David Brooks’ piece in today’s NY Times talks about the protocol (as in software instructions) as being the most valuable asset in the Networked World economy. He writes things like:

The success of an economy depends on its ability to invent and embrace new protocols.

and

Protocols are intangible, so the traits needed to invent and absorb them are intangible, too.

and sums up with

When the economy was about stuff, economics resembled physics. When it’s about ideas, economics comes to resemble psychology.

My comment:

There is a technique for cultures to absorb new protocols. It’s called improvisation. The fundamentals of its practice were developed in the 1930s by a couple of schoolteachers in Chicago, Neva Boyd and Viola Spolin, whose objective was to create a way for children from diverse cultural backgrounds to collaborate productively (sounds like today’s economy, doesn’t it?). The underlying construct is ‘the game,’ which is defined by rules, roles, environment and objectives. The game transcends the cosmetic boundaries of language and culture to create the shared focus that is essential to progress.

Organizationally, economically, linguistically, and even biologically, it is the ability to improvise — to continuously adapt by making pragmatic and productive choices in a changing environment — that allows any culture to evolve. For the past two hundred years, no nation’s culture has been better at improvising than America’s, and more than anything else, it is our ability to improvise that is being tested today. As Charles Darwin said, “It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.”

Poster for The Origin of Species, a play with music written by Lizzie Mitchell that debuted at the 2009 Edinburgh Fringe Fest