"We Want to Think Like You" — Patrick Short on the Accident That Started Our Corporate Work

Our corporate training practice started in San Jose in 1989, when a group of engineers from Apple cornered Patrick Short one night and told him their new department was falling apart.

Patrick co-founded CSz Portland with Ruth Jenkins and spent 13 years in high-tech sales and marketing before he began bringing this work into companies. He sits on the board of the Applied Improvisation Network and was associate chair of this summer’s Global Improvisation Initiative symposium in Portland. He recently talked through that 1989 conversation, and the 37 years of client work since, with psychotherapist Margot Escott on her Improv Interviews podcast.

You can listen to the full episode. Quotes below are lightly edited for clarity.

It started with somebody shoving him against a wall

In 1989, Patrick was running CSz in San Jose. One evening a man walked up to him afterward, pushed him against the wall, and said:

We want to think like you.

He was there with a newly formed department from Apple, sent out together as a team-building exercise. Here’s what they told him:

We’re a newly formed department, and we came here as a team-building thing, but we’re really struggling. And we watched your show, and we saw people working together seamlessly.

Patrick is honest about the distance between that night and now:

Now I’m thinking back to 1989, and I’m not entirely certain what they saw compared to where we are now in terms of our ability. But they saw something.

What they saw was a group of people making decisions together at speed, in public, without a script, and without anyone getting left behind. That’s a team skill.

CSz already had a written syllabus for teaching improv, which Patrick notes a lot of groups didn’t, so they could say yes. They signed a contract for six Monday afternoons and taught that department. Then the department wrote them a check.

And we stared at the check. And we thought, this is good.

The pivot that made it work

The first version of that engagement taught the Apple group how to be performers. It didn’t take long to figure out that was the wrong target:

We figured out very quickly, we’re not really teaching people how to be performers. We’re teaching people how to use the skills that we know.

That distinction still shapes how we describe the work to a prospective client. Nobody in your organization needs to get better at improv. They need to get better at listening under pressure, at building on a colleague’s half-formed idea instead of waiting to talk, at staying useful when the plan changes at 4pm on a Thursday. Improv is an efficient way to practice those things.

The format kept getting refined from there. Patrick sums up 37 years of that in one line:

We do less demonstration and much more participation.

If you’ve ever sat through corporate training where an expert talked at you for three hours, that’s the difference. The work has moved steadily away from watching and toward doing, because the doing is where the skill transfers.

What that asks of a room

The hardest part of this work has never been the exercises. It’s that most people arrive having learned, somewhere along the way, that contributing is risky. They have plenty of ideas and very little confidence that a half-formed one is welcome. Patrick describes what he’s actually doing when he teaches:

Whatever comes out of your mouth is the right thing that came out of your mouth. And in the few moments that it wasn’t, we all laugh and we go back to it. We just go back and do it again.

Rebuilding that takes a room where being wrong out loud is survivable and, ideally, funny. That’s the first thirty minutes of every workshop, before anything that looks like skill practice begins.

The long view

Patrick went to his first Applied Improvisation Network conference in 2009 and has been to eleven since. He now serves on its board. He was associate chair of the Global Improvisation Initiative symposium held in Portland this July, where roughly 200 people gathered around research and teaching rather than corporate application.

He also tracks the research, which has changed a great deal in the last decade. He points to Larry Sherman at Oregon Health & Science University, who has written on music and the brain and is working on a book about comedy and the brain, and to others presenting evidence-based work at this year’s symposium. Ruth made a related point in her episode: the practice has been ahead of the literature for a long time, and the literature is finally catching up.

Thirty-seven years after a stranger pushed him against a wall and demanded to know how his group thought together, that’s still the request we get, usually by email and in more words.

If your team is in a similar spot, book a discovery call and tell us what’s actually going wrong.

Listen to the full Improv Interviews episode with Patrick Short