Ask yourself this question: Would you rather work or play? The answer is easy. If we could afford to, just about all of us would choose play over work because play, by definition, is much more fun. Playing (unless your idea of play is competitive eating, hydroplane racing, bounty hunting or something along those lines) relieves stress, improves your mental and physical health, and fills you with good energy.

Let’s pose the possibility that, through improvisation, work can take on the qualities of play. Imagine that you’re not going to work any more. You’re going to play! We are not glossing over the fundamental facts of business life here. Serious work must get done. Products pick-pack-shipped on time. Papers filed. Satellites launched. Deals closed. Stalls mucked. Connections made. Fires put out. Incomes earned. But how much more exciting would all of that could happen in the context of a game, with you as one of the its primo players?

Modern improv theory began with the playing of games. In the 1920s, Neva Boyd, a Northwestern University professor in sociology, and her protégé, Viola Spolin, used simple games to help immigrant children of many different nationalities on Chicago’s South Side communicate and assimilate into their new culture. (Spolin’s son, Paul Sills, would later co-found Second City, where he and his troupe used his mother’s foundational work with games to create and perform improvised comedy.)

It was Spolin who observed that a remarkable transformation took place during the playing of group games. At the heart of this transformation is something akin to spiritual transcendence – the setting aside of oneself and one’s ego for a higher purpose. When a game is played, all of a sudden it’s not about you or me. It’s about us. And because it’s about us – not about an individual, but about the activity of a group – the playing of games generates an experience that is engaging and rewarding, not only to the players, but to their audiences as well. In business, when your team/company/brand plays the game well, there’s a magnetic quality to this play that will have your customers — the most significant segment of what we call your ‘External Audience’ — wanting to play along.

Good improvisers — in theater and in business — can identify what I call in GameChangers ‘good’ and ‘bad’ games. They know and promote the difference between games that are productive, and lend themselves to the progress of your scenes, and games that get you nowhere.

Here are a couple of (abbreviated) examples of games being played in business scenarios. The first is that timeless classic, ‘Kissing Ass’. Because the objective of this game is usually to curry favor with one player, it almost always limits a scene by obscuring important or relevant information. Players who don’t recognize or join in the game are going to pay a price, like the intern in the video. The second video illustrates a more productive game, call it ‘Crazy Like a Fox’. Note how the playing of this game elicits information that’s useful to the scene. Again, the intern earns a glare from the CEO, but now it’s the CEO who must be careful to keep the scene productive, not let it veer into some kind of status game or turn into a two-person scene about the conflict between him and the intern. That would be good for an improv comedy scene, but conflict and comedy are not what you want from a business situation.)

(EDITOR’S NOTE: We had these videos up with this post a day ago, and found to our chagrin that the default YouTube player associated the business game of ‘Kissing Ass’ with various porn-related or YouTubesque clips with titles like ‘Jared Kisses Chamath’s Ass at the Office Party Then Spits’. To those who witnessed and were offended by the witless vocabulary of this, we apologize. To those who are disappointed that we yanked it, you know where to go. YouTube’s cool custom player lets a player manage and brand a player’s playlists, check it out…)

Tags: Audience, Chicago, GameChangers, Games, Improvisation, Neva Boyd, Northwestern University, Paul Sills, Second C, Transformation, Viola Spolin

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 at 11:51 am and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.