Today, we sit down with Tyler Dean Kempf — a director, writer, and teacher from The Second City — to explore how improvisational theater intersects with neurodivergent thinking. Tyler shares his late ADHD diagnosis at 40 and how improv gave him tools to understand and embrace his brain. Whether you’re neurodivergent or managing a diverse team, Tyler offers a fresh perspective on listening, collaboration, and creating space for different minds to thrive — on stage, at work, and beyond.
Today, we sit down with Tyler Dean Kempf — a director, writer, and teacher from The Second City — to explore how improvisational theater intersects with neurodivergent thinking. Tyler shares his late ADHD diagnosis at 40 and how improv gave him tools to understand and embrace his brain.
Whether you’re neurodivergent or managing a diverse team, Tyler offers a fresh perspective on listening, collaboration, and creating space for different minds to thrive — on stage, at work, and beyond.
Timestamps:
(02:45) How the principles of improv can help businesses
(06:37) Tyler’s ADHD diagnosis and what led to it
(09:42) Talking about neurodivergence at work
(14:25) What improv really is — and what it’s not
For a transcript and more resources, visit Minds at Work on Understood.org. You can also email us at podcast@understood.org.
Nathan Friedman: Welcome to "Minds at Work," the podcast for leaders who embrace neurodiversity in business. I'm your host, Nathan Friedman, co-president and chief marketing officer of Understood.org, the leading nonprofit focused on helping those who learn and think differently thrive. Each week, we're here exploring how neurodiversity sparks innovation and how we as leaders across industries can create a more inclusive future for all.
Today, I'm excited to be talking with Tyler Dean Kempf. Tyler is the creative director at Second City Works, the business-to-business arm of Chicago's very well-known improv comedy empire. And there he develops and leads workshops to unleash creativity, collaboration, and team building. Tyler himself was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, and he also has lots to say about how that's changed how he works and how he mentors others who are neurodivergent. So, pleased to have you with us here today, Tyler. Thank you for joining.
Tyler Dean Kempf: Thank you for having me. Happy to be here.
Nathan: I think a good place to start would be Second City Works. I think a lot of people know or hopefully a lot of people know Second City and its origins and the powerful enterprise that it is. But why don't we just for those who aren't familiar, give a quick overview of what Second City is and we'll go from there.
Tyler: Second City is a comedy theater that was founded here in Chicago in 1959. We have theaters in Chicago, Toronto, and Brooklyn, New York. And at each of those theaters, we also have training centers where people can take classes in improv, writing, stand-up, you name it. And we noticed about 40 years ago that many of the people that were taking classes at the Second City weren't doing so because they wanted to become the next stars of "SNL," but rather because they wanted to utilize those skills at work. And so we formed Second City Works where we get to travel the world and deliver custom improv-based programming for people to become better collaborators, communicators, storytellers, presenters, leaders, everything.
Nathan: Laughing also helps people get through things.
Tyler: It also helps with learning too, right? There's science that proves that when you laugh, when you learn, you retain that information.
Nathan: Live, love, laugh. Is that what it is?
Tyler: I think I saw that at a home store once.
Nathan: Yeah, exactly. So talk to us about Second City Works a little bit more. What is your role there and how does that interact with businesses?
Tyler: So my role is really unique. As the creative director, I oversee all of our programming that is client-facing at the Second City. And that's in the world of learning and development, in live entertainment like custom improv shows or tailored sketch reviews with sketches written specifically for that audience, and video programming. We have a library of digital shorts called "Real Biz Shorts" that are short comedic sketches with a learning focus. It's like "Sesame Street" for adults, if you will.
(02:45) How the principles of improv can help businesses
Nathan: Can you talk us through specifically how some of those principles of improv can really help businesses foster that sense of creativity and collaboration?
Tyler: I once heard someone say that if you have a problem at work, it's a people problem. And improvisation is about human connection, collaboration, communication. So the type of improv that we do at Second City was created by a woman named Viola Spolin, who was a social worker in Chicago in the 1930s at a place called the Hull House. And she was tasked with creating programming for immigrant children who spoke a wide variety of languages to communicate and collaborate together.
And so she created these exercises utilizing gibberish so that there were no language challenges that anybody needed to overcome. Her son, Paul Sills, later took those exercises that became theatrical to the University of Chicago, where there was no theater program, and did them with his friends who also wanted to be in theater. And they started doing it for audiences and realized that they could generate scenes based on what they were improvising with the audience right then and there. Cut to five years later and they are the Second City.
So we use those same tools, those same skill sets in the way that we create our shows on our stages in collaboration with our audience. And the skills that you need to succeed there are really about how we work together to build something. So "yes, and" is the fundamental philosophy of improvisation. It's the idea of accepting the reality in front of you and building upon that reality. A lot of people will use the phrase "yes, and," thinking that they're "yes, and-ing," but in fact, I actually would challenge they probably are not. It's not about using the words, it's about accepting the reality that somebody has presented an idea to you, accepting the reality that what we had planned is not going to happen, so we need to pivot. The "and" part is what are you doing next? How are you growing together rather than looking for ways to poke holes in someone's ideas or sitting too long in our feelings about how change makes us feel, right?
Nathan: Yeah, totally.
Tyler: And instead embracing that growth mindset together.
Nathan: And I think in today's world of ever-changing landscape, I think we're moving faster than ever before. That's super critical. I think often times you hear people saying, "Yeah, totally, totally, comma, but," which really devalues the first half of what they were saying.
Tyler: That's exactly right. But negates everything that came before it. What is so great about embracing this mindset--and this is just an introduction to the philosophies that we focus on in our programming, right? But even this mindset, that growth mindset, utilizing that "yes, and" philosophy gets you to generate more ideas in a shorter amount of time to find the one best idea to move forward with. That is so helpful, as you mentioned, in this time of constant change. Companies that embrace making space for humans to collaborate with other humans find that growth happening faster and change happens easier.
Nathan: Yeah, it's interesting. That brings up so many different philosophies, right? Being curious, growth mindset, development, opportunity. Those have always been present in corporate culture or different organizations. But I think it's almost that growth mindset and curiosity is critical as we're moving through sets of change. And particularly how these types of changes impact people who are neurodivergent. As this podcast is about neurodivergent individuals at work and how we unleash and unlock that creativity. How have you seen the principles of improv help with those who are neurodivergent at work?
(06:37) Tyler’s ADHD diagnosis and what led to it
Tyler: My own personal experience is what I'm going to tap into here.
Nathan: Yeah.
Tyler: So I was diagnosed at 40 years old as ADHD. And I grew up in a household where my brother had severe ADHD with a hyperactive component and dyslexia. So he needed a lot of attention and a lot of support to succeed. I was a B-plus student who loved to read, and so I think my parents were like, "He's fine, he's good," right? Teachers probably thought the same thing. I was even like in the gifted and talented program, right? I was not seen as somebody who could have ADHD.
So realizing that at 40 and taking the time to learn more about what that means really gave me an amazing opportunity to give myself some grace where I wasn't succeeding, where I wanted to be, and also understanding that the way I do things is right. It's just the way my brain needs to function to be successful. And by giving myself that grace, it's allowed me to also be more, I think, authentically curious and open about learning about others' accessibility needs, right? Or what changes I can make within our organization's processes, ways of communicating, all of that, to best meet them where they are.
Nathan: Yeah. And so do you have any trainings that are focused on neurodiversity? And you know, do you see that becoming more and more of a trend?
Tyler: I have, of course, because of my own personal experience, I got very interested in this topic several years ago and started developing potential programming that we could have at the ready in case clients were coming to us or that we could even promote. And so I developed a program around leading neurodiverse teams and and and focusing on how leaders can listen better with an open mind to earn that psychological safety from their teams so that people can feel comfortable coming to them and saying, "Hey, this doesn't quite work well for me or for me to reach the goal that we've set for us, I need XYZ," and to be able to do so without feeling like they're going to be retaliated against or made to feel a certain way.
And I mean, I had that same personal experience yesterday.
Nathan: Oh, really?
Tyler: Yeah, one of my leaders has a Teams chat with me and one other employee, and it was on fire yesterday. And it was pretty distracting for me. And I would occasionally look over and see that there was stuff that they were actually looking for me to chime in on, but my focus was other places and I needed to get specific work done. And so I got up and I walked over to their office and I shared with them. I said, "You know, the Teams chat is great at times, but right now it's really affecting my ADHD."
And the amazing thing is that he said, "Thank you for sharing that with me. Let's find a better way to do this work that doesn't impact that."
Nathan: That's amazing.
Tyler: It was lovely. It was an ideal experience. And to know that I have that support helps me understand I can provide that same support for my team as well.
(09:42) Talking about neurodivergence at work
Nathan Friedman: Yeah, and I think that's a model that other people can potentially use, right? I think there's a lot of awareness mechanisms in the world right now to understand what ADHD is and what neurodiversity is. We see that whether it's TikTok or whether it's Instagram or wherever you get your information. I think the challenge is how do we continue to reduce stigma so people feel that it is okay to talk about it or to ask for the right accommodations, right? I think we've seen people have been retaliated against. We at Understood did a survey in the workplace and a significant amount of people don't feel comfortable disclosing. And a significant percentage of people who have disclosed have been retaliated against. And disclosure is a really personal, personal choice.
Tyler Dean Kempf: It's funny, as soon as I was diagnosed, I was immediately vocal about it. This was around the time the pandemic was beginning. At the end of March 2020, my husband and I moved from L.A. to Vegas to be near family. And my niece and nephew live near us and ended up actually spending that first school year at our house every day because their mother needed to work. And so we had my nephew downstairs and my niece upstairs on their laptops and my husband and I would bounce back and forth.
And they both have ADHD and their perspectives on it were so negative. And it's clear that they had been made to feel a sense of shame. And I did not want that. And so I immediately began speaking about my own challenges and just being very open and honest about it. And my niece and I joke about her procrastination.
Nathan Friedman: Yeah.
Tyler: She's a huge procrastinator. Absolutely it's part of her ADHD. And she was chosen to be her class speaker at her graduation and she made her entire speech about that, about her procrastination. She even procrastinated to write the speech. So it's nice to see that pivot in her ability to embrace who she is and how her mind works and and and showcase it.
Nathan: We've actually also seen through research that some creative industries are as much as 53% neurodivergent. We do know Gen Z is also 50% identifying as neurodivergent. What type of changes would you like to see in the workplace or a work culture that make it more adaptable to the needs of neurodivergent individuals?
Tyler: It's a great question. And I can only speak for myself. So I will say this, when I came into my role four years ago, it was the first 9-to-5 that I'd worked in a very, very long time. I was a gig worker my entire adult life, right? Worked at restaurants, taught in the training center here, did facilitation for Second City writing jobs, teaching at universities, all at the same time, because it was three hours here, four hours here, two hours there, fly here, do a workshop, come back, that sort of life.
So shifting into that more routine, structured work environment, one, I learned I thrive in it as long as I like what I'm doing. Structure is really good for my brain. But I also learned that I needed to protect my time for myself. So it's about blocking off chunks on my calendar that is just "do not disturb" time for me to do my work and holding strong to that, right? If someone tries to put a meeting there, asks if I'm available, my answer's no. That is my time to do my job that is not on camera, not in a meeting. And that is a common way of working in this in our work environment at the Second City.
Nathan: Yeah.
Tyler: And it's respected and it's appreciated and it's not looked down upon by any means.
Nathan: Yeah, I think the macro point you're getting at is how do you create a rhythm that works for people? The consistency and structure can benefit a lot of people. And as you pointed out, not everybody thrives in a corporate, quote unquote, environment. They need that flexibility.
Tyler: I also say a lot of, you know, we have a lot of clients who have come to us over the last couple of years being like, "How do we get people back into the office?" And my pushback on that was like, you don't. You don't get them back into the office the way it used to be. It's never going to go back to that way. But what you can do is if you are going to ask them to be in the office on certain days, use that time wisely. Don't have them come into the office on, like everybody on Wednesdays, and then get on Zooms all day. If you're going to have them be in the office on Wednesdays, make that an in-person day where you're able to do things that you can't do virtually. And a big part of that is collaboration. It's that human-to-human connection that you just cannot replicate in a virtual setting.
Nathan: Yeah, that's exactly right.
(14:25) What improv really is — and what it’s not
Nathan: So, I want to switch back to improv for a second. Can you give an example maybe, maybe walk us through an improv exercise that we can do right now to just help the listeners understand what improv is in this construct?
Tyler: Absolutely. Yeah. So I'll say this, when I ask participants in an improv workshop--we call it applied improvisation because you're applying the skills of improv to other situations. When I ask them how many of them are scared at the top of a workshop, and many hands shoot up, or I see people who are even too afraid to raise their hand. And when I ask why, what's scary about improv, it's that lack of control, right? It's that, "I don't have a script." And I said, "But you don't have a script when you wake up in the morning. You improvise throughout your day." It's just there's a sense of comfort in that space. And our goal is to create a sense of comfort in this space.
And so we immediately start diving into the fundamentals of improvisation. The key tenets of improvisation are to trust your instincts, to relax that inner editor, to support your scene partner, and to remove judgment of yourself and of others. And removing judgment of ourselves is often the most difficult for people because we're constantly worried about what we look like or what we sound like or what other people may think about us at any given moment.
But when we're able to shift our focus from being self-focused to being others-focused on our scene partner, it provides them the space to trust their instinct to say the first thing that comes to mind because they know I'm going to "yes, and" it. So it's just embracing that the work that we're going to do in the space, it's going to be low-stakes, very conversational-based, and it's going to be about exploring for various skills that might make us uncomfortable while we're doing it, but it's our goal to find comfort in that discomfort, because that's when we truly grow. So one of the first exercises that I'll often do is an exercise called "Last Word," and I think you've actually done this exercise before.
Nathan Friedman: I'm going to ask you to do it with me again. Oh my gosh. This one was so embarrassing when I did it. Yes, and I'm willing to give it a try.
Tyler: Thank you for your bravery. So we're going to have a conversation, but the caveat to the conversation is that each person's line of dialogue will begin with the last word that the previous person spoke. So why don't you go ahead and begin, just give me any first sentence of our conversation and we'll go from there.
Nathan: It's great to see you today.
Tyler: Today is a great day to be recording a podcast with you.
Nathan: You have been great to talk to.
Tyler: To me, you said that? What a gift.
Nathan: Gifts are what I enjoy.
Tyler: Enjoyment is the spice of life.
Nathan: Life, what is it? Is it this or is it something more meaningful?
Tyler: Meaningful is subjective. Life is just being.
Nathan: Being true to yourself is believing in yourself.
Tyler: Yourself, myself, all of us are using a lot of tropes right now to get through a conversation.
Nathan: Okay, end scene. So this is...
Tyler: It's a hard thing to do right off the bat.
Nathan: It's very difficult to do, absolutely. And so there's different things that we can talk about coming out of this exercise.
Tyler: Yeah. First and foremost, we don't explain what it is that we're focusing on in our debrief before the exercise. And our programming, we want it to be super experiential. We want people to just be present and embrace the challenges of each individual exercise, and then we'll unpack their experience afterward and focus on different skills that they use to be successful or that they could have used better.
In this exercise, our focus is often listening. As improvisers, we have to listen to our scene partners and we have to listen to our audience at all times. We can't tune out, we can't get into our heads, we can't preplan where we're going to go. Because if we miss an element of just some detail and we don't "yes, and" that detail, it could crash the scene and then 300 drunk people are mad at us. So we have to be fully focused. This is a skill that has to be exercised regularly.
Kelly Leonard here at the Second City says that improv is yoga for your social skills. And listening is just one of those skills that we need to continue to exercise, even if we think that we're good listeners.
Nathan: Before we finish here, are there any other improv principles we haven't touched on that maybe you can help us be better leaders, creators, or just better humans?
Tyler: We actually partnered with the University of Chicago about seven years ago in the Booth School of Business at the Center for Decision Research. And we created a partnership called the Second Science Project, where we explored the intersection of behavioral science and applied improvisation, mostly with a focus on communicating across difference.
Nathan: Oh, wow.
Tyler: And one of the exercises that we co-developed in that partnership is an exercise we call "Thank You Because." In this exercise, two people will have a conversation with each other. You're going to find a topic that you and your partner disagree on, a very low-stakes topic, window versus aisle seat, coffee versus tea, winter sports versus summer sports.
Nathan: Hot coffee versus cold brew.
Tyler: Exactly, exactly. And so once you found that topic, participants have a conversation with each other where their goal is to convince the other person that their opinion is right. That goes for about 90 seconds. It gets heated in a ridiculous way. We then have them wipe the slate clean. We're going to engage in that conversation one more time, but your intention in this conversation is to appreciate something about that person's perspective before you share your own.
So that means that the first person will go share their opinion about cold brew. The second person then needs to say something like, with "Thank you because I now know XYZ," or "Thank you because I didn't realize," sharing what they appreciate about that person's perspective, and then they'll share their own perspective on hot coffee. And then the first person will say, "Thank you because," so on and so forth.
This has proven to neutralize emotion when we have differing opinions about a very high-stakes topic, because we're taking the time to see the other person and that other person feels heard. There's empathy that's immediately injected into that conversation. And there's a scientist at Stanford who learned that even if one person who's had this training engages in this way of communication, the other person will naturally mirror them and have that more thoughtful and empathetic conversation. It's not about finding common ground. It's not about agreeing on anything. It's not negotiation. It's just embracing that person's reality as their reality and accepting that, "yes, and-ing" that.
Nathan: Yeah, it sounds like these skills that you're learning in Second City is doing at work can be applied to life. It can be applied to relationships. It can be applied in a variety of ways.
Tyler: I very honestly will say that this work has made me a better human being.
Nathan: Thank you so much for joining us today, Tyler.
Tyler: Thank you for having me. It was a true joy.
Nathan: It's been a great little conversation and I look forward to connecting with you again very soon.
"Minds at Work" is brought to you by Understood.org. Understood.org is a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering people with learning and thinking differences, like ADHD and dyslexia. If you want to help us continue this work, donate at understood.org/give.
The show is produced by Julie Subrin and Alison Hoachlander. Mixing is by Justin D. Wright, with production support from Andrew Rector. Briana Berry is our production director.
From Understood.org, our executive directors are Laura Key and Scott Cocchiere. And I'm your host, Nathan Friedman.