Specific notes:

- After cautioning the audience at the beginning of the presentation about long monologues as a means of communicating, I wrapped up the presentation with a long monologue.

- Our direction was soft on a couple of the exercises. This resulted in a kind of sponginess in the middle of the two-hour session, with drawn-out explanations by Antonio and me, less focus by the teams, and a rushed ‘third act’ in the last 15 mins.

- As any improviser can tell you, you have to work on pieces of the process at a time. You cannot drop everything you know on your audience all at once. In my explanation of what we call ‘the orchestral model’ of business communication, and the concept we call ‘quantum narrative,’ I got into more detail than the audience was able to absorb in such a short window. ‘Too clever by half,”as they say in Blighty. ‘Ten pounds of potatoes in a five pound bag,” as they say in Boise.

- The teamwork that usually happens during our workshops was not so much apparent in this one. Things stayed more individualized, and less knit-together than we would like.

- The tempo at which we conducted the session was inconsistent. If I had been conducting a piece of music, it would have been in about 20 different time signatures, with me conducting at least part of the performance with my back to the orchestra. Missing cues. Dynamics roller-coastery instead of scenic.

These notes are related to our business objective for the workshop, which was to explain GameChangers and give attendees a sampling of what we do with our clients. At achieving this objective, we give ourselves a 50%. We were only about half as effective as we believe we’re capable of being.

So why are we not upset?

Two reasons: One is that because our process lets us see so clearly where the issues are, we have already taken steps to remedy them before the next open workshop.

The other, bigger, reason is that the outcomes of the session have been extraordinary, better than the outcomes of many workshops where our performance was actually  much better than it was Tuesday. A lot of credit for this goes to the people who were in attendance. One of the points we make in these introductions to GameChangers is to distinguish between objectives of the game, and the outcomes of the game, and wow, has that been our experience since Tuesday.

These are some of the outcomes:

- Our friend Ron Finley, the ‘renegade urban gardener’ connected with our friends Jenna and Adam from TakePart, who were in attendance. TakePart is the digital division of Participant Media. They are going to do a story about Ron.

- Erin Reilly, the creative director of USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, spoke yesterday to her faculty committee about having us do a one-day workshop there in March.

- Marcy and Strath Hamilton of Tri-Coast Studios, which is producing a lot of e-books, met a Ruby on  Rails coder named Patrick Maddox, who was in attendance Tuesday.  They’ve been looking for a coder. Now they’re talking to Patrick.

- T.H. Culhane and David Groder, who are working on a robotics education program funded by the U.S. Naval Research Dept., are making a presentation today (Wednesday) at Washington High School in Los Angeles, and are being joined by Ron Finley, who is a Washington High graduate. This is happening as a result of them connecting on Tuesday night.

- T.H. and Groder will soon get introduced by GameChangers associate Jamal Williams, who was in town from D.C. for the Tuesday workshop, to Nii Simmonds, the ‘Nubian Cheetah,’ a Ghanian-born D.C. resident and former investment banker who funds a program called Afrobotics, a robotics competition for African schoolchildren.

- Kevin Wall, who is producing the opening ceremonies and concert for the 2014 World Cup in Rio, was in attendance. Kevin learned for the first time that Fernando Godoy, who used to be an intern in at one of Kevin’s companies, is today a successful internet entrepreneur in Sao Paulo and is a partner in Spirit of Football 2014. Kevin and Fernando are going to meet the next time Kevin is in Brazil.

- Tri-Coast Productions and GameChangers are meeting this coming Monday to discuss two projects–a GameChangers ebook and a video series that would be produced and performed by people from our network of world-class improvisers.

- Andy Sternberg has since Tuesday introduced us to two friends of his whom he believes will be interested in our work.

- We were able to continue a conversation with Nicholle McClelland Betelier, a marketing officer from IdeaLab, that began at a yoga retreat in December.

- A crypto-hipster named Som showed up uninivited, and asked some of the best questions and offered some of the most thoughtful comments of the evening. Thank you, Som, whoever and wherever you are! Please stay in touch!

- My favorite outcome of the evening came about thanks to a ‘gift’ from David Groder. At the very end of the session, after my long-winded closing monologue, Groder asked if we could go around the room and have everyone introduce themselves. All 25 people introduced themselves and described the work they’re doing. It was really remarkable, not only because it completely subverted the normal order of things—introductions at the end instead of the beginning!—but also because the people in attendance are doing brilliant things in the world. Attendees are working in robotics, social media, community development, urban gardening, fashion, cause-related marketing, transmedia storytelling, architecture, criminal law, venture capital, entertainment, academia, e-books, tech, watercraft stabilization, app development, etc. etc. etc. Introductions at the end became a very enjoyable kind of reveal. Almost everyone stayed and talked for half-an-hour or more after the session, and I believe most of that conversation would not have happened if not for David’s gift to the scene.

Never get objectives confused with outcomes. Objectives are what we use to assess and improve our performance. Outcomes happen as a result of having performed. Objectives are finite. Outcomes are unlimited. Objectives create focus. Outcomes generate value.

Post-event conversations were the most productive part of the evening

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One night when my son, Alex (who’s leaving tomorrow for a job in NYC) was five years old, we watched the movie

“E.T. had to go home,” I said. “To his family, on the planet where he lives.”

“I didn’t want him to go. I wanted him to stay with Elliot.”

“E.T. and Eliot were sad about it, too. But they love each other. And as long as they love each other, they’ll never really be apart. In their hearts, they’ll always be together.”

A pause, as Alex ponders.

“So you and I will always be together?”

“Yes, Son, you and I will always be together.”

Of all the motivational sayings used in business my least favorites express the idea that  ‘Life is Short.’

Because you see, Life is not short. Life is long. Our own lives are short, for sure. Birth, fornication and death—as the poet Ogden Nash so succinctly put it—are the facts when you get down to brass tacks. A human being’s life—or a whale’s or a bacterium’s—is a tiny spark in the night of eternity. But to say or act as if life itself is short generates the kinds of  hurrying and worrying that can cause us to miss much of what life actually is, or can be.

Life is long like the love a parent has for a child. There is nothing short about that. Nothing hurried. Time ceases to matter when we are proving our love.

Life is long like the warmth of a fire on a cold night. We are warmed as much by an experience as old as humankind as by the fire itself.

No matter what mountain we have chosen to climb, or what sudden twist of fate confronts us, when we behave as if life is short, we begin to hurry, and that’s when mistakes happen. As the basketball coach John Wooden said, “Be quick, but don’t hurry.”

My wish for 2012 is that we all find ways to appreciate the idea that life is long…

That the reason we make footprints on the planet is to mark a path for who comes after, and that it’s not the size of the footprint that matters, but the direction of the path.

That we are patient with one another, and not short, abrupt, rude, inconsiderate, unkind—all the stuff we do intentionally or not, when we get impatient, when we are driven by the ticking of an internal clock that no one else can hear.

That we embrace the notion that our Success is inevitable, and so is our Failure.

That the Birth-Fornication-Death thing is fleeting, but poetry endures.

That we remember that nothing of value was ever harmed by the taking of time. (I thought Abraham Lincoln said it, but can’t find the citation. What’s likely is that even if Abe Lincoln did say it, someone said it before Abe. Because life is long.)

That we see growth not as something that takes time, but as something that transcends time, because growth is happening now and always has been. What can take time is our own ability to see and make sense of it. The Disney animator Ken Anderson once pointed out to me, about the great old California Oak trees in Descanso Gardens near his home in Flintridge, CA, “The trees are dancing. If you could look at them over a long, long time you would see them dancing.” Life-is-short sees a tree. Life-is-long sees a dance.

That while our time here is limited, our ability to love one another is not. And that as long as we act out of love, our footprints will mark a path worth following.

Have a lively 2012! Don’t be the Tree, be the Dance!

In a business environment that changes at the speed of thought, there are lots of issues with this leadership model. Specifically, it’s too slow. it does not let an organization act quickly enough on opportunities or adapt cost-effectively to changing market conditions.

In networked organizations, by contrast, leadership is organic, it grows out of the structure of the scene and its problem-solving process, and not from a presumed hierarchy.

Visibly good leadership is essential to attract employees and customers to a brand and keep them engaged in its narrative, but that visibility can come from anywhere. Sure, it can and should still come from the ‘top.’ It can also come through the side door, from behind, the center, the edge, from out of left field, up from the ashes, or out from the shadows. It can be bombastic, it can be imperceptible, or any dynamic in between.

In networked organizations, leadership is everyone’s responsibility, and there is no single context for it, or one accepted style of leading. It is the scene that determines what leadership looks like, and what purpose it serves.

Further, being a leader is no bigger or lesser a deal than being a follower (i.e. team player). Just as everyone in a networked organization ix expected to be a leader, everyone is also expected to be a follower. A player’s leadership (or followship) status is a condition of the scene and the game, not necessarily a condition of his or her rank in the organization.

Among the questions addressed, on a scene-by-scene basis, in a gamechanging leadership model:

-Whose subject matter expertise, perspective, or professional experience is most important to the scene?

-How well-articulated and shareable is the vision?

-Is your scene’s narrative (and its possible outcomes) scripted ahead of time, or co-created by your team as a result of its problem-solving process?

-Are your team’s roles complementary and supportive, lacking expertise to solve the problem, or overlapping and in conflict?

-What is the balance, and who does the balancing, between listening and speaking? Between information and intuition? Deconstruction and construction? Postmortem and Premortem? Questions and declarations?

-How does a team stay focused on the problem at hand, while at the same time honoring historical and future organizational narratives?

-Who decides? How?

-What’s the game? When is it time to change the game or edit the scene?

And while there’s no one style or way of behaving that defines effective leadership, two things are true of all gamechanging leaders:

1) They listen first. 2) They do not script outcomes.

They understand that there are many ways to solve a problem, and that most of those ways will not be their own. This leadership model is the only way to act quickly enough on market opportunities and adapt cost-effectively enough to changes in the environment to stay competitive in the networked world.

NEXT: How we define Roles

Dr. David Boje, the 'Einstein of Story'

This morning, I’m wrapping up a visit with Dr. David Boje, who’s on the faculty of the business school at New Mexico State University. Boje’s work focuses on storytelling and its effect on business (huge!) I participated in two of his classes, one undergrad, one for PhD candidates, in which we explored what he calls the Quantum Physics of Storytelling and its relationship to improvisation. We found all kinds of connections and I think we both came away from the experience feeling there’s  lot more to be discovered and explored in this realm. Improvisation is the ‘trigger mechanism’ that can release the quantum energy (and meaning) stored in stories. Boje’s work provides the framework for the process and the empirical evidence of its outcomes. We’ll leave it at that for now. Very excited to see where this scene goes, and how it can help GameChangers’ clients!

An interviewer asked Terry one of the most cliche questions in sports (paraphrasing): “Jason, what made the difference this year? How did the Mavericks finally win the championship?”

Terry gave an answer that was anything but a cliche. “We found a home for all our stories,” he said.  It might be my favorite sports quote of all time.

They found a home for all their stories.

That is such a huge idea, I’m going to write it again, just so I  can savor it once more.

They found a home for all their stories.

I think of Terry’s quote every time I see another inescapable headline or hear another sports radio host mention the scandal at Penn State. See, they found a home for all their stories, too. Happy Valley became a home for stories of geographic isolation, cultural myopia, personal idolatry, money, bigtime college sports, religion, patriarchy, imperialism, egotism, groupthink, pride, fear, careerism, irresponsibility and institutional insanity. And, oh yeah, the horror stories of a child rapist preying on the Happy Valleyness of it all.

(I think Terry’s quote gets to the heart of the Occupy Wall Street movement, too. America is supposed to be a home for more stories than those being imposed on most citizens by the financial oligarchs of Wall Street and the politicians who are their puppets. We are supposed to be a country where the stories we imagine for ourselves have a chance of coming true. Not a 1% chance. More like a 99% chance. For me, Jason Terry was the first person to Occupy Wall Street, because his quote was the first time I’d thought of politics in these terms: As a country, are we creating a home for all our stories? Or just for the so-called-success stories of a privileged and fortunate few?)

When you think about what kind of country or city you want to live in, or what kind of company you want to be, become, or belong to, think about it in Jason Terry’s terms. What stories will call you home?

Lonnie Marshall (l.) and the Lil Big Ups performing on their 'Rubba Boxes' at the Hollywood Farmer's Market

A couple of years ago, we got the Life Drum Core invited to perform as part of the World Wildlife Fund’s Earth Hour celebration at L.A. Live. A few weeks later, the kids gave me a couple of their hand-painted buckets, autographed by the group, as souvenirs. Naturally I kept one. Off and on for the past two years, I’ve been trying to make a meaningful gift of the second bucket. L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa jammed with the kids after they’d performed for Earth Hour, and a number of people in the Mayor’s office have told me since then that he ‘would love to have the bucket,’ but no one from the Mayor’s office acted on it, so after a series of slow phone call volleys, I moved on.

Next, I tried to give it to an executive at AEG who’d arranged for Lonnie’s kids to get a dozen sets of drumsticks from the Grammy Hall of Fame gift shop. After the L.A. Live show, the exec said to me, “I want one of those buckets for my office.” He was always too busy, however, to actually accept the bucket. “Leave it in the lobby,” was the word finally relayed by his assistant. Didn’t do it. Leaving it in the lobby would have turned a meaningful artifact into just another hunk o’ schwag on the non-stop schwagathon of gift baskets, food, wine, comp tickets, and sports and music memorabilia sent to an office with that exec’s title on the door. No, this gift was too sacred to be left to the lobby gods and processed through the AEG gift-receiving system like just another gourmet cheese wheel. The rule was that it had to be presented in person and accompanied by its story.

Life Drum Core plays drum buckets at L.A. Live

Today  I took a couple of bags of groceries to the young people camping outside L.A. City Hall as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement. As I was leaving my office to get the groceries, the Life Drum Core bucket caught my eye. I was using it as a stand for a guitar amp. I took it. Put the groceries in it. Handed it off to members of the movement standing along Temple Street in front of City Hall.

Groceries delivered in drum bucket signed by Life Drum Core, today, Occupy Wall Street at L.A. City Hall.

Into the bucket I dropped a couple of business cards on which I’d written, ‘I’ll blog about the the origin of the drum/bucket.’ This is the blog. I hope that whoever discovers this story keeps it going. And I don’t mean repeat the story I’ve told here. This is just the beginning. Build on it. Bang on the bucket until its story becomes your own. Keep its beat alive.

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.

'A Captain of Industry' by Graham McKean

I don’t think it’s a matter of anything ‘taking leadership’s place.’ What are we going to do, remove the word from the dictionary? Are we all going to wait around for someone else to make the first move? (Oh wait, that’s what happens now.) What leaders can do is adapt to a business environment that is different than the one that shaped the textbook definitions of leadership. This environment moves faster, with more, and more fleeting, opportunities for a generation of restless, tech-savvy players entering the global workforce. To prosper in this environment, leaders and the companies under their guidance must adapt. This is not a one-time only thing, adaptation is not a new program that that can be taken off a shelf and ‘acquired.’ It’s a way of life.

We call this new model of leadership Flexible Vision. Naturally it is informed by the principles of improvisation, among them:

Take care of yourself first. This is a phrase popularized by Chicago improvisation master, Mick Napier. It doesn’t mean be selfish, as in ‘get your golden parachute packed, and don’t worry about where the plane is going because you’re jumping off before it gets there.’  Not that. It means come prepared. Have a take. Be someone. Stand for something. Rock your style. What your style is doesn’t matter nearly as much as whether or not you rock it.

Begin with listening. How can you contribute to the conversation if you don’t know what the conversation is about?

Follow the follower. This is a Viola Spolin concept. The narrative was going on before you entered the scene, and it will continue after you’re gone. Don’t ‘try to make things happen.’ Connect with what’s already happening.

Let go of status. In the old leadership models, status followed a person from scene to scene. If you were the CEO that was your role, and you played it in every scene you were in. This model forced a lot of managers into a mode of pretending to know more than they actually did, to feign authority in subjects with which they were not familiar, just to preserve their status. These ‘false narratives’ are a big inefficiency in any organization clinging to old leadership models. Improvisers, by contrast, change roles and status freely from scene to scene. Though your title is ‘The CEO,’ your roles can be ‘Student,’  ‘Fearless Explorer,”Arbitrator,’ ‘Cheerleader,’ etc. Adaptive leaders adjust their role and status to fit the scene, not the other way around. And the higher a person’s rank in the company (however that is gauged), the more adaptive that person can be, because the range of roles he or she can play is wider than that of a lower-ranked person, e.g. a new employee.

Give gifts. This is the phrase improvisers use for supporting one’s scene and one’s fellow players. In improvisation, giving gifts is the most productive move there is. Those who do it most consistently? Those are our leaders.

'Made for Each Other' by Graham McKean

]]> http://www.gamechangers.com/index.html/archives/2743/feed 0 http://www.gamechangers.com/index.html/archives/2731 http://www.gamechangers.com/index.html/archives/2731#comments Wed, 21 Sep 2011 16:21:20 +0000 admin http://www.gamechangers.com/index.html/?p=2731 She sold her HuffPost to AOL for $315M, and didn’t offer as much as a thank you note, forget about any money, to the people who, like myself, had posted most of the content that created the value behind her brand.

Today, the HuffPost ran this headline:

GameChangers LLC owns the trademark ‘GameChangers’ in 17 different trade categories, including business education, seminars, improvisation for business, training, etc. I’m not going to say that HuffPost’s repeated use of the phrase ‘Game Changers’ in its editorial violates our trademark (though I implied it in a snarky comment on her story today). And I don’t know for sure, the difference, litigationally speaking, between ‘GameChangers’ and ‘Game Changers’ with the words spaced. We don’t own the phrase, didn’t coin it, and lots of people use it–including every sports announcer who ever lived, and the Bloomberg Network, which DOES for sure tromp on our trademark (but how are we going to sue or even slow down a billionaire politician’s billion-dollar company in the legal arena? If you’ve got ideas, let me know.)

I do know that last year my HuffPost producer, Willow Bay, brought up to Arianna the HuffPost’s use of the ‘Game Changers’ branding and proposed a conversation between the two of us about a possible collaboration. Nothing. Zippo. We shouted into the maw and got nary and echo.

In improvisation, we honor taking. You’ve got to take strongly, and politeness has nothing to do with it. Be aggressive. Play hard. Go for it. Claim turf. ‘Take care of yourself first,’ in the words of the legendary teacher, Mick Napier.

The thing is, we honor giving, too, and if anything, we honor it more. Yes-and. Connect. Make others look good.  Share the narrative. Give gifts.  Politeness, the consideration of others, has a lot to do with it.

One without the other makes you only half a player.

This is just my experience speaking, it does not represent any kind of larger dataset, for all I know Arianna has given $314M to Sloan-Kettering Hospital since February. It is pretty direct experience, though, so it must mean something. What it means to me is that Arianna is Half a Player. She’s fantastic at taking, and needs to work on her giving.

As you go about your business today, wielding a sword forged by your your authority, your education, your responsibility, your intelligence and experience, don’t think of this sword as a severing device that you use to slice, dice, and eviscerate. Don’t go medieval on anyone’s ass, or be chopping off  heads to generate fear among the populace. Instead, think of this sword of yours as a de-severing device, a weapon of compassion, one that joins–

the fire of purpose with the steel of structured action;

the art of entrepreneurship with the craft of leadership;

the genius of others with your own;

your history and your future;

your intuition and your intellect;

your character and your role;

your brand and your customers.

A weapon of choice isn’t the same thing as a choice of weapons. How you choose to use your weapon is way more important than what weapon you choose to use.