It's Friday night and in a small theatre, not far from San Francisco's Golden Gate bridge, something unique is about to begin. Eight actresses are playing tonight in a show no one, including the actresses themselves, knows anything about.

The lights go down. The audience turns quiet. The curtain comes up to reveal an actress dressed in everyday clothes. She smiles and approaches the front of the stage. "We'd like to start tonight's show by doing the first scene from a musical. What would you like the title of the musical to be?" she asks the audience. "The Bar Brawl!" shouts someone from the crowd. "Midnight Express" suggests another person. "The Tarantula's Dance!" yells a woman in the front row. "The Tarantula's Dance it is!" announces the actress, and joins her fellow actresses, who are about to improvise a scene from a musical they know nothing about. Nothing, that is, except its title.

"This is crazy," someone next to me whispers. "How the heck can you improvise something like 'The Tarantula's Dance'?!"

Suddenly, a church-organ starts playing, creating a chilling atmosphere of suspense. One by one the actresses (it's an all-women act) get on stage and take on different roles inside the imaginary lab of "Professor Googol". One actress is 'The Sweeper'. Another 'plucks the fur off of the spiders' back' and a third 'mixes the deadly potion in the glass vials'.

Soon, there are eight women on stage, all singing and miming their respective parts as if they've been doing this show forever. But in fact, the scene, which ends with a loud applause from a thrilled audience, has never been rehearsed before. It had no script, no pre-defined characters and no director. It simply happened, and the audience loved every second of it.

Welcome to the world of Improv, the most dangerous theatre there is. Improv (popularised by the TV show "Who's Line Is It Anyway?"), is a branch of drama where actors get on stage and improvise a scene with no script, no preparation and no explicit coordination.

Think of it as the extreme sports of acting. In Improv scenes, actors get on stage and are given a situation to act out. For example, the audience might ask them to play a couple, out on their first date, eating at a restaurant where the waiter turns out to be the woman's ex-boyfriend. The actors aren't given any time for preparations. They simply have to act in real-time.

To do great Improv, actors are trained to follow a set of basic, often counter-intuitive rules. They are told, for example, to ask the audience for suggestions, to inspire their partners and to make mistakes. In short, they are encouraged to suck.

Encouraged to suck? Doesn't that go against everything we know about how to run a good business? It might. But it might also be the case that with all the emphasis on cutting costs and "getting back to basics", we've forgotten that to grow (the business and ourselves) we have to be creative. And to be creative, we have to explore unknown territories.

That's a scary thing to do, and it's no surprise that most of us stop doing it once we turn 7 or 8 years old. But sooner or later we reach a point where "business as usual" simply doesn't work. And that's where we could all use some Improv.

Take Capital One, for instance. With over 47 million customers, Capital One is one the world's most successful credit card issuers (Visa and MasterCard don't issue credit cards directly to consumers - that's what financial institutions such as Capital One or your bank do). Before Richard Fairbank and Nigel Morris founded Capital One in 1995 most credit card companies enabled you to apply for any card you wanted as long as it had an annual fee of $20 and an interest rate of 20%. Back then, credit cards bared much resemblance to Henry Fords 'Model T' car: you could have it in any colour, so long as it's black.

Fairbank and Morris felt that there's room for more than one card and started experimenting with various card offerings, like the one tailored to middle-aged customers who like hiking and own a Saturn car. Each year, on average, the company conducts over 40,000 experiments to test which new offerings (like the one above) will be successful. Sure, most of them fail. But backed by state-of-the-art information technology and a culture of innovation, Capital One learns as much from its mistakes as it does from its successes.

"The sooner you make your first five thousand mistakes, the sooner you will be able to correct them," says Kimon Nicolaides, author of "The Natural Way to Draw". That same rationale is applied at Skyline, a toy company.

Making mistakes can be a painful experience, and many of us are conditioned to view making mistakes as the antithesis of good behaviour. In fact, so great is our fear of mistakes, that we often prefer inaction.

Companies are a lot like people. Instead of trying out new ways of developing products and services, most companies prefer to stick with what works (or used to work 30 years ago). That, in turn, explains why so many ideas about new products and services get shot down too early, resulting in a world full of customer experiences that are bland and boring.

But going through the process of improvisation, as I did this summer, makes you realise that what causes most of our failures is not that we make too many mistakes. It's that we're not making enough mistakes to learn from. You also realise that most of the ingredients for success - be it entertaining the audience or delighting your customers - are already within you. You simply have to unlearn some of the behaviours that drive us towards inaction. You simply have to learn how to suck more often.

--> Interested in Improv? Check out the best there is at http://www.improv.org

--> Keith Johnstone is considered the Grandfather of modern Improv. His book 'Impro' is an amazing introduction to the field. If you feel it's time you re-invented yourself, check it out at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0878301178/