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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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

A ’scene’ can be a single meeting or a years-long campaign. It can address an immediate crisis or seek lasting change in an organization’s culture. Whatever the reason for your scene, you always have the ability to apply game structure to it.

In addition to defining game structure, we help our clients sort out productive games from the unproductive ones. It should come as no surprise to anyone that there are a lot of unproductive games getting played out there. They can be unproductive for a lot of reasons. Here’s a big one: Games that treat Objectives and Outcomes as the same thing are not good games.

Objectives are structure. Outcomes are performance. These are two very different things. Here’s an example we sometimes use in our workshops to illustrate this point:

What is the Objective of the game of basketball? It’s to put the ball in the hoop. This objective has not changed since Dr. James Naismith nailed a peach basket to the balcony of the gymnasium at Springfield College in 1891. Other elements of the game, the E the R and the G, have evolved dramatically, the O has not. It is remarkable for its unchangedness.

The Objective: same as it ever was

Now…what are the Outcomes of the game of basketball?  Let your mind play with that question for awhile, and see what kind of responses pop up. Here are just a few that I myself have experienced: the Ireland (Indiana) Spuds high school basketball team; Hoosiers; my first pair of Chuck Taylor white canvas high tops; numb fingers from playing in 30-degree weather at recess; the fact that I first learned about Crispus Attucks because Oscar Robertson played for Crispus Attucks High School; Marv Albert’s arrest and subsequent rehabilitation; LeBron James leaving Cleveland; Dude Perfect; Magic and Bird; Rick Mount; George McGinnis; Wilt vs Russell; a rubber band that I wore on my wrist for a year; the Chuck Taylor black leather high tops that Corey Feldman wore in my film, The Lipstick Camera; the Chuck Taylor brand; the relationship between Spike Lee and Michael Jordan; Bobby Knight; Extreme HORSE with my friend Tim; hoops with my sons and their friends; coaching at the Y; the 2002 and 2003 Loyola Cubs CIF Championships; my friendship with Jamaal Wilkes; Ernie Barnes’ paintings…you get the idea…while there’s only one Objective, there are many possible Outcomes. And that’s just me. Your Outcomes are different from mine. Outcomes are an ever-expending set of possibilities.

This same dichotomy between Objectives and Outcomes is applicable to any game structure for your business. The Objective is the constant; the Outcomes are the infinite unknowns, where all the possibilities and all the upside reside.

Focus on your Objective, yes, by all means, absolutely! From a process standpoint, it is the most important thing, the target, the point of the exercise, it can even be your motivation. It is not, however, where the action is. Not where growth and extension occur.  If the only action you’re open to is achieving your Objective, you’re missing most of the possibilities of the game.

The game is put the ball in the basket. The possibility is Oscar Robertson.

"High Aspirations" by Ernie Barnes

In reality, it was no such thing.

In reality, as David Lee Roth describes in his 1998 autobiography Crazy from the Heat (first edition paperback selling  for $123.41 on Amazon?!), and Ira Glass documented in a story that first aired July 24, 2009, on This American Life, the fine print about the M&Ms was a game designed by Van Halen  to make sure every part of its contract was read and observed by the local promoter and crew, especially the details of stage and stadium safety. Early in the stadium concert era of the 1970s, there was a lot of variance in stadium electrical systems and construction, and the supergroup, who traveled with 9 semi-trailers of equipment, wanted to make certain their concerns about safety were addressed with the same focus and attention to detail that goes into separating the brown M&Ms from the rest.

In the words of Jeff Bartsch on Editmentor.com:

“If the band rolled up to the next venue and found brown M&Ms in the backstage candy bowl, they immediately demanded a full line-item review of the entire rider contract.  Eddie Van Halen specifically buried the M&M Clause, because concert promoters who don’t pay attention to one part of a contract usually don’t pay attention to the rest of it, and resulting technical issues could be disastrous, even deadly.”

In a 2010 Fast Company article, the Heath Bros. describe the brown M&Ms as a ‘canary in a coal mine.’ They interpret it as a kind of red flag used by David Lee Roth to catch careless oversights of details in their contract.

We see it as a game.

The brown M&Ms were the anomaly that defined a game, a game whose objective was to eliminate brown M&Ms, and whose result was safety.

Note that there’s a big difference between the objective of a game and the results achieved by playing it! For example, the objective of chess is to checkmate the opponent’s king. The results of playing it are strategies and counter-strategies, study, focus and the testing and extension of one’s abilities.

A canary in a coal mine doesn’t really define a game, because the results are, for the most part, binary. The canary lives, or the canary dies. The canary in the coal mine tests only one thing—the presence of lethal gas. No fresh dialogue results from it, no unexpected discoveries, the processes following either outcome have already been scripted. The Heaths’ analogy is weak, because a productive game like ‘Brown M&Ms’ has a nearly infinite number of possible outcomes.

Variations of this game can work for any team involved in QA, Safety, Compliance, Supply Chain, Facilities Management, Engineering, etc., where there’s little or no tolerance for error. It’s not a game you can play too often. Played too often, your ‘brown M&Ms’ will no longer be an anomaly, and the game will lose its bite.

The advantage of playing a game like this is that it brings every imaginable detail into play, not just those you and your legal team can stipulate in a contract or manual. When you call attention to the ‘brown M&Ms,’ you initiate a dialogue about the details of your working relationship that holds far more possibilities for problem-solving in real time than the necessary, but inevitably frozen-in-time terms of a contract.

We have defined it as “A process for producing consistently positive outcomes from unforeseen circumstances.” We call it “serendipity by design.” “A game, a theme, and an exploration.” “Collaborative problem solving.” “Acting on environment and letting environment act on you.” Listening, Learning and Transformation.” “Agility + Ability.” “Freedom within Structure.” “Creating a cosmos out of chaos.” “Openness to opportunity.” “The Big Yes-And.” “Flexible Vision.” “How Tina and Amy Got Their Grooves,” and “Not comedy.”  Among others.

Leave it to Steve Jobs, interviewed in The Pixar Story, Leslie Iwerks’ 2007 feature documentary, to phrase it with the assured elegance of an Apple design.”Unplanned collaboration” is the phrase he uses.

“We wanted a place that would encourage unplanned collaboration,” said Jobs in describing the design of Pixar’s new studio. He repeatedly cites this this as the architecture’s objective.

He didn’t connect this phrase to improvisation, per se, but it’s as good a definition as we’ve heard. Improvisation is unplanned collaboration. And even though it’s unplanned, it’s all part of the design. In the architecture of improvisation, you fully expect to run into someone unexpectedly. When you do, you are prepared to exchange information, find an agreement, and build a scene together or continue one that had begun earlier. You expect that others might jump into this scene with you, and you are prepared for anything they might add. Through this process, in thousands upon thousands of such unplanned increments, each filled with its own unique potential to be productive, you move your narrative forward.

It’s hard to imagine a better case study for the value of improvisational design than Pixar’s studio, or a better model of what it means to be a GameChanger than Steve Jobs.

Jobs also said it took ten years for Pixar to make any money. We’re just going to ignore that one. Play on.

Actually, Jonathan did the presentation. He told all the stories. I designed a game that engaged the audience with the material in a way that it would not have if Jonathan had used the standard format of ‘45 minute speech + 15 minute Q&A.’

Jonathan Franklin in conversation with Disney Animation

The game was called ‘15 Themes in 45 Minutes’. Here’s how it went:

I dumped images from the Chilean Miners’ rescue that we have permission to use (abt 90 of them) into Prezi.

Then I arranged the images by Theme. We settled on a number of themes, 15, that divided evenly into 60, because that would give structure to the hour.  (10 would have worked just as well, or 12) The Themes were ideas like, ‘Extreme Conditions,’ ‘Top Drill,’ and ‘Flexible Vision’  which I know, from knowing him and reading his  book, Jonathan can illuminate with great story after great story.

Then I added animation to the images, which is super easy to do on Prezi and showed some respect for the animators in the Disney audience. A presentation with no movement is an insult to animators.

So now we had three of the four elements of what we call the ‘ERGO’ structure for a game: Environment (Disney Animation Theater, Prezi); Roles (Storyteller, Audience, Prompter); and Objective (explore 15 themes). We still needed the ‘G’ in ERGO: Guidelines. I gave the game three:

1) Audience member can at any time request a description of an image (by calling “Caption”)

2) Audience member can, at any time ask a question (by calling “Question”)

3)  Audience member can, at any time, request a new Theme (indicated by calling “Scene”)

For most audiences, I would have added another guideline or two, to encourage editing by everyone in the Audience, not just a few people, but because these were professional storytellers, there was no need to do this.

It was an excellent experience for all of us. The game took 55 minutes to play, which left 5 minutes for a few follow-up questions.  Our time together had a much better flow, it was more of a conversation with the Audience, than if everyone had tried to save their question for a 15 min. Q&A at the end.

In exploring the 15 Themes, the conversation danced through subjects like President (of Chile) Pinera’s leadership strategy, NASA technology, the physics of hard rock drilling, Chilean culture, post-traumatic stress psychology, blow-up dolls, chocolate, tactical news leaking, the saving grace of humor, the fickle nature of celebrity and similar stories of people  trapped underground or underwater (Ace in the Hole, Jessica McClure, the Soviet Sub,  Kursk). The ideas for what to talk about belonged as much to the Audience as to Jonathan. And even though we were free to explore in all directions, we did it within the structure of the game.  We never lost track of where we were because we always knew what Theme we were in.

I made a couple of adjustments to the game while we were playing it. Initially the role of Prompter (mine) was only to explain the game structure to the audience and click through the Prezi images. Once or twice, when I felt the editing by the audience was lagging relative to the time we had left, I’d call ‘Scene’ myself.

Jonathan, his wife, and their six daughters, are in Southern California for two weeks, courtesy of Oakley, who is returning the favor Jonathan did for them when (without any kind of quid pro quo) he got Oakley to design and donate the sunglasses for Los 33 to wear and protect their eyes from the severe reaction they’d have to daylight when they were freed from mine last October.

Five of the Franklin girls–Fancisca, Kimberly, Amy, Susan and Maciel–accompanied Jonathan to Disney. Afterward, the director, John Musker (”Little Mermaid,” “Aladdin,” “Princess and the Frog”), along with Howard Green, Stephanie Morse and Kelsi Taglang of Disney, treated us to lunch in the ABC commissary and a tour of the Disney Animation studio. John drew little sketches of characters from his films for each of the girls.

A good game was had by all.

Legendary Disney Animation director John Musker draws for the Franklin girls

I love this story because it shows how what stifles our ability to solve a problem is less often about the nature or scope of the problem than it is about the quality of the problem-solving process.

Too often, we invest in poor communication practices and processes, characterized by unproductive games like ‘Eight Axes, One Budget,’ that no one enjoys playing, never mind that they are not designed to solve our particular problem in the first place. I call these poor games. ‘Poor’ because they don’t have much ‘play’ in them, either in the sense that they are a happy experience, or that they are flexible. No, they’re grim and rigid, like the dead. Their ROI is poor because the probability of getting to a solution quickly is low. Because they frequently lack focus and energy, they waste time.

There are thousands of characteristics of poor games, and thousands of poor games played in business every second of every working day. ‘Reading Your PowerPoint Deck to Your Audience’ is a poor game. ‘Kissing Ass’ is almost always a poor game. The ‘Eight Axes, One Budget’ game Barb Groth walked into was a poor game. She saw it, and suggested an adjustment. That’s what gamechangers do.

All it took for her to transform the game was changing its objective–from ‘Cut $20K’ to ‘Save $20K.’ One word. A tiny shift in perspective on the problem. Suddenly, the opinionating, negotiating, status-seeking, bragging, positioning, arguing, joking, backstabbing, politicking, gossiping and justifying that plague poor games, were not getting in the way of solving the problem. The new game got played, the problem solved, in the time it takes to Rochambeau.

Barb’s gamechange freed time that could be better invested in activities with more business upside, or in personal time. Any game that lets you swap an hour of arguing about whose budget gets cut for an hour playing with your kids or helping them with their homework?  That’s a rich game.

Jason Terry

Interviewed after his Dallas Mavericks’ victory tonight over the Miami Heat for the NBA championship, their star shooting guard Jason Terry was asked how they did it, and he said (I’m paraphrasing)…

“We found a home for everybody’s stories. Everybody’s story came together here. Dirk (Nowitzki’s), Jason (Kidd’s), mine, Shawn Marion’s, Stojakovich, Berea, Tyson Chandler, Deshawn Stevenson’s–all our stories, together, made this happen.”

This is a really great expression of a team concept, especially, for a pro athlete in the wake of a big victory, when the cliche is to spout cliches, thank God and sponsors, credit the opponent for a hard-fought game, and then say something about going to Disneyland. A quote about the secret to the Dallas Mavericks’ success that they that they built a narrative consisting of all their individual stories? That’s an athlete’s voicing  fresh thought. And it’s an idea that can benefit any organization.

We saw this theme again seconds later when the Mavericks’ owner, Mark Cuban, deferred to the team’s previous owner and founder, Fred Carter, by asking Mr. Carter to accept the championship trophy. When Cuban was interviewed by the TV announcer, he couldn’t get the team’s coach, Rick Carlisle, to the mike quick enough. For someone known to love the sound of his own sound bites, this ‘best supporting actor’ role is a new one for Cuban, and he wears it well.

The Miami Heat, by contrast, are a team of individual stories that have not yet found a way to co-create a championship narrative. In the wake of the season, the stories about them will be all about divisiveness, disappointment and unfulfilled promise,  about who was responsible and who should take the fall.  The team’s stories, in other words, will continue to exist independently of one another, without really benefitting the franchise brand.

Your company, your brand, your team, isn’t a single story, it is a narrative composed of all your stories, and your customers’ stories, too. Evolved leaders like Jason Terry and Mark Cuban don’t inflict their story on the organization, but rather, create an environment in which individual stories can flourish in the shared pursuit of the business objectives.

Well-said, Mr. Terry! Well-played, Mavs!

How many different ways are there to combine six 8-peg Lego bricks?

The answer:

102,981,500  (Update:  Even though this number was supplied by the Toy Industry Association, I’ve since been notified by a tweet from LEGO_Group that the number of different combinations, according to Math Professor Soren Eilers from University of Copenhagen, is 915,103,765 if the bricks are the same color, 658,869,076,800 if they are different colors.  No matter which number is correct, for purposes of composition, the number is practically infinite.)

If that’s how many possibilities there are for half a dozen 8-peg Legos, just imagine how many different ways six people can connect!

The possibilities are practically infinite. Yet so often when six people collaborate, the temptation is to script an outcome, as if, out of a universe of possibilities, we can pick one that is better than all the rest.

It is a mistake to focus on one specific outcome. Focus, instead, on the game, which has potential to generate limitless positive outcomes, and lets you explore more possibilities than anyone can script.

Japan is a chrysanthemum.  Many petals.  One flower.  The meta language of the chrysanthemum is deeply rooted in Japanese history and culture.  It is the official mark of the Japanese Emperor’s family. It symbolizes happiness.

A disaster like the quake that literally shifted the planet on Friday in Japan gets us to focus on what is most important.  At times like these improvisation—a system for generating positive outcomes from unforeseen circumstances—is especially critical.

I have a feeling that in the coming days, we are going to see the power of the flower.  As the Japanese people face the challenges confronting them, we will see the creative potential of the group mind, especially when a group as large and connected as the Japanese are are given a sense of purpose like the one they have now.

We will see that improvisation consists not of making it up as you go along, but of making focused and productive moves at every opportunity.  Here, for example, via our friend, Michelle James (@creatvemergence), is a list of suggestions from Time Out Tokyo, for how the Japanese people can respond to the crisis.

Already, we can see that there is structure to the process defined by TOT.  The objectives, environment, roles and rules of the game are clear.  Process is clean.  Everything is achievable and scalable. In short, the advice consists of:

Give money–being present in spirit is more important right now than being present in person;
Give blood–to be healthy is an obligation to care for the infirm;
Conserve electricity–the people are in this together.

Though it’s seldom as sudden and concentrated like it was on Friday in Japan, natural destruction is happening at all times, all over the world.   Lives end.   Rivers flood.  Mountains slide.

At the same time, nature’s creativity is expressing itself with equal energy.  Lives begin.  Rivers heal.  Mountains rise.

How can we improve the odds that our creativity will triumph over our destruction?

We can play the Chrysanthemum Game.  Find our purpose.  Believe in happiness.  Bloom as one.