Improv Meets High Performance
How Improvisation and Performance Psychology Unite to Unlock Human Potential
A conversation between Chris Shambrook & Max Dickins
Introduction
What happens when you place a performance psychologist who has spent decades working with elite Olympic athletes in the same room as one of the UK's leading improvisers? The answer, it turns out, is a masterclass in the art of being human under pressure.
This white paper draws on a wide-ranging conversation between Chris Shambrook and Max Dickins, two practitioners who, on the surface, occupy very different worlds, but who share a deep belief that high performance is a set of learnable skills, not an innate gift reserved for the elite few.
Max Dickins is a director at Hoopla, one of the UK's longest-running improv theatre and training companies. With twenty years of experience teaching thousands of people to improvise, and a book, aptly also called ‘Improvise!’ -exploring how improv thinking applies to working and everyday life- Max's expertise lies in helping people respond brilliantly in the moment. As he explains: "I think a lot about improv as a metaphor, as something we do all the time. I think a lot of life we're improvising. We just don't necessarily use that word."
Chris Shambrook is one of the directors at Planet K2, a consultancy that has spent twenty-three years taking the principles of high-performance sport into commercial, medical and military environments. Having worked extensively with the British Rowing team, Chris brings the rigour of psychology to the messiness of everyday performance: "We talk about performance being a force for good and not a problem to be solved."
Together, their conversation uncovers five interconnected themes that sit at the heart of both improv and performance psychology: what performance actually means, the relationship between structure and spontaneity, trust and collective confidence, responding to mistakes, and the art of competitive collaboration. Each section below draws on their words directly, weaving the practical wisdom of improv with the evidence base of performance psychology.
1. Redefining Performance: Input, Output and the Art of Showing Up
One of the central misunderstandings both Dickins and Shambrook encounter is a confusion about what performance actually means. In business and in sport, the word tends to get collapsed into results: revenue, medals, metrics. But both practitioners argue this conflation is precisely where high performance breaks down.
For Shambrook, performance is defined with clarity: "Performance for us is doing the things you need to do to get the results you want. It's the input to get the output, and it is the art of creating the inputs that will give you the best chance of getting the result that you want." The emphasis here is significant. Results are not the performance, they are the potential consequence of a performance executed well. When teams and organisations fixate on results without equal discipline around process, they lose the ability to control what is actually within their grasp.
Improv offers a complementary lens. On stage, the result Dickins is after is laughter and connection, but he is equally quick to challenge the assumption that improvising means "winging it." The word itself, he points out, has its origins in scripted theatre, where an actor is in the wings cribbing lines before a show: "They go out and they do a bad version of the thing they should have prepared properly. No one's saying that's a good thing. Improv's about responding in the moment to try and create things out of what's coming at you."
"There's a huge amount of training you go through to get to the point to reliably produce that result."
- Max Dickins
Both disciplines converge on the same insight: high performance in the moment is made possible by deep preparation before it. The improv performer who walks on stage and appears effortlessly spontaneous has done the work. The athlete who performs in flow at the Olympic final has prepared obsessively. The business leader who navigates a crisis with grace has built the habits and psychological frameworks that make that response possible. Performance, properly understood, is never accidental.
2. Structure and Spontaneity: The Springboard, Not the Cage
A common assumption about both improv and high-performance teams is that success depends on either rigid structure or total freedom. The reality, both Dickins and Shambrook argue, is far more nuanced, and the tension between discipline and creative expression is one of the most important things a team can learn to navigate.
In improv theatre, audiences watching a live show often assume performers are in free fall. In fact, as Dickins explains: "There's so much structure that goes into it. You know when you're going to start, you know when you're going to finish. You often know the format. You don't know any of the words, but roughly there are different forms." The structure is not the enemy of spontaneity; it is what makes spontaneity possible. It is the container within which genuine creative risk-taking can occur safely.
Shambrook draws a direct parallel from sport psychology: "You want the structure to be a springboard for expression. You get that balance between discipline and freedom." He goes further, warning of the danger of over-structure, the manager so wedded to a tactical system that players can no longer exploit the opportunities right in front of them. In business, this translates to teams so attached to process that they cannot respond to change.
"As soon as you get homogeneity, you close down high performance. We need discipline and structure, but we also need freedom of individuality."
- Chris Shambrook
The conversation turns, tellingly, to artificial intelligence. Dickins uses it as a live example of the challenge every organisation now faces: "A lot of the stuff we learned about marketing, we're now having to rethink. We had an SEO model - now a lot of people are going to find their suppliers through ChatGPT and LLMs. If we're too wedded to what we previously knew and weren't addressing the moment, we're not going to be able to get the result we want."
This is the improvisational challenge of our time. The organisations that thrive will be those that have built the structural foundations to absorb change without being paralysed by it, and the human flexibility to respond to it without abandoning what they know. Preparation and adaptability are not opposites. They are partners.
3. Trust, Collective Confidence and Having Each Other's Back
If there is a single word that appears most frequently throughout this conversation, it is trust. And what emerges from both the improv stage and the world of performance psychology is that trust is not a nice-to-have cultural flourish, it is a fundamental structural ingredient of high performance.
For Dickins, this is visceral and immediate. Before every improv show, performers literally tap each other on the back, look each other in the eye, and say: "I've got your back." He is careful to explain this is not theatrical ceremony: "It's trying to embody this idea that if we are going to be confident, it's on all of us to help each other be confident." Confidence, he argues, is misunderstood when it is framed purely as an individual attribute. In improv, and in any team environment, it is something the group creates together.
"We learn in improv that confidence is given to you by how a group responds to you and the space they create. Are you trying to make me look good? Support my choices? If it's going a bit south, are you quick off the back line to help me out?"
- Max Dickins
Shambrook provides the psychological architecture behind this observation. Drawing on Bandura's concept of collective efficacy, situationally specific confidence at the group level, he identifies four key ingredients: past experience, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, and physical state. Critically, two of those four are entirely dependent on other people. "You can't have isolated confidence," he says. "The more you can go -this is a thing, if we've got safety in numbers as well as extra strength in numbers, we stop the decline but we maximise the potential for good."
His own experience with the British Rowing team makes this concrete. Building a crew of eight is not just a physical endeavour, it requires psychological framework building: shared understanding of collective goals, individual contributions, and mutual interdependency. "There's a huge amount which is reinforced by: we live that trust every day, and we've demonstrated that when we say we're going to do something, we do."
Shambrook offers two definitions of confidence that deserve to be written on every team's wall. "Confidence is knowing that by being yourself right now, it will be enough. And the other: confidence is knowing that you will do what you say you're going to do." Both definitions place preparation at the centre, but they also locate confidence firmly within the web of human relationships that surround performance.
4. Mistakes, Errors and the Note You Play Afterwards
Nowhere do improv and performance psychology overlap more powerfully than in their shared approach to failure. Both disciplines have arrived, through very different routes, at the same conclusion: the mistake is not the problem. The response to the mistake is everything.
Dickins references Miles Davis directly in this conversation, recalling the famous principle: "It's not the note you play that's the wrong note. It's the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong." In improv, this is not a philosophical position but a practical skill, drilled into performers from the earliest stages of training: "Everything's an offer. If something could go not quite right, how can we incorporate that into the scene? And a big part of that is just letting go of what's just happened in the moment and going, how can I use this?"
"Half the warm-up games in improv are about celebrating getting it wrong. It takes people weeks, months of just going: you can fail in this room, by the way. It's fine. And they go: so much of my story around failure was in my head."
-Max Dickins
The psychological parallel Shambrook draws is elegant. He references Roger Federer's acceptance speech for an honorary degree, in which the greatest tennis player of his era revealed he had only won 54% of the points he had ever played. The margin between genius and everyone else, it turns out, is remarkably thin. What separated Federer was not the absence of errors, but his ability to forget the last point and play the next one.
Shambrook draws on Viktor Frankl's concept of paradoxical intention to frame this further, the idea that the things we fear most often have far less power over us when we confront them directly. In improv, this principle is baked into the training: "The world's worst. Could you describe it? Could you be it? Deliberately being error-strewn, rather than going for this thing where we must never make an error."
The practical application for business teams is significant. Organisations that inadvertently punish mistakes through judgment, blame cultures, or simply the accumulation of micro-expressions and subtle language choices create environments where people stop taking risks. Psychological safety, as both men acknowledge, is not a buzzword. It is the precondition for any team performing near its potential. As Dickins observes: "Do people feel like they can put forward half an idea, admit to a mistake?" The answer to that question tells you almost everything you need to know about the ceiling on a team's performance.
5. Competitive Collaboration: The Ensemble That Wins Together
The final theme that runs through this conversation is perhaps the most counterintuitive: the idea that genuine high performance is inherently collaborative -even in environments that appear competitive. Dickins introduces the concept with characteristic directness. In an improv ensemble, selfishness is visible immediately. "If one person is dominating beyond selfish and looking after themselves and not looking after other people it stands out like a horrible red thumb."
But he is also honest about the human reality underneath the ideal. Improvisers are competitive. They want to be noticed. They want the audience coming to them at the bar afterwards. The resolution, he argues, is not to suppress individual ambition but to recognise that individual brilliance is only possible within a thriving ensemble: "I will not have a good show personally in a bad group show."
"Competitive collaboration, who's the best in the team at collaborating? You harness the ego, but you do it in a way that is in service of what we're trying to do together."
- Chris Shambrook
Shambrook introduces the concept of competitive collaboration to describe this dynamic and anchors it with a wonderful piece of etymology. Researcher and Olympic silver medallist Cath Bishop explored the origin of the word competition, tracing it to the Latin competere: to strive together. "It does not mean to battle against," Shambrook notes. "Even the origin of competition is a striving-together piece, which is collaboration."
He also references Steve Redgrave, widely regarded as the greatest rower in Olympic history, who famously said he wanted to be the worst rower in any crew he was part of. "He had ambitions to be the best, but he knew that elevating other people beyond his own levels was in his own self-interest." High performance at the team level requires individuals who understand, truly understand, that their personal ceiling is raised by the quality of those around them.
In improv, this is expressed through the teaching focus that underpins everything Hoopla does with both performers and business clients. "Most of the work we do in training improvisers and doing work with business groups," Dickins explains, "is around: how can you be more present? How can you be a better listener? How can you be more supportive? How can you be a good scene partner and make the other person look good?" These are not soft skills in any diminished sense of the word. They are the advanced capabilities that separate good teams from extraordinary ones.
Conclusion: Forget and Trust, The Freedom to Play
At the close of their conversation, Shambrook offers a quote from the behaviourist psychologist B.F. Skinner that distils the entire dialogue into a single idea: "Education is that which remains after what has been taught is forgotten." He reframes it for the world of coaching and performance: "Training and coaching is that which remains after what has been coached is forgotten. You go into the moment to forget with trust."
This is the meeting point of improv and performance psychology. Improvisation is not the absence of preparation, it is the full flowering of preparation when the performer is free enough, trusting enough, and present enough to let go of everything and simply play. Performance psychology provides the framework for getting there: the habits, the identity work, the collective confidence-building, the feed-forward loops and the psychological safety that allows risk to feel like opportunity rather than threat.
Dickins puts it simply: "High performance, including high performance in the moment, is a set of skills you can get better at, and there are ways to actually practice it." That practice does not happen in a boardroom presentation or a strategy day. It happens in the repeated, embodied experience of doing, of getting it wrong, recovering, building trust, and going again.
"It feels like there should be more improv in life, and there should be more freedom to play and enjoy. The combination of what we've got could really help do a lot of that."
- Chris Shambrook
The implications for business are profound. In a world that is changing faster than any strategic plan can anticipate, where AI is reshaping entire industries, where hybrid working has fragmented team cultures, where the pressure to perform has never been greater, the organisations that will thrive are not those with the best processes. They are those with people who know how to be present, how to trust, how to recover, and how to lift each other up in the moment. That is not a training programme. That is a practice. And it starts with saying yes.
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