10 Disadvantages of Applied Improv Training

We believe in transparency. So before your organization commits to applied improv training, we want you to know exactly what you’re getting into. Here are ten genuine disadvantages we’ve observed over our years of delivering this work.

1. People will actually enjoy the training. This creates an uncomfortable precedent where employees expect professional development to be engaging. Your other training vendors may not appreciate the comparison. 2. Teams start communicating more openly. This can be disruptive if your organization relies on passive-aggressive email chains as a primary communication strategy. 3. Participants become better listeners. Which means they’ll notice when leadership says one thing and does another. Proceed with caution. 4. People get more comfortable with failure. This may reduce the amount of time spent in blame-assignment meetings, which some managers have come to rely on as a core part of their weekly schedule.

5. Creativity increases. Employees may begin generating ideas outside their job descriptions, which can be confusing for organizations with rigid role definitions. 6. Meetings become more productive. This can be alarming for people who use lengthy meetings as a way to avoid actual work. 7. Trust builds quickly. When people trust each other, they spend less time covering themselves and more time collaborating. This efficiency can be jarring. 8. The training is memorable. Unlike the forgettable PowerPoint presentations your team has endured for years, people will actually reference what they learned. This sets an unreasonable standard.

9. Leaders become more self-aware. Self-awareness has been known to cause leaders to question their own assumptions, which can be uncomfortable but is annoyingly effective. 10. People ask to do it again. Perhaps the most inconvenient disadvantage of all — teams that experience applied improv training tend to request more of it. This may require you to allocate additional budget to professional development that people actually want.

In all seriousness, we hear real objections to this work, and we take them seriously. People worry it will feel silly, that it won’t be relevant, or that their team will resist. Those are fair concerns. But what we’ve seen consistently — across hundreds of organizations and thousands of participants — is that when the exercises are well-facilitated and connected to real workplace challenges, even the most skeptical participants walk away with practical skills they use immediately.

The real risk isn’t that applied improv won’t work. It’s that it might work so well you’ll wonder why you waited so long to try it.