Improv, Psychological Safety, Compliance & Speak Up Culture: Part 2 “Listen Like a Thief”

May 8, 2026

This is part 2 of a 6-part series of Creativity & Compliance, where Tom & Ronnie explore the connections between improv comedy and improving compliance, psychological safety and speak up culture. Today's episode - "Listen Like a Thief"

Hosts

Tom Fox

Ronnie Feldmen

 Resources

60-Second Communication & Awareness Shorts
A variety of short, customizable, quick-hitter “commercials” including songs & jingles, video shorts, newsletter graphics & Gifs, and more. Promote integrity, compliance, the Code, the helpline and the E&C team as helpful advisors and coaches.

Workplace Tonight Show! Micro-learning
A library of 1-10-minute trainings and communications wrapped in the style of a late-night variety show, that explains corporate risk topics and why employees should care.

Custom Live & Digital Programing
We’ll develop programming that fits your culture and balances the seriousness of the subject matter with a more engaging delivery.

Tales from the Hotline
Fast, fun case studies about workplace behavior gone wrong, brought to life by comedians and storytellers.

About This Episode

Improv, Psychological Safety, Compliance & Speak Up Culture
Part-2, “Listen Like a Thief”

This is part 2 of a 6-part series of Creativity & Compliance, where Tom & Ronnie explore the connections between improv comedy and improving compliance, psychological safety and speak up culture. Today’s episode, “Listen Like a Thief”

Improvisation is a spontaneous, collaborative art form where performers take suggestions from the audience and create characters, dialogues, scenes and stories spontaneously, off the top of their heads, without a script.

Psychological safety can be defined as the belief that you won’t be punished for speaking up with ideas, questions, mistakes or concerns. Creating psychological safety in your organizations is arguably the most important challenge that an ethics & compliance program faces.

So what do these two things have to do with each other? Strange as it may sound, quite a bit. The philosophies and techniques behind creating an environment where comedic creativity can thrive and creating an environment where employees feel safe to speak up to challenge business decisions and report concerns are similar. There is a lot that ethics and compliance professionals can learn from this connection. You can get a few A-Has from the Ha-Has.

“LISTEN LIKE A THIEF”
Improvisers, like bartenders and therapists tend to be great listeners. To be successful on stage, creating in the moment, in collaboration with our scene partners, an improviser needs to be a sponge. We need to pick up on all verbal and physical cues. We listen by staying in the moment and not planning ahead. The more perceptive we are the more we pick up on our scene partners intentions and emotions and the more quickly we can connect to get to something interesting, meaningful or perhaps even memorable. This can’t happen if we’re in our heads trying to think of funny things to say. Active listening is about taking in every word, gesture and emotion so that you can absorb, understand, react and build solutions together. Listen like a thief.

Being a good listener is crucial to being a successful ethics & compliance professional. But it can be challenging. As an authority figure you want to get a head start formulating a thoughtful answer. You’ve probably heard their question and seen their mistake a thousand times before. All this makes it easy to get into your head and start preplanning what you are going to say. This is all quite common, but it leads to two big problems.

  • Information: When we get into our heads and stop fully paying attention, we often miss crucial information.
  • Trust: We’ve all seen people’s eyes glaze over when we’re talking to them. Yet somehow we think we get away with it when we do it. We don’t. People are perceptive. They see that you are not engaged and this undermines trust.
So how do we apply this concept to E&C in our organizations? Listen to the podcast as we unpack two philosophies and techniques.

  • Active Listening as individuals
  • Organizational Listening & Feedback Loops

If you’re not into listening and would prefer reading, you can download our Whitepaper: Improv, Compliance, Psychological Safety & Speak Up Culture

Ronnie Feldman is the CEO & Creative Director at Learnings & Entertainments, a learning content provider made up of comedians and entertainers with a focus on corporate risk. We make compliance cool at www.LearningsEntertainments.com

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