Looking back at the posts this week, I kept thinking about the improv rule of “Yes, and”. A principle meant to keep scenes alive. Accept what’s been said. Add something to it. Keep going.
You don’t know if what you’ll say will land. You don’t know if what you’ll do will work. You might feel nervous, even vulnerable, just sharing the thing.
But you do it anyway. You try. You see what happens.
Spark
It starts with a spark. A catalyst. A trigger.
A question someone asked. A comment in passing. A screenshot. A diagram. A video. Sometimes just two ordinary words sitting side by side in a way you’ve never seen before.
Whatever it is, it lights something in you. Gets the wheels turning. What if we tried this? What if we didn’t?
Someone—knowingly or not—has put something out into the world. And something in you answers.
Yes, and…
Speedrun
It’s one thing to share an idea. It’s another to actually try it.
You don’t need two weeks. You don’t even need a day. You can test something in an hour. Sometimes less.
You just have to be (incredibly) scrappy. This is where the speedrun comes in.
Take every shortcut you can imagine. Instead of mocking out the entire UI, screenshot it. Instead of firing up local development, tweak it in the browser. Instead of cleaning your Figma file, duplicate the mess and keep going.
It doesn’t need to be perfect. That’s not the point. The point is to try the idea.
Set a timer—30 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever you can afford. And run.
Sometimes, with a bit of practice, you’ll succeed more often than you expect. Other times, it’ll flop. That’s fine. Because no matter what, you’ve got more information than you did 15 minutes ago.
You’ll know if this direction is worth pursuing. You’ll know how hard it would be to implement for real. You’ll know how the flow feels—not just how it looks.
That tiny, messy, 30-minute sprint—held together by duct tape, hot glue, and hope—might save your team three weeks of discovery, development, and maybe even dismantling, had they gone down the wrong path. That’s not failure. That’s clarity.
After your run, come up for air. And then: share.
Demo
Demo what you’ve got. Demo your scrappy school science experiment.
Remember: the point isn’t to look impressive. What’s impressive is the idea.
It doesn’t have to be long. In fact, the shorter the better. One minute. Two tops. Lower the barrier. Make it easy for someone else to check it out.
Record a walkthrough video. Share a clickable prototype. Deploy something somewhere, anywhere, so people don’t need to spin up environments or wade through Slack threads to find the context.
Don’t make people jump through hoops to understand what you tried. Make it light. Make it easy. So they can respond. So they can yes, and you back. That’s what makes it work.
And sure—it might not land. But it might spark something else. Or it might be exactly what’s needed to unlock the next step.
Momentum
This whole “yes, and” rhythm—this spark → speedrun → demo cycle—it might look like a distraction. Like it’s pulling you away from the real work. The “real work” that was scoped two weeks (or 2 months) ago. Planned and ticketed. Sitting neatly in JIRA. Gathering digital dust.
But if you’ve ever worked in a system that worships the roadmap… If you’ve ever watched a good idea die in a backlog… If you’ve ever felt like discovery was a risk, not a right…
Then you know: this isn’t extra. This isn’t chaos. This is momentum.
Because innovation doesn’t happen after the JIRA tickets. It happens in between them. In the “Wait—what if we…” In the messy demos. In the real-time flow of people responding to each other’s sparks.
This approach reframes creativity as a series of brave, small moves:
- See something.
- Try something.
- Share something.
You do it quickly. Openly. Without needing permission. You say “yes, and” before doubt has time to say “wait, what if you suck.”
And that rhythm? That cycle? It’s what turns a stagnant project into a living one. It’s how dead plans wake up. How teams start buzzing again. How a handful of humans, working inside a browser window, start to remember...
It’s improv. It’s invention. It’s alive.