Comedy & Improv for Change.
The fastest way to surface a perverse incentive is to make a room laugh at it. A working class for senior teams that uses comedy writing and improv to name the loops nobody will name in the meeting — and convert them into an incentive redesign you can ship. Delivered with the REFRAME™ Method as the corporate framework.
Humor is incentive intelligence in disguise.
Every comedian working in corporate America is, under the hood, an incentive diagnostician. The laugh-line is the place a system contradicts itself out loud. The audience laughs because they recognize the loop — the comp plan that punishes the thing it claims to reward, the metric that quietly rewrites the strategy, the ritual that replaces the work.
This class hires the same instrument and points it at your own organization. We use improv structure and comedy writing as a diagnostic, not as entertainment — and we leave behind a written framework, the REFRAME™ Method, that the team can run on its own in any meeting where the truth is too expensive to say plainly.
REFRAME™ — seven moves from laughter to redesign.
REFRAME™ is the Institute's working framework for converting the energy of comedy into a measurable change in incentive architecture. Every engagement leaves behind a custom REFRAME™ Playbook mapping your top loops to scenes, redesigns, and embedded rituals.
Name the perverse incentive nobody in the room is allowed to name. Borrowed from the III Framework: the comp plan, KPI, status game, or ritual that's quietly producing the opposite of what leadership wants.
Push the loop to its logical extreme on stage. Comedy's superpower: the audience laughs because they recognize the system, not the joke. The laugh is the diagnosis.
Swap roles — junior plays CEO, CEO plays the front-line user, finance plays the customer. Improv's 'yes, and' breaks the political grip that keeps the loop in place.
Run the conversation you've been avoiding. The board meeting. The layoff. The bonus discussion. Rehearsal lowers the social cost of telling the truth in the real room.
Translate the scene back into the org. What metric, ritual, or comp line is producing this behavior? What single design change would make the absurd version impossible?
Define the one observable that proves the loop has broken — a meeting that ends differently, a KPI that's allowed to be missed, a decision made in days not quarters.
Install a recurring 'reframe' — a 30-minute monthly scene, a quarterly improv jam, a 'name the loop' standing agenda item. Comedy becomes the org's early-warning system for perverse incentives.
When everyone in the room has named the elephant privately but no one will say it in the meeting, improv is faster than another offsite.
Comedy is the only language honest enough to metabolize a transition without breaking trust. Used well, it accelerates the integration; used badly, it doesn't get used.
The people closest to the customer already see the perverse loops. Improv gives them a stage to surface those loops in front of the people who can change them.
Replace a deck nobody remembers with a 90-minute working session people quote for months. Humor is the most under-used lever in adult learning.
A laugh, a loop named, a redesign in writing.
- 01.A custom REFRAME™ Playbook (~30 pages) mapping your organization's top five perverse incentives to specific scene templates and redesign moves.
- 02.A 90-minute on-site working session for up to 40 leaders, co-facilitated by an III faculty member and a working comedy writer/improv director.
- 03.Five rehearsed scenes built from real, anonymized situations inside your org — each ending in a concrete incentive redesign recommendation.
- 04.A 'name the loop' ritual installed in one recurring meeting of your choice (exec staff, all-hands, town hall, board prep).
- 05.A 30-day follow-up diagnostic from III faculty: which loops broke, which didn't, and the next intervention.
Four hours, one team of 8–24 leaders. The REFRAME™ Method end-to-end against one named loop. Walks out with one redesign decision in writing.
Eight hours, up to 60 leaders across functions. Five loops, five scenes, five redesigns. Includes the custom REFRAME™ Playbook deliverable.
Four 90-minute sessions per year embedded in your operating cadence, plus the standing 'name the loop' ritual and quarterly playbook updates.
Pricing assumes US-based delivery. International travel billed at cost. Non-profit and public-sector rates available on request.
It's improv structure applied to incentive design — with a working comedy writer in the room to sharpen the scenes. There is no audience, no performance pressure, and nothing recorded. Leaders are participants, not performers.
Best result we've had was inside a defense contractor. Comedy works precisely where it's least expected — humor lowers the political cost of saying the true thing. We calibrate the room; you don't have to be funny to participate.
An improv workshop teaches improv skills. This class uses improv as the surfacing mechanism for the REFRAME™ Method and delivers a written incentive-redesign playbook signed off by III faculty. The deliverable is the point; the laughter is the diagnostic instrument.
Every session is co-led by an III faculty member (incentive design) and a working comedy writer or improv director with corporate experience. The pairing is the product.
Yes. The REFRAME™ Method is taught as a module inside the Executive Course and the Masters fellowship. The corporate class can be run as a standalone or as the entry point into a deeper engagement with the Institute.
Bring the class to your team.
Tell us the loop you're trying to break — the metric, the meeting, the ritual that's quietly producing the opposite of what leadership wants. We'll come back within a week with a proposed format and a draft scene built from what you described.