NPR on What You Get From Improv

It’s always encouraging when major media outlets turn their attention to the professional applications of improv. NPR has explored the topic multiple times, examining how improv training helps people become better communicators, more creative thinkers, and more resilient in the face of change. For those of us in the applied improv world, these pieces serve as helpful touchstones when explaining our work to new audiences.

What public media coverage does particularly well is humanize the experience. Rather than presenting improv training as a corporate program with measurable ROI (though it is that too), NPR’s approach tends to focus on the personal transformations — the engineer who learned to speak up in meetings, the manager who became a better listener, the team that found a new way to brainstorm after years of stale meetings. These individual stories capture something that statistics alone can’t: the felt experience of discovering capabilities you didn’t know you had.

The skills that improv develops are the same ones that organizations consistently identify as critical but struggle to train effectively. Adaptability. Emotional intelligence. Creative problem-solving. Collaborative communication. These are perennially on every list of “most important workplace skills,” yet most training programs address them through lectures and frameworks rather than practice. Improv flips that model entirely. Instead of learning about active listening, you practice active listening. Instead of studying collaboration theory, you collaborate. The training is the practice, and the practice builds the skill.

One theme that resonates across media coverage is the accessibility of this work. Improv training doesn’t require any special talent, prior experience, or particular personality type. Introverts and extroverts both benefit, though often in different ways. Introverts frequently discover that the structured safety of improv exercises actually gives them more freedom to contribute than open-ended meeting formats do. Extroverts often discover that they have more to learn about listening than they realized. The exercises meet people where they are and invite growth from that starting point.

At CSz Portland, we’ve been delivering this kind of transformative experience for over thirty years — long before it was making headlines. We’re glad the world is catching on, and we’re here to help organizations who are ready to move beyond reading about these benefits to experiencing them firsthand. Because ultimately, the value of improv isn’t something you can fully grasp from an article. It’s something you have to feel.