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

I've just delivered a couple of talks at 'WMUG', a group run by Mike Little one of the co-founders of the crazily popular WordPress system. The first was on podcasting and the second was on 'Real World Clients'.

I've already posted on how I created the podcast over on my design blog, and if you're interested the podcast itself, interviewing people who use applied improvisation in their work, it's here.

Real World Clients.

Despite doing stand up comedy forever I've never got up and talked about my design work - ever, let alone my experiences with clients. I'm totally comfortable getting up and talking. In fact chatting to the group beforehand, I think that was my worry. In comparison to being Danny Pensive this was a 'zero pressure gig'. My desire to entertain, rather than inform could easily take me take me way off topic very quickly. Without high stakes I could get sloppy.

Having said that I was really worried about throwing myself under the bus. There would be other developers in the room and I wasn't just telling stories, but also talking about my work processes, potentially laying myself open for judgement. So actually there was a bit of pressure, but not the kind that i'm used to. That's good, a bit of performance pressure is better than not at all.

So I dipped back down the last five or six years of work history and picked out a dozen or so projects, then mashed them all together. Mixing old real world situations I've come up against with a bit traditional narrative structure. A call to action here and a stink of death there and pretty soon had something I could work with and relate back to WordPress.

It was a success I thought, in fact putting my comedians head back on...I think there might be a show in this.