This is from a blog post by our friend, Nilofer Merchant, author of the new book The New How: Creating Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy:
The challenge with people feeling powerless is this: we don’t see how we can contribute to solve problems. We believe it is “someone else’s” to own rather than something any of us can contribute to. Powerlessness leads to apathy on global issues and disdain on local issues.
Now check out this from Mick Napier’s classic book, Improvise: Scene from the Inside Out:
Two people…staring at each other and wondering who’s going to make the first move. Two people being nice to each other and allowing the other to start doing something. In that short amount of time, two humans have created themselves as powerless…Who has time? The audience is waiting. They don’t care about your support. They care about what you do. What you do now.
These two statements, made miles and years apart, reflect the timelessness of the concept: Do something! Participate! Add to the conversation! When you’re just getting started don’t worry about what the solution will be, or where the scene will take you. No one knows, and your audience doesn’t care. The most important thing is to bring to the scene whatever you’ve got.
The saying in improvisation is ‘take care of yourself first.’ This is not the same as being selfish. It is, rather, the recognition that making the first move, even if we are not always the one to make it, is always our responsibility.
In our crazy race to escape these kinds of vortexes, we can turn direction-blind. We pick a course of action, or someone picks a course for us, and in our all-out effort to escape a certain fate, we go heads down as hard as we can for as long as we can in that direction, like barn-sour horses galloping toward a distant barn. A strategy, 
Here are some characteristics of a Newtonian Narrative: It is finite, with a beginning, middle and end. It unfolds in linear time. It follows a formula or script. It has a credited author. It is inhabited by a well-defined and finite number of players. It is rooted in physical geography. It is platform specific (even when it is multi-platform). It is solid, mechanical, repetitive and dependable. It is immutable. The book you read today will be the same book tomorrow. It is causative, that is everything in a Newtonian Narrative happens because of something else. Events are related to one another according to its formulas. (”If Peyton Manning endorses it, people will buy it.”)
The Quantum Narrative redefines storytelling by ripping up and recomposing the stuff stories have been made of since the first cave dweller showed her companions how to build a fire (and got thrown out of the cave not long after by another cave dweller who claimed the secret of fire for himself).
I grew up on a farm. My father spent a lot of time away from our farm selling and installing systems for other farmers that gave them more opportunity at what was, quite literally, the grass roots level.
Jeffrey Wells came to my attention around five years ago when I was talking with a Hollywood studio publicist about bloggers who were having an impact on entertainment journalism. The publicist cited a number of names including Wells’, about whom he added, “He scares me a little bit.”
Prepare to struggle. The path to any breakthrough is unpaved. Gamechanging does not guarantee an easy road to fame and fortune. It is, rather, a methodical series of steps taken in order to learn, adapt, and discover new avenues for productivity. Hollywood Elsewhere struggled early. At one point Wells had to solicit donations from his readers to keep the site alive. It now seems on healthier footing financially, but Wells has a penchant for drama, so you never know what kind of bind he’s getting himself into just so we can all enjoy watching him work his way out of it.
In the Business section of its September 22 edition, the New York Times featured 
Dr. Aaron Blackledge opened his San Franscisco clinic, 
“I went to Sarah Lawrence for my undergrad degree. I was a dance major. My background is artistic as well as medical. I have taken many improv classes. My artistic background helps me look at medicine as a design, a feeling, an experience, that the current medical establishment so horribly lacks. I know Jay (Parkinson of HelloHealth) is a very accomplished photographer. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. Artists are used to facing the unknown, the blank canvas or the empty stage. We’ve done the same with the medical profession. What we’re doing didn’t exist before we did it.
“My place looks kind of fancy, but it’s equipment and furniture I’ve bought from doctors closing their practices, CraigsList, Ikea and eBay. Everything I have is used. I put the money into the space, because I wanted that experience. People don’t even know why it is that it’s different, but it is powerful. The people who designed it (Indicate Design Groupe) design a lot of restaurants and retail spaces. They’re used to saying to their clients, ‘Okay this is definitely going to be popular, people are going to come here, you focus on the food.’ And that’s the way we think about CarePractice. They said to me, ‘You take good care of your patients, because we’re going to bring the people.’ So we focused on the roll-out like a restaurant opening. People identify with that. We are like a favorite restaurant. People point us out as their clinic.
