#178 - Why A Defense Contractor Teaches Improv

Move the chairs

I've dished out a lot of interview advice over the years. How-to's on storytelling and self-awareness; tactical tips on negotiation, and researching a company.

But my cheekiest piece of advice? It's something I've done for years, every time I interview:
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Move the chairs.

The idea is simple: when you're invited onsite for interviews, you'll be put in a conference room with a table and at least two chairs.

As a candidate, if both seats are on opposite sides of a table -- as they are by default -- this is bad. You want to use the down time before the interview to physically move the chair that the interviewer will take.

Your goal is to reduce the space between the seats. And to angle the chairs so they're not positioned one across from the other -- but at a soft angle to one another.
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Why?

Because the goal of an interview is a healthy, authentic conversation. But by default, the interview dynamic works against this. It's adversarial:

• Two complete strangers
• Pressed for time
• Low vulnerability
• Low trust

The chair hack makes things less confrontational. Easier to connect. More likely to foster a discussion. 🪑 🪑

I wrote that post years ago, but I was reminded of it when I saw this one, and thought: "My tip is child's play compared to this sourcery". 🪄

Now, don't go taking a screwdriver to your next interview, folks. ❌

But what Lindsay put in parentheses -- "who were all men" -- gets to the heart of what is actually at play during interviews and sales calls, at offices and in academia: hierarchy, status and power.

Both stories make the same point: small physical moves that reshape how people interact. But what's striking is how subtle and mechanical the moves are. The way a tiny tweak in physical space can tilt the power dynamic. It's performance, but not the kind we usually associate with work.

Which is why the next story grabbed me the way it did: a company that didn’t just notice these dynamics, it embraced them, and built an operating model around them.

Why an AI company sends new hires a book on improv
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​Imagine, if you will, taking a job with a software company where national defense rests on the code you ship. Before you start, the firm sends you a welcome package with four books in it:

One is The Looming Tower, about 9/11. A bit on the nose, but ok, makes sense. Then comes Interviewing Users, and Getting Things Done : standard Silicon Valley fodder. No dramas.

But the last book in the stack is: Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre. A book by a playwright with an acting troupe on its cover, written in 1979:

At first glance, it's a curious add. Why would a leading-edge AI company make a book on improv required reading? What does a decades-old improvisational theater guide have to do with modern algorithmic warfare? 🤔

To answer that, you have to appreciate what Palantir actually does. What it takes to make their software work in the real world. And why that work is becoming more relevant than ever.

Palantir doesn’t sell traditional enterprise software. Their customers run critical systems -- defense, intelligence, health care, aviation, energy -- where the data is fragmented, incentives conflict, and workflows are hyper-political. You can’t just drop an AI system into that environment. The tech only works if people trust it, adopt it, and reshape their behavior around it.

So the company hired engineers who could fly to remote places, learn the language of an industry, navigate the messy human push-and-pull of high stakes environments, and build something that worked. In that context, Impro wasn't a cultural quirk. It was a how-to guide -- and a set of shared language -- for the work itself. In a moment, we'll dig into why.
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Before we do, I should share that exploring this is not an endorsement of everything the company does or stands for. Suffice to say its founders, and its defense work, raise questions that I don't have easy answers for.

But it's hard to argue with the firm's commercial success. And as a student of cultures that drive that success, Palantir fascinates me. Its hiring practices, its forward-deployed engineer model, its onboarding -- and yes, its embrace of Impro -- offer a glimpse of what work looks like in an AI-driven world.

What Impro can teach us about modern work

I’ve just shipped myself the book, but early Palantir employee Nabeel Qureshi’s piece about the company, and analyst Mario Gabriele’s book review, both shed real light on what Impro argues, and how Palantir put it to work.

Impro is about acting, but not in the way you might expect. It’s about how humans actually behave: how we constantly signal, posture, defer, dominate, and negotiate our way through every interaction. It’s about status, but not the kind on an org chart; the kind we transmit unconsciously and continuously.

Gabriele puts it bluntly:

Most of it happens subconsciously; the book just brings it to the fore.

For Palantir, every meeting, every launch, every cross-functional meeting is shaped less by the formal org chart and more by a series of mini-negotiations: who speaks first; who holds the floor; who defers; who rescues whom from embarrassment; who fills a silence.

In fact, Qureshi, who spent years as a forward-deployed engineer at Palantir, shares that the people who thrived there weren’t necessarily the best engineers but those who could:

The real work, in other words, was the human work.

The people who thrived were those who read rooms; understood where the real influence sat, who felt threatened, and whose endorsement counted. They adapted their own status accordingly: stepped up when confidence was called for, stepped back when someone else needed to own.

It is, in so many ways, what Impro teaches: staying open, staying attuned, and building on what’s in front of you -- playing the role the moment demands, not the one in your LinkedIn profile. It fit Palantir because its lessons weren’t just about acting, but about coordination: how people read one another, adjust in real time, and move through complexity together. For an organization tackling ambiguous, politically charged problems, those skills weren’t abstract. They were the job.

Palantir was early -- the rest are on the way

Palantir might sound like an outlier, but it was early to a reality more companies are now confronting: AI only works when humans make it work. So as software shifts from being just a tool to something that reshapes entire workflows, the company's approach starts to feel less eccentric and more like a preview of what's coming.

Whether you’re deploying AI or having it integrated around you, AI is stripping away the tidy parts of knowledge work -- the tasks that once demanded credentials and experience but can now be replicated by software. What’s left is the human layer: improvisation, influence, trust, judgment, reading rooms, adapting in real time.

What changes -- and what doesn't

I used to think Work 2.0 would be less performative. That as work decentralized and became more portfolio’d, we’d escape the theater of corporate life: the power grabs, face time, and credentialism.

But the more I dig in, the more I think that’s right -- and not quite.

Performance doesn’t disappear. It changes form. Some features of performative work may fade, but the human needs underneath them don't. Not our needs to connect, belong, accrue status, tell stories, build trust, find meaning. They're hard-wired into us; shaped by thousands of years of group behavior.

The difference, though, is where we'll meet those needs. As companies thin out and work decentralizes -- as more of us build portfolio careers across organizations rather than inside them -- status and influence will increasingly flow through our networks. Success becomes less about climbing a ladder and more about who knows what you’ve built, who trusts you, and who brings you into a next project.

In the end then, the dynamics Impro teaches -- status, trust, narrative, adaptability -- aren’t a Palantir thing. They're tools for navigating uncertainty. And more and more, they’re becoming the work itself.

Thanks for reading and exploring with me -- and have a great end of the week! 🙏

Aki
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P.S. I ordered an extra copy of Impro ! If you reply here and share what you thought of today’s issue, I’ll enter you in a small draw for the spare copy (U.S. or Singapore only). 🙌🏻