might you change the structure there? How might you think differently about the incentive system? Somebody designed it. Why don’t you design something different?
To your point, when we get enough reps of that, so much is possible. That’s why this work fills me with hope and allows me to practice resilience. Both are adaptive moves. Both are creative moves. Both are critical in a world that’s filled with increasing uncertainty and ambiguity. Don’t outsource that. That’s the part that we can do together. One more part about that, I like to think of it as optimistic offense. When we think about what you’re doing, the conditions you’re creating, and what it addresses at its core, when you’re creating together, you’re less lonely.
That’s a huge epidemic right now. When you’re feeling like you’re capable of doing it because you’re either failing cheerfully or celebrating something joyful in that way, something surprising, something filled with wonder and awe, then you are experiencing a high that is like dopamine that is natural. So much of the mental health crisis that we’re experiencing is related to that. It’s because we haven’t felt that. We had COVID, it isolated us. We’re polarized; we haven’t felt it. Here we are in these micro moments where yes, the stakes are low, but if you practice it enough, then you get better when the stakes are high. That’s my hope.
Dan: That’s a hope. Hope and resilience, that’s a great combo because it gives us the fuel, it gives us the wind, but also we have a tool to navigate when it doesn’t go the way-- If we’re doing it right, it’s not going to go the way we thought it was going to go. We have to be ready for that. We have to be able to handle that.
Lisa: When we walk into a room, just say like a typical meeting or something, we’re doing that comparison thing. Do you have more power than I have? Are you going to be the standout? Am I going to be the standout? Status, comparison, all that stuff that gets us into the critical voice versus the generative voice. I’ve heard you give a cue when playing one of these games, and you say, “Here’s what I want you to remember when you’re playing this game with your partner.”
Dan: Your skill at this game is average. You’re fine. You get it. You know how to play. You’re nothing special, which always makes people laugh when I say, “You’re nothing special.” Then I say that’s a gift because you have nothing to prove. You have nothing to prove in this game, but your partner is a genius. It’s so liberating to say, “Yes, I’m in the presence of a genius.” I may not understand their genius, but let me see how much I can appreciate it, and know that whatever they do, they’re setting me up perfectly.
Lisa: Yes, because they’re so good. They’re so good.
Dan: They’re so good, they get it. They totally get it. It’s easy for me. I’m like, “Oh, wow.” It was like a perfect pass that I can’t help but do a layup or whatever. If I get it wrong, if I somehow stumble, they’re so good they can make that even better.
Lisa: What’s great is that the partner is the same about you. They’re looking at you.
Dan: They’re doing the same.
Lisa: They’re like, “You’re a genius.” You’re feeling all of this awe from your partner who is like, “You’re going to be amazing,” and you’ve stripped away that armor that says, “I’m terrible at this.” It’s amazing. In athletics, one of my favorite metrics-- I think I learned this in basketball, and of course, I’m 5’1”, so I’ve never played anything but a horse in my life. This idea of being a net positive player, that when you’re on the court, it’s not necessarily that your stats are better, everybody’s stats are better. I think, again, how amazing for us to work within teams where everybody makes everybody better because you’ve practiced at it. You’ve practiced at it.
Dan: It’s so interesting. I look at the box score in basketball games, too, and it’s funny that the metric that becomes one of the most interesting is your plus minus. You had zero points, and your team is up 17 for the minutes that you were on the floor. That’s got to be the thing that counts. Because when we simplify our stats into just a measurable point or shots attempted or whatever, it doesn’t tell the whole story. That’s not what we care about. You could have terrible stats, but if we win the championship, that was what we were going for.
Lisa: You’re just giving me an idea. Imagine if communities had a net positive, like everybody who lives here contributes, because I think the other part is how we measure, which, by the way, somebody invented. It’s not a given. Somebody figured that out for their own gains and productivity and whatever, but how we measure is so individual versus honoring a collective or honoring something of a feeling. I think once you identify that, then you can redesign it.
I always say in my classes like, “Everyone can get an A here.” I don’t have to be on a bell curve. The worst thing is when they get an A minus and they’re complaining, “Why did I get an A minus?” Now what I’ve said is, “Look, write a letter to your future self about how you got an A. You get to decide. Write a letter. Be clear about what you did.” All of those ways of redesigning and then being agentic in creating it, which is what you allow them to do in a playful way, I just think is so, so powerful.
Dan: Something just popped into my head. One of the things that we get to practice with the improv training is creating imaginary worlds. I mean, it may start with just a sentence or a phrase, or it may start with a single object, but the key is that we, collaboratively, we’re creating a whole world, and the rules of that world might be different than the rules of our world. In order to say yes, we can shift all of reality to accept what had just come up. It’s one of the ways that we can incorporate a mistake into a scene. Change the world into one where that mistake is what’s normal.
We create something else entirely. That experience, the ability to collaboratively imagine something, a shared collective imagination, is probably the thing that fires me up the most in doing this work. I saw an improv show when I was a freshman in school in a dorm. A group of other students came up and they got up on stage. My jaw was on the floor like, “How is this possible?” They didn’t know what they were going to say in there actually, but they just heard it from that person. How did they know what line to say back? I’m still trying to figure it out. I think that’s where you’re playing as well. We’re talking about creating a shared future. It’s the same game.
Lisa: Totally. I think the other word that comes to mind as I hear that is the ability to create abundance, versus staying in scarcity. Here’s a world, everybody’s participating, everybody’s learning, it’s possible, you want to be a part of it, you feel good, versus this siphoning off of like, no, we only have so much to have, and so you’ve got to siphon it off, and it’s magic. It’s magic. The best part about it is that it’s teachable and learnable. I know that from you. It’s amazing. That’s amazing. Dan, I want to hear, maybe this was it, but do you have a favorite game in all of your huge treasure trove?
Dan: I do like playing Oh Good. Oh Good is where one person just says, “Hey, here’s a blank, here’s a book, here’s a car,” and the other person says, “Oh Good,” and says why they need it. It’s so simple. Honestly, in terms of that shared imagination excitement, the other really simple direct one is the shared fake memory where we pretend we’ve done something together, and we say, “Hey, remember that time,” and then we just make it up. It’s like the natural human ability to just make up crap and play off of each other. That might be my simplest, favorite, funnest game. Do you want to play it?
Lisa: Oh, yes. Okay, cool. Cool.
Dan: Okay, great. We just start, “Hey, remember that time we--” whatever.
Lisa: Dan, do you remember that time where we took that crazy trip to an island off of Florida?
Dan: Oh my God, that’s right. It was so hot and humid that day, except for when we were in the water, just cruising around in that calm, cool water. Oh my gosh, that was nice.
Lisa: Oh my gosh, thank God for that. We didn’t know. We didn’t know it was going to be that way because the weather had said that it was going to be much cooler, so we were caught off guard.
Dan: It was going to be cooler, and yet it was this weird hot. Then we were-- Yes. I think you were going to say when the--
Lisa: Then we met the guy who had the boat and was like, “Wait, you look so hot. You look so hot, you have to come with me.”
Dan: He brought us on. He actually had an icy machine on his boat. It was frozen desserts. We cruised around and we could see-- Do you remember that giant ray? It was a giant ray. It was the size of a Toyota.
Lisa: Oh my, it was huge. I thought it was a whale at first. It was like, “Oh my gosh, is this it?”
Dan: It’s a flat whale. It’s a manta. It was like a ray of some kind. It was incredible. Then, yes, was that the day of the eclipse?
Lisa: You know why? I think it was because all of a sudden, things got really dark out of nowhere. We’re on this boat, it’s with the ray, and it gets dark. We’re like, “Is this it? Is this the end?”
Dan: Is this the end? He knew. The guy knew. He was like a guide. He was like, “Check this out.” He turned the boat, and we could see phosphorescent sea life.
Lisa: It was like he planned it. He knew it.
Dan: It was like he planned it.
Lisa: Then he was like, “Here’s your slushie.” [laughs] Oh my God, I want to go there right now. Dan, I’m going to end with where I started. I want you, because I really give hats off to you for not only introducing me to this work, but to Patricia Bryant, Keith Johnstone. One of my favorite quotes about improv is from Keith Johnstone about saying yes. I wonder if you could share that quote. Maybe we’ll end with that.
Dan: Absolutely. He’s the one who came up with the concept of blocking and accepting. He talks about people who have a habit of accepting everything. You know who they are because they always say yes. There’s people who have a habit of blocking everything, and they’re the ones who always say no. This is his quote. “People who say ‘yes’ are rewarded by the adventures they have. People who say ‘no’ are rewarded by the safety they attain.” I love that quote because it reminds me always that we have a choice. They’re both good choices: safety and adventure. It’s great.
Lisa: I love that quote so much because it reminds us that when people are saying no, A, not to take it personally because it’s often not about us, it’s about their search for safety. It allows us to have empathy for people that may not just be moving at our speed or may not have had the experiences that we’ve had. It then says maybe, oh good, how might I try another approach? Again, giving us more options. Dan, thank you so much. You are a gift to me and so many, and I’m already excited for our next conversation.
Dan: I can’t wait. My pleasure. Thank you, Lisa. Great to chat with you always.
Lisa: Thanks for tuning in to this episode of How We Future with Dan Klein. I hope you enjoyed his stories about improv as a practice ground for courage and creativity. Dan’s reminder that the future is something we create together, moment by moment, is one I’ll carry with me. I hope you’ll tune in next time for more conversations on shaping the future optimistically, practically, and joyfully. I’m Lisa Kay Solomon, and if you liked the podcast, please review it and share it with others. Together, we’re futuring.