Harassment exercises are scenario-based applied improv activities for recognizing, naming, and responding to harassment situations. Using role-play and improvisational skills, participants practice assertiveness, bystander intervention, and supportive responses to individuals experiencing harassment. The exercises make visible the dynamics of power, complicity, and bystander choice that typical compliance training addresses abstractly, and develop the specific language and physical confidence to act in real situations.
Structure
Setup
The facilitator establishes a scenario: a workplace interaction, a public situation, or a social context in which one participant is experiencing unwanted behavior from another. Roles are assigned or volunteered: the person experiencing harassment, the person responsible for the harassment, bystanders, and potential allies.
The Scenario
The scene plays out in real time. The person in the bystander role must decide when and how to intervene -- or whether to. The facilitator may pause the scene to allow the group to offer alternative responses, to rewind and try a different approach, or to explore the same moment from multiple perspectives.
Intervention Practice
Participants practice specific response strategies: direct address, distraction and redirection, delegation to authority, and after-the-fact support for the person targeted. The exercise can be replayed with different interventions to compare their effectiveness.
Debrief
The debrief explores what made intervention difficult, what language or physical confidence was required, and what barriers -- social, professional, or situational -- participants noticed in the scenario.
How to Teach It
Objectives
Harassment exercises develop the specific confidence and language to act in situations where most people freeze, defer, or rationalize inaction. They make visible the bystander dynamics that perpetuate harmful behavior and train practical, usable responses.
How to Explain It
"We're going to look at a situation together. You're going to see something happening. Your job is to figure out: what can you actually do? Not what you should do in theory -- what you can actually do, right now, in this scene."
Scaffolding
Begin with lower-stakes scenarios before introducing more charged situations. Establish psychological safety explicitly before the exercise begins: participants should know they can pause, step out, or ask for a redo at any point. The forum theater tradition (Augusto Boal) provides useful scaffolding for this type of work.
Common Pitfalls
Groups sometimes produce heroic intervention scenarios that do not reflect the social reality of most bystander situations. The coaching note is to push toward what is actually possible in the specific social context of the scenario -- the intervention that a real person in that role could actually execute -- rather than the ideal response.
In Applied Settings
Learning Objectives
In applied settings, Harassment exercises develop three specific capacities: the ability to recognize harassment in real time, the confidence to respond (not just to know what one should do), and the practical language for bystander intervention. The gap between knowing what is right and having the capacity to act is what these exercises address.
Workplace Transfer
The exercises prepare participants to act in situations where inaction is the statistical norm -- not because bystanders approve of harassment, but because they lack the script, the confidence, or the social permission to intervene. Scenario-based practice with realistic workplace dynamics gives participants an embodied rehearsal that purely conceptual training cannot provide. The specific language of intervention -- "Hey, that's not okay" or "Can I help you find someone?" -- becomes more available under pressure when it has been practiced.
Facilitation Context
Harassment exercises are used in organizational training, HR compliance programs reframed for engagement, leadership development, and community programs addressing power and accountability. They are particularly effective for groups where compliance training has been mandated but has not produced behavioral change. Facilitators should have training in both applied improv and the specific organizational or legal context.
Debrief Framing
Ask participants: "What made it hard to intervene? What would you need -- permission, language, support -- to do what you practiced here in a real situation? What did you notice about the moment right before action was possible?"
Worth Reading
See all books →
Business Improv
Experiential Learning Exercises to Train Employees
Val Gee
The Second City Unscripted
Revolution and Revelation at the World-Famous Comedy Theater
Mike Thomas
Improv Yourself
Business Spontaneity at the Speed of Thought
Joseph A. Keefe
Improvisations in Creative Drama
A Program of Workshops
Betty Keller
The Improv Illusionist
Using Object Work, Environment, and Physicality in Performance
David Raitt
Improv Ideas
A Book of Games and Lists
Mary Ann Kelley; Justine Jones
Related Exercises
Leadership
Leadership is an applied improv exercise that uses structured group movement and voluntary leader emergence to explore how leadership authority is claimed, transferred, and recognized within a group. Participants move through the space or perform actions in which any member of the group may step into a leadership role at any moment, and the group must recognize and follow the shift without verbal announcement. The exercise surfaces the dynamics of organizational leadership through an embodied, real-time demonstration.
Night Watch
Night Watch is an applied improvisation exercise in which participants practice sustained, deliberate observation of a space, a group, or a situation over an extended period, developing the capacity to notice subtle changes, emerging patterns, and details that others overlook. The exercise cultivates the quiet, steady attentiveness that underpins effective leadership, facilitation, and situational awareness.
Performance of an Audience
Performance of an Audience is an applied improvisation exercise that explores the reciprocal relationship between performer and spectator. Participants experience both roles, discovering how the quality of attention an audience gives shapes the performer's experience and how conscious, engaged witnessing differs from passive spectating. The exercise builds awareness that presence and attention are active contributions to any group interaction.
Predator/Defender
Predator Defender is an applied improvisation exercise from Putting Improv to Work in which each player secretly chooses one person as their predator and another as their defender. On the signal to move, everyone must keep their defender between themselves and their predator at all times, creating a dynamic, self-organizing system of constant movement.
Influence
Influence exercises in applied improv practice develop the capacity to move others through authentic means -- listening, genuine connection, the clarity of one's own conviction, and the quality of one's presence -- rather than through manipulation, pressure, or strategic positioning. The exercises draw on improv principles of agreement and offer-building to develop influence as a relational skill, grounded in the other person's reality rather than in the influencer's agenda alone.
Exposure
Exposure is an applied improv exercise in which two groups stand in lines facing each other and simply look at one another in silence. Once the discomfort of sustained mutual gaze becomes visible, the facilitator invites participants to name what they are noticing in their own experience. The exercise makes vulnerability and the discomfort of being seen conscious and discussable, preparing groups for deeper collaborative or expressive work.
The Lineage
Explore the schools and structures that influenced or evolved from Harassment.
Business Improv (Gee & Gee)
How to Reference This Page
The Improv Archive. (2026). Harassment. Retrieved September 28, 2026, from https://improvarchive.org/exercises/harassment
The Improv Archive. "Harassment." The Improv Archive, 2026. https://improvarchive.org/exercises/harassment.
The Improv Archive. "Harassment." The Improv Archive, 2026, https://improvarchive.org/exercises/harassment. Accessed September 28, 2026.
The Improv Archive is a systemically maintained repository. The archive itself acts as the corporate author.