The extraordinary improviser, Paul Vaillancourt, gave me a list of sayings that have been compiled and passed around the improv theater community over the years. The legendary teachers, Mick Napier and Del Close, get some of the credit, though the exact origins of most of these are as hazy as the roots of any folk wisdom. Here is the fourth in a series of sayings from Vallaincourt’s List, with my notes following. As you go about your business, keep these concepts in play:
If the whole is going to be art, the parts must strive not to be. If we strive to make everything we do precious and perfect and just-so. If we deliberate and debate the appropriateness of our actions. If we measure every move. Craft and eddit every response. The sum of the parts of what we CrEaTeToGeThEr. Is. Surely. Going. To be. Yes. Oh yes most indubitably and beyond repudiating to the level of a statistical certainty will most definitely be…(Say it!) A pompous load of crap.
Always bring a brick, not a cathedral into a scene. We know a businessperson who had built a well-deserved reputation for dropping big ideas on meetings. That was his thing. People were in awe of how inspired and forward-thinking his ideas were, by the compelling scenarios he painted for them with his words and emotions. He liked this role, and didn’t do anything about changing it. Why would he? People called him a genius. A visionary. What usually happened, though, is that his big ideas died on the vine, or failed to live up to their promise. His ideas were so big, so singular, that people had trouble adding their own bricks to his architecture. In our friend’s mind, the cathedral had already been built, all there was for his admirers to do was worship at his altar. We gave the genius an ‘adjustment’. All we said was, ‘Don’t be the guy with the big idea. Be the guy who makes other people’s ideas big.’ This has made all the difference in the world. He has learned that it’s more satisfying and a lot less stressful to make his scene partners look good, and to not worry so much about proving his own genius It turns out he’s just as talented at sharing his talent as he is at showing it off, and sharing has proved to be a much more productive way for him to behave. Today, his reputation is for getting big things done.
Make the strange familiar, the familiar strange. This is a great philosophy for keeping your brand’s culture lively. Every business culture benefits from a flow of ’strange’ (i.e. alien to that culture) situations, environments and characters. Likewise, if we get too familiar with our environment, our process and our fellow players–and most tragically if we quit surprising ourselves–our performance is going to get stale. When every day is the same we lose our sense of anticipation. If we dont’ think we’re going find anything, we quit looking, and the flow of new ideas drys up. It is good to introduce some outside strangness into the workaday mix; it is even more potent to rediscover the strangeness within ourselves.
Don’t prolong the agony of a scene that is slowly dying. Infuse it with the momentum it needs to end on a positive note. There are a lot of business scenes ’slowly dying’ these days. Meetings with HR end in pink slips. Start-ups lose their funding. Towns lose their biggest employer. Often in these situations, the only feasible move is to end the scene quickly and move on. It makes a huge difference to the rest of your performance if the bad scene ends on a postive note instead of a downbeat one. A town that greets the news of losing its biggest employer with some kind of community celebration is already on the road to recovery while a town that gets busy telling lots of sad stories to the news about how they got screwed is going to be staying in the doldrums for awhile.
All masks are empty until they are put on and inhabited by the actor. The same is true with job titles.
Tags: , Additions and Edits, Behavior, brand, culture, Del Close, Gifts, job titles, Mick Napier, Paul Vaillancourt, reputation, Sayings, Scenes, Vaillancourt's List, vision, Wisdom