Why Applied Improvisation Is the Next Frontier in Healthcare Team Performance

Let me tell you about a moment that happens in hospitals every single day. A nurse notices something off during a shift change. A resident senses a medication order does not quite add up. A care coordinator watches an interdisciplinary meeting spiral into defensive silos. In each case, someone knows something important, but the words do not come. The hierarchy feels too steep. The risk of being wrong feels too high. And so silence wins, even when speaking up could change everything.

This is the communication crisis that keeps healthcare leaders searching for solutions, and it is exactly what applied improvisation addresses. Erin Diehl, founder of improve it!, has spent over a decade using corporate improv training to transform how teams communicate, and her methodology translates powerfully to healthcare settings where the stakes of miscommunication are measured in patient outcomes, not just quarterly reports.

The Silent Epidemic: Why Traditional Healthcare Training Fails to Build Real Team Trust

Here is what most leadership development training gets wrong, and it is not just a healthcare problem, though the consequences here are more severe. We keep trying to lecture people into better communication. More protocols. More checklists. More mandatory modules that everyone clicks through while checking email. But you cannot protocol your way into psychological safety. You cannot checklist someone into speaking up when their voice shakes.

What you can do is create experiences where people practice being heard, where they learn that their contributions matter, where the fear of judgment dissolves long enough for authentic communication to emerge. This is what improv does, and it is why research from the American Medical Association shows that medical improv training helps clinicians communicate with greater presence, empathy, and adaptability. At University of Michigan Medical School, over 90% of students reported that improv workshops positively impacted their teamwork, and 84% were still using those skills on clinical rotations months later.

Play as Medicine: The Neuroscience Behind Erin Diehl’s Experiential Learning for Teams

I know what you might be thinking. Play? In healthcare? We are talking about life and death here, not improv comedy. But stay with me, because the science is compelling. People learn best when both head and heart are engaged. Traditional training speaks to the analytical mind, which is why clinicians can ace a communication module and still freeze when a real conversation gets difficult. Transformation requires emotional activation, and nothing activates emotion quite like play.

Play brings us back to our inner child, that version of ourselves that existed before professional hierarchies taught us to guard every word and calculate every interaction. When healthcare professionals engage in purposeful improv exercises, something shifts. They reconnect with who they are at their core, underneath the white coats and the titles and the exhaustion. They practice being present instead of mentally rehearsing their next point. They experience what it feels like to have judgment dissolve, even briefly. And that experience changes how they show up when the pressure returns.

Image Credit: Improve It!

From Handoffs to Hard Conversations: How to Improve Workplace Culture With Improv

Diehl launched improve it! in 2014 after training at Chicago’s legendary theaters, including The Second City, iO Theater, and The Annoyance Theatre. The company won the Chicago RedEye Big Idea Award within months and has been nominated for the Chicago Innovation Award every year since. Now a Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Business Program graduate, she leads a team of seventeen trained improvisers who have transformed how over 51,000 professionals communicate and collaborate.

Her approach to customized corporate workshops starts with listening. Before designing any employee engagement events, her team digs into what is actually happening inside an organization. A nursing unit struggling with shift handoffs needs something different than an administrative team navigating reorganization or a physician group working through interdisciplinary tensions. Every engagement addresses specific challenges through creative problem solving training that feels nothing like another mandatory seminar.

The workshops use improv to teach soft skills that healthcare desperately needs but traditional methods struggle to develop. Participants practice saying “yes, and” instead of immediately finding reasons why something will not work. They learn to listen to understand rather than listening to formulate a defense. They remove the masks they wear at work, even for an hour, and discover what authentic team trust and collaboration events can actually feel like. The learning continues through three-week e-learning courses reinforcing these principles with just five minutes of daily practice, building habits instead of creating enthusiasm that fades by the next shift.

Amazon, Obama Foundation, and Now Your ICU: Why Elite Organizations Invest in improve it!

The client list tells you everything about where this methodology stands. United Airlines, PepsiCo, Deloitte, Motorola, Walgreens, LinkedIn, Uber Freight, Adobe, Warby Parker, Caterpillar, Amazon, and The Obama Foundation have all invested in improve it!’s approach. These organizations understand something that healthcare is beginning to recognize: you cannot train adaptability through slides. You cannot build real team leadership improvement through lectures. You have to practice these skills in low-stakes environments so they become instinct when stakes are high.

Diehl’s influence extends beyond workshops. She hosts The Workday Playdate Podcast, a Top 1% global show exploring how play and connection fuel professional growth. Her book “I See You” examines radical empathy and the transformative power of making others feel genuinely valued. Her mantra, “get comfortable with the uncomfortable,” resonates deeply in clinical settings where difficult conversations are daily occurrences and avoiding discomfort usually means avoiding necessary truth. Play and improv are the catalysts to people finding their highest selves, and in an industry hemorrhaging talent to burnout, helping clinicians rediscover their purpose matters as much as any retention strategy.

Image Credit: Improve It!

The Next Frontier in Healthcare Performance: Permission to Be Human Again

Healthcare has always required improvisation. Every patient presents differently. Every shift brings surprises. Every code demands real-time collaboration without a script. What improve it! offers is intentional practice of these skills, experiential learning for teams that builds the communication and adaptability muscles clinicians already use daily but rarely get to strengthen deliberately.

For clinical leadership and hospital administrators watching traditional training fall flat, the invitation is worth serious consideration. What if your next team development initiative looked less like education and more like experience? What if your people learned to communicate and collaborate not through content but through practice? What if the path to better patient safety, stronger interdisciplinary teams, and healthier workplace culture ran straight through giving your clinicians permission to play, to fail safely, and to remember who they were before exhaustion taught them to hide?

Because applied improvisation is not a distraction from serious healthcare work. It is training for exactly the kind of presence, adaptability, and human connection that serious healthcare work demands every single day.