Early in my career, I could write complex algorithms with ease, but when it came to speaking in a meeting, my brain froze.

If someone asked for my opinion, I ran it through ten mental filters before saying anything, and usually by the time I had found the perfect sentence, the conversation had already moved on.

I wasn’t shy exactly. I just didn’t want to look foolish.

So I stayed in the background. I took notes. I let my work speak for itself.

It felt safe, but over time I realised that silence comes with its own cost. You miss chances to contribute, to connect, and sometimes to grow.

In a moment of desperation to change this, I signed up for improv sessions. It’s a form of theater that artists and creative people seemed to love doing, not science nerds.

It was hell. Every part of me resisted. I hated being put on the spot, hated the silly games, hated feeling like I had no script to rely on. I learnt things about my own behaviours that I didn’t like. But something shifted. Improv pushed me out of my head and into the moment. I began to express myself more freely, and even when my ideas were messy or imperfect, I learned to stay in the conversation instead of retreating.

Later, when I began heading a product team, I started noticing the same pattern I had struggled with. Tech people went quiet when they were stuck or unsure. Not because they didn’t care, but because speaking up felt risky. Brilliant minds, but introverted. Meetings were efficient but flat. Updates were given, but ideas rarely built on each other.

Delay and deadlocks are sometimes caused by a culture of punishment when things go wrong. If you treat people like machines and shame or punish them for bringing issues to your attention, the problems will still arise in the future but will never bubble up because people will be scared about the punishment. When someone gets stuck, they would rather go silent for days than risk asking for help.

So I tried an experiment. Every Monday, we booked a conference room and started the week with a 30-minute improv session.

It wasn’t about being funny; it was about learning to be present, listen, and express more.

At first it was awkward. Some people rolled their eyes. Others played along but kept their walls up.

But slowly, something changed.

We began to look forward to Mondays. We started the week with laughter and lightness. People opened up. Conversations flowed. When roadblocks came, they were surfaced early. And when someone had a half-baked idea, others jumped in to help shape it instead of letting it die in silence. They began gaining the confidence to communicate, to present to a room full of people. They began to communicate and do the improv exercises in a language they were comfortable with (Hindi or Marathi) instead of being bogged down and forcing themselves to communicate in English which was not their language of origin. As long as the communication was clear, language didn’t matter. So we became language agnostic and were compatible with all 3 languages as a team. Sometimes the team’s communication pathways themselves are blocked and your job becomes being a people person more than a tech person and removing whatever seems to obstruct the flow of communication. And sometimes, that obstruction can also be your behaviour which might need some refining.

Technical issues need debugging. So do teams.

And sometimes the fix isn’t a new tool, a new KPI, or a new process. Sometimes it is simply creating a space, however small, where people feel safe enough to speak up, collaborate, and be a little imperfect together.