When people say ’sustainability,’ they can be referring to a lot of different cosmetic concepts (monetary policy, geothermal energy, funding for education or manufacturing, urban gardening, solar power, vegetarianism, LED lighting, gender and sexual equality, etc. etc. etc.). In fact, we know this ‘multi-causism’ to be characteristic of the OWS scene. The meta concept is, for all these causes, the same: Are you playing constructive or de-constructive games? Zero sum or positive sum games? Are your games sustainable or not? OWS is, ultimately, itself a game, one designed to focus attention on the UGs of Wall Street.

The protesters arrested yesterday on the Brooklyn Bridge represent the most creative generation living in the most creative nation on earth. No doubt they have roots in every language, race, religion, culture, science, art form and evolutionary instinct in the human species. And daily, on Manhattan Island, they are forced to confront the 1-percenters who control 99 percent of the nation’s wealth, people who are, for the most part, not creators, but extractors. That’s what their games are designed to do—-extract. These people getting arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge? they’re doing it to point out the difference between where the money is and where it needs to be for us to get a bigger bang out of the creativity they represent. 99 percent of our creativity belongs to 99 percent of the people. That’s a biological fact, Jack. It’s the ultimate sustainable resource. The protesters know this and are calling it to our attention with one of the games they and their friends originated, flash mobbing.

The OWS players understand that if the ratio of ‘99 percent of the wealth to 1 percent of the people’ ratio stays where it is, we will never get out the doldrums economically, because we’re getting no Return on Creativity. No ROC. Because we are putting most of our money where 99 percent of our creativity isn’t. For the ratio to change, the game must change. The OWS players grew up on games. They are the gamingest people in the history of the world. You think they don’t know a bad game when they see one? Wall Street plays bad games. They want game change.

Game change will come about only when we find ways to invest in the creativity of the 99 percent. We cannot afford to have the most creative Americans sitting on the bench right now. We need them in the game. Just not the old games. New ones. The OWS players are screaming at the coaches to put them into a game they can play.

The old game, in addition to being unsustainable, has left a bitter taste in the mouth of the world. Those protesters sitting on the Brooklyn Bridge? They’re bitter too. They’re bitter because they have the ability to change the game and they know it. They understand the scope of the work ahead, and are in a hurry to get on with it.

They have good taste, let them cook with it, and bring the world to our table again.  They have stories to tell that are not the same old stories, let them tell them. They have visions that are not blueprints of the past, let them build them. They hear music that has never been sung and have crazy ideas that no one else would even think of attempting. Let them sing. Let them try. We need that now. We need them. And every day the ‘1 percent to 99 percent ratio’ stays where it is, we are one step closer to losing them.

They are getting arrested for squatting on a symbol of America’s great creative past like birds who have come home to roost, when what they really want to do is fly.

“You’ve got to do a lot of different things,” she said.

“There’s a lot of fear in business. Most people are held back from their creativity by their fear. They focus on the most insignificant things. It’s such a waste.”

“The answers aren’t found in technology.”

The talk with Betsy was a reminder that creativity has no natural boundaries. We build the barriers around it ourselves. The limits of our creative potential are all self-constructed. The good news is that if we built the barriers, we can also break them down. So give yourself the Baytos Test: Confront your fear. Quiet your ego. Kick your subjectivity and self-consciousness in the ass. Embrace your eccentricity…and dance! Doors will open, and you won’t even have to knock.

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)

I.  Story

Watson and Crick

We create and share stories as a way of interpreting our experiences and making sense of the world. Stories turn chaos into cosmos. Our ’story sense’ guides us through life. Stories are the basis of community. They energize our relationships. Shape our careers. Filter our music. Impact everything from our spiritual beliefs, to the schools we attend, to the products we patronize.

It is through stories that we assign meaning to objects and events.

DNA, for example, became meaningful on a global scale in 1953, in a story told by scientist-storytellers Watson and Crick in a brand-new, double-helixed protein-based language. Before 1953, scientists knew the DNA story existed, but they didn’t have the tools to see it, the language to describe it, or the storytellers to make it mean something to the masses.

The discovery of DNA—as with any kind of breakthrough in human consciousness—poses an interesting ‘tree falls in the woods’ question. Before we tell a story about something, does it have meaning?

Was DNA ‘meaningful’ before 1953? Definitely. Had to be. Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid was doing its thing before we had the words to describe what the thing was. So if we weren’t telling stories about DNA, how was its ‘invisible meaning’ expressed?

II. Narrative

Here is my theory: Before it gets expressed as a story (and after, too) meaning resides in narratives.

A narrative is a flow of events connected to a theme.

A story is the conscious structuring of events to elicit meaning.

Before anybody ever put the letters DNA into a meaningful sequence, there was this theme, call it, ‘What Are We Made Of?’—a theme as old as the first time a mother wondered what made her babies look different from one another.  Any and all events connected to this theme comprise its narrative.

Before DNA came into being, its meaning was already present in the ‘What Are We Made Of?’ narrative.

Before 1953 and the birth of the DNA story, this potent narrative produced such meaningful artifacts as Mendel’s genetics experiments with pea plants, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings’ offspring, X-rays, ancient Egyptian seeds that had been placed in fermenting yeast to alter their growing traits—and the musings of every mother who ever wondered what made her babies look different from one another.

A narrative connected to a meaningful theme like ‘What Are We Made Of?’ has transformative potential.

We need this distinction between story and narrative because thanks to the internet, we have the tools to experience and the language to express meaning as never before. Things that meant something before the internet don’t mean as much now. And things that didn’t exist two years ago mean a lot today. We live an an Age of Meaning, and narratives, as the ultimate source of meaning, are ultra-important to our understanding of the networked world.

How narratives live in networks will a huge factor in how we connect and engage with one another, how we make sense of, and transform, the world in the 21^st century.

III. Artifacts

In addition to stories, narratives deliver meaning in all kinds of other media—memes for example. Memes are not stories, but are important to how we connect with one another in networks. A hamster eating popcorn and a dancing baby are not stories. A rumor is not a story. A headline is not a story. A link isn’t. A tweet isn’t. A status isn’t. A sales transaction, in and of itself, isn’t. Yet these forms and many others can, like stories, hold meaning and therefore they have value. We call stories and all the other meaningful media generated by narratives ‘artifacts.’

Artifacts are memorable, shareable expressions of narratives.

The popular meme of a hamster eating popcorn is an expression of a narrative with a theme we could call ‘Loveable Pets.’ We smile at a dancing baby because it’s a quick glimpse of a narrative with the theme ‘Precocious Children.’

All narratives contain enough meaning to generate a practically limitless quantity of artifacts. What hangs in the balance is the quality of the narrative. Does it inspire or repress? Is it productive or reductive?

IV. Narratology

Our ability to store and experience narratives in networks has opened a new era in the ‘narrative sciences’–filmmaking, journalism, theater, business communication, publishing, branding, education, gaming, etc.—that mirrors what happened to the science of physics in the early part of the previous century.

‘Narratologists’ today are discovering, like Einstein’s community of physicist friends did, that stuff is connected in ways we had not previously had the ability to imagine. Networks abound with invisible and non-linear (the U.S. military calls them ‘asymmetrical’) relationships that have the potential to mushroom in a heartbeat into massive manifestations of energy with the power to create and destroy worlds.  Conceptual worlds. Virtual worlds. Physical worlds.

The distinction between story and narrative is also important because in a networked environment, it is increasingly difficult, perhaps impossible, for any one individual, organization or agency to script, and control stories and other artifacts efficiently. That is how business used to get done. When the number of communication channels were finite, ‘script-and-control’ models were optimal. This is no longer true. Your network’s appetite is bigger than what you can feed it purely in the form of scripted-and-controlled content.

Continual co-creation is essential.

V. Script-and-Control vs. Continual Co-Creation

With an infinite number of channels available to us, narratologists can put new, more flexible story strategies into play. In this environment, ‘co-creation’ models are optimal. Continual improvisation and collaboration are required. In the new narrative-focused models, the emphasis is not on authorship, but on participation. Communication is not a matter of control, but of liberation.  Only a co-creation model can generate enough meaning to satisfy a robust network’s appetite.

A big reason Walt Disney decided to give up filmmaking to focus on his new theme park in Anaheim (coincidentally right around the time of Watson and Crick’s DNA discovery in 1953) was that, unlike his films (”Snow White” had a jiggy couple of frames in it that bothered him the rest of his life), the theme park would, in Walt’s words, ‘always be in a state of becoming.’ With the opening of Disneyland, Walt Disney got into the co-creation business.  Together, Disney and the guests at his theme park explored a narrative you could call ‘The American Dream.’

Since its opening in 1953, Disneyland has hosted over 600 million visitors, and it’s safe to say that most of those guests have generated artifacts in one form or another that depict ‘the American Dream.’ It’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow. It it’s a Small World after all.  It’s an actor’s life for Me!  And a pirate’s life! And a Bug’s Life!

Over the past 56 years, the content Disneyland paid for—in the form of photo shoots, television programming, cast performances, etc.—is Dwarfed by co-created content. Google lists ‘about 58,000,000’ search results for ‘Disneyland.’ How much of that do you think Disney paid to produce?

As Viola Spolin (coincidentally born in Chicago just like Walt Disney), said of improvisation, advice Disneyland and its guests have taken to heart, “Act on environment, and environment will act on you.”

How much meaning can we liberate from a narrative in the form of stories and other artifacts? is a question we should ask ourselves, in one way or another, at the beginning of every working day.

V. Characteristics of Stories and Other Artifacts

They unfold in linear time, with a beginning, middle and end.

They are designed.

They are made for sharing.

They are repeatable.

They are authored.

They have texts.

They tend toward genres and formulas.

They are inhabited by a finite number of players.

They are iterative.

The provide context and structure.

They are mappable in conceptual, physical and/or virtual geography.

They are hierarchical. Characters and objects in them gravitate toward high or low status, events toward high or low importance.

They are ‘causative’ in two ways:

1)  Everything in a story happens because of something else;

2) They can cause predictable emotions and reactions.

In the sense that they are causative, artifacts are Newtonian.

VI. Characteristics of Narratives

They have no beginning, middle or end.

They have infinite beginnings, middles and ends.

They are not bound by time, space or geography.

What is observed of them changes depending on the observer.

They can occupy two or more places in space at the same time–they happen here at the same time they’re happening across the room or the planet.

They are generative.

Themes are the ‘glue’ that hold them together.

They resemble the playing of a game by a vast number of players (think of the artifacts generated by a popular MMORPG and you get the idea) more than they do the dynamic between author and audience.

A narrative is non-causative, that is, everything is related, but how and why things relate depends on the environment and the players.

They emphasize thematic consistency over literalness.  There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to explore a narrative.

Narratives are quantum phenomena.

VII. What’s the future of narrative?

In a complex communication environment, narrative, and the artifacts it generates, are the best way to resolve complexity, and in fact, this is what Gen Why? kids do extraordinarily well.  Their sense of narrative is unprecedented, and their personal narratives are the stars they steer their ships by.

In an interesting post on filtering, Tim Kastelle and John Steen explain that there are five kinds of filtering: Naïve, Expert, Network, Heuristic and Algorithmic, and, further group these five genres of filtering into two categories, Mechanical and Judgment-Based. That’s How we filter. Narrative is What we filter. Most people give no more thought to how they filter than Grandma gives to the air filter in her car. What they think about and act on, the way Grandma steered her Cadillac to a particular destination, is narrative.

The science around all this is still in its infancy. You can see glimmers of it in transmedia, massive multiplayer games, distributed production models, theme parks, social media, alternate reality games, activist brands, smart badges, business in China, remixes and mashups, augmented reality, micro-loans and the video of your dance in the musical, Hair.

As to what the future of narrative is, it’s a trick question, because there is no future to narrative.  Narrative happens in the Now. It is the world as we experience it in this second. This heartbeat. This breath.

The Future and the Past belong to stories. The Now belongs to narratives.

Like Disneyland, narrative is always in a state of becoming.

VIII.  Ze Zen

We are spider-like, connecting our webs and heeding their vibrations.

We are dowsers, feeling for the tug of an invisible stream.

Everything is a coincidence. This is not a coincidence.

When the story is ready, the storyteller will appear.

Because GameChangers followed and contributed (seven blog posts) to the narrative of the Chilean Miners…because we were curious about how the 33 miners happened to be wearing Oakley sunglasses when they emerged from the mine after their 69-day ordeal…because we made a connection with Jonathan Franklin, the correspondent for The Guardian, who was the only print journalist with complete access to the rescue site in Copiapo, and was responsible for the Oakley connection…because Penguin Press has just published Franklin’s book, 33 Men, the definitive account of the miners’ ordeal…and because a lot of companies are asking him to share his experiences and insights…

We have co-created a new GameChangers program inspired by Franklin’s observations during the 69 days at Copiapo.  The program will be offered in the U.S. and Europe.  We will present it for the first time on March 2, at a Global Leadership Conference sponsored by Diversey, Inc.  We are rehearsing it this Sunday in New York City, when Jonathan Franklin and I will meet for the first time in person.

We cannot stress this enough:  Narratives are the ultimate organizing principle in the networked economy.

Traditional news reporting and the internet made us aware of ‘Los 33.’  Social media–Facebook, Twitter, this blog, etc.–helped us track and participate in their story.  Skype, email and telephone made personal conversations and collaboration between us and Jonathan Franklin possible.  The Applied Improvisation Network helped us extend the program to Europe.  Geo-locating apps–I can’t even tell you what they were– helped us locate and provide directions to our rehearsal studio in NYC.  I used a virtual concierge to book my travel.  And of course personal relationships made things possible that no technology or platform could.

Through it all, it was the narrative that guided us.  With a narrative as your guide, the choice of platforms becomes an objective process, a series of consistently logical decisions.  How best to participate in a narrative is an entirely different, and more productive, discussion from how best to deploy a platform.  Choose narrative!

Interestingly (and typically) the mainstream media, beginning with 60 Minutes last Sunday, have focused on the more sensational aspects of the ‘Los 33′ narrative—on the fact that in their darkest hours, when they had no idea if they’d ever be found, a few of the miners began to think about cannibalism, or that since their rescue they’ve been suffering from PTSD (this is news because?…).  In Where Are You Stuck? we focus on the positive aspects of the rescue.  On the heroic qualities of the miners and their rescuers.  Teamwork.  Altriusm.  Sacrifice.  Leadership.  Creativity.

In every crisis there is opportunity.  In every crisis, there is destruction.  For something to be created, something must be destroyed.  Doors open and close in unison.  Shiva is the god of creation AND destruction.  Productive change entails creative destruction.

When the times are a-changin’, getting stuck can become a chronic problem, because individuals and organizations get frozen deciding (or avoiding deciding) how to respond to the changes they are experiencing.  The challenge confronting anyone looking to get ‘unstuck’ is all about focus.  Will your focus be on the creative or the destructive aspects of the change?  Will you see the opportunity, or obsess on the loss?  Will you bang on closed doors or walk through open ones?  Will you cling to the status quo until you realize, perhaps too late, that what worked in the past isn’t necessarily what will work in the future?  Interestingly, this is the challenge facing the Miners today.  Working deep underground isn’t an option any more.  That is a closed door.  What got them out of the mineshaft isn’t the same process that will get them out of the ‘mindshafts’ in which they find themselves trapped today. When context changes, everything changes.  Including the nature of heroism.

What made the Miners heroic in the eyes of the world is still within them, but like anyone else, they will have to change their game to suit their new situation.  This time, unlike the 69 days they spent in the mine, they have a choice.  Choosing to move consistently in the direction of creativity, opportunity and the newly-opened door is a challenge each of them will have to confront in his own way.

Check out the Where Are You Stuck? program, and fill out the response form to let us know how we can best help you.

After lunch, I left the restaurant a minute behind him, and he was in the parking lot waiting for me, with the thing that was in his pocket in his hand.  It was a plastic figurine in a dancer’s pose.  (The two ‘prongs’ were its legs.)  He explained it to me that it was called a Quili, and that an artist friend of his, John Perry, had invented it.

On Friday, we were going to be doing a GameChangers event, and I’d been looking for some kind of prize to give away to participants.  Quilis would be perfect.  Our theme was ‘Connect the Dots,’ and that’s exactly what Quilis are designed to do–connect with one another in unique configurations with the super-strong rare earth magnets in their hands, feet and heads. Perfect alignment with our theme.

Spolin put me in touch with Perry, who lives in Agoura on a small ranch at the end of a winding gravel road.  He provided us with 20 Quilis, including several that aren’t yet on the market, for Friday’s event.  Perry had been designing refrigerator magnets five years ago when he came up with the idea for Quilis, and began making prototypes.  He had to design around an old patent on a small wooden cowboy figurine from the 1960s that had magnets in its hands and feet.  The patentable difference is that Quilis can stand alone without magnetism.  “Quilis don’t balance,” explained Perry.  “They stand.”

The current line of Quilis is available at museum and gallery gift shops.  The new line will be featured in the gift shop of the Kodak Theater when Cirque du Soleil begins a long-term engagement there this July.

In certain ways, improvisers are like Quilis.  They can connect with one another, with their environment and the objects in it.  (Rich Talarico calls it ‘Velcro-ing”)  They use their spines to help define character.  They don’t balance.  They stand.

Photo by Tammy Cadence Tso

The current issue of The Economist features a short piece in its Business & Finance section entitled, “The Pivotal Moment:  Bet on a boss who can twirl on his toes.”

In it, venture capitalist Alan Patricof of Greycroft Partners is quoted indirectly as saying he is looking to invest in “young firms whose bosses know how to pivot: ie, dump their old business model and adopt a new one. Difficult times demand flexibility.”

There is a science to pivoting, a science that generates predictably positive outcomes from unforeseen circumstances. That science, despite the article’s continuing use of the metaphor, is not Dance.   It is Improvisation, which has as compelling a body of work supporting it as any business ethos that’s relevant to the networked era of business.

This ethos is both pedagogically sound and creatively liberating.  Works by visionaries like Viola Spolin and Keith Johnstone, and many yes-anders like myself, have, together, laid a solid foundation for ‘applied improvisation.’   With approx 1,600 members worldwide, the Applied Improvisation Network is a loose affiliation of improvisers, many of whom understand how to apply improvisation techniques to business.  Improvisation, in addition to being a key attribute of a successful start-up, plays a huge role in social social media strategies like ‘fanthropology,’ as well as in agile development processes, biomimicry, transmedia, and branded entertainment.

The ability to improvise IS the ability to pivot when the time is right in order to consistently grow through change. In this science of ours, preparation is emphasized over planning, thematic consistency over replication, flow over stock, and trajectory over position. Improvisation is, we believe, a vital skill for organizations and individuals doing business in a networked world—and who isn’t?

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.

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.”

The week’s events demonstrated again and again that what happens in social media doesn’t stay in social media.  Interactions in the social sphere have the potential to turn into valuable real world interactions:  business and personal relationships; jobs; art; activism; entertainment; awakening; health; transactions; fandom; travel; renewable energy; good food and drink; style; and let’s not forget money.  We’re in this to make the economics work, because if the economics don’t work, no one works.

To that end, there was an urgency to the presentations.  If social media is to drive economic growth, how will it happen?  That’s the question underlining every event I attended or heard about.  We pooled a lot of good answers, too, lots of ways that social media can generate ROI.

SMW week showed us that a movement need not begin massively.  Small groups can connect to large networks.  Local action sparks the mass movement, global networks can inform local cultures.  In the social sphere, flow is more important than stock, a trajectory is more indicative of potential than a position, and a community is a better audience than a demographic.

Here are some of my impressions from week:

—>On opening night, at Inner City Arts, a couple of blocks from Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles, Sir Ken Robinson simplifies the complex problems of sustaining  a healthy planet, and throws down the gauntlet to the crowd.  Even though he’s already a knight and everything, he wants us to go out and slay dragons!  He makes it sound like a noble quest, so sure, why not?

We don’t really have a choice, do we? As Sir Ken points out, the population of the earth is on a hockey stick, and it’s going to put such stress on the planet’s resources that, unless we can change the way we live and act toward one another, we are in for a bad ride.  The scarcer the resource, the bigger the war?  How’s that sound, for starters?  If we get ourselves into wars that last 10+ years when petroleum supplies are at their current levels, what kind of wars do we think are we going to get into when supplies have passed their peak? If we cling to the current business models, we are literally talking about endless war.  In fact, we may already be talking about endless war if the Pentagon gets it way.  There are currently over 700 military bases around the world.  No one in the military will project the U.S. getting out of there before 2016.  That is a 16-year war, ladies and gentlemen, costing trillions a year–that we know about. It’s military follies like these that, historically, bring nations to their knees.

—->Also on Opening Night, Dave Stewart of Eurythmics fame performs with two beautiful women, one a violin virtuoso, one a chanteuse with a stunning voice.  They are amazing together, really, especially the part where  Stewart and the violinist improvise a song.  When the singer joins them, they begin performing Eurythmics hits, and the thought strikes me, “That man is going to spend the rest of his career looking for a replacement for Annie Lennox, and he’s never going to find her.”

—->Meebo, Semantic Foundry and CrowdCentric host an event at the Pacific Design Center on Social Media and User Experience.  (It kills me to miss Rob Reed and Jonathan Taplin’s session on Geo-Location, but those guys are here in L.A., and this event is hosted by a crew from NYC, so I choose the scarcer resource.)  I’m stunned at how deserted the Design Center is at 2 PM on a Tuesday.  It has never been one of those places crawing with pedestrians, most of its showrooms being by-appointment only, but even by those standards, it’s a ghost town.  It’s telling that the only signs of life in the belly of the Big Blue Whale, as far as I can tell, is coming from the 150 or so folks attending the SMW event.  It must mean something.

The presentations on user experience are good and smart, and a breakout session changes the dynamic just enough to hold most of the audience for three hours.  The art of designing user experiences has come a long way since the mid-90s, when no one knew what an ‘information architect’ was.  I like how UX designers are tying the customer experience to narratives.  We’re still not doing such a great job of defining what those narratives are, but we are at least recognizing that narrative is what connects buyers to brands, organizes complex datasets, and generates the trust that binds citizens to community.That recognition is, in itself, huge.

—->On Wednesday, I conduct the first of what will be three GameChangers workshops for SMW. This one is entitled ‘The Revolution Will Be Improvised—Brand Narratives in the Networked World.’ 30 people from all walks of life participate–from MBA students to a Malibu beach girl with a transmedia project funded with Brazilian money, to the V.P. of digital for Deutsch Advertising.  As always, we have a lot of fun, and everyone learns something.

—->On Thursday morning, I give a one-hour presentation entitled ‘Communication Trifecta’ at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at USC, in which we focus on ‘three levels of meaning’ – Cosmetic, Emotional, Meta.Several people in the audience indicate that they’ve had improv training, so at the end of the talk, I call on one of them, and the two of us perform an exercise I call ‘the Geico Game,’ which turns out great, because she is so good. Always nice to end a scene energetically.

—->That afternoon, I conduct a three-hour GameChangers workshop focused on science communication for students and faculty at USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering. The class is part of a graduate seminar in science journalism taught by the renowned science journalist, KC Cole, at whose invitation I am here. It is a continuation of a program initated by Alan Alda, who joins us on Skype for the last 30 minutes of the workshop.  During the workshop, we play two Biomimicry games suggested to me by my friend, Belina Raffy, of Imprology in the U.K. It is the first time I have coached these particular games.  I could have done a better job of explaining them, but they work.

Over Skype, Alda and I talk shop for a few minutes which is awesome, because he is one of the original legends of the improv community. At the same time, I am a little self-conscious, because the class is just sitting there, listening to him ask me questions like, “Did you do any contact work?” “How did you create the focus that got them outside their heads?” “Did you find that ego was getting in their way?”

A few people step in front of the camera and do short presentations for Alda. One of the biomimicry games, played by six grad students, has resulted in a silly design for an imaginary animal. Alda points out that what I thought was a shortcoming of their design, its ‘silliness,’ indicates that the group has collaborated freely, unconstrained by the ‘rational’ judgments of the left brain, and compliments them on it.  In pointing this out, Alda himself demonstrates one of the principles of improvisation—there’s opportunity in everything, even in what we might at first perceive as silly or inconsequential. 

—->Thursday evening at The Cimarron Group, a high end entertainment marketing agency….a ‘Fanthropology’ workshop for movie studio and music company marketing execs. I consulted with Cimarron’s social media team on this, but have no responsibilities for presenting it, and we’re there early, so Rick Shaughnessy, who flew in from Chicago for the week, and I sit in the Cimarron Bar, which is an old set from Melrose Place, and talk shop. The event itself is very well produced. Henry Jenkins, the famed author of Convergence Culture, is the featured panelist and Kevin Winston of Digital LA is the moderator. Within the space of an hour, the panel offers dozens of data points that are relevant to any brand looking to create and manage fan communities.

—->Friday…the Closing Night Party at The Room nightclub in Hollywood. Members of the SMW planning committee, the sponsors, and worldwide producers are all here. I’m especially happy to see smiles on the faces of Erick Brownstein of The New Agency, and the members of his L.A. team, including Dawn Sinko and Wendy Walz, who did such incredible work to pull together the week’s 95 events.   We all take a collective breath. Social media is a pebble dropped into the water, and we are all optimistic about where the ripples can carry us.

—->[CODA] On Saturday, Lee Fox, the energetic founder of KooDooz, a cause-related application for kids, hosts an event at the Santa Monica Library, about dealing with all the plastic in the ecosphere. There’s more than you want to know. I thought there was one gyre, as the massive island of floating trash in the Northern Pacific is called. Turns out there are three, each of them larger than the state of Texas. Lee screens the excellent documentary Bag It, a story told by a funny and personable guy named Jeb Barrier, who decides to take a closer look at the plastics industry after he gets some personal news about his family. I meet Ian Moise, the founder and CEO of Reuse Connection, and make a mental note to introduce him to my friend Deb Maher in D.C., where Ian is based, to tell him about Deb’s plan for turning recycled plastic into shipping pallets to replace the wooden ones that predominate today.

I take a picture of a kid wearing a costume made of plastic bottletops, which we learn in Bag It cannot be recycled, and often end up killing the sea animals who eat them. The kid gets it. We cannot deal with the challenges we face as problems to be overcome. They are too big, too overwhelming. In fact, in Bag It, one environmentalist says of the gyres, “There’s nothing we can do about them.” No, the only way to deal with the problem is for all of us to emulate the kid in the bottletop costume–to see a problem as art that has not yet been created, as a story that has not yet been told.