I was struggling with my scenes in this week’s class, then had a little breakthrough in the last scene I did (we do dozens of scenes per class). The difference came about when I began by listening instead of thinking.

“Listen, then think,” says Miles. “Don’t try to make sense of the situation. Interact with it by listening.”

Here’s what happens when you think first instead of listening first:

You begin having a conversation about what’s in your head instead of about what’s in the scene. And because neither your scene partner(s) nor your audience can hear what’s in your head, you’re having a conversation with yourself, which distances you from the scene instead of engaging in it. You’re having a conversation with yourself.

Here’s what happens when you listen before thinking:

You can use your intellect to serve the scene (by doing something smart that propels the scene and makes your partner look good) instead of letting your intellect use you (”I am the smartest person in the room and here’s proof”). You’re having a conversation with reality.

Thinking is the ego talking; Listening is the world talking.

Listen. Then Think. That is the order of the opportunity in any scene you’re in.

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.

Defining GameChangers value proposition so that we can arrive at a fair trade with our clients has been one of our biggest challenges, because our process morphs around whatever problems we are hired to help solve. The problems themselves are wide-ranging and often, at the beginning of the process, can be deeply rooted in the client’s culture, which can make our process fluid, because we have wander a bit to discover a direction. Sometimes what we are given by our clients are symptoms, not causes. To solve their problems, we have to discover why things are the way they are. That takes some exploration. Only then can we co-create a process that addresses the problem.

Last year, for example, we were asked by a manufacturer to help with its innovation process. “We are weak in that area, help us get better,” is essentially what we were told by the company’s leadership. It was only through a series of improvisation exercises and activities that we began to see a pattern…the company culture was one of impatience, and the most impatient people in the company were in Operations. Time and again, we would see members of the Operations team express their impatience. They didn’t listen. They scripted outcomes. They judged others while remaining oblivious to their own (often sub-par) performance.

It turned out that the Operations team was so good at their jobs, and their personalities so forceful, that the entire organization (20,000+ employees globally) was essentially moving at their tempo, and wheeling around their processes. This meant different things to different divisions, most of it related to missed opportunities to innovate. Because to the Operations team the only ‘better’ was ‘faster and cheaper,’ that became the organizational definition of innovation. The company’s problem wasn’t, as its managers said, that it was weak in innovation. The problem was that it was defining (i.e. allowing its Operations team to define) innovation in a way that weakened the company and made it less competitive, its brands less marketable.

Had we defined GameChangers as an ‘innovation company,’ I’m not sure we would’ve gotten to the problem (and the subsequent solutions) the way we did. I don’t know if the Operations people would have even been in the room.

Our value proposition boils down to this: We are a communication company. We use improvisation to help clients improve communication. Improved communication results in:

-better collaboration and alignment;

-faster solutions;

-meaningful innovation;

-more opportunity recognition and activation;

-deeper audience engagement and customer co-creation.

How’s that?

In reality, it was no such thing.

In reality, as David Lee Roth describes in his 1998 autobiography Crazy from the Heat (first edition paperback selling  for $123.41 on Amazon?!), and Ira Glass documented in a story that first aired July 24, 2009, on This American Life, the fine print about the M&Ms was a game designed by Van Halen  to make sure every part of its contract was read and observed by the local promoter and crew, especially the details of stage and stadium safety. Early in the stadium concert era of the 1970s, there was a lot of variance in stadium electrical systems and construction, and the supergroup, who traveled with 9 semi-trailers of equipment, wanted to make certain their concerns about safety were addressed with the same focus and attention to detail that goes into separating the brown M&Ms from the rest.

In the words of Jeff Bartsch on Editmentor.com:

“If the band rolled up to the next venue and found brown M&Ms in the backstage candy bowl, they immediately demanded a full line-item review of the entire rider contract.  Eddie Van Halen specifically buried the M&M Clause, because concert promoters who don’t pay attention to one part of a contract usually don’t pay attention to the rest of it, and resulting technical issues could be disastrous, even deadly.”

In a 2010 Fast Company article, the Heath Bros. describe the brown M&Ms as a ‘canary in a coal mine.’ They interpret it as a kind of red flag used by David Lee Roth to catch careless oversights of details in their contract.

We see it as a game.

The brown M&Ms were the anomaly that defined a game, a game whose objective was to eliminate brown M&Ms, and whose result was safety.

Note that there’s a big difference between the objective of a game and the results achieved by playing it! For example, the objective of chess is to checkmate the opponent’s king. The results of playing it are strategies and counter-strategies, study, focus and the testing and extension of one’s abilities.

A canary in a coal mine doesn’t really define a game, because the results are, for the most part, binary. The canary lives, or the canary dies. The canary in the coal mine tests only one thing—the presence of lethal gas. No fresh dialogue results from it, no unexpected discoveries, the processes following either outcome have already been scripted. The Heaths’ analogy is weak, because a productive game like ‘Brown M&Ms’ has a nearly infinite number of possible outcomes.

Variations of this game can work for any team involved in QA, Safety, Compliance, Supply Chain, Facilities Management, Engineering, etc., where there’s little or no tolerance for error. It’s not a game you can play too often. Played too often, your ‘brown M&Ms’ will no longer be an anomaly, and the game will lose its bite.

The advantage of playing a game like this is that it brings every imaginable detail into play, not just those you and your legal team can stipulate in a contract or manual. When you call attention to the ‘brown M&Ms,’ you initiate a dialogue about the details of your working relationship that holds far more possibilities for problem-solving in real time than the necessary, but inevitably frozen-in-time terms of a contract.

I love this story because it shows how what stifles our ability to solve a problem is less often about the nature or scope of the problem than it is about the quality of the problem-solving process.

Too often, we invest in poor communication practices and processes, characterized by unproductive games like ‘Eight Axes, One Budget,’ that no one enjoys playing, never mind that they are not designed to solve our particular problem in the first place. I call these poor games. ‘Poor’ because they don’t have much ‘play’ in them, either in the sense that they are a happy experience, or that they are flexible. No, they’re grim and rigid, like the dead. Their ROI is poor because the probability of getting to a solution quickly is low. Because they frequently lack focus and energy, they waste time.

There are thousands of characteristics of poor games, and thousands of poor games played in business every second of every working day. ‘Reading Your PowerPoint Deck to Your Audience’ is a poor game. ‘Kissing Ass’ is almost always a poor game. The ‘Eight Axes, One Budget’ game Barb Groth walked into was a poor game. She saw it, and suggested an adjustment. That’s what gamechangers do.

All it took for her to transform the game was changing its objective–from ‘Cut $20K’ to ‘Save $20K.’ One word. A tiny shift in perspective on the problem. Suddenly, the opinionating, negotiating, status-seeking, bragging, positioning, arguing, joking, backstabbing, politicking, gossiping and justifying that plague poor games, were not getting in the way of solving the problem. The new game got played, the problem solved, in the time it takes to Rochambeau.

Barb’s gamechange freed time that could be better invested in activities with more business upside, or in personal time. Any game that lets you swap an hour of arguing about whose budget gets cut for an hour playing with your kids or helping them with their homework?  That’s a rich game.

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)

Here’s the Truth in this scene: With the coming of the cloud, there’s going to be so much new information coming online all the time that the invitation is to stay comfortably lost in it all, rambling on about our own stuff without really listening. Ever. We’re full of it. Just like these guys. Truth.

So what are we listening for?  For the game we can play together. From a productive game will come a narrative that makes sense of it all. But only after the the game has been played.

Later, when people ask, we can look back and say, “That was our strategy.”

Meanwhile, I sort of agree with the caption on the video: ‘The best strategy is one you don’t understand.’ Funny. True.

Japan is a chrysanthemum.  Many petals.  One flower.  The meta language of the chrysanthemum is deeply rooted in Japanese history and culture.  It is the official mark of the Japanese Emperor’s family. It symbolizes happiness.

A disaster like the quake that literally shifted the planet on Friday in Japan gets us to focus on what is most important.  At times like these improvisation—a system for generating positive outcomes from unforeseen circumstances—is especially critical.

I have a feeling that in the coming days, we are going to see the power of the flower.  As the Japanese people face the challenges confronting them, we will see the creative potential of the group mind, especially when a group as large and connected as the Japanese are are given a sense of purpose like the one they have now.

We will see that improvisation consists not of making it up as you go along, but of making focused and productive moves at every opportunity.  Here, for example, via our friend, Michelle James (@creatvemergence), is a list of suggestions from Time Out Tokyo, for how the Japanese people can respond to the crisis.

Already, we can see that there is structure to the process defined by TOT.  The objectives, environment, roles and rules of the game are clear.  Process is clean.  Everything is achievable and scalable. In short, the advice consists of:

Give money–being present in spirit is more important right now than being present in person;
Give blood–to be healthy is an obligation to care for the infirm;
Conserve electricity–the people are in this together.

Though it’s seldom as sudden and concentrated like it was on Friday in Japan, natural destruction is happening at all times, all over the world.   Lives end.   Rivers flood.  Mountains slide.

At the same time, nature’s creativity is expressing itself with equal energy.  Lives begin.  Rivers heal.  Mountains rise.

How can we improve the odds that our creativity will triumph over our destruction?

We can play the Chrysanthemum Game.  Find our purpose.  Believe in happiness.  Bloom as one.

She tweeted back: “<= like this; like going through the process from the other end.”

Bill Kroyer

The animation director Bill Kroyer taught me this game, which I call Kroyering.  It goes like this: To solve a problem look 180 degrees away from the problem. If you can define the problem’s opposite, you will have targeted the problem with just as much accuracy as if you were confronting it head-on.  This ‘exploration of opposites’ makes Kroyering a useful process, especially when you need to come up with an original solution, a creative breakthrough.  Why is this a cool tool?  Three reasons:

First, it gets out of creativity’s way. Like everything that’s natural in the world, creativity wants to happen.  Left to its own devices, it will happen.  If we clear out what gets in its way, creativity will express itself like a plant will find the sun. As Viola Spolin said, “Act on environment, and environment will act on you.”

Second, because a breakthrough is, by definition, something that didn’t exist before, it is not really possible to say what creativity is, or what form it will take, until it actually happens.  It is often more efficient to target what creativity is not.  For this reason, Kroyering offers a disciplined and cost-effective path to innovation.

Third, Kroyering makes institutional memory a positive force instead of an impediment, as it often is (At Disney, where I worked for many years,  the best way to stop any idea dead in its tracks was to say anything that began with, “Well, what Walt would have done…”  It’s why John Lasseter left Disney and ended up with Pixar.  Too many people at the time were telling him what Walt would (or wouldn’t) have done.)  A study by Dusya Vera and Mary Crossan (Organization Science, Vol. 16, May-June 2005, pp. 203-224) reveals that the best problem-solvers in an organization are those with the longest institutional memories, because they are more likely to disregard or subvert institutional memory to solve a problem. In other words, people with long institutional memories are in the best position to see and understand that a system that created a problem cannot be the same one that solves it.  Kroyering helps you identify what you can do differently by getting you out of the attic of your company’s history and into emptier space, where there’s room to expand your vision.

Here are a few qualities that, in my experience, are not conducive to creativity and can be eliminated from your working environment with help from the Kroyering Game:

Randomness; free association; outside-the-box thinking. Creativity craves intent, specificity and structure. Don’t try to get outside the box. Quantum physics tells us that there’s unlimited energy stored inside whatever box we’re in. Or…get yourself inside a different box!

Rigidity, dogma. Whatever creativity is, it’s the opposite of frozen, stuck in place, or with one unyielding position.

Aggression, destruction, violence. The harder you look for it, the harder it is to find.  The next new thing has to be teased and seduced from wherever it’s hiding.  Creativity does not send out invitations, but if we throw a party, Creativity is almost sure to come.  Creativity can’t resist a good party.  Just know that when the fighting starts, and well before the cops arrive, Creativity will be outta there.

Divergence. It is not the separating but the joining of ideas and people that results in innovation.

Dignity, manners. Creativity is impudent. It can be wildly messy. It’s like the weather that way.  Dress appropriately.

Hollowness, heartlessness, lifelessness, cold bloodedness. Sssss.

Eliminating these and other ‘non-conducive’ elements from your environment will help your creativity flow.  When you’re stuck for an idea, your process bogs down, or you can’t seem to get to the heart of a problem, try Kroyering.

This broke today over CNN. The 33 men trapped in a Chilean copper mine have begun to assume different roles that will help them survive the time, estimated to be months, it will take rescuers to drill through 2300 feet of solid rock to rescue them.  This is brilliant.  They’re designing a game to help them get out alive without going batshit crazy while they’re waiting to be rescued.  This is going to give us all a good look at how a game works, and how it informs and inspires group strategies.  One thing is already clear:  There are some good improvisers trapped in that mine.

To review, here are the elements of a game: Environment, Roles, Rules, Objective(s).

Let’s begin with the Objective.  Simple:  ‘Get out of here alive without going crazy.’  Same as most survival strategies.

The Environment of the Trapped Chilean Miner Game could not be more starkly defined:  A pool of darkness deep beneath the surface of the earth, and the rest of the world watching up above.  The contrasts between the Down Below and the Up Above are extreme, an archetype embedded deep in every human’s subconscious.  The Well, the Fallen Rubble, the Cave, the Mine–all tap deep into our unconscious, where our memories of the womb are stored.   As my friend Richard Wynn Taylor says, “It will remind us of something we’ve never seen before.”

The Roles, as stated in the CNN story, are developing.  One of the miners has become a spiritual leader.  Another an entertainer who sings Elvis songs.  Expect that all or most of the miners will eventually define roles for themselves, some as group characters (’peacekeepers,’ ’storytellers,’ ’spokespeople,’ ‘mediators’ etc. etc.)  Some of the miners will play more than one role, depending on the scene they’re in.  Eventually some of them may trade roles, taking turns speaking to the media, for example.  What’s also interesting about the roles element of the game is that all 33 men trapped in the cave will, for the duration of their rescue, abandon the roles they were playing when they went Down Below: None of them will be playing the role of a miner.  Note also that ‘trapped miner’ is not a role.  It’s a circumstance.  Your circumstance does not define your role; it’s your behavior in your circumstance that defines your role.

Expect that in the coming weeks, we’ll be hearing about the Rules of the TCMG. These Rules will be designed to create agreement and establish ground rules for the miners’ interactions.  The rules will initially address the fundamentals such as sleeping, eating, sharing resources, communicating with Up Above etc., and then get more detailed.  The rules of a game will not be designed to create sameness or repetition, but to liberate performance, by empowering players to play their roles well.  The miners cannot afford to get weary of their roles.  It will be interesting to see how many rules will be set or influenced Up Above.

Unlike a reality TV show like Jersey Shore, where editors manipulate the juxtaposition of shots to create scenes and the sequence of events to construct a narrative, the ‘live-ness’ of this scene will demand improvisation, and that means the miners will be the primary architects of their narrative.

The intense focus on this particular scene by the world media, is going to make the elements of the game highly visible.  We will be able to track how well the trapped miners are doing by how focused and productive they are in playing their game.

What’s going to hold our interest about the Chilean Miner scene will not be the drama of whether or not they make it out alive.  The objective, the ‘Will they or won’t they’ aspect of the narrative, will only carry it so far.  What will hold our interest is how the miners behave in the meantime.  How well we get to know them.  Who they are to their families, and to one another.  What kind of character traits emerge. This is true of any narrative.  If you want to hold your audience’s interest, don’t focus on how you want it to end, but on how you want it to be.

When the miners’ survival becomes imminent, their game will transform from a survival strategy to a business strategy.  To the objective of ‘Get out of here alive without going crazy,’ they will undoubtedly add, ‘Make Money.’  When the miners finally walk into the light, the game may change, but it will not end.

Buena suerte, Mineros!