"Improv Isn't the Treatment. It's the Practice." — Ruth Jenkins on the Improv Interviews Podcast

Ruth Jenkins co-founded CSz Portland and has been teaching this work for more than 35 years. She also spent nearly three decades as a speech-language pathologist, most of it working with adults recovering from strokes, brain injuries, and neurological conditions like Parkinson’s. She did both at once for most of that career.

That combination is rare, and it’s why Margot Escott, a psychotherapist who hosts the Improv Interviews podcast, invited Ruth on for a 53-minute conversation about how she uses improv with patients, which games she reaches for, and what she’s learned about why they work.

You can listen to the full episode on SoundCloud. Below are the parts that stood out to us, and what they mean if you’re thinking about bringing this kind of training to your team.

Quotes are lightly edited for clarity.

The game is just the format

Early in the episode, Ruth draws a line she says she’s always careful about:

I have never, ever tried to say that improv is a treatment. It is not a treatment. It is not going to cure what you have. It is a way to practice the tools that will help you get past your issues, or at least be able to manage them.

Later she describes pitching a presentation to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association and getting turned down for lack of research. Her answer explains applied improv about as well as anything we’ve read:

These games that I’m doing — I am always taking a research-based treatment method and using it in the game. The game is just a format so that you don’t have to sit across from them and show them flashcards.

That’s how we think about corporate training. Each exercise in a CSz Portland workshop is a container for a specific skill: listening without planning your response, building on someone else’s idea, describing something clearly when the first word won’t come. The exercises are also fun, which is what makes people willing to practice them.

What the games actually train

Margot asks Ruth to walk through her go-to exercises, and Ruth breaks them into three buckets: comprehension, output, and what she calls life communication skills. A few examples, with what each one targets:

• Up / Down / In / Out / Diagonal. Players pass a signal around a circle, but say one thing while doing another. Ruth uses it for cognitive switching, the ability to hold two things at once and move quickly between them, which is hard for Parkinson’s patients and, honestly, for anyone under pressure. “Usually the first couple of times they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, we just can’t.’ And then eventually they’ll get it.” She’d walk in late to her aphasia group at ElderPlace and find they’d already started without her.
• Five Things. Name five things you’d do on vacation, five things in your kitchen. Straightforward word retrieval, but also what clinicians call circumlocution: finding another way to say what you mean when the exact word isn’t available. “Or you’re just aging like me,” Ruth adds.
• What’s in the Box. Mime receiving a gift, then describe it so your neighbor can guess. This trains semantic feature analysis: describing something by its features until your listener gets there. “It’s heavy, it’s black, it’s got holes for your fingers, you roll it down a lane and knock over pins.”
• Slide Show and Slow-Mo. One person narrates what everyone else is doing. Ruth uses these for verbs and action language, which speech pathologists were once told they were underemphasizing.

Two things she says about all of them are worth noting. First: “All of these games, I modify for simplicity when I start with them.” Second: “It’s not going to work for every single person. Not every single person is going to love that. It’s not a panacea.”

We’d say the same thing about a team workshop. The exercise gets adapted to the room, every time, and the goal is to give people a low-stakes place to try a skill they’ll use at work on Monday.

The stories

Three of the patient stories Ruth tells stuck with us.

There’s the brother and sister, third and fifth grade, both disfluent, who Ruth grouped together in a public school where she carried a caseload of 72 kids. After a few sessions they asked if they could bring the games back to their classrooms. Then they taught them to the whole class. A few days later Ruth was on playground duty and found the kids playing them on their own, with the two stuttering kids, who’d always struggled socially, leading.

There’s the 24-year-old former model who suffered severe brain damage during a cosmetic surgery. Ruth, knowing he had worked as a model and actor before the injury, tried a couple of improv exercises during a home health visit. At the door, his sister was crying. “That is the first time I’ve seen him laugh in two years.”

And there’s the young man in a brain-injury residential program who, his speech pathologist warned, only ever talked about himself. Ruth put him in the “hype man” role in a three-person interview game: someone else gets asked about a hobby, and the hype man’s whole job is to make their answers sound amazing. A young woman said playing violin was harder for her now than it used to be. “He goes, ‘Oh, she’s so humble — she plays that violin two hours a day and she’s amazing.’ Everything she said, he came up with something glorious. We were all shocked.” The program took the game back and kept using it.

That last one is a leadership exercise. It’s the same muscle as making a colleague’s idea land in a meeting, and the right structure unlocked it in a single session.

Getting people out of their rut

Near the end, Ruth tells a story from the Portland State University aphasia clinic, where she taught after retiring from full-time clinical work. One participant was standoffish: if an activity didn’t appeal to him, he wasn’t doing it. But he loved sports. So during a Slow-Mo round, this man, who walks with a cane, got up and mimed ice skating with full commitment, while a woman who had barely strung a sentence together all term delivered play-by-play commentary like a professional broadcaster.

“I think sometimes just getting people out of their rut helps with this,” Ruth says.

That’s most of what we do. Teams have ruts too: the same three people talk in every meeting, the same objections get raised, the same ideas get dropped without discussion. Another conversation about the rut rarely shifts it. An exercise that asks people to show up differently for twenty minutes, and lets them find out they can, usually does.

Ruth today

Ruth works directly with patients and caregivers in “train the trainer” settings for healthcare providers, leads a group for older adults, and still teaches for CSz Portland. If you want to see the clinical side of her work, her ASHA continuing-education training, Improv Theater Techniques & S/L and Cognitive Treatment, is on YouTube.

She’s also a Senior Practitioner on our corporate training team, where she brings the same understanding of how people communicate, at both the interpersonal and neurological level, into the room with your team. You can read more about Ruth and our facilitators here.

Listen to the full Improv Interviews episode with Ruth Jenkins