Second City Communications, the corporate services division of the comedy theater company The Second City, recently announced the launch of a new compliance and ethics training and communication tool called RealBiz Shorts. The following is an excerpt of an interview between Ethisphere and Tom Yorton, President at Second City Communications.
Second City is widely known for its comedy performances and not necessarily as well-known for its B2B offerings through Second City Communications. Can you talk a little bit about how that side of the company came about?
Second City Communications is the creative and corporate service arm of Second City. It’s a wholly owned subsidiary within the company. The broader company has now been around for 51 years and throughout the entire history of the company we’ve done work with corporations.
In the first 40 years it was much more in an ad hoc sort of way. Invariably, business people would come as audience members here in our stages and theaters and see our shows and say, “Hey that’s pretty cool.” We would get questions wondering whether we could do that kind of thing at sales gatherings, annual meetings or those sorts of things.
So the first foray for the company into the corporate world was really through corporate entertainment. We would go in and do a logical extension of our stage shows for corporate and private audiences. What we found when we started doing those is that invariably we would create custom material for those shows. We would write something about Motorola’s engineers, or Pepsi Bottling Company’s truck drivers, you name it.
We work with so many different kinds of companies that what we found was not only that our material could be used in the service of entertainment, but it could be used to help convey messages within the business world. We are thought of as an entertainment company, but when we work in the corporate world we have this axiom that things are only funny when they’re true. So we use humor to reveal the truth in situations, which sometimes can be an inconvenient truth in a big company. So we will be brought in to talk about issues that are difficult or not very accessible.
There is a whole event and conference component of these visits and another side where we use improv training and learning methodologies to help build skills with those same kinds of corporate clients. We have found that the skills that our actors need to be successful on stage have a lot to do with the business world – listening skills, teamwork and collaboration, innovation and collaboration, risk taking, conflict resolution – all those sorts of things that our people require to do what they do. So the second part of the business is using improvisation training for a corporate education context.
And then the last chunk is where we do video services and video productions. We can take those same kinds of messaging challenges and have an unlikely pairing for a company like Second City with topics as difficult as compliance – as we’ve done with RealBizShorts. We’ve found a way to put a humorous spin on those messages to make them more accessible and easier to retain and pass along with corporate clients.
You can think of it this way: We know how to build audiences and we know how to build skills. If you think about all of the stars that have come through Second City, from John Belushi to Eugene Levy and John Candy to Tina Fey, Steven Carell and Stephen Colbert, we have the ability to grow talent and build skills and there is an educational element to what we do to. So we’re funny, but we’re more than funny, especially in the corporate world.
How did an organization which is known for comedy come specifically to the training side of compliance and ethics – an issue which can often be perceived as dry and humorless?
Before we created the RealBizShorts content catalogue, we found ourselves in custom engagements with clients. We do a lot of work with meeting support or internal communications initiatives and we found ourselves doing individual custom build video assignments or custom communications assignments helping various companies with compliance and ethics related messaging. As we started doing more of these it became clear that, while there are important differences from category to category, there is a lot of important overlap in the issues. We also learned there were a certain set of clients who were willing to pay for client work, but there were probably others who would be interested in paying a little bit less in order to get content created off the shelf. We thought if we could find a way to really bring these messages to life that we could really be a service to ethics and compliance officers.
What is the role that the founding partners like Best Buy, MillerCoors and Dow played in these RealBizShorts?
They were key to getting this off the ground. Obviously they were subject matter experts. We have a competency at Second City to be able to create custom funny, but we need to be armed with the information in the first place to know what’s true and know what’s real and know what the issues are well enough so that we can create them in a humorous way. The founding partners were really valuable. We basically polled all of them and asked them to submit their top ethics and compliance related issues. We watched certain topics filter to the top and we decided that that’s where all the heat was, so we built the first wave and the first content library around all of those issues.
We asked them to tell us what their most salient issues were, whether it was something like Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, or conflict of interest, or even Code of Conduct awareness. Then we had them help us get inside the issues, to give us examples of things that may have gone wrong within their organization or within their category that we could find when we created these scenes and vignettes. This way the scenes were anchored in things that happened in the real world.
So, the founding partners gave us the input up front, and we also involved them before we went into production. We read the scripts for them. We did table reads where we would have maybe two or three of the founding clients on board for one wave of production and have them actually listen to us present the scripts. So sometimes when you actually hear it, rather than just seeing it on paper, they would hear some language or some turn of phrase that didn’t strike them as true or authentic and they would give us guidance on that. I think when you look at the finished product you see something that is not only humorous, but it’s anchored in some recognizable reality.
What kind of response have you received so far?
We have been absolutely thrilled with how this has taken off. It’s almost like watering a flower in the desert. Another sign of this stuff being relevant and interesting is we have been asked to keynote at a number of ethics and compliance conferences. We are outsiders, but I think we are outsiders with an interesting take on what all these compliance officers face.
Who are the target customers for RealBiz Shorts? Only large multinational companies? Local businesses?
Early on we have gone with large enterprises. Later on we may expand broader to smaller organizations. Large companies with dispersed populations that can really benefit from a video solution are the primary customers.
Anything else in the pipeline around ethics and compliance?
What we are going to do, based on the response we’ve seen, is to come out with additional modules that get into more specific spaces. Whereas the first RealBizShorts library was great in how it teed up the category in general, I think we see opportunities to do additional models that focus on a specific vertical – say energy or pharma or financial services or others. While there is general stuff that is germane to every company, there are particular things that we can hit that are specific to industries and we see a chance to do that.
What will success look like for RealBiz Shorts
World domination. No, I think success for us will be that we want to have a real nice, installed based. For us, it’s actually showing companies that it’s possible to communicate with their people as people. I think that gets lost on people. It seems that often in business that the more important the topic the more stilted the communication. We think that is precisely the wrong formula. Success for us would be to show a very different approach to communicating around challenging topics. There are different ways to be open and transparent. When you are open and transparent that’s kind of a precondition to having a healthier, more compliant organization.
I don’t know that we’re going to make wrong stuff stop happening, but things we can do is create a forum or space for more honest communications. That’s what success will look like. Obviously we want to grow our business and we’re well on our way to doing that, but we want to show people there’s a different way to do this and it can be effective by using other methods.
