What a Speech-Language Pathologist Knows About Improv

Ruth Jenkins co-founded CSz Portland. She has also spent most of her career as a speech-language pathologist, in Head Start classrooms, public schools, and hospital rehab units. For years she has been running improv exercises with people recovering from strokes and brain injuries.

That’s a harder test than a conference room. When a team does a listening exercise badly, the meeting runs long. When a patient does one badly, Ruth learns where the breakdown is. The exercises have to work at the level of comprehension, memory, and word-finding, or she doesn’t use them.

This video is from a continuing-education course Ruth recorded for other speech-language pathologists. It runs six minutes and explains why these exercises do what they do.

Six points from the talk carry over directly to teams.

The same game does a lot of jobs

Ruth lists what she uses improv exercises to treat: auditory comprehension, attention and memory, pragmatic language, word-finding, syntax, fluency. One exercise often hits several of those at once. That’s why she likes them for groups. Everyone in the room needs something different, and the same ten minutes can work for all of them.

We see the same thing with teams. Nobody has one communication problem. One person interrupts, another never speaks, a third stops listening halfway through a sentence to start building a reply. A good exercise gives each of them something to work on without anyone getting called out.

Rapport first

Ruth calls her approach life-focused. What she’s aiming at is whether the person can participate in their family, their work, their community. So she picks exercises that build rapport: clinician and patient, patient and family, everyone in the group with each other.

That’s the right order for teams too. Skills practiced with people you trust are the ones that show up on Monday. Practice them in a room where you’re still guarding yourself and they mostly stay in the room.

Laughter is doing work

Ruth talks about laughter as a universal social tool, and she’s used it with patients in end-of-life care. Humor lowers the tension in a room. It keeps people connected to each other when the situation is hard.

Nobody in Ruth’s clinic is trying to be funny, and nobody in our workshops is either. The laughter that happens is a side effect of people paying attention to each other, and it’s a big part of why a team is willing to raise a hard question an hour later.

No props, no prep

Ruth’s point to her fellow clinicians: most therapy activities take materials and planning. These take neither. For someone with a full caseload, that’s the difference between a technique that gets used and one that stays in a binder.

Same for a manager. You don’t need a facilitator or a budget to run a two-minute exercise before a planning meeting. The exercises are meant to be picked up by people whose job is not improv.

The patient leads

Once a patient learns a game, they can run it, first with the group, then at home with family.

We aim for the same thing. A workshop worked if a team member can lead five minutes of it at the next retrospective without us in the room.

You don’t need a special background

Ruth says this to clinicians, and it applies just as well to team leads: nothing here requires prior experience, either to lead an exercise or to take part in one. Her patients are recovering from brain injuries. Ours are engineers, nurses, and project managers. Nobody is put on the spot. They show up, listen, and respond. The exercise handles the rest.

Where the clinic and the conference room overlap

The skills a clinician targets when someone’s ability to communicate has been damaged, including attention, comprehension, turn-taking, finding the right word, and reading the room, are the same skills that decide whether a meeting is any good. Ruth works on them at the neurological level. That’s what she brings to every workshop she runs for us.

Ruth also talks about this work on the CSz network podcast. If you want to see what these exercises look like with your team, book a discovery call.