How can you get ahead in your career and still enjoy the ride?
Fortunately, you don’t have to tell sidesplitting jokes to make humor work for you. You can learn to think like a comedian instead.
Comedy works by bending and breaking norms – and when those rules aren’t broken in just the right way, it’s more likely to harm your reputation than to help your team.
People find jokes funny when they break rules while seeming harmless. Miss one of those ingredients when you tell a joke and your audience won’t appreciate it. When it’s all benign and there’s no violation, you get yawns. When it’s all violation and not benign, you could end up triggering outrage.
It’s hard enough to get laughs in the darkness of a comedy club. Under fluorescent office lights, that razor-thin line becomes even harder to walk. What feels wrong but OK to one colleague can feel simply wrong to another, especially across differences in seniority, culture, gender or even the mood they’re in.
In our experiments, when everyday people are asked to “be funny,” most attempts land flat or cross lines.
Research by other scholars who examine leader and manager behavior in organizations tells a similar story.
But Ogilvy wasn’t telling executives to crack jokes in meetings. He was encouraging employees to think like comedians by flipping expectations, leveraging their networks and finding their niche.
To apply this method, pick a stale assumption your team holds, such as that adding features to a product always improves it or that having more meetings will lead to smoother coordination, and ask, “What if the opposite were true?”
You’ll discover options that standard brainstorming misses.
We’ve observed that many of the best comics don’t try to please everyone. They succeed by deliberately narrowing their audience. And we also find that businesses that do the same build stronger brands.
Some people want hot tea. Others want iced tea. Serving warm tea satisfies no one. Likewise, you can succeed in business by deciding whom your idea is for, and whom it’s not for, then tailoring your product, policy or presentation accordingly.
Stand-up may look like a solo act. But comics depend on feedback – punch-ups from fellow comedians and reactions from audiences – iterating jokes in the same way lean startups may innovate new products.
A team designing a new app, for instance, needs all three: Pirates to propose bold features, robots to streamline the interface, and ninjas to bridge gaps. Empowering everyone in these roles leads to braver ideas with fewer blind spots.
Telling someone to “be funny” is like telling them to “be musical.” Many of us can keep a beat, but few have what it takes to become rock stars.
That’s why we argue that it’s smarter to think like a comedian than to try to act like one.
By reversing assumptions, cooperating to innovate, and creating chasms, professionals can generate fresh solutions and stand out – without becoming an office punchline.
