DC Visionaries Founder, Shane Yeager, Speaks About The Value of Improv at The World Bank Group, Offers Interview Booth Via ShortKlips.
Shane Yeager
The World Bank Youth Summit is always an event to mark your calendars for! Each year more than 500 entrepreneurs and innovators from 100 plus countries meet at the World Bank in Washington, DC to collaborate, attend workshops, and bring back valuable action items to their countries.
This years topic, Unleashing the Power of Human Capital led to many valuable discussions. Outside of the seriousness of the topic, the attendees had plenty of laughs too!
Through the talented leadership at Innovazing, DCV's Shane Yeager was tapped to give a workshop on improv and how it relates to business and leadership.
The room comfortably held around 50 people, but over 100 showed up for the workshop; It was a standing room only event!
Shane decided to have the workshop flow is 4 parts, mirroring the phases of the business cycle. It was the best way to keep it relevant to the entrepreneur participants.
The activities were:
Finding a business partner.
This activity was done to break the ice and end the awkwardness between 100+ total strangers. Each person picked a partner or ended up in a group of 3. They then had to stare into the eyes of the other person for 3 minutes, saying nothing. It was very uncomfortable, but an immediate trust was built.
The participants then did the activity again, this time they changed their appearance and their partner was required to compliment 2 changes.
They discussed how they felt. Surprisingly participants felt very positively to their partner, all by simply receiving a compliment and knowing they were noticed.
The room was into it!
Founding the new venture.
Now that participants found suitable partners, they were instructed to form groups by their birth month, again putting them with strangers.
In groups of around 10, they then nominated a CEO.
The CEO picked a noun and an adjective from a large list. No group had two of the same.
It was then announced the two words were the name of their new venture. Laughter erupted as the leadership sealed the fate of their new venture, there were some interesting combinations...
Each "new company" know had to pitch their venture to Shane, their potential angel investor.
The pitch was required to have:
A hand drawn logo
What does the company do
Mission
Vision
Teams had 5 minutes to act and then were asked to pitch to the group. It was hilarious what people came up with.
Since it was an improv workshop all teams were funded with imaginary money, the easiest investment they'd ever get.
Everyone then discussed the challenges they had and also how simple it was to work together making a believable business pitch, plus defend it.
Updating your board of directors.
Teams were asked to provide a quarterly update to their board of directors.
Like all board meetings there will be ups and downs, and this activity to it to the extreme. The game was a variant of fortunately/unfortunately.
Each group made up a sentence to fit the previous groups answer, opening with fortunately/unfortunately; It flowed like this:
Group 1: "Fortunately, we exceed revenue this month by over 50 percent!"
Group 2: "Unfortunately, our accountant was committing fraud"
Group 3: "Fortunately, he was a fast runner and the police couldn't catch him."
This continued on for 5 minutes with Shane wrapping the activity on a positive note.
"Fortunately, this is all an improv workshop and everyone in here rocks."
Everyone then discussed how much fun it was to tell stories as a group, how typically shy people were motivated to contribute, and how negativity can always be reworked into a positive outlook.
Selling your venture.
As lunch time was nearing it was time to sell the venture and get out of there!
All ventures were "sold" and then it was up the participants to tell a round robin recap of the entire companies journey.
Each team could only say 1 word and had to quickly move from team to team making a cohesive story. We let some words count as one to make it a little easier.
It went like this:
Group 1: Our
Group 2: Story
Group 3: Begins
Group 4: With
Group 5: A CEO
Group 6: Who
Group 7: Quit
Group 8 The Circus
It starts to get out of control quickly and if groups can't answer fast they get skipped at the moderators discretion and shamed in a joking way.
The room then discussed how tricky this was, who participated, and what they learned from the workshop.
It was a BLAST!
DC Visionaries and ShortKlips, their technology, provided an interview booth to record VIP and attendees stories, thought leadership tips, and general thoughts.
Check out the recap here:
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