Tuesday night, we staged an invitation-only workshop for 25 friends, acquaintances and interested folks to let them experience the marvel that is GameChangers. After reviewing our performance, the GameChangers team’s consensus is that on this particular night we were not marvelous. We started 15 minutes late, got slow in the middle and rushed at the end. We felt that the experience was, at times, less than riveting for our audience. A couple of people spent an inordinate amount of time on their mobile devices, and we know for a fact they were not tweeting about how great it all was.
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
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I’m doing a photo essay on Western Avenue for a client of ours. In walking Western yesterday, I had all kinds of rewarding encounters. A street poet named Ron shared a poem he wrote, called Shine that was amazing; a restaurant owner grilling chicken on the sidewalk shared stories of his adventures in the real estate biz; a beauty shop owner opened the door after hours to pose for a photo; a kid showed me his python; another kid getting a tattoo showed me his cool shoes–
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. 
