Jeremy Redleaf, one of the new physicists of the narrative form and the creator of this brilliant site
initated the scene when he sent me this email
about this JetBlue ad
which is anchored by copy that says
In my role of Commentor On All Things About Improvisation in Business, I responded to Jeremy’s email with this GameChangers post
in which i point out that ‘the first rule of improv’ if there even is such a thing, which itself is debatable, is not to say ‘yes’ but to say ‘yes and.’ ‘Yes’ is a state of mind. ‘Yes and’ is action. The most fertile ground in the world is useless until it’s planted. ‘Yes’ is the ground. ‘And’ is the seed. My blog post inspired Jeremy…
Posi-ffiti! Yes! I love threads like this. As usual, I’d tweeted a link to my blog post. I decided to yes-and Jeremy by calling JetBlue’s attention to its error with a Tweet. I was able to Google their CMO, Marty St. George and find his Twitter account. 
To Marty’s credit, he tweeted back within 15 mins. This already puts @martysg and JetBlue way ahead of most CMOs in brand narrative game. It also tells me that this is one vigilant, sensitive cat. Dude’s running it like Ochocinco
here @martysg commits the improvisation error of denying. He does this by being vague–what does “if you said ‘no quotation marks’ I might be with you” mean, anyway?–and acting as if I’d accused him of misquoting ‘John’, and seems to be saying that the mistake is not theirs, but mine, for calling them out on the wrong thing. I responded by suggesting the ‘Posi-ffiti’ game
and further suggested how to initiate the game…
@martysg blocks the game… 
By acting as if I’d said something I hadn’t–that ‘The Posi-ffiti Game’ would have to be played without ‘John’s’ permission–Marty kills the scene. This was probably his intention. He also implies that quoting people without their permission is MY style. In one statement, he refuses my gift and pimps my character. Nice. This is classic old school management style, a familiar corporate game I call, “Parry and Thrust.” It’s played by stalling, and staying non-committal (”Hm…if….I might…”) and then landing a knockout blow (”Do something unethical? Not us. YOU maybe. Not us.”)
Look, everybody understands that a CMO like @martysg will not alter an ad campaign because some nitpicker tweets him about the word ‘and’ in an ad. Like I said, he gets credit for being open enough to have the conversation in the first place. This is more responsiveness from a tweet than you’d get from 90% of all the CMOs in the world. It is, however, short of the kind of action a person would get from an improvisational brand like Southwest Airlines. Furthermore, what happened when @martysg did respond is precisely the point of my blog post. The conversation didn’t go anywhere because Marty St. George ‘yessed’ and he did not ‘and.’
How might Marty have yes-anded? Anyone who’s gone through a GameChangers workshop can give you a dozen games that would be more productive than ‘Parry and Thrust.’
The good news coming out of this exchange is that all is not lost. Jeremy Redleaf has a new job description for OddJobNation: “Posi-ffiti Artist.”
To an improviser, Lost is just the first step on the way to Found.
Tags: @martysg, Agreement, Blocking, Denying, Game, Gifts, Improvisation, JetBlue, OddJobNation, Scene, Yes And