One night when my son, Alex (who’s leaving tomorrow for a job in NYC) was five years old, we watched the movie

“E.T. had to go home,” I said. “To his family, on the planet where he lives.”

“I didn’t want him to go. I wanted him to stay with Elliot.”

“E.T. and Eliot were sad about it, too. But they love each other. And as long as they love each other, they’ll never really be apart. In their hearts, they’ll always be together.”

A pause, as Alex ponders.

“So you and I will always be together?”

“Yes, Son, you and I will always be together.”

Of all the motivational sayings used in business my least favorites express the idea that  ‘Life is Short.’

Because you see, Life is not short. Life is long. Our own lives are short, for sure. Birth, fornication and death—as the poet Ogden Nash so succinctly put it—are the facts when you get down to brass tacks. A human being’s life—or a whale’s or a bacterium’s—is a tiny spark in the night of eternity. But to say or act as if life itself is short generates the kinds of  hurrying and worrying that can cause us to miss much of what life actually is, or can be.

Life is long like the love a parent has for a child. There is nothing short about that. Nothing hurried. Time ceases to matter when we are proving our love.

Life is long like the warmth of a fire on a cold night. We are warmed as much by an experience as old as humankind as by the fire itself.

No matter what mountain we have chosen to climb, or what sudden twist of fate confronts us, when we behave as if life is short, we begin to hurry, and that’s when mistakes happen. As the basketball coach John Wooden said, “Be quick, but don’t hurry.”

My wish for 2012 is that we all find ways to appreciate the idea that life is long…

That the reason we make footprints on the planet is to mark a path for who comes after, and that it’s not the size of the footprint that matters, but the direction of the path.

That we are patient with one another, and not short, abrupt, rude, inconsiderate, unkind—all the stuff we do intentionally or not, when we get impatient, when we are driven by the ticking of an internal clock that no one else can hear.

That we embrace the notion that our Success is inevitable, and so is our Failure.

That the Birth-Fornication-Death thing is fleeting, but poetry endures.

That we remember that nothing of value was ever harmed by the taking of time. (I thought Abraham Lincoln said it, but can’t find the citation. What’s likely is that even if Abe Lincoln did say it, someone said it before Abe. Because life is long.)

That we see growth not as something that takes time, but as something that transcends time, because growth is happening now and always has been. What can take time is our own ability to see and make sense of it. The Disney animator Ken Anderson once pointed out to me, about the great old California Oak trees in Descanso Gardens near his home in Flintridge, CA, “The trees are dancing. If you could look at them over a long, long time you would see them dancing.” Life-is-short sees a tree. Life-is-long sees a dance.

That while our time here is limited, our ability to love one another is not. And that as long as we act out of love, our footprints will mark a path worth following.

Have a lively 2012! Don’t be the Tree, be the Dance!

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.

When people say ’sustainability,’ they can be referring to a lot of different cosmetic concepts (monetary policy, geothermal energy, funding for education or manufacturing, urban gardening, solar power, vegetarianism, LED lighting, gender and sexual equality, etc. etc. etc.). In fact, we know this ‘multi-causism’ to be characteristic of the OWS scene. The meta concept is, for all these causes, the same: Are you playing constructive or de-constructive games? Zero sum or positive sum games? Are your games sustainable or not? OWS is, ultimately, itself a game, one designed to focus attention on the UGs of Wall Street.

The protesters arrested yesterday on the Brooklyn Bridge represent the most creative generation living in the most creative nation on earth. No doubt they have roots in every language, race, religion, culture, science, art form and evolutionary instinct in the human species. And daily, on Manhattan Island, they are forced to confront the 1-percenters who control 99 percent of the nation’s wealth, people who are, for the most part, not creators, but extractors. That’s what their games are designed to do—-extract. These people getting arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge? they’re doing it to point out the difference between where the money is and where it needs to be for us to get a bigger bang out of the creativity they represent. 99 percent of our creativity belongs to 99 percent of the people. That’s a biological fact, Jack. It’s the ultimate sustainable resource. The protesters know this and are calling it to our attention with one of the games they and their friends originated, flash mobbing.

The OWS players understand that if the ratio of ‘99 percent of the wealth to 1 percent of the people’ ratio stays where it is, we will never get out the doldrums economically, because we’re getting no Return on Creativity. No ROC. Because we are putting most of our money where 99 percent of our creativity isn’t. For the ratio to change, the game must change. The OWS players grew up on games. They are the gamingest people in the history of the world. You think they don’t know a bad game when they see one? Wall Street plays bad games. They want game change.

Game change will come about only when we find ways to invest in the creativity of the 99 percent. We cannot afford to have the most creative Americans sitting on the bench right now. We need them in the game. Just not the old games. New ones. The OWS players are screaming at the coaches to put them into a game they can play.

The old game, in addition to being unsustainable, has left a bitter taste in the mouth of the world. Those protesters sitting on the Brooklyn Bridge? They’re bitter too. They’re bitter because they have the ability to change the game and they know it. They understand the scope of the work ahead, and are in a hurry to get on with it.

They have good taste, let them cook with it, and bring the world to our table again.  They have stories to tell that are not the same old stories, let them tell them. They have visions that are not blueprints of the past, let them build them. They hear music that has never been sung and have crazy ideas that no one else would even think of attempting. Let them sing. Let them try. We need that now. We need them. And every day the ‘1 percent to 99 percent ratio’ stays where it is, we are one step closer to losing them.

They are getting arrested for squatting on a symbol of America’s great creative past like birds who have come home to roost, when what they really want to do is fly.

I think there is a similar need for game designers in business today.

Networked structures and systems are as different from Industrial Age systems as a jellyfish is from a jetty. Networked companies must adapt. Continually differentiate their brands. Quickly recognize and act on opportunity in a constantly-morphing business environment.

Networked companies absorb and ride change like seagulls adjust to the wind.

Continuing our trip to the beach…a rigid, hierarchical approach to business has about as much chance in this environment as a sand castle does at high tide. The flow of change is that strong, that tidal. The new structures must be fluid, like the roiling environment they navigate every day. Fortunately for us human beings, we are 90% water. Fluidity is in our nature. It’s there. All we have to do is recognize and embrace it.

Games are among the most dynamic and productive structures that can be introduced to a system. They legitimize authority, lend themselves to accountability and encourage autonomy–energies that must work in concert for a networked organization to succeed.

At GameChangers, we design improvisation games to help clients achieve their business objectives. Our definition of a game is E-R-G-O. Environment, Roles, Guidelines and Objective(s). If you can define those, game on.

Ideas are cheap; execution is hard. Games require execution. An idea is like a game that’s never been played. We never consider an idea–for either ourselves or our clients–without looking at it through the ERGO lens. Whether an idea is any good or not is a a subjective discussion. The experience of playing a game, by contrast, can be analyzed objectively.

In a networked world, the power of an idea, its ultimate meaning, resides in ‘how much game’ it’s got. How much ‘play’ it generates. Games create focus. Elevate performance. Stir emotions. Reward innovation. They result in great stories. The value proposition is the size of Monstro the Whale.

(NEXT: POOR GAME, RICH GAME)

I know you are busy with your lives and your careers and such, and you know I’m not one to meddle or nag.  Live and let live, that’s my motto.  But as your Mother I’ve got to tell you that your behavior lately has been hurtful to me, and to the rest of our family. You seem to have forgotten that I am a living, breathing being, with real feelings. And right now my feelings are hurt. Badly.

I held you in my arms.  Fed you.  Gave you a nice home. Helped you grow into the people you are today. I guess I have failed, because the people you are today have wounded me.  I want to scream.  Sometimes I do scream.  Of course you don’t hear me, you only hear what’s coming out of your own mouths. How about listening for a change?

I made it possible for you to get an education, so you can do whatever it is you do for a living (I still don’t understand it!???) and yet you take me for granted.  Like I am nothing to you.  This is the treatment I deserve?  This is your response to a lifetime of love?

I do not ask for your thanks.  A Mother’s job is a thankless one.  I accept that.  Spare me the holidays.  Show me some appreciation, that’s all.  I will not be ignored! I will not go gently into the night!!!

How about I cut off your inheritance? You have no idea how close I am to doing it.  You’ve already blown through most of what I intended to leave you, anyway.  Take, take, take, and never give back, that’s you.

If you’re not going to show me respect, I promise you I’ll start taking back what’s rightfully mine.  How did you like it when I took back that piece of Japan last month? That hurt, didn’t it?  You felt that, didn’t you?  It is just the beginning of where this thing is headed unless you get your act together.

At one time, the family owned a million or more varieties of apples, did you know that?  What are we down to now?  Six?  Seven?  It took me ages to save up my precious minerals collection.  You walked off with it, and you’re not bringing it back, you think I don’t notice? It took me 10 million years to build the family oil business, and you’re going to blow through it in a couple of measly centuries?  Some nerve.  Frack me?  No, frack you!!!

The Dodo was my favorite tsotchke , you probably didn’t know that, did you?  Of course you didn’t, because it’s always all about you.  I loved that animal, it made me laugh every time I looked at it, and then you broke it.  I miss my Dodo.  It was one of a kind.  It cannot be replaced.  Too late for an apology.  Don’t even try.  I’m not forgiving you for that one.

Mustard gas?  That any children of mine would make such a thing is one of my greatest heartaches.  Agent Orange?  First of all, I resent like hell that you named it after one of my favorite fruits.  Second, I still have a rash in Southeast Asia, one of the most beautiful parts of my body (one of the few I have left) because of it.  Asbestos?  Awful stuff.  Zylon B? If only it were the bad science fiction it sounds like, instead of the awful reality it was. Still gives me nightmares. And then to top it all off, you take innocent little hydrogen, and turn him into a weapon?!! Honest to Gaia, where do you learn such things?  Who are your friends?

Chernobyl?  Nuclear reactors and vodka? That was a bright idea. First, you poison me with  radiation, then you invite tourists to see the results?  Why?  So you and your kids can laugh at the featherless geese?  Have the geese not been humiliated enough?  (Yes, they have!)

Is anyone ever going to take responsibility for the mess you made in Bophal? Someone did it, and someone is going to clean it up, and we are going to wait right here until that happens, I don’t care how long it takes. And if one of you doesn’t own up to it, all of you will.

How is that cancer thing working out for you? Nobody had cancer before you brought it home, we didn’t even know what the stuff was. Now we can’t get rid of it. What’s the matter with the genes I gave you?  Nothing is ever good enough for you, is it? You’re weaving a tangled web, that’s all I can say. What are those hard red things you call tomatoes, anyway?  The corn was just fine until you came along. What is so bad about four teats on a cow? Why must you try to make six? Stop meddling with my DNA! It’s my responsibility. Keep your noses out of it!

Another thing—my air conditioner isn’t working. Why? Because I have you for children, that’s why. You broke it with your incessant smoking, and I don’t see you offering to fix it. Fine! Tell the police they’ll find my body in the kitchen, propped against the open refrigerator, where I went to get one last breath before my lungs turned to ash.

My water!  What has happened to my beautiful water? I turn my back for a minute, and you’ve dumped so much of your crap into it that all I hear is complaints from the other family members. The dolphins and whales won’t shut up about it. The salmon don’t spawn like they used to.  The octopi are pissed.  I’m not even going to go into what the plants have to say. I’ll say it for them. Thanks for nothing!!!

Have you no idea how much pain I am in?  I’m sick.  Last year I had a leak in my gulf that didn’t let up for months, and my turtles and birds are still hurting.  I get the cold sweats.  I cry for no apparent reason, until I can’t cry any more. The doctors don’t know what’s causing the vomiting, which I do with awful regularity.  My nausea is the only constant of my existence.

You have hollowed me out.  Drained me.  The only feelings I have toward you are angry ones.  Maybe venting like this is what it will take to get your attention, or make me feel better anyway.

Don’t make me lose my temper!  The last time I lost my temper, I killed the dinosaurs, you know.  That was me.  Boom!  Just like that. Gone in a heartbeat. It was an accident.  The Creator slugged me and I slugged back, and the poor dinosaurs got in the way.  I am not a cruel woman, as you often claim (don’t tell me you don’t, I’ve read your diaries!!!)  Anger can be a cruel thing, though, the reason being you never know who’s going to get hurt by it. The dinosaurs happened to get caught in the middle of a quarrel between me and the Creator and that was that.  You do not want a repeat of that scene, I promise you.  Or maybe you do.  Maybe we’re going to find out.  That’s how angry I am.  Your behavior is a slap in my face, and don’t think I won’t slap back. I will. Promise.

You’re the only species that has made a practice of killing your own kind, did you know that?  The rest of the family are disgusted by this. To make matters worse, you glorify it in your games and your stories like it’s a good thing.  I hang my head. When I think that children of mine are doing this, I want to die. I do.

You cannot leave your spent rods and your empty drums and your plastic gyres lying around the house like it’s the morning after a frat party and not expect to suffer the consequences!

You cannot not pump me full of your potions like I’m some daft heiress you’re poisoning for her dowry and expect to get away with it!

You cannot not take what is mine and pretend it is yours without waking up someday to the reality that you are a generation of thieves!

Here’s an idea for you.  Leave!  Move out of the house!  If this is the way you’re going to treat me, take your smokestacks off the roof and your jet skis out of the driveway and get out!  The rest of us can use the room. The coyotes would be happy to have your bedroom.  Do you think the trees care whether or not we have cable?  Probably not.

You are my Children, and this should not have to be our relationship. Truly, though, I am at my wits end, at a loss for what to do about the horrible way you are treating me.

Please do better.  There’s still time to heal these wounds, but not a lot.

Love,

Your Mother

Environment:  Artists studios; Daily Paintworks website, with the starting point being a page hosted by artist Keiko Tanabe.

Roles: Artists, Buyers, International Disaster Relief Players

Guidelines: Listed here.

Objective:  Raise money for the communities in Japan that were devastated, and still are, by the Sendai quake.

I get jazzed by projects like the Daily Paintworks Japan Challenge for a number of reasons:

Sekura III - Watercolor - 8.25x11.5 in. - Artist: Keiko Tanabe

It demonstrates how art has the power to connect us. As we rely more and more on technology for the processes by which we communicate, we cannot let the fact that communication itself is a human thing.  The nerve endings of the network are human.  At GameChangers, we call this human-to-human quality of communication ‘heart.’ Nothing connects across the techno-chasm like art.  It speaks a universal language. It keeps our humanity from getting marginalized, or gamed out of the communication equation entirely, by the mechanisms of the virtual world.

It rallies a community. There is something especially inspiring about a game like the Japan Challenge that rouses a community like Daily Paintworks out of ‘business-as-usual’ mode.  When individuals and communities are stirred to become more than what they were before, so are we.

It is a beautiful yes-and. It deals with the realities of the scene directly.  Keiko Tanabe of Daily Paintworks has family in Japan.  Art production and merchandising in a ‘challenge’ format is something Daily Paintworks already did.  It was embracing these two realities that led to the new reality of $21,000+ in ten days.  To change the game, don’t try to come up with a whole new game, tweak a game that’s already there.

Yes, we are here, and I see a place we can grab over there.  Yes!  A new crack reveals itself, and we grab it.  We see another hold and we make the move.  Yes, and now we’re experiencing the mountain from a new perspective.  Multiple new holds appear, and one hold at a time, with each move accompanied by a thousand little calculations that are faster than conscious thought, we move up the face of the mountain.

Beginning improvisation students tend to use the phrase ‘Yes and’ literally.  Skilled players discover infinite ways to ‘Yes and’ without necessarily using the words themselves.  This keeps technique in the background where it belongs.  A scene in which every player begins every contribution with the words ‘Yes and’ will get sing-songy in a hurry, and that’s not what we want.  We want nuance.  Refinement.  We want technique to be second nature so that it becomes invisible to our audience, and we can pay attention fully to the realities of the environment and our fellow players.  That’s gamechanging leadership.

Gamechanging is the art of doing what’s best for the scene.  That means knowing a lot of different ways to yes-and.  GameChangers yes-and artfully, with technique taking a backseat to the scene’s objective.

They can do it with a smile and a supporting comment.  Or

A reaction and a correction. Or

With constructive criticism. Or

By giving gifts to their scene partners and making them look good.  Or

By seeing and adding to the environment. Or

By joining in the shop talk of the scene. Or

By keeping the scene focused on its objective. Or

By supporting the scene from offstage. Or

By making declarative statements instead of interrogating scene partners. Or

By energizing and heightening the emotional level of the scene.  Or

By emphasizing convergence on a solution when a divergence of ideas gets unwieldy. Or

By doing what our friend Kristen Parrinello calls ‘invisible work’ (@invisiblework is her Twitter handle), the little moves that are so subtle as to be invisible to the audience.

Walt Disney used to call yes-anding (and Pixar Animation has taken to calling it) ‘plussing.’  Add something to the scene, and if you don’t have anything to add, get off the stage.

Not that you shouldn’t practice yes-anding by literally using those two words.  You should.  Use them as a kind of warm-up or rehearsal, like you’d practice the basic forms in ballet or the scales in music.  When the game is on, and you’re in the heat of a big scene, ‘Yes and’ may not literally pop up in your dialogue, but the technique will be there, invisible and inaudible, doing its work, ratcheting you and your team to the summit of whatever mountain you choose to climb.

This came across the Huffington Post yesterday.  I love Scott Avidon’s approach to a job search.  It is generous and ingenious.  It reminds me of our friend Erick Brownstein’s cousin, Alec, who got a job as an art director in NYC by buying the names of all big agency Creative Directors as Google keywords, so that when they Googled their own names, his C.V. was in the top five results.

In his ‘brand narrative,’ Avidon does a good job of communicating on the meta level, and he speaks well on the emotional level, too.  The images he uses on his job search blog are pure meta, not the least of which is the fact that his own image is balanced with the other five.  It suggests a balanced life.  But not TOO balanced.  Avidon, an industrial designer by training, has laid out the page so that the images and the program description near the bottom are justified left while the rest of the content on the page is centered.  It doesn’t matter whether this is Avidon’s conscious design or an accident, it’s brilliant,  because it uses the meta meaning in design to communicate the INCOMPLETENESS of the narrative.  Something’s missing.  Something we, in the audience, naturally want to fill.  We are coded as human beings to strive for completeness, and the incompleteness on Avidon’s page gets us leaning forward, into his narrative, as a result.

As a systems thinker, Avidon has plugged, somehow, into the HuffPost network in order to expand his narrative in a quantum way that is of his doing, but is now, by his design, out of his control.  His work now consists of channeling the chaos that ensues.  This is good narrative science, and conjures up something that cannot be present in a flat resume.  Energy, vitality, generosity, creativity, dimensional thinking.

Compare Avignon’s narrative to a typical job query or resume, which is primarily cosmetic: information, facts, history, data points, objectives. There’s no comparison.

Employers today are looking to invest in personal narratives, in trajectories, and in generative, ‘Yes-And’ thinking.  Companies hire individuals who can make good moves when faced by unforeseen circumstances.  Who share their own success with their team.  Who can be engines of newness and positive change.  That you’re knowledgeable at what you do is just table stakes that can get in the game, maybe.  Whether or not you can change the game in your favor is what really counts

I hear Oblong Industries is hiring.  They need Scott Avidon on their team.

We have been analyzing the scene here since shortly after the miners were discovered alive.  One of the most instructive aspects of the ‘Los Mineros’ scene is that it has very little spin.  The cave where they were trapped was truly a no-spin zone.  Events were not manipulated or interpreted to someone’s economic or political advantage.   There were no conspiracy theories.  No, this was as unadulterated as a media narrative can be.

During their 68 days in the darkness, the miners had time to ponder their lives in ‘the normal world,’ as Joseph Campbell would call it.  Many, if not all, seem to have been enlightened by the experience, emerging with a newfound clarity about themselves and the world they are re-entering.  “I have been with God and I have been with the devil.  I seized the hand of God,” said one, Mario Sepulveda.

“I have changed.  I am a different man,” said another, Mario Gomez.

Here is a post-by-post summary of the GameChangers series about  the ‘Los Mineros’ scene:

PART ONE:  THE TRAPPED CHILEAN MINER GAME (August 26)

Lesson: Don’t be defined by your circumstances.  Be defined by how you behave in those circumstances.

PART TWO:  LEVELS OF MEANING (August 31)

Lesson: Narratives communicate on three levels of meaning:  Cosmetic, Emotional and Meta.

PART THREE:  YONNI’S WAITING PARTY (September 2)

Lesson: Rules of the game must be known to all players.

PART FOUR:  ESPERANZA! (September 17)

Lesson: Additions can heighten a scene emotionally.

PART FIVE:  SUPPORT FROM THE WINGS (September 28)

Lesson: Additions are generative.

PART SIX:  ACT THREE BEGINS (October 10)

Lesson: End energetically.

One of the ways GameChangers defines a ‘Scene’—no matter what its duration, could be minutes, could be months—is with a classic three-act structure.  We label these acts Connect, Adapt and Deliver.  Continuing with our analysis of ‘Los Mineros,‘ the Trapped Chilean Miners scene, we can clearly see that the scene is entering its third act. The drill boring through the 2,300 feet of solid rock to the hollow where they are trapped has just made it through to them. That’s a clear signal for the heightening of energy and emotion, increasing tempo and sharpening focus that typically indicate the beginning of Act Three of any scene.

Here’s how the three-act structure has defined Los Mineros to date.

Act One:  Connect.  This is where we first heard about this story.  We were introduced to the main characters.  The conditions of their life-threatening predicament were explained to us.  With the news that it was going to take a long time to reach them, a kind of ticking clock was set in motion.  The clock was not life-or-death, but it helped us frame the scene in our minds.  The ‘Game’ —defined by Objective, Environment, Roles and Rules—came into focus.   A lot of the meaning associated with this act was cosmetic—that is, strongly oriented toward data, raw information, clinical analysis.  A mythic theme, one you might call, ‘Trapped in a Cave,’ got defined.   All of this earned the audience’s attention on a global scale.  Clearly, this was going to be a story that many, may people could relate to.

Act Two:  Adapt.  In this act, complications were introduced to the scene, and communication began to turn toward the Emotional level of meaning, as emotions like Urgency, Fear, Jealousy, Camaraderie, Patience, Frustration and Surprise colored the events during this stage.  We began to learn more about the main characters, and new characterss–wives, mistresses, politicians, drillers, NASA scientists and a newborn baby—entered the scene to interact with the main characters and make the scene deeper, richer, more complex.   This is where the scene often takes unexpected turns, hence the need for the characters to adapt.  Three drill bits were tried before one worked.  Original plans were discarded in favor of new ones.  A miner’s wife and mistress both showed up at the rescue site on the same day.  The newborn baby’s name got changed from what its parents originally intended—to Esperanza, the Spanish word for ‘hope.’   In other words, everyone involved rolled with the ever-unfolding reality.  They had to improvise.  There was no script for this.

And now…

Act Three:  Deliver. Typically, the third act is shorter than the first two.  This has the effect of compressing time, as does the increasing tempo of entrances and exits, and the steady release ‘new news’ by the world’s media.  We are building toward a 24-hour news cycle in a couple of days in which Los Mineros will dominate current events. It is during this cycle that the scene will reach its emotional apex, and the audience will feel more pull and lean forward more than it has at any other time in the scene.  There will be a lot of postscripts added after this climactic 24-hour cycle, but in terms of the three-act structure, this scene will have ended, and new scenes (you can think of them as ’sequel’ or ’spin-off’ scenes) will begin.

For business communicators, the three-act structure is a really useful framework.  It gives players and audience alike a sense of where you are in your scene, and helps you organize the many narrative elements that are part of it.   It will give you the ability to put the emphasis where it belongs, when it belongs there.