Adam is a customer experience consultant with a background in stand up comedy and psychology.

"We are going to break your ideas". Adam uses improv theatre techniques to drive design and innovation and is the co-initiator of the world's largest service innovation event, the 48 hour Global Service Jam.

In this interview we discuss how Adam brings his skills in theatre, marketing and design together with improvisation. Using the 'yes and' in service design,  showing client's how to embrace uncertainty, understand the world they sell to and deliver a better product and service. We touch on the subjects of conformation bias,  big ideas versus cheap experiments and allowing flexibility within structure.

Bullet Points

• The handicraft of emotion
• Treating design prototypes as offers
• The iterative stages of innovation & customer centric innovation
• Removing risk in product design
• Using improv to generate ideas, break them and get better questions
• "We've got this idea, how do we sell it?" - understand the world you're selling to.
• Confirmation bias. Defending our own ideas and getting precious about them...
• ideas generated by a group are my readily accepted.
• Get up and try stuff, get your hands dirty and enjoy the uncertainty
• Micheal Schrage, The Innovators Hypothesis - "You don't need big ideas, you need cheap experiments"
• Service design & design thinking - moving away from a linear approach
• How do you lead a non-linear, improvised approach to design?
• A brief word on agile design & scrum
• What works for you might not work for me; Allowing the flexibility for a great performance.
• Tom Peters - If it's rock and roll you can smell it.
• Global service Jam

Links:
www.workplayexperience.com | Adam on Twitter

Direct Link

Neil Mullarkey is one of the founding members of the Comedy Store players and probably one of the most recognisable faces in the world of improv.

He has a string of well known movie and television credits appearing with other improv alumini. Just as impressive is the list of companies he's worked with, where he has brought improv theatre techniques into businesses like Barclays and Google.

In this interview we talk about Second City and the early days of the comedy store players. We also dig into Neil's work applying improvisation and performance in his workshops. How he encourages people to enjoy uncertainty and identify offers, and re-frame a 'yes but' into a 'yes and'.

We cover a lot of ground in our conversation:
Structure in improv, the 7 stories.
'Get on with it', introducing improvisation into a workshop.
L Vaughn Spencer, costume disguise in character comedy.
Agile workflow for teams.
VUCA: Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.

The show notes for this episode are pretty extensive. Neil has an encyclopedic knowledge of improv and I've tried to capture most of the reference's that came out during our conversation below.

Direct Link (MP3 file)

Links:
www.neilmullarkey.com | Comedy Store Players | L. Vaughn Spencer

A lot of mentions in this show, here a most of them;

• The Comedy Store
• Comedy to go
• Keith Johnstone
• Desmond Jones
• Mike Myers & Kit Hollerbach
• The Second City
• Jim Sweeney, Steve Steen, Justin Case & Peter Weir
• Voila Spolin
• Dan Patterson, Hat Trick Productions
• The Free Association
• Bridie Connell
• Whose Line is it anyway, Australia
• Arthur Smith
• Josie Lawrence
• Robert Poynton, Everything's an offer
• Showstoppers
• David Pearl - Impropera
• Peter Drucker "Culture eats strategy for breakfast"
• Love, Food, Power...The 7 Stories
• Comedia Del arte
• Cariad Lloyd, Ruth Bratt, Joseph Morpurgo, Kirsty Newton
• Mike McShane
• Greg Proops
• Provocative thearpy
• Agile workflow
• Paul Goddard
• VUCA: Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity
• Brenne Brown, The Power of Vunerability