For a long time, I thought of improv theater as entertainment. Stage, laughter, applause. Today, after nearly 30 years of performing and teaching improvisation, I see it differently. Improv is one of the best training grounds for modern leadership I know.
This realization didn’t come overnight. It grew slowly, through years of standing on stage with ensembles and, in parallel, working as a leader in business. Again and again, I noticed the same pattern: the very skills an improv ensemble trains on stage are the skills that make a team strong at work. Listening. Accepting. Building something together without knowing the whole plan in advance. The very thing we now call “agile.”
This bridge between stage and business is the theme of a new book called “Der Impro Code” (The Improv Code), published by Gabal Verlag. Twenty authors contributed, each bringing their own angle on what improvisation can offer the working world. I had the privilege of writing one of the chapters — on Storyfinding — and I’ve been reading the others with growing fascination.
One chapter has stayed with me in particular: the contribution by Nicolas Bechthold.
Where psychology meets the stage
Nicolas is a psychologist based in Switzerland, where he runs his company Improaktiv. His focus areas are motivation and decision-making processes. That combination — scientific depth plus genuine stage experience — is rare, and it’s exactly what gives his work such weight. He doesn’t borrow improv exercises and apply them superficially. He understands what’s psychologically happening when people improvise together, and he translates that understanding into practical training for teams.
In his chapter, he presents three exercises from the world of improvisation that make three specific qualities visible in any group: collaboration, courage, and adaptability. These aren’t abstract values printed on the wall of a corporate lobby. They’re behaviors you can observe, practice, and develop.
Let me walk you through them.
Exercise 1: The Circle of Chairs
At first glance, this exercise looks almost too simple. A group sits in a circle and works through small shared tasks. But within minutes, the unspoken rules of the team become visible. Who takes initiative? Who waits? How does decision pressure distribute itself across the group? Where does responsibility quietly settle?
Improv actors are trained to read these verbal and nonverbal signals continuously. For a working team, experiencing this kind of awareness in their own behavior is often an eye-opener. The ingrained patterns — the ones nobody talks about but everyone follows — suddenly have names. So do the new patterns that emerge under different conditions.
What Nicolas does here is elegant. He takes a simple physical game and turns it into a communication laboratory. The group doesn’t just play. They observe themselves playing. And out of that observation grows something more valuable than any team-building slogan: genuine self-awareness and, with it, trust.
Exercise 2: The Equilateral Triangle
This one is my favorite to run with teams, because it produces an experience people don’t forget.
The instructions are deceptively simple. Each person silently picks two others in the room and tries to maintain an equal distance from both throughout the exercise. There’s no starting signal, no defined end, no leader. Just the task.
Here’s the catch: everyone else is doing the same thing at the same time. Every movement triggers a chain reaction. The system never settles. People drift, accelerate, get pulled across the room by the movements of others they didn’t even know they were tracking.
What emerges is fascinating to watch. Within a minute, you see the entire system pulse and reorganize. People laugh, get dizzy, sometimes give up — and then come back to it. Afterwards, the conversation almost runs itself: Where did I end up? When did I lead, when did I follow? How much control did I actually have?
The exercise touches on stability, the need for control, and systemic thinking. Most powerfully, it makes one thing physically tangible: the action of a single individual ripples through the whole system. You can read about systems theory for years. Two minutes of this exercise teaches it in your body.
Exercise 3: The Layered Handover
The third exercise plays with something we all do every day at work but rarely examine: passing information along. A short scene is handed from one person to the next, similar to the children’s game Telephone, but with full scenes instead of single sentences.
What survives the handover? What disappears? Which details get distorted under time pressure or performance pressure? Which subtle changes happen unconsciously?
The exercise makes one thing visible that we usually only experience as frustration: information in social systems is fragile. It changes shape as it moves. For anyone leading a team, running a project, or trying to communicate a strategy across an organization, that insight is gold.
Why this matters for leadership
Nicolas’s exercises share a common thread. They take something invisible — group dynamics, control, information flow — and make it experienceable. Not as theory. As something you feel in your body and remember.
I’ve worked as a leader long enough to know that most team problems are not really about strategy or tools. They’re about how people communicate, where trust lives, and how the group organizes itself when no one is looking. Exercises like these create the moment of recognition where a team sees its own patterns. From there, change becomes possible.
This is what applied improvisation, done well, can do. And it’s what Nicolas brings to his work: deep observation, a light touch, and a serious payoff.
The book
“Der Impro Code” is released on May 26, 2026, published by Gabal Verlag. Twenty authors. Twenty perspectives on what improvisation can offer the working world. What surprised me most while reading it: how often the contributors, each coming from their own corner, circle the same insights. Just like on a good improv stage.
If this resonates with you, you can pre-order the book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.de/Impro-Code-Profis-Business-Alltag-Erfolg/dp/396739283X
And if you’d like to experience these exercises yourself – with your team, your group, or your leadership circle – I’d be glad to hear from you. I run trainings that bring the principles of improvisation directly into the working world, and exercises like the ones Nicolas describes are part of how that work comes alive.