How can I support you?

In life, in work, and in improv, it’s easy to resort to black-and-white thinking when things don’t go well: “It’s all my fault, I messed up” or “It’s their fault for dropping the ball.” Almost always, the reality lies somewhere in the middle. I’ve found that asking the question “How can I support you?” cuts through this polarized thinking by acknowledging our individual responsibility (I’m offering help …) but also recognizing the responsibility of others (… but as support for you).

Wait, what does improv have to do with this?!? A bit of context:

I’ve been doing improv comedy for about 1.5 years now (I perform with a group we started called Milequetoast), and I’m still very much an amateur. But I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how the kinds of skills and the mindset that you need to cultivate to be successful as an improviser overlap a lot with what makes one successful as a UX professional. At some point I want to write more about how risk taking, trusting the process, making connections, and allowing oneself to be vulnerable and a little goofy can help one in their career, but now I wanted to focus on a specific mindset: shared responsibility for success and failure.

Let’s take a look at two hypothetical situations:

A co-improviser gets upset at themselves about how some scenes of their show went. They mentioned how they could have handled this input better. Or should have started out with a different initiation. Or cut a scene earlier.

A co-worker gets upset at other people when a project doesn’t go well. They mention how this other person could have made the requirements clearer. Or could have given them more time. Or could have taken on part of the workload.

To the co-improviser, I’d say: When a scene goes starts going south, it’s everyone’s job to save it. It’s not fair to solely blame yourself. The success or failure of a scene is rarely the work of one person, but a result of the interactions between people on the stage. Your teammates could have asked themselves, “What can I do to support you?”

To the co-worker, I’d say: When a project starts going south, it’s everyone’s job to save it. It’s not fair to solely blame other people. The success or failure of a project is rarely about the work of one person, but a result of the interactions between people on the team. Maybe you could have asked others “What can I do to support you?”

Now … I say this is about co-workers or co-improvisers but this is a pattern I recognize in myself all the time.

I also recognize that there is a bit of a naive simplification here. It is totally possible for one person to royally fuck-up a scene. And it is also totally possible that one’s co-worker is straight-up not fulfilling their responsibilities, and that’s negatively affecting a project. It is important to have some clear-eyed boundaries here.

The point is, though, that we shouldn’t reflexively resort to this kind of all-or-nothing thinking. Instead, we should try give ourselves, and the people we rely to make great scenes and products, the benefit of the doubt, and bridge the gap with them. Asking “How can I support you” - and it’s equally important close cousin “Here’s how you can support me” - are simple but powerful tools to do that.