This episode is part of the Presence project: Presence: Fixing culture starts with your calendar, not your office

You might think an episode about improv comedy might be a stretch for a podcast about making work better. But in fact as Kelly Leonard explains today the skills of improv comedy are the most important ones that will determine our success at work.

Kelly helps to run Second City, the world's famous famous improv comedy club - he believes that improv skills can teach us about what we need in work going forwards.

** TRIGGER WARNING ** includes one brief mention of poetry

Check our Kelly's book

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This episode is part of the Presence project: Presence: Fixing culture starts with your calendar, not your office

In the 2000s a book called Fish! A remarkable way to boost morale and improve results became a bestseller. A small book, it was often used by companies accompanying a video of the same name. Together the two told a story of the culture of the fish market in Seattle, a noisy, bombastic place, but a place that was filled with joy. I first encountered Fish when a firm came to pitch to me when I was working in publishing. They told me that their culture was Fish.

There are a few things that stood out from it. The idea of intentionally designing culture isn’t new but this seemed to be explicitly linking culture, emotion and mood.

There were 4 principles of Fish

• Play
• be there
• make their day
• choose your attitude

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This episode is part of the Presence project: Presence: Fixing culture starts with your calendar, not your office

This is the second episode about rituals - the first one is next to it in the podcast feed, it's an interview with Kursat Ozenc about how rituals can be used to create culture. This episode goes into real life examples.

Claudia Wallace talks about Crisp Thursday (Connection)

Andy Puleston talks about Pizza Meetings (Connection) and Leaving Speeches (Change)

Dan Pink talks about Friday Night Experiments (Creativity)

Biz Stone talks about Hack Week at Twitter (Creativity)

Dr Heidi Edmondson talks about Ten at Ten (Performance)

Heidi has a wonderful new book out - Darkness in the City of Light

You can also hear the original episodes that each of these extracts came from by click the links above. I have to say that those whole episodes are worth revising. For example, Andy Puleston talks about how effective the culture was at Radio 1 when it was a series of affiliated tribes and he articulates the role that buildings play in shaping cultures. Each episode teaches something special.

Andy Puleston is now Director of People & Culture at Circulor, an award winning technology business.

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