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.

What is psychological safety?

Psychological safety in the workplace is the belief that you can speak up, ask a question, admit a mistake, or offer a different perspective, without fear of embarrassment or punishment.

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.

Improv has long been used to help teams work together, and has helped scientists better communicate with civilians about complex topics. Alan Alda's work in the space has shown that just one workshop can help with this. Improv can help developers communicate with non-technical staff and help support and listen to each other.

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.

Improv doesn't just help us communicate more confidently. It teaches us, in moments that we all feel like afraid naked babies who don't know what we're doing or what to say, to listen and support each other.

I offer both virtual and in-person workshops. This is the virtual version of the workshop. All workshops require a full afternoon and are 4 hours long with periodic breaks. Mornings are not available for bookings.

When you purchase a workshop here, you will be sent a link to a calendar to schedule your virtual workshop. If you're having trouble booking through the link or have any other questions, reach out with your purchase information to admin@alligatorimprov.com

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.