Karen Hough - Go with It: Embrace the Unexpected to Drive Change

Evolution and growth is always on the mind of a leader, and this book provides practical advice on how to adjust and improve in the midst of change.

Kurt Tunnell
Managing Partner, Bricker & Eckler

Throughout my career, Ive managed the unexpected. Go With It gives anyone great ideas to improvise and be effective.

Dan Creekmur
President, Columbia Gas of Ohio, a NiSource Company

The speed of innovation is reliant on the people who drive change. This book allows any team to up their game, collaborate radically, and improvise. That means faster to market with better outcomes!

Ben Verwer
Vice President, Strategic Initiatives, BD Diagnostics

Real life is all improv! Go With It outlines usable skills that allow professionals to engage in behaviors that increase success, and get us all comfortable with discomfort.

LaChandra Baker
President, Columbus Chapter, International Association of Business Communicators

This practical little book offers fresh and powerful insights into how anyone can learn to make themselves more creative and to help others by leading them to much more creative and superior outcomes. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it!

Alan Robinson
Co-Author, Ideas Are Free and Corporate Creativity

2017 ASTD DBA the Association for Talent Development (ATD)

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2017935217

ISBN-10: 1-56286-571- 4

ISBN-13: 978-1-56286-571-9

e-ISBN: 978-1-56286-574-0

ATD Press Editorial Staff

Director: Kristine Luecker

Manager: Christian Green

Community of Practice Manager, Human Capital: Ann Parker

Developmental Editor: Kathryn Stafford

Senior Associate Editor: Melissa Jones

Text Design: Iris Sanchez

Cover Design: Faceout Studio, Derek Thornton

Illustrator: Francelyn Fernandez

Printed by Versa Press Inc., East Peoria, IL

To all the people who were ever slapped upside the head, caught unawares, tripped up, or blew it. And instead of crying or hiding, they got up, started over, learned something new, or laughed. You are my people. Were the ones who never get to learn lessons the easy way. And thats a good thing. That means were improvisers.

Improvisation is the bedrock of my life. It affects how I behave, work, parent, communicate, and create. It wove itself into my DNA because the moment I learned about improv, I realized that anything was possible. And my serendipitous life path is a reflection of that improvisers belief in every possibility.

Ive lived several lives, and all of them have been in the midst of innovators. Whether I was creating theater in the moment on the improvisational stage, working on the front lines of the Internet revolution, or developing scientists and engineers as a consultant, Ive had the good fortune to watch innovation happening. And what struck me, over those decades of observation and participation, was that innovators behave in special ways. When I was immersed in teams of innovators, I admired their utterly natural ability to deal with dichotomy, prepare, play, and think upside down. However, when I would move to a group or corporation bound up in old patterns of thought and action that quality vanished; I found the difference alarming.

The good news is that even those groups who were not working well together could learn. They could grow, develop, and change their patterns of behavior to be more creative and innovativeand those changes came from embracing improvisational techniques. Ive worked with pharmaceutical scientists who wanted to accelerate their fuzzy front-end work on new drugs, technologists who needed to get their breakthrough idea to market, and executives who had to get their teams working and innovating together. This book is the outcome of those many experiences across myriad industries and teams.

My company, ImprovEdge, has created training and development for Fortune 1000 employees and executives since 1998 using the principles of improvisation, paired with research in psychology, human behavior, and neuroscience. Corporate leaders and teams have applied those practices to great success, becoming more flexible, creative, and innovative.

I first learned to improvise as an undergraduate at Yale. Soon after, I trained with the Second City of Chicago, performed and started my own troupes, and had a wonderful acting career in TV, film, radio, and the stage. I zigzagged at one point, taking eight years to stretch and challenge myself by working in the network engineering industry. Im not kidding! Yes, a liberal artseducated actor can go to work in IT. (And if I can do that, then Im sure you can improvise.) I helped startups go public or be acquired, and although I was taking tech classes and cramming every night, I continued improvising during the day. Those techniques allowed me to be flexible, creative, collaborative, and more successful than I ever imagined possible.

These incredible experiences also led me to create contentfrom narratives of what is possible, of what works best. The Yes! Deck is a toolkit I developed comprising 29 cards full of tips, ideas, and exercises for trainers and managers (youll see examples of these exercises at the end of many of the chapters in this book). I also wrote two books, The Improvisation Edge: Secrets to Building Trust and Radical Collaboration at Work and Be the Best Bad Presenter Ever: Break the Rules, Make Mistakes and Win Them Over, which is an award-winning book published in four languages. Those books allowed me to dive deeply into team dynamics and personal development. Theyve inspired thousands of people to behave differently, take risks, and throw out old conventions to emerge as more effective individuals and teams. And that theme kept driving me to wonder, Whats the next, most important application of this work?

We must innovate. And I believe that the behaviors of improvisation can directly drive our ability to continue to evolve and improve. There are such pressing issues of global technology, science, health, and welfare at stake as we fly into the 21st centuryand with everything moving so quickly, we have to approach this with flexibility, humor, and focus. We need to innovate as improvisers.

This book on innovation came about through my relationship with ATD, which has hosted many of my presentations on innovation and improvisation at conferences and encouraged me to share my blog posts and webcasts with its members. That excitement led to this book, in which I intend to inspire you to engage in improvisational behaviors to drive innovation in your life and work.