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.

5.  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.

1)  A Best Practice is typically imposed on an organization by a manager or a process-hawker selling a particularly methodology or enterprise solution.  It promotes the idea, as Hildy says, that ‘the answers are outside us’  when, in fact, this is totally untrue.  The answers are always within.  Our inspiration and motivation for working through them may come from somewhere else, but the important questions and the talent for answering them are within each of us, waiting to be discovered.

2)  It’s something people can fight over.  Let’s face it, managers and boards will fight over and chew on what is ‘Best’ until, by the time it actually gets implemented, there’s no meat on its bones.   After a pride of management lions has finished feeding on it, a Best Practice can resemble a zebra carcass of mediocrity.

3)  Sometimes it’s worse than mediocre, it can actually be something BAD masquerading as Best.  This, according to Hildy, happens when managers use Best Practices to either absolve themselves from accountability or, at the other extreme, micromanage.   And when managers use Best Practices to characterize players, who may be equally passionate about the mission but have different approaches to it, as problems or troublemakers instead of allies, Truly Awful Practices often ensue.

The GameChangers analysis of Hildy’s post:

Best Practices are often a weapon of choice in the management game.  Because by definition there can only be one Best, managers are inspired to compete with one another for supremacy, usually at the expense of teams waiting for decisions and direction.

The idea that there is ANY ONE WAY to do things Right or Best is a huge issue for relationships between managers and teams, and to tell you the truth, for people generally.  When a husband tells a wife that Best Practice is Football, the wife opines that it’s Soccer and junior thinks it’s Skateboarding, we are going to have issues, and we are all going to be unhappy. This kind of squabbling and scrapping scenario is we often experience at the top management or board level of an organization–a battle for whose narrative will hold sway, forget how effective the narrative will be, that’s secondary to winning the battle to have your Practice declared Best.

The quest to own ‘Best’ is at its most toxic when managers are either pro bono (”If you don’t want my opinion, why did you ask?”) or justifying the difference between what they get paid and what their teams get paid (”I’m a genius and you’re not, okay?”).

Several of the commentors to Hildy’s post suggest Inspiration as a possible alternative to the Best Practice scenario.  This can be a slippery slope too, because Inspiring Others can be a less-then-tangible practice.  Ephemeral, it comes and goes.  The most inspiring (emotionally uplifting) point of view can also be the most unachievable day to day.  We have a good friend who’s an inspirational character, so inspiring that Hollywood made a movie about him.  I wouldn’t want him coaching my team, though, because he only knows one way to approach a problem, and that’s with a kind of stubbornly sunny, over-the-top cheerleading optimism that is unique to him. Most people don’t have his game, and most don’t want to. He’s great to have on the team, but day in and day out, he is far from its most valuable player.

Overuse of the phrase Best Practice is a symptom of an organizational illness, a telling twitch in the body politic.  The illness itself, the battle by managers and brands for control of the narrative, is what we call Scripting. The opposite of Scripting is Improvisation.  The ability to improvise is the most important practice in the day to day life of a productive team.  There are huge benefits to improvisation that cannot possibly be realized by a group bound up in a dialogue about Best Practices:

The ability to listen connects managers and teams, and creates a collaborative environment.

The ability to adapt means that we are open to more than one way to achieve an objective.  It recognizes that we will encounter problems that we could not have anticipated.

Improvisation recognizes that the ability to solve problems is much more important than deciding ahead of time how the problem is going to be solved.  It does not expect us to fit square pegs into round holes.  Rather, it gives us the ability to create dodecahedronal pegs when we encounter dodecahedronal holes.

Improvisation is not a Best Practice.  It is a Good Practice.  With discipline and patience some Good Practices will actually turn out to be Best.  Minute to minute, day to day, expand your capacity for doing Good, and let history determine what is Best.   As Steve Jobs says, “You can only connect the dots looking backwards.”  You can only construct the narrative of the battle after the battle has been fought.   To ensure that dots are connected and battles won, move forward always.  And be prepared to improvise.

This story broke in the L.A. Times a couple of days ago

There are three elements of gamechanging at work in Carroll’s United Breaks Guitars song (with two other ‘complaint songs’ to follow, according to Carroll):

1)  The first is that productive games like this one spin off wealth in unexpected ways.  The game does not pursue wealth, wealth follows the game.  Who knows how much revenue and brand equity Carroll and the Sons of Maxwell are going to generate because of this?  More than the value of the broken guitar, that’s for sure.  Generating wealth was not Carroll’s objective.  The objective was to tell the world his broken guitar story.

2)  The second bit of learning is that emotional and meta meaning trump cosmetic meaning.   It seems as though United Airlines kept its communication with Carroll strictly cosmetic, that is, strictly by the manual and on the surface.  No one accepted responsibility.  No one apologized, or related to the anguish of a traveling country musician without a guitar.  No one stepped outside their corporate role and expressed any kind of personal character.  Instead, the United employees stonewalled, hid, delayed, obfuscated.  They counted on Carroll simply giving up after enough time had passed.  But Carroll never lost his emotional connection to what had happened, and never quit upping the emotional stakes.   In his song, the broken neck of his Taylor guitar serves as a metaphor for all the pissed-off travelers out there.  The emotion and the meta-meaning expressed in Carroll’s song overwhelm the empty rhetoric of the airline.  How can an audience not cheer and share Carroll’s sentiments?

3)  A third gamechanging aspect of Carroll’s song is that it tells the same story in a new genre.   The song is essentially the same story Carroll had been telling for six months. By telling the story again, and doing it in song–with harmony, melody, wit, style and fake moustaches–it took the game to a whole new level.  Stakes were raised, emotions heightened, and the productive game came into existence.  Genre generates games.

Next time you want to communicate anything business-related, first imagine how you’d sing it as a country song, a hard-rock anthem, a hip-hop beat, or whatever your favorite musical genre is.  You’ll discover news ways of expressing your story, and connect with your audience by creating meaning and context that doesn’t exist in the flat data.  When your communication ’sings,’ so does your brand.

The words ‘yes’ and ‘and’ do not have to be spoken literally, of course. It is the spirit of the phrase that matters. A common improv exericise invokes this spirit by having players begin every exchange of dialogue with those two powerful words, spoken literally.

If we are in a scene together and are ‘yes-anding’ one another, by the third line of the scene, it will not be about your reality, or my reality, it will be about our reality. Now we have the ability to work together toward an objective. It is the ‘and’ that makes all the difference. Anyone can say ‘yes’. It might get me a reputation as a being a positive person around the office, but it will not necessarily make me a productive player.

Let’s put it this way: ‘Yes’ is agreeing to a marriage proposal. ‘Yes and’ is agreeing to a life together.

Pay attention to the people in your network who are skilled communicators. Analyze your scenes with successful entrepreneurs and top salespeople. They never deny their scene partners’ reality. They add to it. They augment it. They build on it.

‘And’ is the catalyst, the propellant, the push. What are you going to add to the scene that will advance it toward its objective? It’s not always as easy as it sounds. Business scenes can turn into a battle for control of the narrative. They can fall victim to players who play ’status games’ designed, for example, to give the top-ranking player in the scene the last word. They can get derailed by players who insist on being the naysayer (or the ‘Yes but’ ter), and conversely by players whose flights of fantasy (’Yes and it’s where Israeli girls can go to meet Palestinian dudes’ ) hijack the team for a trip to Crazy Town.

Some tips for ‘Yes-anding’ in your scenes:

1) First listen. If you don’t hear what your scene partner is saying, your ‘and’ won’t mean much.

2) Add in increments. The ‘and’ does not necessarily have to be some earth-shattering addition to the scene. It does not have to have the drama of a marriage proposal. It can be simple. Small. A show of support. In improv theater, this is known as ‘playing slow’. It takes skilled, disciplined, patient players to play slow. Slow and steady progress toward the objective is preferable to lots of dramatic, news-making behavior that ultimately lands you right back where you started.

3) Agree to the underlying game. If you and your scene partners are at cross purposes–you’re in it to learn more about a problem, and they are in it to eliminate the problem–no amount of yes-anding can turn it into a productive scene. First agree to ‘why’ you’re in the scene, then you can deal with ‘what’ the scene is meant to accomplish.

4) Deal in objective reality. There are times when unfettered bouts of brainstorming are helpful. At the beginning of a project, I usually invoke the ‘No Bad Ideas’ Rule, in which any idea, no matter how far-fetched, extravagant or unlikely, can be put into play. But business gets transacted, for the most part, in the Real World. What do I have, how much am I asking, how much are you willing to pay? That’s reality. The yes-anding should acknowledge reality and work with it as the raw material of a scene the way a sculptor works with clay.

His and his team’s ability to improvise their way to an election victory against rivals who were, initially, much better funded, more networked and more familiar brand names proved beyond any doubt how skillful improvisation can change the game. Obama is the epitome of what it means to be a gamechanger.

Because they improvised instead of slaving themselves to a script, Obama and team were quicker to act on opportunity. They consistently made better, faster and more authentic decisions than their rivals. It is one thing to be smart, but what difference does it make if you don’t act smart? Obama and team showed how improvisation marries intellect with action. This resulted in breakthrough processes for organizing and raising money, and creative solutions to whatever problems they faced along the campaign trail.

It is no coincidence, to me, that Obama lives in the same Hyde Park neighborhood in Chicago where modern improvisation was born in the 1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression. In Chicago, improvisation isn’t just some thing the artsy-fartsy folks do, it’s a way of life, a fixture in the cultural firmament. A lot of people taking improv classes in Chicago at Second City or I.O. or Comedy Sportz treat it like night school, almost like it’s getting an extra degree that will help them in whatever their walk of life. Obama is one of the best examples ever of how improvisation works outside the confines of theater comedy–how it improves job performance, and has the power to transform the status quo.

Obama listens and communicates on multiple levels, which makes his message extra resonant for his audience. He changes status depending on the scene he’s in without ever losing his essential character, what makes Barack Obama Barack Obama. When he’s with generals he’s leaderly, when he’s with children he’s fatherly, when he’s on the court he’s lefty, and it’s always through the truth of who he is. He’s not posing, acting, or going for effect, or a photo op, or a big move. He’s doing the best he can with what the scene has to offer. That’s improvisation.

He acts on the reality of the scene he’s in, not on some fantasy scenario he’s trying to make come true (see ‘Mission Accomplished’). When, on a blistering summer day in North Carolina during the presidential race, a woman in the audience fainted from the heat during one of his speeches, Obama took one look at what was happening, stopped his speech, and with no hesitation called it to the security team’s attention then reached into his podium for his water bottle and tossed it to the crowd to give to the woman. “They’ll be okay,” he said, in a reassuring voice. It was the most genuine, most helpful thing anyone in his position could have done in that situation. It was not a big deal. It was just the best possible move at that particular moment. That’s is how an improviser rolls. It is not a big deal. It is a lot of little deals, done consistently, with 100% focus and commitment. And these have the potential to add up to a big deal. A really big deal in the case of Obama’s election.

During his campaign he staked out huge and momentous themes–Hope, Change, Equality–and then liberated his team and the voters themselves to explore those themes in as many ways as possible. This meant that Brand Obama could deliver a much livelier narrative than the McCain Brand, which lurched from one lame scripted event (Palin) to another (ride to the rescue on the bailout plan), confusing the audience and the candidate alike.

After January 21, the Obama administration’s ability to riff on big themes will continue to liberate good ideas and innovative thinking to the benefit and betterment of the U.S. and the world. Economic transformation on the massive scale it’s needed cannot be scripted like some Olympic Opening Ceremony. It must be improvised.

They are off to a banging good start in naming people to his team, a ‘team of rivals’, it has been called, echoing what Lincoln said about his own cabinet. The cluckers are already clucking about how hard it will be for Obama to ‘manage’ such strong and independent personalities. To an improviser, it is the most natural thing in the world. Synthesizing different, often radically different, points of view to achieve an objective is what improvisers do.

There is a saying in improvisation, Follow the Follower. This is what Obama means when he says to voters that he’s representing their will, embodying their energy, pursuing their happiness. Pundits have described this as a new kind of leadership, but I believe it’s more accurate to say that Obama’s got outrageously good listening skills. Sometimes it’s necessary to lead, but the best improvisers, like Obama, are the best at following. They raise the level of their own game by raising the level of everyone’s.

On the emotional and meta levels, the levels of communication that matter most, there was only one campaign promise made by Barack Obama. It was not a plank in his platform, but it was implicit in everything the campaign said and did. It was a promise that Americans will all become a little better, a little stronger, a little more improvisational in our own ways for having him as President. We believe it has already happened, is happening, and will continue to happen on an ever-broadening scale, as more and more people — not only in the U.S. but all over the world — get attuned to the new game and start playing along.

This morning, my friend David LaPlante (if you want to read something beautiful, see his most recent blog entry) sent me a link to a CNN story and headline:

Here’s my response:

Candidates and media use the word erroneously, as CNN does in this story, when they refer to an EVENT as a gamechanger. A gamechanger is PERSON with the ability to change the game. Like you : ) A gamechanger can also be a brand, as in the focused, networked behaviors of a group of people who share business objectives.

The media have the luxury of predicting the future, reporting after the fact, and pontificating about the meaning of it all. Most of us have to face facts in the present. We don’t deal with things as they were, or as predicted, but as they are, as events unfold and new information comes our way. This is why gamechangers are good improvisers. They make every moment count for something. They don’t focus on outcomes but on process and trust that the outcomes, whatever they are, will be positive, and that their group’s agreed-to objectives will be achieved.

GameChangers change events. If a person does not have the improvisational skill to change an event, the event is sure to change them, and they will have no say in the matter. GameChangers play the game, and don’t let the game play them.

In terms of improvisation, Obama kicked ass last night. He was in tune with the scene and the audience. He listened. Agreed with his scene partner. Matched energy. Heightened. Called back lines. He moved more confidently than McCain. His timing and editing were far superior to McCain’s, who not once but twice walked in front of a live camera like a rookie P.A. on the Amarillo local news. McCain went for jokes, which is a big no-no in improvisation

If CNN had been looking through the lens of improvisation, they would’ve seen their gamechanger in last night’s debate. It was Obama.

So I look at it like this:

The crisis is an Elephant, and everyone wrestling with it–you, me, Hank Paulson and Barney Frank–is a Blind Man of Hindustan.  How we describe it depends on which part of it we’re feeling.  And no matter how we describe it, it doesn’t help us figure out what to do with the Elephant.  It’s just a very large animal standing there while blind people disagree about it.

So six blind men of Hindustan
disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
exceeding stiff and strong;
Though each was partly in the right,
they all were in the wrong! – John Godfrey Saxe

One of the benefits of improvisation in business is that it provides a lens, and a common language, through which we can see and learn from performance.  This triangulates the problem and gives us common ground for solving it.  Barney Frank sees the Wall Street problem from a Massachusetts legislator’s perspective.  I see it from a small businessperson’s perspective. As a person the cameras are pointed at, Barney is probably feeling the tusk, so he describes the Elephant as being ‘like a spear.’  From my perspective, the Elephant ‘feels very like a wall’ between me and capital.  If all we’re going to do is debate our differences, we’re never going to get anywhere.

But if Barney and I both speak improvisation…aha.  We can find agreement in that language. Our disagreement about what the Elephant looks like is no longer important because now our dialogue can be about what to do with the Elephant! 

Here’s an analysis of the ‘Bailout Scene’ seen through the lens of improvisation:

Casting:  It is casting more suited to a comedy than to the dramatic gravitas of the moment.  Hank Paulson looks like a steady hand, a guy who’s going to hold our attention onstage, but then he opens his mouth and it’s like a scene from the Exorcist:  “Can you help an old altar boy, Father?” Make it stop!  Barney Frank is like Uncle Frank in It’s a Wonderful Life.  We expect him to have a string tied around his finger to remember the bank deposit, and he’s still going to lose it.  He probably has a pet crow at home.  Boehner is content to sit and pose like some 1980s ad for men’s cologne.  Pelosi has the impossible objective of getting the Blind Men to agree on what the Elephant looks like and then describing that agreement to the voters.  Bush has jumped the shark a couple of times, and now looks like a guy getting eaten by the shark.

Additions and Edits:  There are so many people running on and off the stage that we in the audience are losing track of who the players are, and what roles they’re playing.  Is Warren Buffet a player in this?  I’m not quite sure.  McCain runs in like he’s got an important role to play, does nothing, runs off.  Bush appears on TV for 20 seconds.  Says nothing.  Exits.  Barney Frank tells us in one breath that the country is facing its biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, and then announces that he’s taking a day off work.

Stage Spacing:  There are so many people crowded into the frame in scenes from the U.S. Capitol that viewers are almost forced to ask themselves, ‘Who are they and what are they doing there?’  It becomes a kind of political trivia contest, and makes it difficult for the person speaking to hold the audience’s focus.

Suggestions From the Audience:  If anyone in this scene had a lick of improvisation training, they’d understand the importance of collaborating with the audience.  Improvisation is predicated on the idea that the audience gets involved.  By failing to understand the audience’s anger at the people who created the current turmoil, the players in this scene now have an audience revolt on their hands.  People are out on the sidewalk demanding their money back, and it is not going to be easy to coax them back into the theater.

I wish I could give this a better spin, but they don’t call it a crisis for nothing.  It is, above all else, a crisis in confidence.  The audience has lost confidence in the performance.

The one bright spot in this is Barack Obama, who is a skillful improviser.  As such, he understood from the start that he did not belong in the Bailout Scene, and wisely remained offstage.  Confusing the Election Scene with the Bailout Scene would not have helped anyone’s performance.

With the current scene devolving into chaos, Obama is editing.  He has initiated the new scene with a statement about the bailout easing restrictions by the FDIC.  This at least addresses the suggestion from the audience that whatever the bailout is, it must be structured to give breaks to the small businessperson.

The improviser’s challenge is not to describe the Elephant, it’s to move it in a productive direction.

At lunch the other day at a new sushi restaurant called Sugarfish, my friend, Josh Rose, a creative director at Deutsch Advertising, told me about watching the legendary improviser Christopher Guest (Best in Show, Waiting for Guffman, et al) essentially rip up the script Deutsch had given him for a series of DirecTV spots, and tell its creative team he and his cast were going to improvise everything instead. Guest promised the agency team they’d get ten usable spots worth of material, far more than their contract called for.

He delivered, to excellent effect. The series of commercials starring Guest, who also directed, memorably distinguish DirecTV’s product from that of a fictional blowhard cable company.

Josh took the position that, well, yes, you can get away with something like that if you’re Christopher Guest. And if you’re not Christopher Guest, maybe improvisation isn’t going to be so beneficial.

I wish I had responded by holding the albacore sushi drizzled with ponzu sauce between my chopsticks and said to him with a Kung Fu master’s equanimity, “Yes and Christopher Guest is no Chef Nozawa.” That would’ve been deep. I didn’t. I took the more mundane position that there is improvisation in every business process, and that, while its place in the process may vary–most TV commercial shoots, for example, cannot withstand the amount of improvising that a Christopher Guest brings to a set–there is always an opportunity somewhere in every business process where improvisation is possible, and in most cases, required. As long as you’re going to do it anyway, why not do it well? And as far as the fuss Guest stirred up, who ever said birthing originality was easy?

Josh chewed on his yellowtail for a sec, and I wish I could say he nodded like an eager Chef Nozawa apprentice, accepting every word I said as doctrine. He did not. He told me that he is a ‘plug-n-play’ guy, meaning he carefully measures the opportunity afforded, and calibrates performance to it. Improvisation, he said, can feel too loose and unpredictable.

Maybe that’s when I should have stood and slapped him across the face and and told him to wake up and smell the wasabi. I did not. Instead, I calmly explained that recognition of an opportunity for what it is, and responding accordingly, is good improvisation. The Networked World, I explained, is filled with new opportunities. New plugs that require new plays. This continually-evolving business environment demands improvisation.

I imagine Christopher Guest could have walked into Sugarfish at that instant, looked our way when he overheard us use the words ‘improvisation’ and ‘DirectTV’ in the same sentence, and, having heard, come over to our table to support my argument. He did not.
My lunch with Josh Rose did not result in a decisive win for the art of improvisation in business. Josh is an intelligent and reflective person, with his own well-honed ways of working. He sells way more than he buys. He was not in any hurry to introduce Deutsch to what they’d no doubt perceive as more headaches like the ones Christopher Guest gave them. That would not be the plug-n-play thing for Josh to do.

Our debate about the merits of improvisation in business was the agreed-to game. The objective was to reconnect after not having seen each other in a couple of years. The result was a productive lunch scene, at which Josh and I discussed business, families, photography, the evolution of journalism in the Networked World, the role of social networking on behalf of brands, Dr. Pepper, Big Red soda, Costa Rica, the Great Apes (Josh’s dad is a primatologist who lectures all over the world), Chef Nozawa’s sushi, gonzo multimedia – and Christopher Guest’s DirectTV work.

It was not the lunch that might have been. It was the lunch that was. Likewise, none of us are the players we might have been. We are the players we are. We all – Christopher Guest, Chef Nozawa, Josh Rose, you, me – have the potential to realize our own particular form of greatness. To realize it, we have to travel our own paths, accepting and acting on the gifts we are given along the way.

Knowing how to improvise is like having an experienced Sherpa along on your climb, versus following a map and seeking advice from random climbers down at base camp. For the best chance at reaching the summit, especially if the climb is challenging (and whose isn’t?) gather all the information you can and retain the Sherpa.

A scene is an idea and a comment. Every scene you do should wheel around a central idea or theme. It is every player’s responsibility to explore this idea in a way that enlightens and engages fellow players and audience alike. This exploration of the central idea is what is meant by ‘comment’. Comment is not passive. Improvisers think of ‘comment’ as a verb, not a noun.

Avoid preconceived ideas. Start each improv as a blank canvas waiting to be filled in with detail. Good scenes very quickly get to be ‘about something’. Skilled improvisers can express this ’something’ in single look, or a couple of lines of dialogue and with that they are off and running. There is an important beat at the beginning of every scene that is the ‘blank canvas waiting to be filled’. It may last only as long as it takes two players to make eye contact, but in that instant, a world of possibilities exists. Your call, player. Are you going to lock yourself into a preconceived idea? Or are you going to give yourself options. Are you going to paint by numbers? Or are you going to bring something new into the world?

Accept what your partner says or does as you would a gift, not a challenge. Just say ‘yes and’. Honor the actions and ideas of others. Enough with the asshole unproductive behaviors — like constantly wanting to have the last word, upstaging your partners, steering scenes toward your scripted outcomes so you can prove what a visionary you are, and forcing your questionable aesthetic sense down everyone’s throats. Play nice. You expand the possibilities of the scene simply by showing some gratitude for the contributions of your scene partners.

Don’t talk about your activities, play with them. Show yourself through them. The activity is the focus. Give yourself up to it, and let it guide you toward productive attitudes and behaviors. A two-line email notifying your team that something has been handled is much more productive than a two page email that no one is going to read anyway, because it’s just you trying to prove what a genius you are and what a dunce everyone else is. One of the ways that good managers get results is by encouraging their groups to choose action over talk about action, and always being sensitive to the difference between the two.

If all else fails, describe. (The improv actress and director Elaine May used to say, “If all else fails, seduce” — which just goes to show you that there’s more than one way to bake a cat.) What this saying says is that you can get a stalled scene moving again by adding details to it, getting more specific, adding to the environment. The legendary editor of The New Yorker, Harold Ross often used to scrawl in large block letters across unsatisfactory reporting: “Get facts, will fix!” — meaning if the story dug its claws a little deeper into the meat of reality, that story would realize its objective.

One day my friend K., an executive at one of the big entertainment companies, and I were talking on the phone when the subject of Woody Allen came up. K. had recently been to a concert by Woody’s Dixieland jazz band at a club in Los Angeles called the Jazz Bakery. She didn’t say much about the concert itself, but told a funny story about what happened with Woody’s clarinet after the concert.

It went something like this…

After the concert, Woody and his entourage emerged from the front of the club where a small crowd awaited, and before he got into his limo, he paused to speak with a video crew. As he did so, he handed his clarinet case to his wife, Soon Yi, who promptly passed it to Woody’s manager. Woody’s manager handed the clarinet to his publicist. The publicist handed it to the limo driver. The driver didn’t know what he was supposed to do with it and had to ask the publicist, who had to ask the manager, who told the publicist what to do with it, who in turn told the limo driver to put it in the car. The driver put the clarinet in the front seat of the limo. Soon Yi, noticing this, whispered something to the manager, who spoke to the driver. The driver retrieved Woody’s clarinet from the front seat and handed it to the manager who made a move to put it in the back of the limo at the same instant Woody finished his interview and turned to get into the backseat of the car. Without missing a beat, he took the clarinet case from the manager like that’s the way they’d planned it all along.

“It was hilarious,” K. said. “Like they were playing Hot Potato.” What we laughed about was, of course, the dysfunctional behavior. The objective of the scene K. described was to get a clarinet into a car. Simple enough, right? Yet look at all the effort it took. The wasted motion. The broken lines of communication. The confusion about the rules of the game. The establishment of the pecking order. The corrections of mistakes. The whole scene probably didn’t take more than 45 seconds, and someone like Seth Godin could write three best-sellers about how to correct everything that went wrong in that interval.

The ‘Passing Woody’s Clarinet’ scene is a useful parable for the conduct business of business in the Networked World. The rigid, machine-like organizations of the Industrial Age could assign a finite value to the costs of inefficiency. Of poor communication, re-do’s, and extraneous or unnecessary players (e.g. ‘featherbedding’) in a finite number of scenes. Unproductive behaviors belonged to a certain headcount, and their costs could be calculated and accounted for with a certain accuracy.

The mathematics are different in the Networked World. In a business environment with unlimited horizons, its grids and clouds holding potential for incalculable numbers of scenes and players, the opportunity costs are equally unlimited. Efficiency gets rewarded exponentially, inefficiency gets penalized the same, and the outcomes are entirely open-ended.

Look at the current financial market chaos as the reigning example of how the Woody’s Clarinet Syndrome can have disastrous consequences. The game these players have been playing, as we continue to discover, is riddled with misinformation and unproductive moves that reverberate in ever-expanding waves across the world’s financial networks. The next thing you know, the dollar is behaving exactly like Woody’s Clarinet, moving madly but to nowhere in particular, its handlers behaving like characters in Take the Money and Run.

So Woody Allen is a professional neurotic surrounded by dysfunctional people passing along bad information and behaving comically. For this he and his team earn millions of dollars a year. From this he has produced a body of work that makes him one of our best living filmmakers, applauded by movie fans all over the world, and revered by new generations of actors eager to run scenes with him. He continues to evolve as an artist who owns one of the most enduring and productive personal brands in his industry.

What’s your excuse?