I thought I'd seen the ultimate in off-the-wall training schemes last year when Cooks of Crucus Hill, the St. Paul gourmet kitchenware shop, began marketing its cooking school as a likely place for businesses to promote communications and teamwork among employees. That was before I met Stevie Ray, however. Stevie, 39, is a slight, bespectacled gent who looks like an insurance agent, talks like a college professor-and has made his living for nigh unto 20 years in improvisation and stand-up comedy.
     More to the point of today's ruminations, he's adapting the techniques developed in the comedy business to the needs of corporate employers seeking to improve their workers' communication skills. With partner Pamela Vervair, 29, Ray is propreitor of Stevie Ray's Improv Company, a Minneapolis company that for 10 years has offered training in improvisational, stand-up, and sketch comedy and managed a comedy troupe of its graduates that performs at public and private events in the metro area.
     It's also a business that, until about six years ago, gave new meaning to the phrase "starving artist." "We never made alot of money, particularly with the comedy theatre we had [from 1989 to 1994]," Ray said. "But then we began hearing from former improv students, people with regular jobs at some of our biggest corporations, about how they'd used improvisational techniques to resolve on-the-job problems." Bingo! Ray stumbled into the business that today contributes the bulk of his revenues.
     Transfer to Business "The same techniques used in improvisational comedy can be effective in the business setting," he said. There are listening and concentration skills that are required, for example. And the need to work easily with partners who have varying ideas and styles. Not to mention the ability to think on your feet, combining creativity and body language to express ideas effectively.
     The business applications are apparent: sales people seeking to establish rapport and hold the interest of prospects, customer service staffers who must deal with difficult customers without becoming defensive, supervisors laboring to improve their people skills, shrinking viloets who have trouble making a presentation. Add it all up and you've got Stevie Ray's School of Improvisation for Professionals, which since 1993 has been offering custom-designed workshops that cost corporate clients $2,800 for a one-hour session, $5,000 for a half-day seminar, and $8,000 for a full day of training. Despite the cost, the venture has attracted such sizable clients as 3M, Honeywell, NSP, ReliaStar, Edina Realty, and Abbott Hospital.
     The results have not yet made Ray and Vervair wealthy, however; Stevie Ray's Improv Company grossed about $200,00 last year, 85 percent of if from the corporate market. He supplements his income with two single-family rental properties he owns. "And I don't buy a lot of toys," said Ray, whose car is a 12-year old Honda.
     Marketing Seminars There's hope for improvement, however: Ray did no marketing until mid-1998, when he hired his first sales person. As a result, he expects to double the number of corporate seminars to about 60 in 1999, he said. By all accounts, the concept of applying improvisational comedy techniques to the workplace is not as offbeat as it sounds. "It gave me a new way of thinking about teamwork," said Caren Grantz, who is on leave from her job as an information systems project manager at the St. Paul Companies. The workshops "are more about listening and working together than about humor or comedy."
     Susan Flygare, a vice-president of BlueCross BlueShield of Minnesota, agreed: "I've never had a training seminar that had such a positive effect on our employees performance." Why? "In a conversation, many people are so busy getting ready to respond that they miss a lot of what they're told," said Flygare, who supervises about 280 sales and customer service people in the insurance company's national business unit. "But in improvisation, you have to be totally focused on your partner in order to know how to respond properly." In short, she said, the key message of the training sessions is: "The best response is, 'Yes, and...,' rather than 'Yes, but..."
     Ray and Vervair use a variety of interactive exercises to make their points.
     Listening Skills To teach concentration and listening, for example, two people are instructed to talk to each other simultaneously on completely different subjects - after which they must repeat as much as possible of what their partner said. To hone think-on-your-feet persuasive skills, one trainee must seek a favor from another - a son asking his father for the family car, for example - only to meet a strongly negative, even belligerent response. The idea is to meet the hostility and win the favor without losing your cool.
     Then there's the group brainstorming sessions, in which participants must sort through, expand on - but never criticize - ideas for new products, no matter how absurd. Among the proposals that groups have come up with: a Metamucil chewing gum, inflatable underwear as emergency flotation gear, and - most practical - a carrier behind the driver's seat for baby's bottles, toys, and other paraphrenalia.
Ray, a Rochester native who began doing comedy routines at 9 and sharpened his skills at school functions through high school and beyond, spent three years studying speech pathology at Moorhead State University. "I woke up one morning in 1980 and realized it was all wrong - that what I really wanted to do was perform." To be precise, what he wanted to do was open a comedy theater and school that taught the fundamentals of improvisation and stand-up comedy. So he persuaded the university to let him design his own major in something called "Theory and Performance of Comedy." It involved a mixture of speech, theater, and creative writing, plus a diet of independent study that ranged from Aristotle's and Plato's treatises on the cuases of laughter to analysis of the comedy styles of Cosby, Winters, and Skelton.
     He graduated in 1981 "at the top of my class," Ray said. "A class of one, that is."