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GameChangers Glossary, A to G

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

Adapted from GameChangers–Improvisation for Business in the Networked World, by Mike Bonifer:

Addition–Entering a scene in progress for the purpose of contributing immediately to the team’s performance; contributing to a scene; giving a gift

Agreement, The Agreement Principle–A principle of improvisation, characterized by players’ openness towards each other and an organization or communications network’s openness at its edge; the group consensus around a game or theme that informs a scene

Audience–Those within and outside of an organization whose reactions and opinions will determine the success of a scene or performance

Audience, External–People outside an organization or network, including customers (and potential customers), competitors, bloggers, users, fans, viewers, etc. whose reactions ultimately determine the value of a performance or narrative

Audience, Internal–People inside an organization or network, whose judgment acts as a kind of filter on scenes and narratives before they reach the External Audience

Blocking–A performance-related problem that occurs when players impede the progress of a scene by refusing the gifts offered them by their teammates

Callback–The act of recalling information that was stated by a player earlier in a scene or in a previous scene.

Cast–Players who share the same business objective; also called a Group or Team; can also refer to the employees of an entire division or organization (Disney, for example, refers to all employees as ‘cast members’)

Casting–The process of selecting players who will comprise a business team

Character–Traits that make a player unique as an individual and consistently valuable to his or her team

Close, Del–Credited as one of the originators of longform improvisation, and one of its most influential teachers, Close (1934-1999) created ‘Harold,’ probably the most-performed structure for group improv theater performances; his proteges include Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd, John Belushi, Amy Poehler and Tina Fey; legend has it that he willed his skull to the Goodman Theater in Chicago to be used in future productions of Hamlet, in which he was to be billed as playing the role of Yorick

Coach–A person who casts a team; an objective observer and critic of a team’s performance; one who establishes game-based strategies and standards of preparation and performance in directing a team toward its objectives; manager; director

Cosmetic Communication/Meaning–The surface level of communication within a scene, primarily through spoken dialogue; data; information. (See ‘Emotional Communication/Meaning‘ and ‘Meta Communication/Meaning‘)

Crazy Town–A performance-related problem that occurs when players indulge in fantasies, magical thinking, or egoistic behavior, until the scene becomes un-moored from any actionable reality.

Denying–A form of blocking in which a player repeatedly contradicts or ignores other players, confusing the audience and fellow players; refusing to recognize another player’s reality

Edit–The action of making an entrance for the purpose of shifting the scene’s focus, or to begin a new scene; edits usually occur in concert with other players exiting the scene

Emotional Communication/Meaning–The most dynamic and meaningful level of communication in a scene. conveying its players’ passions and desires, where reactions (both positive and negative), and reinforcements/alienation are strongest

Energy–The pitch at which a player or group performs (and modulates) its performance; an umbrella term for the level of activity and intensity the audience observes in the group, and that players in the group experience in one another

Entrance–A player’s first appearance in a scene

Environment–The setting in which members of team collaborate to achieve their objective; any place where players interact; more expansively, any place where an audience experiences a brand; the overall business climate in which an organization operates, shaped by factors such as regulatory agencies, competitors, geopolitical factors and the desires, attitudes and beliefs of customers

Exit–A player’s departure from a scene

Fantasizing–A performance-related issue that occurs when players build outlandish, or wildly fictitious scenarios that do not acknowledge or act on the real world environment or the businessa; magical thinking; (see ‘Crazy Town‘ and ‘Invention‘)

Flatlining–A performance-related problem that occurs when players show no energy or life, impeding or halting a scene’s progress

Game–Rules, roles, environment and objective(s) defined; an exploration of a theme; a strategy used to achieve a business-related objective; games fall into two broad categories – productive and unproductive

GameChanger–A player who has mastered the art and practical techniques of business improvisation; a manager/coach or player with the ability to identify and support productive games and quickly change or edit unproductive ones

Gift–A move that supports the scene and the players in it; ‘giving gifts’ is one of the most powerful and effective moves a player can make

Grandstanding–A performance-related issue that occurs when a player wastes time and effort trying to contribute something ‘heroic’ to a scene; holding back for effect instead of engaging in the moment; habitually swinging for the fences or reaching for the ‘Wow Factor’; going for a home run when a single would better serve the scene

Group Mind– The tangible web of connectivity between players that achieved through a shared focus on a game and the exploration of a theme; the collective unconscious; not the same as ‘Group Think‘

Group Think–Rubber-stamping; going along to get along; consensus for its own sake; agreement that does not involve a game or theme; behavior that is not intended to achieve the objective, but rather to reinforce status; uncritical or unquestioning support for a political agenda, ideology or hierarchy

TO BE CONTINUED….

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Posted in Additions and Edits, Agreement Principle, Branding, Casting, Character, Coaching, Communication, Dialogue, Emotion, Entrances, Environment, Fundamentals, Games, Gifts, Group Mind, Issues, Narrative, Objectives, Scenes, Themes | No Comments »

Fools With Rules

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

This one’s for the golfers…

I used to joke with our neighbor back in Indiana, Euline Kieffner, that the reason she and I loved golf so much was that there was nothing more alluring to folks who’d grown up on farms like we had than a mown field with no manure in it.  Until four or five years ago, I was enchanted by the game of golf, and literally could not get enough of it.  I played and practiced it religiously, at one point working my way all the way down to a four-handicap, which is pretty damn good.  I could play.

Golf is a great game that can teach a person a lot about patience, persistence, imagination, focus, character, and the difference between trying to force positive outcomes and letting positive outcomes emanate from an open mind.  As my business focus has changed, so has my relationship with the game.  Today, I play rarely, maybe two or three times a year, and only on social occasions.   The romance is gone.  Occasionally, my Taylor-Mades and I stare wistfully at one another across a crowded garage, and remember how it used to be between us.

What fascinates me most about the sport of golf today, sad to say, is the wreckage to its most visible brand experience–the PGA Tour.  We’re talking multi-vehicle pile-up. Its shiningest star has lost most of his luster and its TV ratings have tanked in tandem with the Tiger brand.  The Tour’s newcomers have apparently had no life experiences to differentiate them from one another–all they know is golf.  Its core demographic is aging.  Its most interesting personalities have retired.

Last Sunday, while I did a little work in the office, more out of habit than anything, I had the PGA Championship—the last of the four ‘majors’ of the season—on the TV in the background. It held no inherent interest for me. And then, all of a sudden, it did.  Several of the game’s young lions—Rory McElroy from Scotland(?), a long-hitting lefthander with high follow-through named Bubba, a cool German named Kaymer I’d never heard of before, and Dustin Johnson, who hits it insanely long, were all fighting for the lead, along with a caddyshacker named Wen-Chong from China, who learned to play on that country’s first golf course, which was built only 20 years ago.  All of a sudden, it was a story worth following.

DustinJohnson1Over the last five or six holes the tournament’s drama became palpable.  None of the young guys were holding back, no one was playing not to lose, they were all winding up, letting it rip, and playing for the win, and it was riveting.  The tournament came down to a tie between two players, Bubba and the German, Kaymer, with Johnson playing the final hole of the tournament with a chance to win it.  He missed his par putt to win.  We were looking at a three-player, three-hole playoff for the championship.

And then, all of a sudden, we weren’t.  A PGA Tournament official pulled Johnson aside as he walked off the 18th green and told him that he had violated a rule by grounding his club in a hazard along the 18th fairway, one of the 1000+ sand bunkers that lined the course.

I’m not going to get into the specifics here, except to say that technically the officials were correct—Johnson had, in fact, let his club touch the sand prior to making his second shot.  Narratively, however, the PGA people blew it like I’ve never seen a call blown in a lifetime of watching sports.  There was no possible way for Johnson to know that the spot where his ball sat—a spot that had been trampled by tens of thousands of people during the tournament, and was tightly framed by hundreds in the gallery as he made his swing—was a hazard.  Besides that, if there had once been a border to the sand bunker, that border had been erased by the week’s crowds to the point where it no longer existed.  Given this, there was no way for the PGA officials to know for sure from looking at a replay whether the ball was ‘in’ a bunker or not.

This wasn’t some snap judgment in the heat of the moment by a referee or ump.  This was a deliberation.  A review.  A consideration.  And then, a horrible decision that took all the life out of the story.  Johnson was penalized two strokes, and eliminated from the playoff.

The tragedy of this decision goes way beyond any personal setback to Mr. Johnson.  The PGA brand desperately needed this story, needed the drama to keep building with the playoff between three of its new stars.  They had it.  It was happening.  The audience was engaged.  There was real enthusiasm from the broadcasters.  It was turning into the most interesting finish to a tournament in years.  All the PGA officials had to do was stay out of its way.  Instead, they committed the golfer’s most grievous mistake: they over-thought the shot.  And then they shanked it.

This was not the behavior of people concerned about what’s best for the game of golf, about supporting their brand’s narrative, or about nurturing the next generation of golfers.  This was vainglorious meddling by middle-aged men desperate for attention and fearing nothing as much as their own impotence.

Oh yeah, Kaymer won the playoff, but who cared?  Nobody outside of Kaymer’s girlfriend is talking about it.  All the fan conversation is about the idiotic ruling.

We see this a lot in business.  A compelling narrative begins to unfold, or an idea seems to be gathering momentum, and then, from out of nowhere, an expressionless manager with a rule book derails it.  It sucks for everyone involved except the person with the rule book.

If the rules don’t support your brand’s narrative, don’t change the narrative, change the rules.  If your managers, like those PGA officials, aren’t nuanced enough to understand what it takes to support your narrative, change managers.  This is what the PGA needs to do, pronto, to get its ailing game back on track.

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Posted in Branding, Character, Focus, Games, Issues, Narrative, story | No Comments »

Quoteworthy

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

Our friend Christian Wach, one of the founders of Spirit of Football, sent us this quote:

“Paying attention to the last ten years means we need to realize that nonproprietary, distributed production is not the poor relation of traditional proprietary, hierarchically organized production. This is no hippy lovefest. It is the business method on which IBM has staked billions of dollars; the method of cultural production that generates much of the information each of us uses every day. It is just as deserving of respect and the solicitude of policy makers as the more familiar methods pursued by the film studios and proprietary software companies. Losses due to sharing that failed because of artificially erected legal barriers are every bit as real as losses that come about because of illicit copying. Yet our attention goes entirely to the latter.”ChristianWach1A

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Posted in Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Issues, Leadership, Networked World | 1 Comment »

The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Game

Friday, August 6th, 2010

FROM THE HUFFINGTON POST…

In tangling with a subject that’s loco, one runs the risk of going loco oneself. It’s probably why I’ve been struggling with this post, to the point of being driven crazy by it, for a week. Here we go, this time for sure, hoping that some semblance of sanity awaits you and me on the other side of the exercise.

The ‘Wall Street Game’ is destroying the economy. The end? Okay, on the chance that it’s not, that there’s still hope for dealing successfully with the godzillagram knocking on our door, let’s, just for the torture of it, keep going…

The game played by Goldman Sachs and all the predatory satellites in its system goes beyond crooked. It’s criminal. And worse than criminal, it is a crime that can’t be prosecuted. Here’s why: The game has been designed so that it cannot be played by human beings. It can only be played by programs. In milliseconds-long synapses of electrons that can be parsed only by machines, programs perpetrate crimes with no witnesses, no fingerprints, no conscience, no heart. The humanity, and along with it, the culpability, has been bred out of these programs. They are pure, unassailable, law-unto-themselves, math. Data for data’s sake. Programs designed to interact with other programs without any of the patience, tolerance or thought that will give a human being pause.

WebOfDebt1The originators of these programs are as guilty of their crimes as Smith & Wesson are of the next murder committed with one of their handguns, which is to say they cannot be held accountable. “That’s just the way the game is played,” say the originators. Exactly. This does not mean, however, that the way the game is played is any good, or helpful to the 95% of U.S. households that, together, control as much wealth as the top 1% do. What the programmers call ‘innocence,’ and ‘what no one could have anticipated,’ and ‘God’s work,’ is actually ignorance by design. What comes across as confidence is actually just a con. On Wall Street, nobody really knows anything. The machines are in control. So don’t bother asking.

Here is a good explanation by Ellen Brown of how the Wall Street game is rigged. Brown, author of Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System and How We Can Break Free, does an excellent job of unmasking the mechanics of the game that swings advantage toward the casin–errr–banks. She points a finger in particular at High Frequency Trading (HFT) software (I didn’t know its code originated with the Hollywood Stock Exchange of the dotcom era. Interesting.) that gives Wall Street’s traders the ability to make money in thousandths of a second with programmed trading.

I call this game ‘Global Owning without Local Consent.’ Go Loco, for short. It’s just that crazy.

Because it relentlessly seeks victims to separate from their money like hustlers of a quantum three-card monte game, Go Loco systematically destroys the potential of money to be productive. Money is too busy changing hands and getting hustled to be put to work any other way. In this game, money talks only to itself, like a patient in an asylum.

We see the outcomes of this insanity all around: Foreclosures on every block; constant and permanent erosion in the jobs market; crippling household and national debt; crumbling infrastructure; broke education systems; a dispirited class of permanently unemployed. The game saps entrepreneurship of its passion by punishing risk-taking. It smothers human creativity with machine rationality. Because it is based on consumption, it regards sustainability as an enemy. Because it is pure data, it has no resonance as a narrative. No soul. It is a cousin to the game played by people who sit under a mountain in Utah and fly drones that blow up villages halfway around the world. Hey, it’s all just a game, right? Yes, it is. A terrible, horrible, no good, very bad one.

At GameChangers, we define a game as consisting of Rules, Roles, Environment and Objective(s). Here’s a breakdown of the Go Loco game in terms of these four elements:

Terrible Rules: The rules of a productive game are known by all its players. This is not the case with Go Loco. Far from it. Its rules are so opaque and complex that no one holds an entire playbook. Its most significant rules are programmed like a virus (with no known antidote) to infect every significant, or anomalous, movement of money across the networks that carry financial data. The rules do not determine or care where the money is going, any more than a rattlesnake cares where a mouse is taking a kernel of corn. They are designed only to sense movement like the snake senses the mouse, then, like the snake, strike with blinding speed. The rules are machine-enabled executions of that old business bromide, “Follow the money.” With the added instruction: “And when you catch the money in an unlit alley, jack it and get some.”

Horrible Environment: Viola Spolin, the godmother of modern improvisation, said, “Act on environment, and environment will act on you.” Because the environment for the Go Loco game is ‘inside machines,’ those who ‘act on’ the game naturally begin behaving like machines themselves. The tasteless offices in which they work, the sameness banality of their attire, their fear of creative disruption, and their relentless calculating for advantage, all reflect the electronic latticework across which these players crawl like spiders on crack. Because players’ insides have a machined sameness to them, extra emphasis is placed on surface labeling, on cosmetics and appearance. How you appear becomes much more important than how you actually are, because how you actually are is so…unremarkable. All you talk about is money. Give a man a billion dollars and try talking to him about anything but the billion dollars. It can’t be done.

No Good Roles: Wall Street’s game is to business what pornography is to sex. Don’t for a second believe it has anything to do with love, or with having a relationship. It’s all about volume, baby. It’s as real as reality TV. What do we have that we can sell? How many units can we move? When the autistic boy who senses the world at different frequencies than you and me puts his hands to a machine running a program playing the game, the voice he hears will be saying, “Faster, pussycat, kill, kill!” Is it pure coincidence that Lawrence Fishburne’s daughter sold herself to the Matrix? Or did she hear the voice, too, and simply obey its instructions?

Very Bad Objectives: In improvisation, a game’s objectives are win/win. All the players benefit from the communication, learning, and transformation that result from playing. The Go Loco game is, by contrast, win/lose. Bigtime.

A lot of people will tell you winning and losing is inherent in the nature of trading, someone wins and someone loses, and the objective is to win more than you lose, and that this dynamic drives markets. There are two problems with excusing the Go Loco game for this reason: 1) It ignores the power of collaboration, which is where most of the growth potential exists in the networked business environment; and 2) in this game, the winners win so much (when’s the last time you made $28,000 in milliseconds? For doing nothing?) and the losers lose so much, the game produces extreme cycles of bubble-and-burst, of richer-and-poorer, that only promise to get more extreme, because the more the Go Loco programs eat, the hungrier they get. It is a zero sum game they play, and they will play it until the sum of all accounts not controlled by the programs is zero.

Now what? The big problem we have now is that in one breath we can find agreement that the current game is rotten, in the next breath we will be arguing over what to do about it, and as long as we’re arguing, the rottenness persists. The way to break through this dilemma is to quit worrying about what the new game should be and focus on changing the old one. One way to begin changing the old game is by changing the conversations we have:

From being about money, to being about how money is put to work.
From consumption to sustainability.
From fast food (or fast anything) to local food (or local anything).
From destination to journey.
From connecting the dots to connecting.
From owning the story to sharing the story.
From programmed to human.

Make moves that programs cannot see, with a gait that describes the glorious, inchoate lurching of love! Trust your intuition! Express what’s in your heart instead of your head for a change. Howl with your dog! Prove that it is we, and our beautiful gift of a planet, and not the programs, who are truly alive! Change the game!

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Posted in Agreement Principle, Creativity, Education, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Games, Initiations, Innovation, Issues, Movement, Narrative, Networked World, Objectives, Problem Solving, Relationships, Speed, story | No Comments »

Sweet Spot

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

GolfBallTee1I used to play a lot of golf, and the game taught me a lot.  One bit of wisdom came my way one Sunday afternoon from a golfer named Jim Bishop, while he and I were playing the classic old Wilson Course at Griffith Park in Los Angeles.  He told me that one reason he plays golf is that it that offers a person the chance to experience perfection.  “Every now and then,” he said, “you make a perfect swing.”  As any golfer who took the game seriously would, I understood exactly what Bishop was talking about.

On occasions, something amazing happens in the game of golf, when you transcend the conscious boundaries of all your prior experiences with the game, let go of your expectations, and become a passenger on the boat of your own brilliance.  You experience the patient takeaway, the coiling in the hips, the shoulders in perfect orbit around the spine, your back leg buttressed like a telephone pole, until you are behind the ball and then, your entire being uncoils through the ball, not swinging at it as much as passing a wave of energy through it, and in immortal words of Carl Spackler, “Cinderella story. Outta nowhere.”  There it is.  You feel it for just an instant.  Perfection.

A golfer pays a price to get there, because most often golf is crap and collapse, frustration, bad behavior and the sudden and unexplainable disappearance of one’s powers.  In other words, it’s a lot like life, which why everyone should play golf at some point in their lives.  It teaches you a lot about how to persist in the face of adversity.

Like the game of golf, the work we do requires a lot of patience and, like golf, work is all about managing adverse events.  The professional golfer, Frank Beard, once said that he hit exactly the same good shots an amateur golfer hits, he just hit more of them.  The same is true with our work.  Success looks the same for everyone.  You make money.  You enjoy the interactions.  You go home happy.  It is the consistency of our game, and the ability to manage adversity, that distinguishes the real players from the weekenders.

It doesn’t matter how great a player you are, there are times when you just have to take an unplayable lie, stroke and penalty, or when you find yourself out of bounds and have to hike back to the tee and start all over, stroke and distance.

Then there are times when work comes together like the perfect swing.  When your biggest client calls to thank you for solving a couple of problems, your oldest client makes things new again, and your newest client signs the contract.  When a friend makes news for doing something cool and funny.  When you begin a journey that is going to take four years and promises no end of excitement.  When you get to study with one of your favorite teachers for two hours.  When you have tickets with friends for a great concert tonight.

This is one of those days for me, and I wish you all the same.  Because we all know that soon enough we’ll be hooking them deep into alligator country again, trying to locate our ball in places where, as Lee Trevino once said, “there’s things with no shoulders living in there” and be asking ourselves why in the hell we put ourselves through it.

We put ourselves through it because we are promised times when perfection smiles on us, and we experience the satisfaction of seeing ourselves and the games we play in a new light, when we are capable of doing, in the context of the game, what we had only dreamed about before.

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Posted in Coaching, Creativity, Focus, Fundamentals, Games, Innovation, Issues, Problem Solving | No Comments »

Apparatus and Apparition

Thursday, June 24th, 2010

Observing the interwebs abuzz today about the long (up to an 11-hour wait in L.A.!) iPhone lines, and the lines already forming (three days ahead of the first screening!) for the next Twilight sequel, I am reminded of this scenario:

Piaggio1A friend of ours who works in sales gets honored often as a leading performer at his company, a large and established organization which is one of the 87 current members of the S&P 500 that have been members since its inception in 1957. The honoring happens at lavish banquets attended by the company’s top managers and featuring a pricey speaker.

Understand that our friend is a madman, who rides his three-wheeled Piaggio motorcycle with the governor of the state where he lives, has 28 tattoos— including one on his (hairy) chest of a man pushing a lawnmower, next to which he shaves a smooth swatch as if the tattooed lawnmower has mowed his chest; and as a hobby he spent a couple of years performing standup comedy as a Catholic priest (he’s Jewish).  None of the tattoos is visible outside our friend’s business suit. Nobody at his company knows he does stand-up under a stage name while wearing a Roman collar.   He plays the company game, but it is far from the only game he plays.

Our friend told us that the speaker at a recent banquet where he was honored as his division’s Salesperson of the Year gave a speech about ‘Finishing First.’ About how nothing else would do. About how a person has a choice between finishing first and being a loser. How in sales, there is no prize for second place, first place is the only place that matters. You either make the sale or you don’t.

Our friend approached the speaker after his speech and struck up a conversation that went like this.

FRIEND: Nice speech.
SPEAKER: Thank you.
FRIEND: What’d you get for it? Forty thousand dollars?  Am I close?
SPEAKER: Uh..that’s in the ballpark.
FRIEND: You know, our first choice for a speaker was Colin Powell, but he wanted two-hundred thousand dollars and we couldn’t afford it.  So it looks like finishing second worked out pretty well for you, didn’t it?

“When I saw the look on his face I felt bad for saying it,” says our friend. “But I couldn’t resist.  It was such an obviously lame premise.  There are all kinds of situations where finishing first has nothing to do with your success.”

So you’re waiting in line for the iPhone or the Twilight.  Cool.  It’s a happening.  A social event.  Remember, though, that meaningful transactions happen in the line, with other people, not at the end of it, with an apparatus or an apparition.

Enjoy the ride and you won’t ever have to worry about whether you’ll be the first to arrive.

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Posted in Games, Initiations, Issues, Leadership, Networked World, Relationships, Sales | 2 Comments »

The Power of Pull

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

This is not a review.

This is an appreciation.

PoP_CoverJohn Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison’s new book, The Power of Pull–How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion, describes the business environments most of us are living in these days:  fluid, complex, generative, with networks, not machines, as their framework.  The book itself reflects this.  Its structure mirrors the structure of a network.  Its concepts are expressed as a matrix.  This gives the Power of Pull depth and perspective that asks quite a bit of the reader.  I had to go through the book twice to even begin to grasp its concepts and their implications to business.

The reading expands as you’re reading, as if you could stop at almost any page in the book and use it as a lens to zoom in on some aspect of business in the 21st Century.  What will it be like?  How will it change us? How can we change it? Who will prosper? What will hold us back? What’s the relationship between chaos and control? Between core and edge? It’s a lot to ponder.  This is not some fluffy recipe for feeling good about the future.  This is an important assessment of the work to be done.

The Power of Pull labels this evolution ‘The Big Shift.’  Make no mistake, The Big Shift is a life-altering change of game.  It is the tornado to Oz.  It is the jump to hyperspace.  It is the event that turns everyday turtles into Ninjas.  Prepare to be transformed by what you read.

Here’s a small sampling of the many concepts expressed the book that can make the difference between survival and prosperity in the networked era of business.

Push vs. Pull. ‘Push’ business models are (the GameChangers term for it) ‘Industrial Age’ models.  They are machine-like, hierarchical, heavily scripted, and emphasize planning over preparation. As one manager told me recently, “We are supposed to plan for every contingency, but you can’t plan for every contingency.  It’s impossible.”  ‘Pull’ models, by contrast, are dynamic, nimble, and emphasize preparation over planning.  In the Pull model, plans are designed to evolve, and deviations from the norm are seen not as failures but as opportunities to learn and grow.

Stocks vs. Flows. Push models treat knowledge as a scarce commodity.  A stock.  A ‘Push’ manager says, “I know but I can’t tell you.”  Pull models treat knowledge as an abundant resource.  A flow.  A Pull manager says, “Here’s what I know that can help solve the problem.”

Fast Learning. Push models called for standardized institutional learning.  Everyone worked off the same playbook.  In the networked world, there’s no time to transfer knowledge from edge to core, have it interpreted, codified and re-distributed to the edge as institutional dogma.  By the time the core has reacted, the opportunity to put the knowledge to use has been lost.  Because they treat knowledge as abundant and not as a scarce commodity, Pull models are free to direct flows of knowledge not just to the core, but to wherever in the enterprise there is a problem to be solved.  This is a far more efficient way for a company to apply its knowledge than the old Push model.

Small Moves. As improvisers we learn that the little things can make the biggest difference to performance, because the little things that have the ability to expand into big things, and the audience loves this.  Big things, by contrast, can only get so big as to be unmanageable, or be broken down into manageable chunks.  The small moves have manageability built into them. Networks are designed to knit together small moves into significant phenomena.  When communication is significant, markets move.   And when markets move, money gets made.

Serendipity. (I neglected to include this in the original post, and it’s important.)  Serendipity is an unforeseen positive outcome.  Because networks contain infinite potential for serendipity, it is essential to take it into account in the Pull model, as Hagel III et al certainly do.  Improvisation can influence serendipity in two ways:  First, because unforeseen positive outcomes are what improvisers intend in every scene, it invites serendipity; second, it is a process for turning the unforeseen events into positive outcomes.   Push models automatically regard what is unforeseen as negative.  Pull models (and improvisers) greet what is unforeseen as an opportunity to make something positive happen.

What JSB, Hagel III and Davison describe in The Power of Pull is a kind of magnetism.  The cover of the book shows iron filings aligning along magnetic fields.  This is my one quibble, what I’d call a slight disconnect in their narrative:  If The Power of Pull is, in fact, meant to describe magnetism, then the concept of Push can’t be discounted or discredited quite so much as the authors seem to want.  Magnetism involves both Pull and Push, attraction and repulsion.  There is a relationship between the two.  Just because we are divorcing Push to marry Pull doesn’t mean we’ll never deal with Push again.  We had kids with Push.  We built some wealth together.  As the authors themselves point out in the book, without a core there can be no meaningful edge.  Push will never be entirely out of the picture.

There is a whole new language coming into existence to describe business in the networked world.  This language invokes new rules, like the 140 characters rule; and defines new ways of collaborating, like the crowdsourcing game.   The Power of Pull freshens the lexicon by describing how and why business is changing, must change, to prosper in the new realities made possible by networks.  If, as I believe, this is magnetism we’re talking about, the work of realizing the new realities will consist in equal parts of rejecting the negative, attracting the positive, and not messing with the in-betweens.   Push, Pull or Get Out of the Way!

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Posted in Education, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Games, Innovation, Issues, Leadership, Narrative, Networked World, Problem Solving, Speed | 2 Comments »

Eight Empty Arguments

Friday, May 28th, 2010

EmptyGasTank1A friend of ours working inside a large U.S.-based organization marvels at how much time gets wasted on what he calls Empty Arguments.  Empty Arguments, he observes, result in too many unfocused meetings and conversations involving too many people, and require too much follow-up and clarification.

In exploring this theme with him, we came up with eight Empty Arguments that suck up bandwidth and limit a company’s potential to innovate, adapt, and act quickly on opportunity:

1.  Who’s in charge.

The quest for, and maintenance of, one’s status is one of the most prevalent and profligate business behaviors there is.  It results in wasteful games like that old standard, “Kissing The Boss’s Ass.”

In the improvisational model, who has high status in a scene depends not on one’s job title or institutional pedigree, but on the circumstances of the scene.  Leadership does not always have to come from the top.  It is as likely to emanate from the center, in the form of rapid consensus-building, or from the rear, in the form of decisive and enthusiastic support for a scene, a player or a productive game.

2.  Scapegoating (a.k.a. The Blame Game, a.k.a. It Wasn’t Me, a.k.a. I Never Got Your Email)

This Empty Argument is another classic time-waster, a purely political game that’s a huge drag on productivity.  In the improvisational model, teams succeed and fail together.  Everyone is in charge, everyone accepts credit, and everyone shoulders blame.

Just look at how much time and effort BP is spending on assigning blame for the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.  President Obama made a good move yesterday by accepting full responsibility, a move designed to clear the air of this Empty Argument.  Edit. Done. Move on.  Whenever you, as a manager, sense any energy being devoted to scapegoating, edit the scene and move on.

3.  The Big Idea (a.k.a. The Killer Concept, a.k.a. The Gamechanger, a.k.a. The Moby Dick)

The quest for a Big Idea can turn into an Empty Argument in a three ways:  1) Stalking, capturing and processing a Big Idea can blind your team to other opportunities (this was an okay game on a whaling ship in the 1840s, not so much in the networked business environment of today); 2) so many people inside and outside the organization have to weigh in on a Big Idea that its original intention and power gets watered down or lost; and 3) the Big Idea will inevitably get divvied into a series of Little Ideas, so why not simply start with Little Ideas?—all of which will have the potential to morph into Big Ideas! Start small and build, don’t begin big and diminish!  Enhance, don’t dilute!

Focus on purpose and all your Little Ideas will align themselves with Big Themes.  Focus on process and Big Ideas will emerge organically.  Focus on people, because Big Ideas don’t change the game quarterly, people do, on a daily basis.  Big ideas come and go.  Purpose, process and people are the stars you can steer the ship by.

4.  The research.  Research is a snapshot taken in the past.  It can tell you a lot about where you’ve been but very little about where you’re going. It is a dial on the dashboard but is not a way of charting your course or predicting what the weather will be like in the future.  Research can inform a scene, but it should almost never be what the scene is about.

PalinHand15.  How to spin a story. Scripting, editing, re-writing, getting bottlenecked on approvals, and then spinning a narrative for your audience is a really Empty Argument. As much as I abhor her politics and her prideful ignorance, Sarah Palin gets a lot of credit as an improviser. The reason she can stay relevant and a beat ahead of the news cycles is that, unlike John McCain and most other politicians, she’s not scripting or trying to spin anything, she is relating to her environment in real time, in her own authentic way.  It drives the liberal news spinners crazy.  (President Obama does the same to the righties.)  Nosy neighbor?  Build a fence!  When Palin makes notes on the palm of her hand during a speech, the Ivy League-educated (I do not include Brown grads in this) grademaking machines in the liberal media try to spin it as “Doesn’t do her homework.”  Palin, however, knows intuitively that 90% of the people who see this image will have it made this move themselves.  We can relate.  The lesson:  Living your narrative is more effective than trying to live up to a narrative you’ve scripted, then convincing others to buy into it, too (see Woods, Eldrick “Tiger”).

6.  Labeling. In the Networked World, curation is an essential skill.  The ability to provide context for ubiquitous content is important, and should be an area of constant focus.  The Empty Argument here begins with the notion that everything has to fit into the known universe of the organization or brand, that there will be an institutional meme to deal with every anomaly.  In a networked environment, there are so many anomalies that this is an impossibility.  Don’t waste time arguing about how to label everything. This dampens originality and creative energy.  Approach every situation as its own anomaly.  Act first, label later.

7.   The platform. This is one of the newer Empty Arguments that have gone viral in large organizations.  Decisions about which technology platforms to use has become a high-stakes game that often involves tens of millions of dollars and countless hours of discussion and debate.  Here are a couple of reasons why platform Arguments are often Empty:  1)  There are too many platforms to assess with any certainty, thousands of them.  No one can be an expert in all of them.  For this reason, decisions about platforms often as not come from a personal agenda, and not from any qualified assessment of all the options.  2)  The platform is secondary to the narrative.  By arguing about platforms, a company is pulling focus from its narrative.  This is putting the cart ahead of the horse.  Performance has very little to do with platforms.  Great design is great design whether it’s computer-generated, hand-drawn or modeled in clay.  Narrative first, platform later.

8.  Who’s right and who’s wrong. When you script your narrative, there’s only one ‘right’ way to deal with a problem and every other way (see ‘Labeling’ above) is, by definition, ‘wrong.’ Improvisers understand that there’s always more than one way to solve a problem, and that the ability to collaborate and come up with original solutions to original problems is far more effective than arguing about who’s right and who’s wrong in any given scene.  Improvisers focus on whether or not behaviors are consistent or inconsistent with themes and environment.   This liberates all sorts of possibilities that aren’t present when the argument centers on right vs. wrong.

So…let’s put a cost estimate on these Empty Arguments:

The organization where our friend works, a relatively well-run company by American standards, employs 120K people around the world.  Figure 10K of them are managers who have a say in the direction of the company and its brands.  Our friend estimates that a third of a typical manager’s day (call it 3 hrs/day) is spent engaged in Empty Arguments.  That’s 30K management hours a day across the enterprise.  At an average cost per manager of $100/hr, that’s $3M a day, which equates to approximately $270M worth of wasted time per quarter!

Improvisation gives employees the ability to see and minimize the Empty Arguments listed here, and many others, too.   If the managers at my friend’s company can spend one less hour per day on Empty Arguments, it will save the company $1M per day, or $360M per year in resources that can be  put to better use.

That’s a lot of Empty.

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Posted in Agreement Principle, Coaching, Games, Issues, Leadership, Narrative, Objectives, Problem Solving, Themes | 5 Comments »

What He Said

Saturday, April 17th, 2010
Tecumseh

Tecumseh

Live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart.

Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their views,and demand that they respect yours.

Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life.

Seek to make your life long and of service to your people.

Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide.

Always give a word or sign of salute when meeting or passing a stranger if in a lonely place.

Show respect to all people, but grovel to none.

When you arise in the morning, give thanks for the light, for your life and strength.

Give thanks for your food and for the joy of living.  If you see no reason for giving thanks,the fault lies in yourself.

When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death,so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way.

Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home.

- Tecumseh of the Shawnee Nation, whose tribe hunted and lived on the land in Indiana where I grew up

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Posted in Character, Environment, Fundamentals, Group Mind, Initiations, Issues, Leadership, Themes | 2 Comments »

Digg the Toyota Scene

Thursday, April 8th, 2010

When Toyota hit the icy patch in their narrative this January, they did not do what most organizations their size would do, they didn’t do what the Tiger Woods brand did when the Escalade hit the fire hydrant:  huddle, confer, strategize, ponder, debate, script, re-write, close ranks, assume a defensive posture, call in damage control experts, and use all of it as an excuse for Not Doing Anything.

No, they improvised.  And by that, I don’t mean they flew by the seat of their pants, or made it up as they went along.  From the CEO on down, they jumped into the conversation with the audience and performed aggressively to build a narrative that countered the media hysteria around the recall and the ambulance-chasing members of the legal profession who fanned its flames.ToyotaLogos1

This is what improvisation is.  A conversation designed to connect the performers with their community.  Not a monologue, a strategy, a script or a campaign.  A dialogue. Observations and comments.  Listening and responding.  Action and reaction.

AdWeek this week highlights one component of Toyota’s conversation with the audience:  a Digg Dialogg with Toyota’s head of U.S. Sales, Jim Lentz.  One of the more telling beats in the article is how skeptical J.D. Power & Associates, the traditional arbiter of performance and quality in the automotive industry is about this tactic.  They don’t see ‘movement’ in their polls, they say.  The jury is still out, they say.  What the J.D. Power people fail to grasp is that the conversation itself is the movement.  The fact that it happened, along with untold other interactions between the brand and audience, constitute a flow of events that defy any one snapshot’s (i.e. poll’s) ability to capture its effectiveness.  Trying to measure one data point in a narrative with a million data points is foolish.  J. D. Powers is trying to apply old school metrics to a new school process.  It’s like taking a poll about how people feel about Rings and using it to gauge the audience’s perception of Lord of the Rings.

No doubt there’s a major problem with Toyota’s process, the company has admitted as much.  Its quantity got ahead of its quality.  It began thinking of its audience as consumers instead of customers.  It’s a big, big, issue, with immense implications for the brand.  What’s impressive is that they didn’t let the immensity overwhelm them.  They didn’t look for an epic solution to the epic problem.  Rather, they began a journey of epic proportions., and they are conducting it one conversation, one scene, at a time.  They are contrite, but they are not backpedaling, or wasting time deliberating.  That would cause the narrative to lose its momentum.  They didn’t script a narrative and then try to force it on the audience.  They improvised, with the conviction that their journey will eventually re-connect them with their community, and win back its confidence and its applause for their performance.

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Posted in Branding, Communication, Dialogue, Issues, Listening, Narrative, Problem Solving, Sales, Scenes, Themes | 1 Comment »

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