FRISCO PROFESSIONAL
Team Building & Brainstorm Training
In addition to traditional stage training, the FRISCO staff has experience when it comes to putting your workgroup, staff or company through their paces, improv-style. By learning what it takes to work together to create funny characters and scenarios, your people will quickly discover new ways to come together as a team.
YES, AND...
“Yes, and...” is the principal component that makes improvisation comedy happen. It’s what keeps the ideas coming and the action moving. Without that simple element, everything grinds to a halt on stage.
And the same thing happens in boardrooms, bullpens and offices around the world.
Those two tiny words -- “Yes, and...” -- are the very simple building blocks that can be applied at any level of business interaction to help make sure your team is always working on track and together on their objectives. At the same time, our FRISCO teambuilders will teach your crew how to use those magic words to gain the freedom to be as creative as they want to be when it comes to mining and implementing fresh ideas.
WHAT WILL WE BE DOING?
In order to discover just how powerful “Yes, and...” is, we’ll guide the members of your organization through a variety of exercises, structures and games that will get them up on their feet instead of sitting on their hands. They’ll be so busy having fun playing and making each other laugh that they won’t even be thinking about how much they’re learning along the way.
If you’ve ever watched TV’s Whose Line Is It Anyway, you’ve already got a feel for the sort of interactive stage games that FRISCO bases our teambuilding model on. From the get-go, we’ll have your team performing for each other -- crazy physical antics, made-up foreign languages and giving a press conference without knowing a thing about the topic that they’re being interview about.
Depending on the size of your group, we’ll split folks up into small teams so that they’ll be spending more time doing and less time watching. And besides the cardinal rule of improv (pssst -- it’s “Yes, and...”!), we’re going to give them one other principle of improvisational comedy and creative thinking that’s so simple and yet is ignored time and time again: the Art of Listening.
THE ART OF LISTENING
By combining “Yes, and...” and active listening, together with the wide array of teambuilding and brainstorming structures taught by the FRISCO trainers, your team will emerge more together and energized than ever. Imagine them looking forward to the next meeting where they have to share ideas and actually being excited instead of dreading it. By learning how to listen properly -- to instructions, to others and to their own inner voice -- your corporate team is going to become your creative team in nothing flat!
OUR EXPERIENCE
The trained and talented staff not only has performed for numerous corporate groups, but has worked with many other to bring the concepts that makes improvisational comedy so creative and fresh into the business workplace. We’ve worked with many Silicon Valley groups as well as such interesting assignments as teaching Japanese and Swedish engineers for Sony Ericsson how to work together despite their language and cultural barriers.
Our instructors include Marc Hershon, the guy who named the BlackBerry and co-author of the new business book I Hate People!: Kick Loose from the Overbearing and Underhanded Jerks at Work and Get What You Want from Your Job; and Sammy Wegent, a teacher of long-standing at the Comedy College with a BFA in Theatre from Shorter College and an MFA in Acting from Catholic University.
OUR FEES
We offer very reasonable rates in addition to coming the location of your choice in order to do our teambuilding and brainstorming workshops. Pricing is based on a per hour and per person basis. Prices for much larger groups may vary based on time and how many of our FRISCO staff are required to suitably instruct all present. Any guaranteed FRISCO session includes a free consultation to help select the perfect curriculum for your group.
CONTACT
For more information or to book a FRISCO Professional session, please contact Rich Stimbra at the San Francisco Comedy College, (415) 921-2051.
TESTIMONIALS
“AAPCHO, a 20+ year-old national health advocacy non-profit based in Oakland, California, has for many years held a number of all-staff annual retreats aimed at helping employees develop on a professional and personal level. For our “innovative retreat” this past June, we reached out to SFCC/FRISCO to improve our public speaking and presentation skills and were very pleased with our instructor Sammy Wegnet’s tailored curriculum for the session.
Our three-hour class with Sammy onsisted of a “warm-up” portion, followed by team-oriented exercises, then finally closed with a brief but impactful lesson on mindfulness as an audience member and also as a performer. Certainly, some had to reach a bit deeper and push themselves harder to loosen up and fully engage in the activities, but the majority of our staff truly embraced the exercises with vigor and openness. It’s one thing to attend a seminar on public speaking and presentation, another entirely to be faced with the discomfort and awkwardness of actually performing in front of others. It’s also a much more effective way to learn...Sammy helped us channel creativity in our words as individuals on stage, and confidence in each other as a team. Great job, SFCC!”
Jeffrey Caballero
Executive Director
Association of Asian Pacific Community Heath Organizations