Improv and Psychological Safety
How Improvisation Can Build the Conditions for Teams to Think, Speak and Learn Freely
By Max Dickins, Director, Hoopla Business
Introduction
Last year, I was delighted to work with the pharmaceutical company Merck, using improvisation as a frame to explore psychological safety.
In pharmaceuticals, biosafety is fundamental. Rigour, precision and process discipline are non-negotiable. But alongside biosafety sits something equally critical: psychological safety.
Psychological safety is one of those terms many people have heard, but not everyone knows its origins. It was first coined by organisational psychologist Amy Edmondson, who defines it as:
“A shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.”
In practice, this means people believe they can speak up. They can ask questions, suggest ideas, admit mistakes and challenge approaches, without fear of punishment or humiliation.
In the improv world, we don’t always use that exact terminology. But we think about it constantly.
We ask ourselves a simple question:
Do I want to play with you?
Because on stage, confidence and creativity only emerge when people feel supported. Safety isn’t created by slogans. It’s created by behaviour: repeated, consistent behaviour over time.
In our session with Merck, we explored four core pillars of psychological safety through an improv lens.
1. It All Begins with Listening
Not performative listening. Real listening.
Improvisers talk about being a good scene partner: being present, flexible, and willing to be changed by what we hear. Trust is built when people feel seen, heard and understood.
This led to an important reflection in our session:
· How do you listen as an individual, a team and an organisation?
· Do people feel that?
Psychological safety often rises or falls on micro-behaviours: interruptions, corrections, rushed conclusions, subtle status plays. Listening is the foundation. Without it, everything else collapses.
2. ‘I’ve Got Your Back’
In improv, we actively support one another’s risks. If someone makes a bold offer, we build on it rather than undermine it. The phrase we use backstage is simple: “I’ve got your back.” Before every show, performers literally tap each other on the shoulder, look each other in the eye, and mean it.
Support in organisations can look different — but the principle is the same.
· What does “support” look like in your context?
· What does it look like to have someone’s back?
· Where do you consciously or unconsciously block ideas or feedback?
· How might you raise someone’s status to encourage challenge?
When people know they won’t be exposed or diminished for contributing, they contribute more. This isn’t soft management theory — it’s the structural condition for high performance.
3. Be Mistakes Agnostic
Improvisers try to treat mistakes as gifts. This isn’t about trying to fail — it’s about using what happens. It’s also about having a relationship with mistakes and failure that is realistic and creative.
Amy Edmondson’s research distinguishes between three types of failure:
1. Preventable failures (arising from process breakdowns, negligence)
2. Complex failures (arising from unexpected events)
3. Intelligent failures (arising from thoughtful experiments that don’t work)
Preventable failures at work must be minimised. Standards matter. But complex failures and intelligent failures should be celebrated.
The question becomes: what stories do leaders tell? Do they only tell success stories, or do they share the experiments, the false starts, even the “failure CV” moments?
Psychological safety isn’t about lowering the bar. It’s about increasing learning speed.
How Leaders Can Tell Failure Stories to Destigmatise Failure
Telling failure stories is one of the most powerful things a leader can do and one of the rarest. Research suggests that managers who have experienced failure firsthand often hesitate to share those stories, fearing it will undermine their credibility. Yet, paradoxically, it is often the most credible, established leaders who are best placed to do it. They have permission. And they have an obligation: when failure stories are withheld, organisations miss out on profound learning.
Here are four practical examples of how leaders, organisations and institutions have turned failure into a storytelling practice.
The CV of Failures
The concept was originally proposed by Melanie Stefan, a lecturer in Biomedical Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, in a 2010 article in Nature. Her argument was simple: academic CVs present only the high points, making the path to success appear frictionless. The reality of rejection, missed grants, failed experiments stays invisible.
In 2016, Princeton professor of psychology Johannes Haushofer took the idea viral by publishing his own CV of Failures publicly. It listed, with candour and some wry humour, every degree programme he didn’t get into, every award he wasn’t given, every grant application that was rejected. He introduced it with a line that has since been shared millions of times:
“Most of what I try fails, but these failures are often invisible, while the successes are visible. I have noticed that this sometimes gives others the impression that most things work out for me.”
- Johannes Haushofer, Princeton University
The document went viral and Haushofer later added a wry note under “Meta-Failures”: that his CV of Failures had received far more attention than his entire body of academic work.
The CV of Failures is now used in corporate and educational settings as a structured exercise in failure storytelling. Leaders who share one whether internally with their teams or more publicly shift the unspoken rules of their culture. They demonstrate that the path to success is paved with false starts, and that this is not shameful. It is normal.
See the original: Johannes Haushofer’s CV of Failures - https://johanneshaushofer.com/Johannes_Haushofer_CV_of_Failures.pdf
The Museum of Failure
What if an entire institution were devoted to celebrating the things that didn’t work? That’s the premise behind the Museum of Failure, founded by Dr Samuel West, a psychologist specialising in organisational innovation, in Helsingborg, Sweden, in 2017.
The travelling exhibition showcases over 150 failed products and services from some of the world’s most successful companies, (Google, Apple, Coca-Cola, Sony) and the stories behind why they flopped. New Coke. Colgate lasagna (yes, really). Bic For Her pens. Each exhibit is less about mockery and more about recognition: that innovation is inherently risky, and most experiments fail.
“To learn from failure we need to talk about it. The museum is a good way of creating that discussion.”
- Dr Samuel West, founder, Museum of Failure
West’s insight is directly applicable to leadership storytelling. The museum doesn’t dwell on blame or incompetence. It reframes failure as the cost of attempting something new and makes that reframe physical, tangible and even entertaining. Leaders can do the same: not by minimising failure, but by contextualising it, narrating it, and making it visible.
Explore: The Museum of Failure - https://museumoffailure.com
The Anti-Portfolio
Bessemer Venture Partners is one of America’s most storied venture capital firms. On their website, alongside their list of successful investments, they maintain something unusual: an “Anti-Portfolio”, a public record of the companies they had the opportunity to invest in, and passed on.
The list includes Apple, Google, Airbnb, eBay and PayPal. Each entry is accompanied by the specific reasoning the partner used at the time to justify passing. On Google, partner David Cowan was introduced to “two really smart Stanford students writing a search engine” by a college friend and reportedly asked how to leave the house without going anywhere near her garage.
The Anti-Portfolio is a masterclass in institutional failure storytelling. It names names. It includes detail. It does not bury the judgement errors, it publishes them. The self-deprecating tone creates trust, signals intellectual honesty, and models the kind of culture where people can own a bad call without it ending their career.
Explore: Bessemer Venture Partners Anti-Portfolio - https://www.bvp.com/anti-portfolio
The FAIL! Conference
MIT students launched the FAIL! conference series to destigmatise failure among some of the highest-achieving people in the world. The series brought together faculty, researchers, and leaders, including Amy Edmondson herself, to share stories of setbacks, experiments that didn’t work, and hard-learned lessons. With 350–400 attendees at each event, the series demonstrated both the appetite for this kind of storytelling and its power to shift culture.
“FAIL! is about being human. By sharing the challenges and vulnerabilities that many people try to hide, our brave speakers are helping to create an environment where students feel comfortable being themselves and expressing their creativity.”
- MIT FAIL! organiser
The FAIL! model is scalable for organisations of any size. A quarterly “failure debrief”, an internal talk series where leaders share what didn’t work and why, or even a visible wall of “experiments that taught us something”, these are all ways to institutionalise failure storytelling without requiring a full museum.
Read more: MIT FAIL! initiative - https://news.mit.edu/2019/mit-students-organize-fail-conference-destigmatize-failure-build-resilience-0528
The common thread running through all four examples is this: failure loses its power to silence people when it is named, narrated and normalised by someone with credibility and authority. The leader who goes first, who shares the failed product launch, the bad hire, the strategy that didn’t hold, gives everyone else permission to do the same.
4. A Learn-By-Doing Mindset
Ultimately, psychological safety supports a learn-by-doing mindset.
When tackling complex challenges, we rarely get it right first time. There will be failures along the way. It’s not about getting it right first time, it’s about metabolising those small failures into insight and action quickly.
That requires:
· Greater tolerance for experimentation.
· Permission for imperfect action.
· Visible modelling from leaders.
This is where improv training becomes more than a metaphor. The improv stage is a rehearsal space for exactly these behaviours, making bold offers, recovering from mistakes in real time, and trusting that the group will hold you when you fall. The muscle memory built in the room carries back into the workplace.
In Summary
Psychological safety is built - or eroded - one interaction at a time.
· How we respond to other people’s ideas.
· How we handle critical feedback.
· How we react when something goes wrong.
Improv provides a rehearsal space for those behaviours. And it all comes back to that question:
Do I want to play with you?
Want to explore more?
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