Three people from the Mystery Table are featured on the Annenberg Innovation Lab website…
Now more interested than ever in contacting someone who sat at this table, to learn how they out-played every other table in the game we conducted at the 2012 Innovation Summit.
Last Friday, at the invitation of Jonathan Taplin and Erin Reilly of USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, we conducted a 90-minute session at the 2012 Annenberg Innovation Summit on the USC campus. The objective was to summarize the thinking that came out of a day of presentations and panels with high fliers from the worlds of academia, technology, urban design, entertainment, non-profits and government. People like Henry Jenkins, Anne Balsamo, and John Seely Brown.
We used our ERGO (Environment, Roles, Guidelines, Objectives) game structure to design the session. The game involved 100 people seated at 12 tables. In 90 minutes, the group came up with 800 ideas grouped into four different themes and ranked from 13 to 1 in order of ‘impact in the next five years.’
The objective of the game was to generate and rank as many ideas as possible in the time we had, and then look at innovation as a process of identifying patterns and connections in large datasets.
Objective
As communicators, our 800+ ideas are our material the way a rock is a sculptor’s material. What we do with the material is what a sculptor does to a rock–chip away at it to reveal patterns and narrative elements concealed within the rock that are made visible through our process.
THE MYSTERY TABLE:
We noticed a really interesting outcome to Friday’s game. (Remember: Outcomes are different from Objectives, and are where most of the value of a game resides.) Of the 12 tables, one table performed better than the others. It was a table of seven women and one man. Their ages varied. And because we asked everyone to sit with people they did not know, we can assume at least some of them were new to one another. Yet their focus was better, their tempo faster, their agreements quicker, than any other table in the room, as far as we could tell.
Why? How? It is a mystery begging to be solved.
The people at that table understood our game well enough that they were able to adjust one of its guidelines without affecting the game in any way except to make it go faster. That choice probably gave them an extra 5 minutes over the duration of the game that could be spent on idea generation instead of game mechanics.Many of the other tables got bogged down in game mechanics for 10 of the 90 allotted minutes. That gave the Mystery Table a 15-minute advantage over the less agile tables. That’s 17% more productivity over the 90-minute period.
I never saw them ask for help, but I saw one of them listening whenever a nearby table asked for help. That’s one way they communicated and shared efficiently. The work at other tables would come to a complete standstill as they got an explanation from Jenkins or Balsamo. The work at the high-performing table never stopped. I want to know more more about the Mystery Table, about what made their process so efficient.
If we’d have had another half hour in our session, we could have dug into the Mystery Table’s process. What was the game like for them? What choices did they make that kept things clear and focused? How did they listen to one another? How did they yes-and? How did they sort out any confusion they might have had? How was the decision made to change one of the game’ guidelines to make their ranking process more efficient? What secrets would this Mystery Table have revealed to the rest of the participants?
I am going to follow up with at least one of the people at the Mystery Table and let you know what he or she says about their process. Stand by.
Outcome
Drew Coolidge
Most of the credit for this post goes to Drew Coolidge, an exquisitely gifted improviser I’ve had the fun of watching many times in action with his group Cartel, and before that in a group called Spank Drew (draw your own conclusions about what that team thought of him). On USSRocknRoll.com he writes about his three favorite improv teachers, and the gifts each of them gave him.
Here’s a summary of Drew’s post and my take on its applications to business:
From Eric Hunnicutt, he learned how to deal with fear. “Just be present. It’s not about getting rid of fear, if you’re present, fear has no room to exist.” Hunnicutt taught him.
When it comes to business, or life in general for that matter, who among us doesn’t have fears? A speech. A parent. A spider. A client. Hunnicutt’s advice to Drew about performing onstage is just as legit in any other context: don’t work at being fearless. That’s like treating fear as some kind of virus and yourself a victim in need of medication. Don’t go there with your energy. Instead, practice being present. If you’re completely absent, begin by focusing on your breathing. Your senses, all of them, and the space around you, all of it. Go from there. By giving 100% of your attention to everyone and everything around you, fear ceases to become a factor in your performance.
(The basketball legend, Larry Bird, once said about playing in an NBA championship game against the Houston Rockets that, while running a fast break, was he aware not only of where all ten players were on the court, he was aware of every fan in the first 20 rows of the arena. If someone was sitting down with a box of popcorn, or leaving their seat, Bird saw it while sprinting down the floor. We normally think of players confining their awareness to the court, but when our senses are 100% engaged, a line painted on a floor is just one more thing we notice. It does not define the limits of our awareness.)
From Dave Hill, Coolidge got insight into what improvisers call the group mind. The group mind is when all the players on a team tap into and share the flow of a performance. They are all on the same page, they are one organism, evolving in realtime right before our eyes. “It’s the product of individuals making strong choices and completely supporting the moves of the other players,” is how Drew boils down Hill’s gift. It naturally follows Hunnicut’s note. If you’re present, you can do this.
In business, everyone talks about teamwork, but dishearteningly few understand what Dave Hill taught Drew: Every player on a team can make the strongest, boldest, ballsiest individual move she or he is capable of making, and support those moves by their fellow players, and have all of it be consistent with good teamwork. (Oh, and group mind is not the same thing as groupthink. The two concepts are completely at odds with one another.) Agree on the game your team is playing and you’re on the way toward discovering the group mind.
From David Pasquesi, Drew received this gem: “The scene is already occurring, it’s our job to allow the scene to reveal itself to us. The tools for doing that are: 1. Listening (or Paying Attention) 2. There is no two.”
We call Lstening (or Paying Attention) ‘Heeding.’ In business, we can get so focused on the desired resolution to our ‘scene,’ that we forget to heed what’s happening in the moment, which is the only chance we have to improve our odds of success. Heeding results in opportunity recognition. Forget to heed, fail to recognize opportunity.
I’ve evolved the headline from Drew’s post a bit. He made it go, I heeded, and that’s how we up along. Spanks, Drew!
Games are structure. They create focus, encourage participation, and stimulate the Group Mind, which gives players the freedom to work at the height of their intelligence toward collaboratively solving a problem. At GameChangers, we define game structure as ‘ERGO’–Environment, Roles, Guidelines and Objective. If you can define these elements in your scene, you’ve called out a game.
A ‘scene’ can be a single meeting or a years-long campaign. It can address an immediate crisis or seek lasting change in an organization’s culture. Whatever the reason for your scene, you always have the ability to apply game structure to it.
In addition to defining game structure, we help our clients sort out productive games from the unproductive ones. It should come as no surprise to anyone that there are a lot of unproductive games getting played out there. They can be unproductive for a lot of reasons. Here’s a big one: Games that treat Objectives and Outcomes as the same thing are not good games.
Objectives are structure. Outcomes are performance. These are two very different things. Here’s an example we sometimes use in our workshops to illustrate this point:
What is the Objective of the game of basketball? It’s to put the ball in the hoop. This objective has not changed since Dr. James Naismith nailed a peach basket to the balcony of the gymnasium at Springfield College in 1891. Other elements of the game, the E the R and the G, have evolved dramatically, the O has not. It is remarkable for its unchangedness.
The Objective: same as it ever was
Now…what are the Outcomes of the game of basketball? Let your mind play with that question for awhile, and see what kind of responses pop up. Here are just a few that I myself have experienced: the Ireland (Indiana) Spuds high school basketball team; Hoosiers; my first pair of Chuck Taylor white canvas high tops; numb fingers from playing in 30-degree weather at recess; the fact that I first learned about Crispus Attucks because Oscar Robertson played for Crispus Attucks High School; Marv Albert’s arrest and subsequent rehabilitation; LeBron James leaving Cleveland; Dude Perfect; Magic and Bird; Rick Mount; George McGinnis; Wilt vs Russell; a rubber band that I wore on my wrist for a year; the Chuck Taylor black leather high tops that Corey Feldman wore in my film, The Lipstick Camera; the Chuck Taylor brand; the relationship between Spike Lee and Michael Jordan; Bobby Knight; Extreme HORSE with my friend Tim; hoops with my sons and their friends; coaching at the Y; the 2002 and 2003 Loyola Cubs CIF Championships; my friendship with Jamaal Wilkes; Ernie Barnes’ paintings…you get the idea…while there’s only one Objective, there are many possible Outcomes. And that’s just me. Your Outcomes are different from mine. Outcomes are an ever-expending set of possibilities.
This same dichotomy between Objectives and Outcomes is applicable to any game structure for your business. The Objective is the constant; the Outcomes are the infinite unknowns, where all the possibilities and all the upside reside.
Focus on your Objective, yes, by all means, absolutely! From a process standpoint, it is the most important thing, the target, the point of the exercise, it can even be your motivation. It is not, however, where the action is. Not where growth and extension occur. If the only action you’re open to is achieving your Objective, you’re missing most of the possibilities of the game.
The game is put the ball in the basket. The possibility is Oscar Robertson.
"High Aspirations" by Ernie Barnes
At PlayCon 2011, between speakers, the audience got entertained by a series of trivia questions. One of them was this:
How many different ways are there to combine six 8-peg Lego bricks?
The answer:
102,981,500 (Update: Even though this number was supplied by the Toy Industry Association, I’ve since been notified by a tweet from LEGO_Group that the number of different combinations, according to Math Professor Soren Eilers from University of Copenhagen, is 915,103,765 if the bricks are the same color, 658,869,076,800 if they are different colors. No matter which number is correct, for purposes of composition, the number is practically infinite.)
If that’s how many possibilities there are for half a dozen 8-peg Legos, just imagine how many different ways six people can connect!
The possibilities are practically infinite. Yet so often when six people collaborate, the temptation is to script an outcome, as if, out of a universe of possibilities, we can pick one that is better than all the rest.
It is a mistake to focus on one specific outcome. Focus, instead, on the game, which has potential to generate limitless positive outcomes, and lets you explore more possibilities than anyone can script.
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.
One of the best improv groups I’ve ever seen is the three person team, Dasariski, consisting of Bob Dassie, Rich Talarico, and Craig Cackowski, who perform at I.O. West in Los Angeles. They are a great group for a million reasons. My favorite thing about them is that they are incredibly patient about letting the game come to them. They are as delighted as the audience by what they discover in their scenes, and they discover a lot. It’s what makes a Dasariski show a delightful experience.
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.
This from the business section of the Dec. 6 2010 LA Times website (it was in the print newspaper on Dec. 7) about how Groupon, the geo-couponing company, turned down a buyout from Google estimated to be worth $5-6 billion.
Groupon CEO Andrew Mason is known for his quirky sense of humor, which is evident in the company’s e-mailed daily deal notifications and its office decor. Many member of the sales and writing staff have backgrounds in improvisational comedy.
Groupon which is expecting 2010 sales of $2 billion, is described by one investor in the article as “…one of the fastest-growing venture-backed companies ever in terms of revenue ramp. They have plenty of options.”
Of course they do. They’re improvisers. The group mind makes the decisions at Groupon. What more do you need to know?
William Gibson
Where trajectories of fashion, business, government and technology will someday intersect, William Gibson is already there, reporting back in mindbending detail. His novels are, for me anyway, like books of code, densely-clued mysteries about the near future, that challenge a present-day intelligence to unravel them. Here is one clue that gets dropped over and over again in Gibson’s newest novel, Zero History:
In the future, improvisation is a must-do.
Page 135: “Doing it, as a pickpocket had once advised him, as if it were not only the expected but the only thing to do.” The improvisation: When you invest in your scene, the scene makes choices for you. ‘Doing what’s expected’ is someone else’s script for you, it’s a voice in your head that’s not even your own. ‘Doing the only thing to do’ is the feeling that you are in tune with everyone and everything around you. It is acting on the clarity of one’s intuition instead of obeying the voices stored in the RAM of one’s rational mind. Just don’t be using your new-found powers to pick pockets. Not all improvisation is put to work for the good of the team. Beware the bad game!
Page 171: “THE ORDER FLOW” (Chapter title.) Gibson’s characters talk about “the inability to aggregate the order flow”—the sum of everything being bought and sold around the world at any given moment in time—as being the dynamic that keeps markets alive. “Stability’s the beginning of the end,” says the character of Milgrim, a high-level intuitive, quoting an even more intuitive base jumper named Garreth. “We only walk by continually beginning to fall forward.” The improvisation: Always fall forward, never stand still. Turn fails immediately into positives. Embrace flow. Stasis—a static state—is the enemy. Harness chaos with structure. Subvert structure with flow.
Page 202: Garreth talking about whether a phone call that’s crucial to their fates will happen or not: “Either way, we’ve moved it forward.” The improvisation: ‘Something happening’ and ‘something not happening’ are both opportunities to move your scene forward. Don’t worry about what will or won’t happen, do something with whatever happens.
Page 225: “You’re just doing this to see what happens,” says Milgrim. The improvisation: Do something and see what happens.
Page 234: “…some kind of London PR hive-mind thing,” says a character named Heidi, a biker chick who uses taser-tipped darts as her weapon of choice. “Wires are hot but there’s no actual signal. Kind of subsonic buzz.” The improvisation: This is a description of the group mind. Nothing perceptible is communicated. What the group needs to know is simply, without ever being consciously transmitted, already there, waiting to be shared.
Page 319: “Follow the accident. Fear the set plan,” says Garreth. “I thought you loved plans,” says Heidi. “Love planning. That’s different. But the right bit of improv makes the piece.” The improvisation: Think of your process as a series of scenes, in Gibson’s lingo, ‘pieces.’ Preparation is more important than planning. Planning goes out the window in the first few beats of your scene, but preparation will be there for you throughout.
Zero History also has juicy insights into the future of marketing and brand strategy, which I’ll post separately.
Now go do something to see what happens.
The author Steven Berlin Johnson, recently gave a TED talk on the subject of his next book, which will be his seventh: Where do good ideas come from?
He’s an observant man, so the observations come tumbling out of him in a 17-minute torrent, from why coffee shops were important to the Enlightenment, to the debunking of ‘Eureka’ moments. If you want the full effect, step into the Johnson waterfall and view the video.
If you’re looking for a summing up, well, there’s a one-word answer to the question, ‘Where do good ideas come from?’ The answer is ‘Improvisation.’ Good ideas come from improvisation. Check this out:
Johnson says, “Don’t protect ideas, share them.” This is precisely the concept behind of yes-anding. Instead of scripting, blocking, denying, judging or yes-butting–all anathema to innovation–add to the ideas of others. Walt Disney used to call this “plussing,” a phrase that has been adopted by Pixar Animation Studios. In doing so, Pixar yes-anded Disney. That’s how it works. Ideas evolve. And when you yes-and by sharing, they evolve faster and more purposefully than if you don’t.
Johnson says, “Ideas are a network.” This equates to the Group Mind of improvisation, where ideas belong not to any one individual, but to the group, and the scene. Ideas are not isolated phenemona. They always exist in relationship to other ideas, and other people. An apple falling on Newton’s head was not his idea. It was a connection between a number of ideas that described the physical world at that time. Johnson says, “Chance favors the connected mind.” He might just as well have said, “Chance favors improvisers.” It was because he was able to connect it to other phenomena that the chance occurrence of an apple falling on his head became meaningful to Newton. This is no different than what a good improviser does in a scene. He or she turns chance into meaning by making connections. That’s the work. It’s not easy. It is a practice that takes study, discipline and time.
Johnson says, “Ideas are a slow hunch.” This equates to the patience some of the best improvisation groups have for finding the game in a scene. My favorite example of this from improv theater is the L.A.-based group, Dasariski. Those guys take their time about finding the game, this discovery arises organically–though quite predictably–from conversations, and it is a beautiful thing to see. Good ideas are the equivalent of productive games in improvisation. They often arise from anomalies or even mistakes. They’re generative, that is, they led to other ideas. Even though it makes for better anecdotes, ideas are not like a single frame from a movie, a frozen image—apple hits man on head!—they are montages of images, and jumps back and forth in time. Ideas are narrative.
Johnson says, “Ideas are a product of environment.” Yes and this, too, is one of the most fundamental ideas of improvisation: Environment fuels performance. This is why Belina Raffy conducts improvisation classes in Europe that are based on Biomimicry, where performers mirror biology to help their innovation process. Today, thanks to our connection with Belina (ideas are a network, remember?) we are beginning to play with biomimicry at GameChangers. As Viola Spolin said, “Act on environment and enviroinment will act on you.”