CHICAGO — Three dozen police captains pair off in a Chicago conference room to play a game: They must start a sentence with the last word their partner used.

Many exchanges are nonsensical, full of oneupmanship using difficult words and laughter. But the improvisation game eventually makes sense.

“What we are trying to do, is get you to listen to the end of the sentence,” says Kelly Leonard, wrapping up the improvisational exercise. “If my arm was a sentence, when do most people stop listening? Always the elbow! But then you’re missing everything that goes after ... and sometimes that’s critical information.”

The police captains who have flown in from departments across the country nod. “I definitely do that,” some call out.

Officials at the University of Chicago Crime Lab’s Policing Leadership Academy brought members of the Second City, Chicago’s storied improv theater, to teach police leaders the more diverse skills found in improv exercises — like thinking on your feet, reserving judgment and fully listening.

The academy, a workshop taught over five months, tackles some serious topics, like to make data-driven decisions or how to help officers handle on-the-job trauma.

“We call it yoga for social skills,” said Leonard, the vice president of Creative Strategy, Innovation and Business Development at the Second City.

The skills might not apply to all policing situations in the field, but being a better listener or learning to take a breath before responding can make for better leaders, according to Tree Branch, a strategic client partner at the Second City Works.

The creation of improv and of the Second City is rooted in social work. Both trace their beginnings to Viola Spolin, who created some of the exercises still used in improv while she was a resettlement worker in the 1920s helping immigrant children and local Chicago children connect. Spolin was also the mother of Second City co-founder Paul Sills.

The Policing Leadership Academy’s creators believe those skills can also help meet their goals to increase community engagement, improve officer morale and ultimately reduce violent crime.

The academy is focused on working with leaders from departments dealing with high levels of community gun violence and pays for them to fly to Chicago one week a month to attend the five-month training.

Crime Lab researchers found that district and precinct captains have the largest potential impact on their colleagues, despite often receiving little leadership training for the job. A precinct could have high marks for morale, community relationships or be making a dent in crime numbers, but if the captain changes, those gains could plummet, researchers found, even if the community, the officers and everything else stayed the same.

Capt. Louis Higginson with the Philadelphia Police Department said the academy provided a much broader training than the two weeks of police job training he got before being promoted to captain.

“The big thing for me was thinking about the things we allow to happen because they’ve been that way before us,” he said. “And the ways we can change the culture of our district by changing the thinking around why we do things.”