Archive for the ‘Relationships’ Category

Power and Powerlessness

Friday, March 5th, 2010

TheNewHow1This is from a blog post by our friend, Nilofer Merchant, author of the new book The New How: Creating Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy:

The challenge with people feeling powerless is this: we don’t see how we can contribute to solve problems. We believe it is “someone else’s” to own rather than something any of us can contribute to. Powerlessness leads to apathy on global issues and disdain on local issues.

Now check out this from Mick Napier’s classic book, Improvise:  Scene from the Inside Out:

Two people…staring at each other and wondering who’s going to make the first move.  Two people being nice to each other and allowing the other to start doing something.  In that short amount of time, two humans have created themselves as powerless…Who has time?  The audience is waiting.  They don’t care about your support.  They care about what you do.  What you do now.

These two statements, made miles and years apart, reflect the timelessness of the concept:  Do something!  Participate!  Add to the conversation!  When you’re just getting started don’t worry about what the solution will be, or where the scene will take you.  No one knows, and your audience doesn’t care.  The most important thing is to bring to the scene whatever you’ve got.

The saying in improvisation is ‘take care of yourself first.’  This is not the same as being selfish.  It is, rather, the recognition that making the first move, even if we are not always the one to make it, is always our responsibility.

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Posted in Agreement Principle, Communication, Dialogue, Entrepreneurship, Initiations, Innovation, Leadership, Relationships | 1 Comment »

Over Under Sideways Down

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

One of the characteristics of networks is their flexibility. What our communication channels looked like yesterday may not be what they look like today. This, of course, can be an asset or a liability. The net that allows us to build new relationships, discover markets and expand our potential for taking productive action is the same one that swallows channels and markets like a singularity sucking down solar systems in nanoseconds.  The global financial system, guaranteed, is right now teetering on the edge of such a debt-and-greed-spun vortex.  Call it The Bank Hole.

TheBankHole1In our crazy race to escape these kinds of vortexes, we can turn direction-blind.  We pick a course of action, or someone picks a course for us, and in our all-out effort to escape a certain fate, we go heads down as hard as we can for as long as we can in that direction, like barn-sour horses galloping toward a distant barn.  A strategy, as Umair Haque points out in his latest HBR post, can be just as bad as a locked-in direction, because it can confine or limit one’s options instead of liberating them.

What Haque advocates, and what we could not agree with more, is adopting a set of behaviors (he calls these behaviors ‘Wisdom’) that foster liberation of the ideas and the ethical actions that can deliver us from the Goldman-Sachs Singularity, and whatever else sucks.  These behaviors have no time frame, because they are timeless.  They cannot be quantified, because they are potentially limitless in number.

One of these behaviors (me, adding to Haque’s list) is to Envision.   And by that I don’t mean Ayn Rand’s old Burt Lancaster-as-One-Of-A-Kind-Genius concept of vision but what I call ‘Viola Vision’, which consists of ’seeing and sharing what we see.’  This kind of envisioning expands our horizons, and gives us infinitely more options for escaping what sucks.  So in your quest for solutions, don’t forget to:

Look over. It’s how you get perspective on a problem.

Look under. Play with the dynamic of concealment and revelation.  Respect roots.  Dig deep.

Look sideways. My friend, the animation director John Musker, talks about stories as ‘taking an unexpected left turn.’  A sideways move can shake up your narrative in a way that keeps you on your toes and your audience engaged.

Look down. Who needs help?  Some days, this the only question worth answering.

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Posted in Communication, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Fundamentals, Games, Innovation, Issues, Leadership, Movement, Narrative, Networked World, Relationships, Scenes | 1 Comment »

GameChanger of the Month, November 2009

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

The GameChanger of the Month for November goes to Jimmy Biblarz, Mimi Rodriguez, David Kamins and Maya Festinger of Hamilton High School and the teacher, Christina Gutierrez, whose job they saved.   By organizing a campaign that included (administration approved) student protests, stories in the media, a letter-writing campaign, and a formal presentation to the School Board, they were able to keep ‘Miss G’ at their school.MissG2

It is evident from reading the story in the L.A. Times that Gutierrez is the kind of player anyone would want on their team.  It was not the loss of a teacher that stirred the students to action, as much as it was the threat of losing someone who genuinely cares about them.  Biblarz felt extra heartache when he heard Gutierrez was getting laid off (because she lacked seniority).  When his younger sister, Veronica, was out of school for two months with an illness, Miss G made sure she got her homework assignments, and that she was all caught up when she returned to the classroom.  “She just actually cares,” Veronica Biblarz says in the Times article. “Not like the fake pretending to care. . . . She takes it seriously.”

Interesting, isn’t it, that the student calls out ‘fake pretend caring?’   A fact of which every brand should be aware: the b.s. detectors of the networked audience are fine-tuned.  And there is no substitute for authenticity.

One of my improvisation teachers, Scot Robinson, said one day in class, “I hate people who generalize.” He delivered it with such deadpan perfect timing that it got a laugh, but getting a laugh was not the point, the point was this:   Give the gift of specificity. Don’t be a generalizer generalizing.  To hold your audience’s interest, be unique, be remarkable, buck stereotypes.  You cannot accomplish this if you are ‘general’ about your role, your character, or your game.   You cannot accomplish it if you limit yourself to what’s in the script, the employee manual or the teacher’s guide.  If the people in your audience feel they already know you, you will fail to hold their attention.  It’s when they do not know you, but rather, want to know more about you, that you win them over.  It is when they see the the world a little differently because of you, that you create value, and make a difference in their lives.

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Posted in Character, Education, Gifts, Leadership, Networked World, Relationships | No Comments »

Applied Improvisation, Part Three: Connections

Friday, November 20th, 2009

Part of a series about the Applied Improvisation Network’s world conference, Portland, Nov 11-16, 2009:

Chris Sams Connects

Chris Sams Connects

Chris Sams’ “Missed Connections?” workshop stresses the importance of connecting with scene partners and groups in meaningful ways.  Chris guides the group through a series of exercises designed to get beyond the bullshit and the expectations, remove the masks we typically wear, and see what’s beyond the façade of the physical world.  The ‘Eye Contact’ exercise, which I do with Kay Scorah, is literally and figuratively, an eye-opener, very moving and evocative.   “It felt like family,” I told her.

Every connection I make at the AIN conference is meaningful because improvisers know how to make them that way.  Networking by improvisers is extraordinarily productive, a fact that will become more important to business the deeper we get into the Networked World, and organizations begin to model themselves around social media and other network-friendly structures.  Here’s a cross-section of connections:

In the past two years, Yael and I have both worked with our friend Lynne in D.C., and no sooner do we figure this out than, as if on cue, Lynne texts me from D.C. with a status update on a proposal.

Theresa, who’s at OU writing her doctoral thesis on Keith Johnstone, breaks the ice for a newcomer to the group (me).

Alain and Jeremy save my ass with a timely dongle and projector set-up for my presentation.

Max and I are definitely going to pow-wow in L.A.   Patrick passes along the name of a superb improviser friend of his who’s based in L.A. with Comedy Sportz.  Improvisers unite!

After my workshop, Munir and I talk about value creation.  The time is short.  Too short!  Next session is starting!  We have more to discuss!

I sit next to Sue at lunch and even though we only make small talk I am plenty happy to meet one of the true greats of the game.

Paul and I huddle briefly over business strategies.  Paul is one of those people who’s just ‘on.’   The quality of performance he brings to even a sidebar discussion like ours is brilliant.  It defines one of the value propositions of improvisation:  Work at the top of your intelligence.

Armando Diaz and Me

Armando Diaz and Me

THE Armando and I do an exercise together and get pretty good at it.  The Armando.  It’s like playing catch with The Babe, or something.

Kevin and I compare notes about live event production.  I know people in this field.  Maybe I can help him.  We’ll see.

After lunch, Janet tells me some of what I missed in her session about your brain as an improvisational organ.  Took place at the same time as the GameChangers session.   Brain says must look into her work asap.

Bard tells me about the convening of the real and the virtual in a space he’s designing for an office building in Oslo.  He calls it The Tank; I feel certain this kind of environment is where work and learning spaces are headed, and I tell him about conversations I’m already having around this subject with friends who design retail and theme park experiences.   When I get back to L.A., there’s a link waiting in my inbox, it’s in Norwegian, which I don’t speak, but I get their intentions and dig them deeply.

I must say, Trilby Jeeves has the greatest name.  Ever.

I take a picture with three other Tall People of Improvisation.  I look like I’m wearing jodhpurs.  IMG_5843

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Posted in Coaching, Communication, Initiations, Networked World, Relationships | No Comments »

Adios, Vacilar?

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
TravelsWithCharley1

John Steinbeck and Charley

There is a passage early in John Steinbeck’s book Travels With Charley that I often cite in GameChangers workshops, where he writes about a Spanish verb, vacilar, which he claims has no equivalent in English.  (Despite what Babelfish says, it does not mean to vacillate.)  To vacilar, Steinbeck says, is to travel with a sense of direction without greatly caring whether you get there or not.  To be vacilando is to be purposeful in your travels without sweating your destination too much.

A friend of Steinbeck’s told him that the way to attain this state is to go looking for something almost certain not to exist wherever you’re looking for it– a jai alai cesta in Anchorage or a bar patron in Dublin who doesn’t want to talk politics, for example.  To the left brain, this will seem like a big waste of time, but to the right brain, it’s pure liberation.  You never know what may turn up along the way or what kind of beneficial experience you may have.  This is not to say that vacilar is a recipe for randomness.  It does not mean vacillating.  Quite the opposite.  It imposes discipline upon one’s journey.  A sense of purpose and the nature of one’s inquiry trigger one’s discoveries, whatever they are.

Vacilar, I have often claimed, is a good process for creativity, innovation and problem solving.  You do not have to get to a stated destination to have forged a new path.  Business is awash in success stories, from synthetic rubber to Post-It Notes to Google, that resulted from unexpected explorations.  Our friend, the animation director, Bill Kroyer, likes to say that if you want to solve a problem, the best way is to look a hundred eighty degrees opposite of where the problem is.  To paraphrase Kroyer, to find a solution, go to where the problem isn’t.

Last month, as I was waxing on about this concept to a group of NYU business students in a GameChangers workshop when one of them hit me with this comment:  “Why don’t you just Google what you’re looking for?”

Wow.  Quite a reversal this B-schooler laid on me.  It posed a good question:  In the age of Google, has the vacilar concept become obsolete?

Have we become so menu-driven and search-reliant that if we can’t find evidence of a thing’s existence (and website and location and customer rating) online we won’t even bother to go looking for it in the real world?  Have the metaverse and the universe switched places, so that if an object doesn’t exist in cyberspace it will cease to exist altogether, like Marty McFly’s family evaporating from the Polaroid picture in Back to the Future?  Has the spiced-up, mashed-up virtual world gained an edge in our attention over plain old vanilla physical space?  Has the augmentation become more valuable than the reality?  Are we at the dawn of an age, literally a ’second life,’ in which we’ll never again encounter anyone in person whose avatar we have not powwowed with first?

If that’s the way you want it, that’s certainly the way you can have it.  If you don’t want to leave the house without knowing for a solid fact that what you’re leaving the house for is waiting for you like a bride on her wedding day, that’s your prerogative.

It’s just that you’ll be missing so much of the romance along the way.

Vacilar is why, a few years ago, a team of Honda engineers set themselves up with the task of building a humanoid robot that could run, and walk up and down stairs.  Such a robot did not exist.  The engineers themselves saw no practical reason, nor did they need one, for it to exist.  What they knew is that by ‘getting lost in the problem’ of designing a robot they would, along the way, make all sorts of useful discoveries about the nature of robotics.Asimo2

Vacilar is why our friend, Taylor Davidson, specializes in what he calls the Science of Serendipity.  Davidson’s process, which you could call full-time vacilar, takes him all over the world.  He looks for photos that do not exist until he takes them, and relationships that do not exist until he causes them to occur.  None of it could be Googled or Mapquested or scripted.  He uses technology as an enabler, but not as an endpoint.  From a business standpoint, this approach makes no sense except in retrospect, and there’s no time frame on the retrospection.

TDavidsonPhoto1

Photo by Taylor Davidson

For a brief instant in that workshop at NYU, I let myself imagine, darkly, that maybe vacilar was no more, that maybe it had been rendered irrelevant by the marvels of computing, and would have to be stricken from the GameChangers lexicon.  And then I came to my senses.  Not true.  Not true at all.  Never less true, in fact.

Life happens when we take the local, not the express.  When we are open to what and whom we run into unexpectedly, we make possible what we can’t imagine or bring into being on our own, and find new and productive avenues for expressing ourselves in the world.

Getting lost is the first step toward discovering what no search engine can find.

Posted in Creativity, Innovation, Movement, Relationships | 2 Comments »

When The Best is the Enemy of The Good

Monday, September 28th, 2009

Gottlieb1Hildy Gottlieb, President of the Community-Driven Institute, recently made some potent observations in a blog post entitled When Best Practice is Bad Practice. In it, she bemoans the overuse of the phrase ‘Best Practice’, especially by her consulting colleagues, and cites a number of the problems with the whole idea of Best Practices:

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.ZebraLions1

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.

Posted in Games, Issues, Leadership, Listening, Narrative, Objectives, Relationships | No Comments »

Health Care, Already Reforming

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

We have a client in the health care sector, and our work with them has put us in touch with remarkable people who are changing the health care game without waiting for President Obama or any other policymaker to tell them how to do it.  People like Jay Parkinson, co-founder of HelloHealth in Brooklyn, Greg Gramelspacher of Wishard Hospital’s Palliative Care Program in Indianapolis, and Gordon Moore, founder of the Ideal Medical Practice Movement.

CarePractice1Dr. Aaron Blackledge opened his San Franscisco clinic, CarePractice, in 2008.  Today it is the fastest-growing primary care practice in the Bay Area.   We have ideas about how the new community-based, patient-centered models will do more than any legislation to define the future of health care in the U.S., but we cannot express it any better than Aaron Blackledge can.  In his own words, he describes what he did to change the game:

“In the beginning I told my employee–at the beginning there was only one–that if he had friends or family that needed to be seen that he had the authority to set the price on his own without asking me for permission depending on how much they could afford or how much of a deal he wanted to give them.  This may seem crazy to some people, but I think I benefited in so many ways from this practice and feel lucky I came up with at the beginning of Care Practice. It really helped to empower my staff and bring in clients that loved Care Practice.  It reminds me now that since we have grown so much in the past 3 months I am not sure if all the new staff are aware of this ‘policy.’  I will have to remember to tell people about this tomorrow.

Carepractice3“I went to Sarah Lawrence for my undergrad degree.  I was a dance major.  My background is artistic as well as medical.  I have taken many improv classes.  My artistic background helps me look at medicine as a design, a feeling, an experience, that the current medical establishment so horribly lacks.  I know Jay (Parkinson of HelloHealth) is a very accomplished photographer.  I don’t think it’s a coincidence.  Artists are used to facing the unknown, the blank canvas or the empty stage.  We’ve done the same with the medical profession.  What we’re doing didn’t exist before we did it.

“I come from a social activist background.  I never desired to be an entrepreneur.  Never desired to own my own company.  I left my last job and was canvassing for Obama in California.  I heard that Super Tuesday speech, where he said,  I’m paraphasing, ‘Be the change you seek.’  And I thought why isn’t anyone doing this?  And I finally realized you know what, this is my moment, this is my time.  And if I’m going to do it, I’m not going to do it partially.

“I tapped into my altruistic desires, into what it meant, and then I risked everything.  Every dollar I owned, or that I’d ever saved, and put it all into this.  If I needed to spend money on something to make this happen, I spent it.

“All my friends thought I was absolutely crazy.  They couldn’t believe it.  Some of them thought it was going to be some raggedy little space, not the big facility that we have.  Everyone else is closing up shop and joining Kaiser.  And they’re like, ‘What, you’re opening a clinic?!  What are you thinking?!  But I looked at it like this:  There’s no access to care in this city.  There are vice presidents of companies that can’t get in to see a doctor for like a week.  If do it transparent, intuitive, and don’t charge a lot…and I really wanted to show that the future of networking and connecting with patients was through social media.

“I put it in a place where there were lots of young people who’d talk about it.  Mention it on their Facebook, on their Twitter, on their Yelp.  I chose the neighborhood I’m in, Mission Dolores, specifically for that purpose.  I’d heard the story about Tommy Hilfiger opening stores in urban areas and basically letting people shoplift from him, and that was sort of my thinking.  Everything has to exceed expectations.  It’s not what you come in with that matters, it’s about what you walk out with.  We’re building CarePractice as an entity that resonates in the community.  Giving free care to the busboy at the little restaurant who cuts his hand…taking care of one of the guys at the bike shop who has an eye infection.  I wanted to express the view that taking care of people is about more than money, and that is how we’ve grown.

CarePractice2“My place looks kind of fancy, but it’s equipment and furniture I’ve bought from doctors closing their practices, CraigsList, Ikea and eBay.  Everything I have is used.  I put the money into the space, because I wanted that experience.  People don’t even know why it is that it’s different, but it is powerful.  The people who designed it (Indicate Design Groupe) design a lot of restaurants and retail spaces.  They’re used to saying to their clients, ‘Okay this is definitely going to be popular, people are going to come here, you focus on the food.’  And that’s the way we think about CarePractice.  They said to me, ‘You take good care of your patients, because we’re going to bring the people.’  So we focused on the roll-out like a restaurant opening.  People identify with that.   We are like a favorite restaurant.  People point us out as their clinic.

“I want to give you real examples of neighborhood care.  Basically it usually involves simple things for people with little money or struggling that we know through the neighborhood.  The Latino laborers of the contractor who helped to build Care Practice always come to me for their bumps and illnesses and I see them for free.  There is also a shop right next to us and I see a lot of the employees for simple stuff for free or significantly reduced prices and they always tell me if my car is chalked or run up to my car when it is about to get ticketed and pretend like it is their car when the DPT comes.   They are always ready to help me carry in supplies when I need help, which is often.  Another example is the security door guy at a neighborhood shop who I always talk to on the street.  He wanted to quit smoking and asked me to get him some Chantix so I ordered him some at cost and he just yelled out to me a week ago when I walked by that it had been 5 months since his last cigarette.  I didn’t charge him anything besides the cost of the meds. When you create that type of sentiment in a neighborhood it is a powerful component to branding a business.

CarePractice4

“You (i.e. GameChangers) talk about the beginner’s mind, improvisation, and not being afraid to feel like a dumbass and make mistakes the first time around.  That’s the way I look at it, too.  Build a company that serves patients first.  I want every one of my employees to see that we’re generous.  Every interaction is an opportunity to show your character.  And in an age of social media, it is magnified by ten.

“I think the health care system is so ready for change, and people are so unhappy, and the amount of money being spent is so huge that I think can happen very quickly, and not necessarily through legislation, but through individual action.  Ten thousand doctors getting up and walking out of the room and saying we’re not going to do it that way any more, we’re going to do it differently, can change it.  That is my goal.

“People often ask me about health care reform, ‘What if we have single payer?  What if we have this or that?’  My response is that I don’t care.  I can turn on a dime.  I can turn the entire practice around and move in a different direction, and I can do it in a day.  If we went to a Canadian style health care model, pfff, I don’t care, I’d change overnight.”

CarePractice5

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Posted in Branding, Character, Education, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Innovation, Networked World, Relationships | 1 Comment »

GameChanger of the Month – May 2009

Monday, June 1st, 2009

Cutie1Father Alberto Cutie of Miami has been in the news a lot lately.  First, a Spanish language tabloid caught the handsome celebrity priest canoodling with a woman on the beach.  Last week he made the mainstream news again when he announced in a press conference that he was changing his affiliation from the Catholic Church, with its rules on celibacy, to the Episcopal Church, where priests are allowed to marry.

Forget for a second that this scene has anything to do with religion.  It’s not really what the scene is about, anyway.  The scene is about is faith and  faithlessness.  It is about reputation and disrepute.  It is about a tug of war between one’s own personal brand and values, and the brand and values of an organization.

In other words, it is a scene that is completely familiar to anyone who’s ever had to make a career decision that involves profound personal choices.  Which means it’s about all of us. (more…)

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Posted in Branding, Emotion, Relationships | No Comments »