To introduce her students to the concept of improvisation, Viola Spolin, the godmother of modern improv, used to summon half a dozen students onto the rehearsal stage, and then say nothing to them. Literally nothing. No direction. No reason for them to be there.

Nothing.

Nothing…

Still nothing…

Nothing yet…

Nothing…

Maybe now?

Nope.

Nothing…

Even more nothing…

Nothing…

Nothing…

Not a thing…

Silence.

Followed by silence.

Followed by silence.

And then…

Nothing…

Followed by nothing…

Followed by nothing…

And more nothing…

Until –

– the people standing onstage and those in the audience would get uncomfortable, they’d giggle and stew in self-consciousness.  When she had everyone squirming, Spolin would finally give the people onstage a simple task to perform, like counting the floorboards. This would break the tension. Given something to do, the group would find focus. The audience, meanwhile, had something to watch, and hold its attention.

Spolin would then note the change.

For the group onstage, the game (’Count the Floorboards’) defined the objective and created focus. It made the difference between productive behavior and wasted time. Given a game to play, the group would go from aimless, nervous and unfocused to focused, purposeful, confident.

For the audience, the activity generated by the game provided multiple points of interest, posed and answered dramatic questions, and helped define the characters of the people on the stage.

This is the simplest explanation I know for how improvisation works: A game focuses a group’s otherwise aimless energy on the objective, and gets the audience involved.

Last year, early in the existence of GameChangers, the Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) of Reno-Tahoe generously (the teaching at that time was as raw as green strawberries) invited me to conduct a GameChangers workshop for 40 of its members in the plush auditorium of the Reno Arts Museum

To introduce the workshop, I used the Spolin exercise described above, and something very revealing happened because of it. Within 30 seconds, the six entrepreneurs I’d invited to take the stage began lining themselves up according to height. Then they reversed the line. Then they re-aligned according to age. In other words, they created their own game!

I was writing my book at the time, and the event in Reno inspired me to polish passages like this that were already in draft form:

The future…belongs to the flexible, the free-spirited, the open-minded, the entrepreneurial. It belongs to people with heightened powers of observation, who excel in teamwork and creativity; to people who can adapt in a changing business environment. To people who don’t plan as much as they prepare. Who don’t cling, they let go.

Entrepreneurs improvise. They start their own engines. They do not wait for directions or for permission before they take action.

Waiting for directions, or for approval up and down a chain of command, or for permission from a committee, and even that old standard called Biding Your Time Until Someone Else Makes a Decision for You (After Which You Can Blame Them When Things Go Bad), are all behaviors calibrated to the rigid, hierarchical, mechanized structures of Industrial Age organizations.

In the fluid, networked, neo-biological business environment of the global economy, these behaviors from a bygone era can sap a brand like Colony Collapse Disorder can disappear a hive of honeybees.

Networked organizations thrive on entrepreneurship at every level. They invite personal initiative, objective coaching by management, productive games with clear rules, distinctive voices harmonizing as the ’sound of the brand’, and spontaneous yet informed decision-making aligned with agreed-to themes, values and mission.

In a word…

Improvisation.

(Republished from Aug. 13 to eliminate WordPress formatting funkiness. This version 20% re-written from the original.)

At lunch the other day at a new sushi restaurant called Sugarfish, my friend, Josh Rose, a creative director at Deutsch Advertising, told me about watching the legendary improviser Christopher Guest (Best in Show, Waiting for Guffman, et al) essentially rip up the script Deutsch had given him for a series of DirecTV spots, and tell its creative team he and his cast were going to improvise everything instead. Guest promised the agency team they’d get ten usable spots worth of material, far more than their contract called for.

He delivered, to excellent effect. The series of commercials starring Guest, who also directed, memorably distinguish DirecTV’s product from that of a fictional blowhard cable company.

Josh took the position that, well, yes, you can get away with something like that if you’re Christopher Guest. And if you’re not Christopher Guest, maybe improvisation isn’t going to be so beneficial.

I wish I had responded by holding the albacore sushi drizzled with ponzu sauce between my chopsticks and said to him with a Kung Fu master’s equanimity, “Yes and Christopher Guest is no Chef Nozawa.” That would’ve been deep. I didn’t. I took the more mundane position that there is improvisation in every business process, and that, while its place in the process may vary–most TV commercial shoots, for example, cannot withstand the amount of improvising that a Christopher Guest brings to a set–there is always an opportunity somewhere in every business process where improvisation is possible, and in most cases, required. As long as you’re going to do it anyway, why not do it well? And as far as the fuss Guest stirred up, who ever said birthing originality was easy?

Josh chewed on his yellowtail for a sec, and I wish I could say he nodded like an eager Chef Nozawa apprentice, accepting every word I said as doctrine. He did not. He told me that he is a ‘plug-n-play’ guy, meaning he carefully measures the opportunity afforded, and calibrates performance to it. Improvisation, he said, can feel too loose and unpredictable.

Maybe that’s when I should have stood and slapped him across the face and and told him to wake up and smell the wasabi. I did not. Instead, I calmly explained that recognition of an opportunity for what it is, and responding accordingly, is good improvisation. The Networked World, I explained, is filled with new opportunities. New plugs that require new plays. This continually-evolving business environment demands improvisation.

I imagine Christopher Guest could have walked into Sugarfish at that instant, looked our way when he overheard us use the words ‘improvisation’ and ‘DirectTV’ in the same sentence, and, having heard, come over to our table to support my argument. He did not.
My lunch with Josh Rose did not result in a decisive win for the art of improvisation in business. Josh is an intelligent and reflective person, with his own well-honed ways of working. He sells way more than he buys. He was not in any hurry to introduce Deutsch to what they’d no doubt perceive as more headaches like the ones Christopher Guest gave them. That would not be the plug-n-play thing for Josh to do.

Our debate about the merits of improvisation in business was the agreed-to game. The objective was to reconnect after not having seen each other in a couple of years. The result was a productive lunch scene, at which Josh and I discussed business, families, photography, the evolution of journalism in the Networked World, the role of social networking on behalf of brands, Dr. Pepper, Big Red soda, Costa Rica, the Great Apes (Josh’s dad is a primatologist who lectures all over the world), Chef Nozawa’s sushi, gonzo multimedia – and Christopher Guest’s DirectTV work.

It was not the lunch that might have been. It was the lunch that was. Likewise, none of us are the players we might have been. We are the players we are. We all – Christopher Guest, Chef Nozawa, Josh Rose, you, me – have the potential to realize our own particular form of greatness. To realize it, we have to travel our own paths, accepting and acting on the gifts we are given along the way.

Knowing how to improvise is like having an experienced Sherpa along on your climb, versus following a map and seeking advice from random climbers down at base camp. For the best chance at reaching the summit, especially if the climb is challenging (and whose isn’t?) gather all the information you can and retain the Sherpa.

CNN ran a good story this week, part of its Real Simple series, about the benefits of improvisation in our personal and work lives. We, of course, could not be more in ageement.

As CNN says, improvisation in based on a few simple concepts. And as the story also points out, the idea that improvisation can change your game in a few easy-to-follow tips, belies the complexity involved. Practice is required.

Good improvisation takes discipline, persistence and desire. It takes objectivity, and the self-awareness and humility to accept criticism in order to improve. It takes the self-confidence that comes with an emphasis on preparation over planning. It draws upon a generosity of spirit that helps you respect and support the realities of others. It flourishes with the open-mindedness that lets you act instinctively on the possibilities life presents.
If it’s instant gratification you’re after, buy an ice cream cone.

This is a sketch I saw Tammy Tso doing during a recent GameChangers workshop, and afterward asked her for a scan of it. Tammy is a 23 yr-old artist and hip-hop crewster from Atlanta, who works as a graphic designer for ignition, an experiential marketing company there. What I found most interesting about the sketch is that Tammy envisioned steps leading to doorways.

Cool. I was doing my job.

A couple of months ago, Mitsubishi North America awarded its $185 yearly advertising account for strategy, creative and interactive to an agency called Traffic. This item would not necessarily be gamechanging news, except that Traffic is a start-up agency that did not exist before 2008. It was formed specifically for the purpose of winning the Mitsubishi account. Continue Reading »

Josh Greer is the co-founder and president of Real D, the leading 3D visual delivery system in the world. Greer is the epitome of an improvisational player in business, and Real D is proof that no successful improvisation happens solo. Greer had partners. For example…Real D owes its existence to Puff, the Magic Dragon. You know. Lived by the sea? Land of Hona-lee? That Puff. Continue Reading »

Sigh. The post about Paul Polak got swallowed up by WordPress (and I didn’t have it backed up). So if anyone out there saved the lost post in a file, please send it along and we’ll re-post.

Meanwhile, here’s the re-construction, in abridged form:

Paul Polak, founder of International Development Enterprises and the author of Out of Poverty, has been battling poverty in development countries for 23 years by helping poor farmers eke out a better living off the land. IDE operates on a local level, dealing with grass-roots problems and building markets for locally-manufactured solutions. This self-sustaining model has resulted in cleaner drinking water, better efficiency in agriculture, improved health and better standards of living for millions of people around the world.

This year, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded Paul and IDE a $27 million grant over three years, to do more of what they’ve been doing for the past 23.

Paul Polak’s approach to eliminating poverty is highly improvisational. Here are some of the ways that the principles of improvisation play into what Polak and IDE have achieved:

Listen. IDE grew out of Polak’s counseling work in in the 1980s with Vietnam Vets, followed by trips he himself took to Vietnam, and conversations with farmers and poor rural families there. From these conversations, he generated the philosophies and strategies for fighting poverty that became the foundation for his work.

Work with Themes. The central theme explored by Polak and IDE is water. Water is the most relevant element to any farmer. By addressing and exploring problems related to water, the IDE team knows that its work is relevant, and will touch on many areas — irrigation, health and sanitation, efficiency, etc. — that are central to the poor farmer’s plight. Solutions themed around water ripple through the local ecosystems and economies, providing many times the return on investment.

Initiate Strongly. Dealing with the water problem in developing countries gives IDE a way to initiate its development scenes strongly. Water is their ‘way in’ to begin the dialogue that results in productive scenes for everyone involved.

Make Many Small Moves Instead of One Big One. Too many decisions designed to alleviate poverty in developing countries, and the billions of dollars directed by those decisions, are, in Polak’s opinion, wasted on global solutions devised by well-paid, well-fed consultants, who are insulated from the realities on the ground. The problems are local, and require collaboration at the local level. By making its solutions affordable and having them address specific needs of a region, IDE finds ways to offer consistent incremental productivity. A poor farm woman who has to carry water three miles on her head to her family’s hectare doesn’t care about anyone’s global vision, she cares about her family’s prosperity and her hurting neck. Polak and his team understand that relieving the pain in that woman’s neck can be a small step toward improving her family’s way of life, and that family’s improved way of life lifts the local economy. Think of it as the Seep-Up Theory.

Give Gifts. Like all outstanding improvisers, Paul Polak supports the intentions and ideas of players in his scene. One of IDE’s earliest moves was to support the manufacturing and marketing of a foot-powered ‘treadle pump’ Polak had first seen used in Vietnam. Today, there are eight manufacturers and thousands of distributors of said pump, and an estimated 1.3 million small farmers in developing countries have put it to work.

Our friend Ethan Bauley , who has an undergrad degree in Finance (University of Virginia) and a Masters in Improvisational Percussion (CalArts), naturally understands why improvisation is an essential business skill in the Networked World. His work developing social apps and exploring edge economies on behalf of clients like Cisco and Warner Bros. lays the groundwork for what we call the improvised brand narrative. Yes, scripting your brand’s activities in the marketplace is OUT, and improvisation is IN. We know it. Ethan knows it. Soon it will be a truth everyone acknowledges. Today, he sent us this photo (of the book without the jacket):

It was taken on the beach in Tulum, Mexico, while he and his wife, Shannon, were on their honeymoon. (Talk about a COMPLIMENT!)

Thanks, Ethan (& Shannon), and Congrats!

ComputerWorld.com runs an interesting piece, Five Web 2.0 App Dev Lessons for Enterprise IT, this week by Heather Havenstain about how an agile approach to application development permits an almost constant evolution of feature sets that are in line with users’ needs and suggestions. Dynamic scripting languages like Ruby, Perl and Python (sounds like a hoochie-coochie act at the 1908 Chicago World’s Fair, don’t it?) short-cut long lines of code, letting developers be faster, more creative and more flexible with their work. ‘Permanent beta’ the article calls it.

The ComputerWorld article underscores yet again how vital improvisation is to business in the Networked World — after all, what is improvisation if not ‘agile development’? The article also shows how ‘performance’ in business does not refer solely to folks standing up and holding forth in front of other folks. Apps are performance for an audience, too. The Five App Dev Lessons cited by ComputerWorld are straight from the improvisers’ playbook. Here they are. Our comments are in italics:

1) Break the barrier between developers and end users, and involve users in quality assurance processes. Like all good improvisation, agile development begins with suggestions from the audience. When users become players in your game (e.g. QA processes) they are much more likely to have a rooting interest in your performance (e.g. remain loyal to your brand).

2) Keep it simple. Poorly improvised business scenes often get sabotaged by too much extraneous information. That includes the development of apps with functionality that 99% of your audience doesn’t want or care about. If two players are performing an improvised theater scene set on their wedding night in the car on the way to the airport for their honeymoon…and they toss things into the scene like ‘her mother’, ‘his love of baseball’, ‘what happened at the reception’ and ‘who makes them jealous’…that is going to be one unwieldy and not very compelling scene. But that’s exactly what a lot of apps are like. “Feature Creep” is a horror movie we’ve all sat through.

3) Stick to the script. Okay, right, we know, sticking to a script is the opposite of improvisation, but CW is referring to dynamic scripting languages that, according to a recent Forrester study, can cut development time by 30-40%. Anytime the window between when you think about something (functional specs) and when you can do it (release date) closes, you have become more improvisational.

4) Release early and often. Many agile developers update their apps several times a day (the article cites Wesabe, a San Francisco-based money management site as one of these; Mixx.com, a social news site based in MacLean, VA, as two such developers). Think about yourself as being ‘in the audience’ for money management and social news apps: Are you more likely to applaud a site that evolves organically based on your suggestions, or one that announces upgrades periodically but with lots of fanfare, in the MS Explorer style? In cloud computing land, versioning seems stodgy and unresponsive compared to continuous, audience-minded tweaking.

5) Let the users, not the developers, determine new features. We would amend this slightly to read “Let users and developers working in collaboration determine new features.” The spirit of the tip is correct — take suggestions from your audience — but developers know things that users cannot, and vice versa. The collaboration between developer and user should no more discriminate against a developer’s idea than it should against a user’s. And hey, not every idea from every boss’s wife is automatically a bad one. Stay open to where the good ideas come from, because they can come from anywhere.

P.S. A commenter on the article, a guy named ‘Grant’, notes that the ‘agile development’ described by Havenstein is nothing new, and has been around for a couple of years. He rejects the idea of branding any app a ‘Web 2.0′ thing. Grant has a very good point, not only about the concept that there actually is no such thing as a ‘version 2.0′ of the Web, but also about versions generally. With agile development, versioning loses meaning. Versions of apps are like the same movie with many remakes. An agile app, by contrast, is one long neverending movie. An agile app never repeats itself, while versions repeat themselves all the time. Another advantage to agile development over versioning: Users have for too long been forced to pay for versions of software that are either way overbuilt or mostly cosmetic. With cloud computing and agile development, that game is changing in a hurry. Why should I care what version of an app I’m using as long as it does what I need it to do, and enables me to work today more productively than I did yesterday?

June, 1985: At a conference on film financing, a banker from First Boston asks a crowd of film industry executives to name the most valuable thing in the movie business. None of them have the answer she’s looking for, an answer that was prescient at the time, and never more relevant than it is today. “The most valuable thing in the movie business,” the banker informs them, “is 52 weekends a year.” In the banker’s opinion, it is the film studios’ ability to capitalize on the 52 yearly opening weekends that determines their status in the marketplace. Not long after the banker makes this observation, the Weekend Boxoffice Report begins appearing for the first time in newspapers around the country. For better or worse, who ‘wins the weekends’ becomes a new metric for a film’s success, a new context for audiences to consider, and a driver of a film’s revenue in ancillary markets.

In the Networked World, as the costs of producing media and other forms of intellectual property dwindle, and your blog about your dog has the potential to reach as many people as Maureen Dowd’s column in the New York Times, the big business opportunities for brands and entrepreneurs are not so much in the creation of content, but in creating and owning context. Continue Reading »