As many of the entries here will attest, improvisation is a fresh way of looking at familiar business scenarios like the Writers Guild Strike, at Merrill Lynch CEO Stanley O’Neal taking the package, or at how Southwest Airlines employees are good ambassadors for their brand.
It is also a way of understanding scenarios that might not otherwise make traditional business sense, a way of resolving what seems to be a paradox. (Herb Kelleher, the founder of Southwest Airlines, has said that the ability to resolve paradox is a major factor in the organization’s success.) Here is an example of a paradox that’s easily resolved when seen through the lens of improvisation.
My partner in GameChangers, LLC, Dr. Virginia Kuhn, the Associate Director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at USC, pointed me to a recent post on eSchoolNews that contained this information: former MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child organization, which builds and sells a low-cost ($200) computer called the OX that runs on a proprietary system, competes for customers in developing countries with Intel and Microsoft and their their bare-bones Classmate PC, which can run on Windows or Linux. At the same time, all three companies are collaborating. Intel has a seat on OLPC’s board and has invested money and given technical help to the organization. Microsoft is working to make a version of Windows that can run on the OX box.
What gives?
Behavior that would seem like twisted logic to an Industrial Age mindset (”Why should we help a competitor make their product better? We want to own markets, not make more competition for ourselves! Kill! Kill!”) becomes a relatively easy-to-understand scenario when you look at it as business improvisation in the Networked World.
There are three players in this scene: OLPC, Intel and Microsoft.
The players share a business objective: Opening markets in developing countries.
They have agreed upon the game to be played in the scene. The game is called ‘First, Build the Markets’.
The game resolves the paradox. The players have chosen a game that is not win-lose but instead, one that allows them to both compete and collaborate. It is the agreement on the game that explains how players can share resources on the board and engineering levels, then go at it tooth and nail on the sales and marketing front. The agreement centers on the idea that the game they’re playing can move them productively — together! — toward the objective.
Viola Spolin, the godmother of modern improv, differentiated between competing and contesting. She deemed competing as toxic behavior, a win-lose scenario in which ego and dominance are of paramount importance, to the detriment of the players in the scene and the group as a whole. Contesting, on the other hand, she saw as extension, a means of discovering a new and improved version of ourselves. If my fastest marathon ever is 4:55:10 and you and I agree to race one another and I run a 4:45:42 in the effort to cross the finish line before you, what matters to me as a runner is not whether I beat you, but the fact that I have just run the best marathon of my life.
It is important for anyone operating in the Networked World to understand that the most important thing about competition is that it causes us to contest the status quo and extend our own potential. All three players in this scene will discover aspects of their own unrealized potential as a result of the game they’ve chosen to play, and more children are sure to have computers as a result.
Tags: collaboration, competition, developing countries, game theory, Games, Intel, Microsoft, Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC, One Laptop Per Child, paradox, resolving paradox, Viola Spolin