ALLIGATOR IMPROV AND SELF EXPRESSION

This workshop is for one to two teams of 6-7 developers.

I take my experience as software developer (12 years of working), improviser (12 years of experience), facilitator (5 years), and use them to make software teams a better place to work.

Harvard psychologists and business researchers have confirmed that psychological safety is not something that needs to come from the top down in an org. The amount of trust between teammates on a dev team often looks different than the trust across teams or in the rest of the org. And it increases the efficiency of teams.

The work we do as developers can be extremely isolating. And that isolation can hurt performance. Things like parallel programming and swarming on difficult issues can help with this, but there's nothing that helps a team help eachother more than psychological safety.

Feeling psychologically safe means that developers can speak up, ask a question, admit a mistake, or offer a different perspective, without fear of embarrassment or punishment. That means problems get resolved faster, and fewer unrealistic deadlines go un-discovered, un-discussed or un-addressed.

Psychological safety does not require sharing personal information with your co-workers or "bringing your whole self to work". I will NEVER ask you to share personal information with colleagues in my workshops.

One thing improv is great for is getting us to stop overdoing meta-cognition. To turn down the part of our brains that over-thinks how others see us. It also teaches us, in moments that we feel naked and exposed and like we don't know what we're doing or what to say, to listen and support each other. We work on teams of humans, not machines. In a workplace that increasingly involves working with AI agents, we can all use reminders of that. If you have 6 different bugs in your pull request, it helps to have that humility and compassion for yourself, and doubly so if your teammates have that for you too.

All workshops are 4 hours long with periodic breaks. Mornings are not available for bookings.

Money-back guarantee: If this workshop is for a software team that has been working together for at least 6 months with an established velocity from at least 6 months of data, I guarantee an increase in velocity of 10% over your next two sprints or your money back.

To book your workshop, purchase here, and you will be sent a booking link. Or you can reach out to admin@alligatorimprov.com to book.

If you're not sure if this workshop is right for your team, reach out to admin@alligatorimprov.com to ask specific questions or to schedule a 15-minute consultation call.