Archive for the ‘Narrative’ Category

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Is Social Useless?

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

A response to Spencer Fry of Carbonmade, who recently posted a blog entry entitled: “Down With Social–Social is Immeasurable and a Waste of Time.”

Quantum1ASpencer, I agree to this extent:  The phrase ‘Social Media’ is so amorphous as to be essentially meaningless.  In fact, all media are social.  It’s like saying Wooden Tree, or Feathered Bird.

The most social medium is sexual intimacy, followed (if we’re talking relevance; preceded if we’re talking chronology) by meaningful face-to-face conversations, scaling out from there, and eventually reaching the nebulous netherworld of thoughtless Likes, meaningless Tweets and snarky YouTube comments.  Noise.  Cosmetic data with no emotional or meta resonance.

What’s usually ignored in conversations about Social Media platforms is the Science of Narrative.  Narrative is the force that makes media meaningful.  Narrative may not make the world go round, but it describes for us why and how it does.  It provides context for information that would otherwise appear as random.  The reason social messaging echos and evaporates is that it’s not connecting with a narrative.  (A hashtag or a mention does not a narrative make!)

The most relevant aspect of Social Media will turn out to be the lens it afford us with which to perceive narratives.  We are, I believe, at a stage in the history of narratology that parallels where physics was at the turn of the last century, when the science moved from the Newtonian to the Quantum.

Marketers who use social media as you have described it, as a fashion statement, are doomed to keep firing blanks at a target they cannot see.  They are using Industrial Aged models to engage in a Networked environment.  It’s like trying to split an atom with a pendulum.

Those who use it as a lens on narrative, will be able to direct ‘particles of meaning’ at the quantum narrative made visible by social technologies and capture the massive energy predictably released by these interactions.

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Posted in Communication, Emotion, Issues, Narrative, Networked World, story | 1 Comment »

Los Mineros, Part Two

Tuesday, August 31st, 2010

A serial analysis of the quest to rescue 33 miners trapped 2,300 feet underground in a copper mine outside Copiapo, Chile…

TCMG2Levels of Meaning

With the eyes of the news media fixed on one very specific location, everything about the Los Mineros narrative is tightly focused and vividly portrayed.  There’s no mystery to it, no hidden agenda (with maybe the exception of a mining company looking to avoid liability, which itself would be no surprise).  With the focus so intense right now on the mine itself and the rescue efforts, almost every element of the narrative is visible even to a distant observer like me, who might check the story every day or two on the webs to see how the miners are doing.

It is extremely clear how the narrative is conveyed on three distinct Levels of Meaning.

All communication happens on three levels:  Cosmetic (data, information, quantification, surface descriptions, neutral language), Emotional (passion, mood, empathy, attitude, ups, downs) and Meta (symbolism, context, iconography, metaphor, perspective, interpretation, the subconscious connections).

Observe, and learn from, how the Los Mineros narrative is conveyed on these three levels:

Cosmetic: Tons of information here. Plans and backup plans described in detail.  The three four-inch pipes that have become their lifeline.  The NASA psychologists who’ve arrived to help.  The number of calories they’re eating every day (2,000), and how much water they’re supposed to drink every day (5 litres).  We know about the ‘super drill’ being brought in to bore through the rock.  This early in the story, there’s still a lot of cosmetic meaning to be conveyed, an abundance of factual information.  Expect that, at some point, this level of meaning will begin to lose steam, and that the tellers of the story will begin to place more emphasis on the other two levels.

Emotional: As always, this is where the most meaning resides, where the story is most potent, and touches us most profoundly.  We know that some of Los Mineros have been depressed.  We know that they have been able to communicate with their families.  They have shared their frustration.  We feel their claustrophobia.  They have begun to play roles, and these will rouse emotions, too.  Who will give the pep talks?  Who can get them to smile?  Keeping their emotions positive will be key to their mental health during their ordeal, and so, the longer the ordeal goes on, the more crucial the emotional content of the narrative will become.

Meta: The video feed is an existential lifeline.  “I video, therefore I am.”  For this reason, its very existence is a hopeful symbol.  The handsomer guys are getting more facetime on camera.  Stars of the narrative, those who can best hold our attention, will emerge as the Cosmetic flow slows.  Bringing in the NASA psychologists to deal with the miners’ prolonged isolation is a recognition of the global significance of the narrative, and it ennobles Los Mineros by equating them with astronauts, Los Astronautas, and to the heroic qualities we ascribe them.  This blog post is, itself, meta communication about the rescue effort.

Sometimes uncovering the Meta language requires digging beneath the surface, because beneath the surface is where the Meta meaning works.  For example the number of miners, 33, has deep meta significance in the predominantly Catholic country of Chile, because 33 is commonly believed to be Jesus Christ’s age when he died on the cross.  When Los Mineros finally walk into the light, the date on the calendar will not matter, they’ll be celebrating Easter in Chile.

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Posted in Character, Communication, Emotion, Narrative | 2 Comments »

JetBlue Scene

Monday, August 30th, 2010

Jeremy Redleaf, one of the new physicists of the narrative form and the creator of this brilliant siteOJN1initated the scene when he sent me this emailJBJeremy1

about this JetBlue adJetBlue1

which is anchored by copy that saysJBJeremy2In my role of Commentor On All Things About Improvisation in Business, I responded to Jeremy’s email with this GameChangers postJBGameChangers1in which i point out that ‘the first rule of improv’ if there even is such a thing, which itself is debatable, is not to say ‘yes’ but to say ‘yes and.’   ‘Yes’ is a state of mind.  ‘Yes and’ is action.  The most fertile ground in the world is useless until it’s planted.  ‘Yes’ is the ground.  ‘And’ is the seed.  My blog post inspired Jeremy…JBJeremy2C

Posi-ffiti!  Yes!  I love threads like this.  As usual, I’d tweeted a link to my blog post. I decided to yes-and Jeremy by calling JetBlue’s attention to its error with a Tweet.  I was able to Google their CMO, Marty St. George and find his Twitter account.  JBTweet2To Marty’s credit, he tweeted back within 15 mins.  This already puts @martysg and JetBlue way ahead of most CMOs in brand narrative game.  It also tells me that this is one vigilant, sensitive cat.  Dude’s running it like Ochocincomartysg1

here @martysg commits the improvisation error of denying.  He does this by being vague–what does “if you said ‘no quotation marks’ I might be with you” mean, anyway?–and acting as if I’d accused him of misquoting ‘John’, and seems to be saying that the mistake is not theirs, but mine, for calling them out on the wrong thing.  I responded by suggesting the ‘Posi-ffiti’ gameJBTweet3

and further suggested how to initiate the game…JBTweet11

@martysg blocks the game… martysg2By acting as if I’d said something I hadn’t–that ‘The Posi-ffiti Game’ would have to be played without ‘John’s’ permission–Marty kills the scene.  This was probably his intention.  He also implies that quoting people without their permission is MY style.  In one statement, he refuses my gift and pimps my character.  Nice.  This is classic old school management style, a familiar corporate game I call, “Parry and Thrust.”  It’s played  by stalling, and staying non-committal (“Hm…if….I might…”) and then landing a knockout blow (“Do something unethical?  Not us.  YOU maybe.  Not us.”)

Look, everybody understands that a CMO like @martysg will not alter an ad campaign because some nitpicker tweets him about the word ‘and’ in an ad.  Like I said, he gets credit for being open enough to have the conversation in the first place.  This is more responsiveness from a tweet than you’d get from 90% of all the CMOs in the world.  It is, however, short of the kind of action a person would get from an improvisational brand like Southwest Airlines.  Furthermore, what happened when @martysg did respond is precisely the point of my blog post.  The conversation didn’t go anywhere because Marty St. George ‘yessed’ and he did not ‘and.’

How might Marty have yes-anded?  Anyone who’s gone through a GameChangers workshop can give you a dozen games that would be more productive than ‘Parry and Thrust.’

The good news coming out of this exchange is that all is not lost.  Jeremy Redleaf has a new job description for OddJobNation: “Posi-ffiti Artist.”

To an improviser, Lost is just the first step on the way to Found.

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Posted in Additions and Edits, Agreement Principle, Branding, Character, Communication, Dialogue, Games, Gifts, Initiations, Issues, Listening, Narrative, Scenes, story | No Comments »

The Trapped Chilean Miner Game

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

Several years ago, in a Level One improv class at I.O. West, I did a scene with Parvesh Cheena where he and I were given the situation of being trapped together in an elevator.   I immediately began McGuyvering my way out of the situation.   (“You got a paper clip?  We’ll pick the lock on that panel and…blah blah blah.”)  Big rookie mistake.  Our teacher, Sarah Gee, said to me, “If you get out of the elevator the scene’s over.  Show us who you are to one another while you’re trapped!”

TrappedMiners1This broke today over CNN. The 33 men trapped in a Chilean copper mine have begun to assume different roles that will help them survive the time, estimated to be months, it will take rescuers to drill through 2300 feet of solid rock to rescue them.  This is brilliant.  They’re designing a game to help them get out alive without going batshit crazy while they’re waiting to be rescued.  This is going to give us all a good look at how a game works, and how it informs and inspires group strategies.  One thing is already clear:  There are some good improvisers trapped in that mine.

To review, here are the elements of a game: Environment, Roles, Rules, Objective(s).

Let’s begin with the Objective.  Simple:  ‘Get out of here alive without going crazy.’  Same as most survival strategies.

The Environment of the Trapped Chilean Miner Game could not be more starkly defined:  A pool of darkness deep beneath the surface of the earth, and the rest of the world watching up above.  The contrasts between the Down Below and the Up Above are extreme, an archetype embedded deep in every human’s subconscious.  The Well, the Fallen Rubble, the Cave, the Mine–all tap deep into our unconscious, where our memories of the womb are stored.   As my friend Richard Wynn Taylor says, “It will remind us of something we’ve never seen before.”

The Roles, as stated in the CNN story, are developing.  One of the miners has become a spiritual leader.  Another an entertainer who sings Elvis songs.  Expect that all or most of the miners will eventually define roles for themselves, some as group characters (‘peacekeepers,’ ‘storytellers,’ ‘spokespeople,’ ‘mediators’ etc. etc.)  Some of the miners will play more than one role, depending on the scene they’re in.  Eventually some of them may trade roles, taking turns speaking to the media, for example.  What’s also interesting about the roles element of the game is that all 33 men trapped in the cave will, for the duration of their rescue, abandon the roles they were playing when they went Down Below: None of them will be playing the role of a miner.  Note also that ‘trapped miner’ is not a role.  It’s a circumstance.  Your circumstance does not define your role; it’s your behavior in your circumstance that defines your role.

Expect that in the coming weeks, we’ll be hearing about the Rules of the TCMG. These Rules will be designed to create agreement and establish ground rules for the miners’ interactions.  The rules will initially address the fundamentals such as sleeping, eating, sharing resources, communicating with Up Above etc., and then get more detailed.  The rules of a game will not be designed to create sameness or repetition, but to liberate performance, by empowering players to play their roles well.  The miners cannot afford to get weary of their roles.  It will be interesting to see how many rules will be set or influenced Up Above.

Unlike a reality TV show like Jersey Shore, where editors manipulate the juxtaposition of shots to create scenes and the sequence of events to construct a narrative, the ‘live-ness’ of this scene will demand improvisation, and that means the miners will be the primary architects of their narrative.

The intense focus on this particular scene by the world media, is going to make the elements of the game highly visible.  We will be able to track how well the trapped miners are doing by how focused and productive they are in playing their game.

What’s going to hold our interest about the Chilean Miner scene will not be the drama of whether or not they make it out alive.  The objective, the ‘Will they or won’t they’ aspect of the narrative, will only carry it so far.  What will hold our interest is how the miners behave in the meantime.  How well we get to know them.  Who they are to their families, and to one another.  What kind of character traits emerge. This is true of any narrative.  If you want to hold your audience’s interest, don’t focus on how you want it to end, but on how you want it to be.

When the miners’ survival becomes imminent, their game will transform from a survival strategy to a business strategy.  To the objective of ‘Get out of here alive without going crazy,’ they will undoubtedly add, ‘Make Money.’  When the miners finally walk into the light, the game may change, but it will not end.

Buena suerte, Mineros!

ChileanMiners2

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Posted in Agreement Principle, Casting, Character, Environment, Focus, Fundamentals, Games, Group Mind, Narrative, Objectives, Scenes, story | 3 Comments »

GameChangers Glossary, H to N

Tuesday, August 24th, 2010

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

Heighten–To build emotional involvement and energy in a scene

Improv–See ‘Improvisation‘

Improvisation–spontaneous communication designed to generate positive outcomes from unforeseen circumstances; interpersonal and group communication that is instinctive and informed by experience, knowledge, serendipity and respect for environment; improv, as performed in theaters, such as with improv comedy; a conversation with the community; the pedagogy, philosophy and process defined by Viola Spolin in her 1963 book, Improvisation for the Theater; a games-based methodology for generating communication, learning and transformation

Initiation–The first meaningful words or lines spoken during a scene; in this case, ‘meaningful’ refers to anything that directly involves the group’s progress toward achieving the scene’s objective(s).

Interrogation–A performance-related issue, often arising in interviews or employee reviews, that arises when one player only asks questions and never acts on the information revealed by the answers;

Invention–A performance-related issue that occurs when players work with speculative or subjective information instead of the reality of the scene.

Invocation–An exercise that lets players examine a subject from the third-person (“It is”), second-person (“You are”) and first-person (“I am”) perspectives in order to identify themes for a performance.

Issue–Any performance-related problem which can be remedied by better execution of GameChangers business communication techniques.

Judging–A performance-related problem that occurs when a player subjectively assesses a scene while the scene is taking place.

Justifying–A performance-related problem that occurs when a player self-consciously explains his or her (or their team’s) actions in a scene, especially when the behavior does not align with the GameChangers principles.

Liminal–relating to the threshold of perception that players break through by participating in a game; relates to perceptions of one’s own abilities and to what one’s perceptions of what is generally possible; transcending the status quo

Meta Communication/Meaning–A symbolic or allegorical representation of ideas and concerns that exist on a societal, cultural or archetypal scale; the symbolic representation of a macro trend, widely held belief, or aspect of the human condition; (See ‘Cosmetic Communication/Meaning‘ and ‘Emotional Communication/Meaning‘)

Monologue–A speech given by a single player in a scene; a speech shared amongst multiple players in the course of a scene or presentation.

Narrative–A flow of thematically-connected events that can be related after the fact as a story; organizational memory and vision of the future that inform scenes performed in the present; a purposeful alignment of ideas and events, such as for a brand.

Negativity–Traits, ideologies and behaviors that halt a scene’s progress through skepticism and a disagreeable inclination to oppose, deny and/or resist the ideas or involvement of other players; pessimism; the antithesis of the attitude required for productive collaborations.

Network–The communications matrix of an organization, brand or individual; those who are connected by a communications matrix or belong to an organization; defined by John Seely Brown, John Hagel et al as consisting of ‘core’ and ‘edge’

Networked World–The highly communicative, internet-supported global stage on which business gets conducted

Objective–The desired outcome of a scene; the stated purpose of playing a game; the business goal of a scene; one of the four elements that comprise a Game

Opening–An ‘overture’ prior to a scene or series of scenes in which a player or a group develops the themes for an upcoming performance; usually triggered by Suggestions From the Audience

Organization–The manifestation of a business or brand to its audience; the operational structure of a business or brand; a company or group with a shared mission and business objectives (see ‘Network‘)

TO BE CONTINUED…

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Posted in Branding, Communication, Dialogue, Emotion, Environment, Fundamentals, Initiations, Issues, Narrative, Objectives, story, Themes, Uncategorized | No Comments »

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 »

Created in America

Monday, August 9th, 2010

In noting President Obama’s rallying cry for a program to support small businesses in America, the White House published the following in the President’s Facebook news feed:

A minority in the Senate is standing in the way of giving our small-businesspeople an up-or-down vote on the jobs bill. That’s a shame. We need to decide whether we’re willing to rise above the election-time games and come together—not just to pass a jobs bill that is going to help small businesses hire and grow but al…so to rebuild our economy around three simple words: “Made in America.”

While we wholeheartedly support a jobs bill that will help small businesses like ours, ‘Made in America’ is an Industrial Age idea that has very little resonance in the Networked World.  Nothing substantial can be built around anything as meaningless as that statement.  Here’s why…MickeyMouse&Abro1

The problem is that making stuff is not what America does any more, not exclusively to ‘Brand America’ anyway.  Stuff gets made all over the world.  What’s the most ‘American’ brand you can think of.  Disney?  Coca Cola?  Nike?  ‘Made All Over the World’ is the truth of these brands, and the same is true for any other brand vibrating on a network frequency.  The Budweiser Clydesdales are Belgians now.  Deal with it.  In light of these new truths, ‘Made In America’ becomes just another piece of empty political rhetoric, designed to dampen disagreement rather than to foster any large-scale agreement around a new economic narrative.

What we need is an idea that will generate new narratives, and new ideas about how to stimulate the economy.

One of our favorite American companies, ABRO Industries, based smack dab in the heartland of America, South Bend, Indiana, with 25 employees and projected 2010 sales exceeding  $150M, does over $40M of sales a year in Nigeria alone with products it manufactures in South America.  Most of ABRO’s products are made outside America, and yet most of the wealth it generates comes back to this country.  How?  It originates the business cycle and the brand.  It creates networks to market its products around the world.

“Made in” is no longer an differentiator for American business.  ‘Created in’ still is.

What makes American business unique, what we can count on every time, is Creativity.  The true American brew isn’t Budweiser,  it’s the idiosyncratic brew of cultures and personal histories that make the American narrative unique in the world.

What matters about Disney is not where it’s made.  After all, its primary product, happiness, can be conjured up anywhere in the world.  What’s unique and irreplaceable about the Disney brand is that it was created in America, born out of the imagination of a Scotch-Irish Socialist-Farming Depression-Era Cartoon-Making Hollywood-Bound Space-Racing Commie-Fearing Polo-Playing Chain-Smoking Family-Loving Chili-Eating Anti-Semitic Dandy From Kansas City Who Dreamed He Was a Mouse.

Making stuff means replicating it, and that means commoditizing.  Anybody can do that.  Originating stuff–growing Walt Disneys and Apples and Pixars and Lady Gagas and ABROS–that’s what America still does best.

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Posted in Agreement Principle, Branding, Communication, Creativity, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Narrative, Networked World, Sales, Themes | No Comments »

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 »

Old Spice Gamechange

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

OldSpiceMan1When he was working at Twelve Horses Interactive (now part of One to One Interactive) in Reno in 2007-08, Dean McBeth (@evilspinmeister) participated in some of the very first GameChangers workshops.

Dean has since joined the Wieden+Kennedy Agency in Portland, where he’s a Sr. Community Manager and digital strategist for the Old Spice brand, and one of the principal architects of the currently-raging ‘Old Spice Guy‘ social media campaign.  When Dean and I chat, as we did, by phone, this morning, the subject of improvisation in business is never far away.  It’s always gratifying to hear how the learning Dean took away from GameChangers has blossomed into marketplace performance for him and his clients, never more so than with the Old Spice online campaign.

I ask him about the genesis of the campaign.

“We already had a ‘pop media darling’ (in Old Spice Guy, played by actor Isaiah Mustafa), and we wanted to amplify the existing asset of the television commercials.  Our global interactive Creative Director, Ian Tait, said, ‘Why don’t we have Old Spice Guy reply to comments on YouTube?’  That was the idea that got us going,” McBeth says  “In terms of digital media, we didn’t want to limit ourselves to YouTube.  The question became, ‘How do we expand to every major community on the web?’”

Dean and his counterpart in W+K’s New York office, Josh Millrod, designed a strategy that involved charting all recent online comments about Old Spice, identifying anyone who mentioned Old Spice in a positive way, and ranking these people in terms of their influence.  The most influential people on the list were combined with ‘regular folks’ who, by comparison, may not have had a ton of Twitter followers or Facebook friends, but whose comments the W+K creative team found humorous or inspiring in some way.

This Influencer List, which eventually totaled “between 30 and 40 people,” according to McBeth, was combined with traditional PR channels, to create a core audience for the first wave of Old Spice Guy videos.

Then, in one shooting day, the W+K team shot personalized videos for everyone on the Influencer List, with each video written and directed as a response to the Influencers’ previous comments about Old Spice. ”We wanted to be talking to people who already had an affinity for the product,”  says McBeth.  “The messages were geared to how they’d commented.  We wanted to give them the biggest yes-and we possibly could.”

The W+K team was disciplined about addressing Old Spice Guy videos only to influencers who were already ‘having the conversation’ and avoiding those who weren’t.  “We knew that nothing could kill the campaign faster than sending a personalized video to someone like a Howard Stern who maybe hadn’t said anything previously about Old Spice.  We could’ve crashed in a hurry,” says McBeth.

At the same time, the W+K team kept an eye on influencers like Stern and Ashton Kutcher, who command big online audiences, and when these high profile players commented on the first wave of Old Spice Guy videos, they became candidates for response videos of their own that were produced in a second wave, also shot in a day.  Kutcher eventually got a video addressed to him, and it’s how Alyssa Milano got to be a player in the Old Spice game.

McBeth calls the videos “strategic smart bombs,” and describes them as “gifts” to their recipients.  Interactions with an already-existing narrative about the Old Spice brand.

Shooting 30 to 40 videos in a single day is about 30 to 40 times the typical output for a top-tier agency like Wieden+Kennedy.  The Old Spice team had to be incredibly nimble.  Scripts had to be written, approved by the client and performed as first drafts. A table full of props on the shooting set gave Mustafa and the creative team opportunities to keep the actor’s performances playful and personal.

McBeth2Wieden+Kennedy’s client for the Old Spice brand, Procter & Gamble, “couldn’t be more pleased,” according to McBeth.  “They see it as a new paradigm for brand marketing.  We should be seeing numbers soon that will show tremendous results for both awareness and sales.”  With the success of the Old Spice Guy campaign, Wieden+Kennedy’s other clients are, naturally, clamoring for viral brand mojo of their own.  One thing is certain, the ability to improvise will be key.

McBeth did not learn until after the campaign had been produced that Millrod, his co-creator in W+K’s New York office, has a hobby.  Improvisational jazz trumpet.   If there had been any question before, this new bit of information finalized the answer for McBeth:

“Improvisation is the single most important factor in the success of the Old Spice Guy campaign.”

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Posted in Branding, Creativity, Listening, Narrative, Networked World, Sales | 3 Comments »

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