How TeamSnap Embraces Improv at Work

TeamSnap, the sports team management platform, has always been a company that values collaboration. Their product exists to help teams coordinate better, so it’s no surprise that they think deeply about how their own teams work together. When they brought CSz Portland in to facilitate an applied improv session, they weren’t starting from a place of dysfunction. They were investing in something they already cared about — and looking for a way to take it to the next level.

What made the experience powerful for TeamSnap was the gap between what they believed about their collaboration and what the exercises revealed. Like most high-performing teams, they assumed they were already good listeners. They believed they were open to new ideas. They thought their meetings were inclusive. And in many ways, they were right. But the improv exercises illuminated the spaces between “good enough” and “genuinely excellent” — the moments where a slightly deeper listen would have caught an important nuance, where a bolder “yes, and” response could have unlocked a better idea, where a quieter team member had something valuable to say but the conversational momentum swept past them.

These insights didn’t come from a consultant’s assessment or a personality profile. They came from the team’s own lived experience in the exercises. That’s the difference between being told something and discovering it for yourself. When you experience firsthand the moment where you stopped listening and started planning your response, no one needs to explain active listening theory to you. You’ve felt the gap, and you’re naturally motivated to close it.

The TeamSnap team also discovered something that many groups find in applied improv sessions: the experience of genuine play together created a kind of trust that traditional team-building activities rarely achieve. Not trust as an abstract concept, but the felt experience of being supported by your colleagues in a moment of vulnerability. Improv exercises ask you to take small risks — to say something without knowing where it’s going, to support a colleague’s unexpected choice, to be silly in front of people you respect. Those small risks, when met with support instead of judgment, build a foundation of psychological safety that transfers directly back to the workplace.

The most telling feedback came weeks after the session, when team members reported that the principles from the workshop had become part of their daily vocabulary. They referenced specific exercises in meetings. They caught themselves falling into old patterns and self-corrected. The training didn’t just give them new concepts — it gave them shared experiences that continued to shape how they worked together long after the session ended. That’s what we aim for with every engagement: not a memorable event, but a lasting shift.