Specific notes:

- After cautioning the audience at the beginning of the presentation about long monologues as a means of communicating, I wrapped up the presentation with a long monologue.

- Our direction was soft on a couple of the exercises. This resulted in a kind of sponginess in the middle of the two-hour session, with drawn-out explanations by Antonio and me, less focus by the teams, and a rushed ‘third act’ in the last 15 mins.

- As any improviser can tell you, you have to work on pieces of the process at a time. You cannot drop everything you know on your audience all at once. In my explanation of what we call ‘the orchestral model’ of business communication, and the concept we call ‘quantum narrative,’ I got into more detail than the audience was able to absorb in such a short window. ‘Too clever by half,”as they say in Blighty. ‘Ten pounds of potatoes in a five pound bag,” as they say in Boise.

- The teamwork that usually happens during our workshops was not so much apparent in this one. Things stayed more individualized, and less knit-together than we would like.

- The tempo at which we conducted the session was inconsistent. If I had been conducting a piece of music, it would have been in about 20 different time signatures, with me conducting at least part of the performance with my back to the orchestra. Missing cues. Dynamics roller-coastery instead of scenic.

These notes are related to our business objective for the workshop, which was to explain GameChangers and give attendees a sampling of what we do with our clients. At achieving this objective, we give ourselves a 50%. We were only about half as effective as we believe we’re capable of being.

So why are we not upset?

Two reasons: One is that because our process lets us see so clearly where the issues are, we have already taken steps to remedy them before the next open workshop.

The other, bigger, reason is that the outcomes of the session have been extraordinary, better than the outcomes of many workshops where our performance was actually  much better than it was Tuesday. A lot of credit for this goes to the people who were in attendance. One of the points we make in these introductions to GameChangers is to distinguish between objectives of the game, and the outcomes of the game, and wow, has that been our experience since Tuesday.

These are some of the outcomes:

- Our friend Ron Finley, the ‘renegade urban gardener’ connected with our friends Jenna and Adam from TakePart, who were in attendance. TakePart is the digital division of Participant Media. They are going to do a story about Ron.

- Erin Reilly, the creative director of USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, spoke yesterday to her faculty committee about having us do a one-day workshop there in March.

- Marcy and Strath Hamilton of Tri-Coast Studios, which is producing a lot of e-books, met a Ruby on  Rails coder named Patrick Maddox, who was in attendance Tuesday.  They’ve been looking for a coder. Now they’re talking to Patrick.

- T.H. Culhane and David Groder, who are working on a robotics education program funded by the U.S. Naval Research Dept., are making a presentation today (Wednesday) at Washington High School in Los Angeles, and are being joined by Ron Finley, who is a Washington High graduate. This is happening as a result of them connecting on Tuesday night.

- T.H. and Groder will soon get introduced by GameChangers associate Jamal Williams, who was in town from D.C. for the Tuesday workshop, to Nii Simmonds, the ‘Nubian Cheetah,’ a Ghanian-born D.C. resident and former investment banker who funds a program called Afrobotics, a robotics competition for African schoolchildren.

- Kevin Wall, who is producing the opening ceremonies and concert for the 2014 World Cup in Rio, was in attendance. Kevin learned for the first time that Fernando Godoy, who used to be an intern in at one of Kevin’s companies, is today a successful internet entrepreneur in Sao Paulo and is a partner in Spirit of Football 2014. Kevin and Fernando are going to meet the next time Kevin is in Brazil.

- Tri-Coast Productions and GameChangers are meeting this coming Monday to discuss two projects–a GameChangers ebook and a video series that would be produced and performed by people from our network of world-class improvisers.

- Andy Sternberg has since Tuesday introduced us to two friends of his whom he believes will be interested in our work.

- We were able to continue a conversation with Nicholle McClelland Betelier, a marketing officer from IdeaLab, that began at a yoga retreat in December.

- A crypto-hipster named Som showed up uninivited, and asked some of the best questions and offered some of the most thoughtful comments of the evening. Thank you, Som, whoever and wherever you are! Please stay in touch!

- My favorite outcome of the evening came about thanks to a ‘gift’ from David Groder. At the very end of the session, after my long-winded closing monologue, Groder asked if we could go around the room and have everyone introduce themselves. All 25 people introduced themselves and described the work they’re doing. It was really remarkable, not only because it completely subverted the normal order of things—introductions at the end instead of the beginning!—but also because the people in attendance are doing brilliant things in the world. Attendees are working in robotics, social media, community development, urban gardening, fashion, cause-related marketing, transmedia storytelling, architecture, criminal law, venture capital, entertainment, academia, e-books, tech, watercraft stabilization, app development, etc. etc. etc. Introductions at the end became a very enjoyable kind of reveal. Almost everyone stayed and talked for half-an-hour or more after the session, and I believe most of that conversation would not have happened if not for David’s gift to the scene.

Never get objectives confused with outcomes. Objectives are what we use to assess and improve our performance. Outcomes happen as a result of having performed. Objectives are finite. Outcomes are unlimited. Objectives create focus. Outcomes generate value.

Post-event conversations were the most productive part of the evening

-

Katehi

The old games are exactly that. Old. And like anything old, they lack sap, spine, vigor. In many ways, the Occupy Wall Street movement calls this out. Saturday’s Silent Protest against the UC Davis Chancellor, Linda Katehi, is one of the best ways yet of #OWS demonstrating the impotency of old games.

Here’s the scene breakdown:

A day after the notorious on-campus pepper-spraying incident, the UC Davis protesters have the idea of  creating dialogue with Katehi, by forming a stage between the Administration Building and her car. (Note that no one is out front taking credit for this idea, it doesn’t belong to anyone. Ownable ideas are typical of an old game; shareable ideas are typical of a new game.) The stage is a hundred yards long, a catwalk extending the length of the theater, lined by hundreds of students sitting on the ground in order to effectively elevate the stage.

In forming this stage, the protesters change roles, from ‘Quad Occupiers’ to ‘Silent Audience.’ It doesn’t take them much time to do this. There’s no ’spin’ of a story being told or sold, no research to back it up, no ‘official position,’ only a simple intuitive agreement to keep their mouths shut for the duration of the scene. Game on. ‘Silent Protest’ is the name you can give the game. The reality of the scene emerges from the focus on this game, this agreement. It is the absence of protest that will make the protest so dramatic.

After 3 hours of what must have been a lot of hemming, hawing and phone-calling by her team about ‘how to handle it,’ the scene finally begins when the Chancellor enters, accompanied by a couple of non-speaking ‘extras.’ She is lit dramatically by the glow of cameras—-eyes of the world—-tracking her across the stage. Her delaying has made this a nighttime scene, which is even more dramatic, the darkness creating a heavier silence. By taking the stage without a script, i.e. nothing in her head, Katehi is exposed as someone with nothing in her heart. She’s got nothing. Because —-

The script won’t be ready until tomorrow!

The silence of the audience is remarkable.  Its discipline is impressive. No one breaks. The silence is marred by a few unable-to-resist journos whose subdued questions as the Chancellor nears her car only underline the otherwise-completeness of the silence.

Here is what gets revealed by the scene: The Chancellor cannot speak for herself. Her heart is closed, her emotions as frozen as the mask of solicitude frozen on her face. She is afraid of saying the wrong thing. Her institution’s students intimidate her. There is no dialogue between player and audience, between administration and student, between authority and autonomy. No dialogue. Just an old game, getting called out for what it is. Empty.

The protesters didn’t have to say a thing. All they had to do was create an environment in which the old game of ’script and control’ would be displayed in all its inadequacy for the world to see.

Dr. David Boje, the 'Einstein of Story'

This morning, I’m wrapping up a visit with Dr. David Boje, who’s on the faculty of the business school at New Mexico State University. Boje’s work focuses on storytelling and its effect on business (huge!) I participated in two of his classes, one undergrad, one for PhD candidates, in which we explored what he calls the Quantum Physics of Storytelling and its relationship to improvisation. We found all kinds of connections and I think we both came away from the experience feeling there’s  lot more to be discovered and explored in this realm. Improvisation is the ‘trigger mechanism’ that can release the quantum energy (and meaning) stored in stories. Boje’s work provides the framework for the process and the empirical evidence of its outcomes. We’ll leave it at that for now. Very excited to see where this scene goes, and how it can help GameChangers’ clients!

Today, the HuffPost ran this headline:

GameChangers LLC owns the trademark ‘GameChangers’ in 17 different trade categories, including business education, seminars, improvisation for business, training, etc. I’m not going to say that HuffPost’s repeated use of the phrase ‘Game Changers’ in its editorial violates our trademark (though I implied it in a snarky comment on her story today). And I don’t know for sure, the difference, litigationally speaking, between ‘GameChangers’ and ‘Game Changers’ with the words spaced. We don’t own the phrase, didn’t coin it, and lots of people use it–including every sports announcer who ever lived, and the Bloomberg Network, which DOES for sure tromp on our trademark (but how are we going to sue or even slow down a billionaire politician’s billion-dollar company in the legal arena? If you’ve got ideas, let me know.)

I do know that last year my HuffPost producer, Willow Bay, brought up to Arianna the HuffPost’s use of the ‘Game Changers’ branding and proposed a conversation between the two of us about a possible collaboration. Nothing. Zippo. We shouted into the maw and got nary and echo.

In improvisation, we honor taking. You’ve got to take strongly, and politeness has nothing to do with it. Be aggressive. Play hard. Go for it. Claim turf. ‘Take care of yourself first,’ in the words of the legendary teacher, Mick Napier.

The thing is, we honor giving, too, and if anything, we honor it more. Yes-and. Connect. Make others look good.  Share the narrative. Give gifts.  Politeness, the consideration of others, has a lot to do with it.

One without the other makes you only half a player.

This is just my experience speaking, it does not represent any kind of larger dataset, for all I know Arianna has given $314M to Sloan-Kettering Hospital since February. It is pretty direct experience, though, so it must mean something. What it means to me is that Arianna is Half a Player. She’s fantastic at taking, and needs to work on her giving.

The WAYS? menu consists of 15 game-oriented activities inspired by the rescue.  A half-day WAYS? workshop will be comprised of  eight of these 15 activities, of which the client chooses six; two activities, the first and last, are ‘requirements.’  Our first WAYS? engagement is March 2 in Miami, for 120 executives from a large manufacturing company that is restructuring its processes on a global scale.

Because we had only one day to rehearse in person prior to March 2 (Franklin is currently on a worldwide book tour), we hired a coach, Sevanne Kassarjian, to guide and focus our work in New York.  Two ‘applied improvisers,’ Zohar Adner and James Tossone, along with Heather Soldania, a Masters student at USC’s Annenberg School of Communication who happened to be in NYC last weekend, joined us for part of the day.  Jonathan’s wife, father and three-year-old daughter, Zoey, also sat in for part of the day at the Ripley Grier Rehearsal Stages where we were rehearsing.  Zoey even participated in one of the activities, in which her job was baking cakes in a high-speed oven.

It was a good day.  We made huge strides toward getting the program ready.  Sevanne is terrifically focused.  She relentlessly probed and pondered the experience from every perspective.  Her work demonstrates how an improviser can play many roles in quick sequence, always through the essential truth of one’s character.  During our collaboration, she played the roles of Gentle Encourager, Stern Critic, Logistics Manager, Playful Mom, Erudite Intellectual and Fellow Improviser, to name just a few of the hats she wore.  Through it all, she was always the brilliant individual we now know as Sevanne.

Sevanne’s work is itself a microcosm of why improvisation is an essential skill for managers in a Networked World.  A job title is just that, a title.  Sevanne’s job title last week was ‘Coach.’  That title did not define the many ways in which she supported us.  Simply put, she did what was best for the scene, in each and every moment.  Given the gift of improvisation, so can you and your organization.

Play on!

Sevanne Kassarjian (Jonathan Franklin in b.g.)

When I saw that Rich Talarico would be conducting an 8-week class entitled The Way of Improv, I jumped at it.  We had our first class this past week and just as one might expect from a Dasariski player, the coaching was patient, and it was delightful.

Rehearsal space is sacred space, and I’m not going be reporting on these classes, but Rich said something wonderful early in the first class that is worth sharing.  I don’t think he’ll mind, because it is drawn from the commonly-shared language of improvisers.  He said, “We don’t have rules, we have tools.”

That, to me, is a perfect summation of what improvisation is all about.  Of course, there are rules to every game.  In business, there are rules governing every transaction.  What Rich meant is that the art of improvisation itself has no rules.  It has tools.  We put our tools to work to liberate performance.  Rules are just there to give shape and context to the performance.  In terms of improvisation, rules are to tools what the block of wood is to the hammer, what the plaster is to the putty knife.

When you invoke rules to guide your process you are using a block of wood to hit the nail.  You are throwing wet plaster at a crack in the wall.  To solve the problem, bring your toolbox, not your rulebox.

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 great teachers Mick Napier and Del Close get some of the credit, as do Viola “The Godmother” Spolin and ImprovWorks’ Sue “Pond” Walden, though the exact origins of most of these sayings would be pretty hard to trace. What’s clear to anyone who explores improvisation is that the the meaning behind the sayings originates from the same place that accounts for such profound ideas as jazz, the Dao De Jing, Johnny Appleseed and Pixar Animation.  Here is the fifth in a series

Play against cliches. First, play with the cliches of your business.  You all know what they are.  Name them.  Call them out.  Have some fun with them.   And then go against them.  There is a lot of movement in playing against cliches.  Just doing this one thing can transform your scene into something delightful.

Think of the environment as a six-sided sphere, of which the audience is a part. What a brilliant way to determine your marcomm budget!  It’s 1/6 of your total operating budget.  Done.  Next.

The environment also has an outside and an inside. This is a good way of thinking about how your brand’s environment travels with the communication that represents it in the networked world.  Think of your network as a place.  What is that place like?  Who is walking the halls?  How is it lit?  What kind of art hangs in its offices?  What does it sound like?  All these concepts should be consistent and play off one another in virtual space and in reality. A friendly atmosphere in the office extends to the social graph.  Artfulness will be apparent in reality and in virtual space.  Clutter is as clutter does.  Etc. etc.

You don’t have to try to be funny, laughter will happen just by being human.  Being human is funny enough. A common misconception we battle all the time at GameChangers is that improvisation is all about being funny.  So not true!  Improvisation is about communication, learning, and transformation.  It is only by a quirk of genetic fate—Viola Spolin’s son, Paul Sills, brought all the games Viola had conceived with him when he and Bernie Sahlins co-founded Second City—that we in the U.S. associate improvisation so strongly with comedy.  Comedy is just a sliver of the output improvisation is capabl of generating.   It’s like saying all ice cream Praline Pecan.  Taint so.

Playful, direct, co-developed ideas, informations, and dreams will always be far hipper than one person’s alone. This is just a basic human algorithm.  The best ideas of eight people will always be better than the best ideas of one person.  Spare us your genius, and bring us something else.  Your work ethic.  Your brain.  Your smile.  Your song.  Your sense of smell.  Your experience.  But spare us your genius.  Because, you know…our stuff will always be far hipper than yours alone ; )

The anecdotal evidence–what we’re seeing and experiencing over the past three months:

- A study in the magazine Science co-authored by MIT scientists cites a 30-40% improvement in performance in groups that apply collective intelligence to problem-solving.  This is another perfectly legit definition for what improvisation is:  The conscious application of collective intelligence to the solving of problems.

- A major airline hires GameChangers™ to improve its customer relations for its sales staff.  In 3 months, offices that institute the GameChangers™system show a 90% reduction in customer complaints.

- Oakley yes-ands the 33 Trapped Chilean Miners by giving them all a pair of their grooviest sunglasses to wear when they exit the mine, demonstrating that improvised branding has a huge ROI advantage over traditional media models.

- Legendary improvisation-trained actor Alan Alda establishes a program with science writer KC Cole to teach scientists how to communicate better using improvisation.  Alda’s  program is co-located at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism, and Stony Brook U. in New York.  I’m honored to continue the program in a workshop exploring biomimicry (in which we riff on exercises taught to me by the brilliant Belina Raffy in the U.K.) as part of Social Media Week in L.A..

- The ‘Old Spice Man’ viral video campaign, partly designed by a social media manager who attended several GameChangers® workshops and a copywriter who plays jazz trumpet, boosts Old Spice sales by 1200% in three months.  This suggests that brands must begin to measure ROI not by platform, but by narrative.

- The Applied Improvisation Network holds its annual meeting in Amsterdam in September.  Success stories abound!

- Renowned London-based organizational expert, Peter Robertson, is adapting  the AEM-cube™ analysis tool created by his group, Human Insight Ltd., to include metrics for how well large organizations, and their employees individually, improvise.

- We hear that two divisions of a large global consulting firm, unbeknownst to one another, hire improvisers to conduct workshops for their managers in two different U.S. cities.  The company’s training staff, hearing of this, requests a proposal from one of its vendors for a company-wide program for more than 12,000 employees that is based on improvisation.

- The Spirit of Football®, an improvised narrative that explores the theme, “One Ball, One World,” has already signed its first two sponsors for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, putting them exactly three years ahead of the pace they were on for this year’s World Cup.

- A Harvard Business Review article on Pixar University and its director, Randy Nelson, cites ‘plussing,’ which is an old term Walt Disney used, as an essential part of its culture.  Plussing is another word for  ‘yes-and,’ a basic concept of improvisation.

This is just a partial tip of one iceberg, the one we see from our little boat at GameChangers™.  There are a lot more icebergs in the ocean than what we can see, and let’s be honest, there are a lot more icebergs in the ocean than there have ever been before.

Consequently, there has never been a better time, no matter what profession you’re in, to be an improviser.  Play on!

People get lucky in all sorts of ways.  I’ve always been lucky with teachers.  My teachers, it always seemed to me, performed at a high level.   They inspired me.  How?  They had great energy, and enjoyed what they were teaching.  Their senses of humor were intact.   They connected the gifts they gave us to a larger world, they cracked open doors that many of my friends and I eventually walked through.

I recite the names of my K-12 teachers to myself, like a person might go over the names of relatives in a family tree or a litany of saints to invoke a certain kind of contentment about one’s path:

Lena Bonifer (my grandma), Sister Francille, Evangeline McDaniel, Henrietta Allen, Sister Augusta, Henrietta ‘Sparrow’ Spink, Ken Dudine, Emil Dischinger, Dimp Stenftenagel, LINDA ROHLEDER (especially Linda Rohleder!), Sister Aloysius, Barry Bird, Gene Keusch, Vincent Arvin, BILL BASSLER (especially Bill Bassler!), Hershel Zehr (”I can solve the time zone issue.”), Del Steinhart (”This is how a brick wall moves during an earthquake.”), Cabby O’Neill (’We don’t live in a democracy, we live in a representative republic!’), Pete Gill, Dave Leuking, Ray Minton, Jerry Brewer, Jack ‘Bulldog’ Leas, Don Hayes, Mary Ann Hayes (favorite historical character:  Eleanor of Aquitaine, wtf??!!), Mel Menke, Ed Schultheis, Rex May, Ray Cox, Ed Haller, Don Gamble, Paul East, Aloysius Mathias Alonzo Curabin Schuler–and can’t forget our school bus driver for eight years, Harold Diddleburger (Bus #3 Ruled!)  I have funny stories and loving memories of you all, God bless you wherever you are!

About the CAPITALIZED:

Linda Rohleder, my sixth grade teacher, wanted great things for us.  She was always bringing up and getting us involved in learning that had to do with the Astronauts, Vietnam, the Optimist Club Speech Contest, the County Spelling Bee, Fast Food, Fashion, Charles Dickens, Indiana State University and a hundred other ideas about the world that cracked doors.  Never mind the finger, she did not permit her students to even give one another a thumbs-down gesture.  Rumor was that she and Don the Bookmobile Driver had a thing going on.

Bill Bassler was my high school Latin teacher for three years.  He showed me how there’s life in everything if you know where to look, even in a supposedly dead thing like the language of ancient Rome.  When he was guiding us through The Aneid or Julius Caesar, a Coca Cola ad written in Latin, or a Roman kid calling out to his buddy to come play, (“Yo, Publius, what are you doing?!”), you were there, living it right along with him.

My lucky streak continues to this day, with my teachers in improvisation, music and the various languages of new media.  Jason Pardo, Aaron Krebs, Sarah Gee, Lonnie ‘Meganut’ Marshall, Craig Cackowski, VIRGINIA KUHN (especially Virginia Kuhn!) and a dozen others have given gifts I’ll be a lifetime repaying.   I’d rather have the good fortune of knowing and studying with these people than win a hundred lotteries.

I was thrilled to find this photo online, taken last year, of some of my high school teachers. From left: Bill Bassler; Aloysius Mathias Alonzo Curabin Schuler and his wife, Rosina; Mary Ann Hayes behind the ribbons; Don Hayes; Del Steinhart

1) A two hour GameChangers workshop, ‘The Revolution Will Be Improvised:  Brand Narratives in the Networked World,’ at KCET television studios.  This will be a quick introduction into the fundamentals of improvisation for business communication, and an exploration of how, to be effective, brands must be prepared to improvise their narratives in the social media space.

2) A workshop billed as ‘Communication Trifecta:  Levels of Meaning in Presentations’ at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy.  This will be for students at USC who are learning to use new media tools and platforms to help them ‘get their show on the road,’ as my dad used to say.  We’re going to focus on how to give good presentations.  (Hint:  It’s not the presentation, it’s the presenter.)

3) A science communication workshop based on biomimicry–using processes found in nature to produce sustainable designs and business strategies–at the Viterbi School of Engineering at USC.  The workshop continues a program begun by the actor Alan Alda and science journalist K.C. Cole to help scientists improve their communication skills.  Cole, who was mentored by (and has written a book about) Frank Oppenheimer, creator of the Exploratorium in San Francisco, will be co-facilitating with me.  Alda will be viewing segments of the workshop via teleconference from Stony Brook U. in New York.

4)  A program on fan culture hosted by the Cimarron Group that will be moderated by the legendary Henry Jenkins of M.I.T. and USC, who’s like a Professor of Fanthropology.  The program will look at the ways that fan culture affects the marketing of motion pictures.

Only the GameChangers workshop at KCET is open to the public. If you’re in Los Angeles  next week, please plan to attend.  The biomimicry workshop will be streamed live online (follow @socialmediaweek on Twitter for the video link.)   You’ll also want to check out the full schedule of events for Social Media Week. There’s something in it for everyone.  And a lot of it will be streamed live.  You can track it via @socialmediaweek on Twitter, and on the Facebook page and lots of other channels, too.  The new networks have thousands of channels, dontcha know.

Ultimately, all human discourse is social media.  The fact that we have new platforms for doing it doesn’t guarantee we’re going to be any good at it.  For organizations and individuals alike, getting good at social media means getting good at human skills like listening, finding agreement, and synthesizing different points of view into a brand new whole.  That takes improvisation.  And that is why GameChangers is so committed to Social Media Week.  Social media platforms are the stages, and every stage needs its play.

Social Media Week in Los Angeles is being produced by Erick Brownstein and The New Agency.   The event began last year as the brainchild of Toby Daniels and his company, Crowdcentric, in New York City.