Dr. David Boje, the 'Einstein of Story'

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

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

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

They found a home for all their stories.

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

They found a home for all their stories.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Being extraordinary became a way of life for our friend. To this day, it doesn’t matter what scene he’s in, it doesn’t have to be world-shaking, it can be as simple as taking a walk in a park, he will find a way to make that walk unlike any other walk through any other park. Today, he and his family live in a beautiful home on Mullholland Drive overlooking Los Angeles, he is a millionaire many times over, and a philanthropist with a giving heart, especially for people who get pounded by life.

Earlier this year, I met the Oldest Boy, now a middle-aged man who still lives in the Midwest, who struggles to keep their old family business alive, and exudes disappointment and alcohol. He told me a story about the Middle Child:

“My parents and I went to visit him after he’d moved to Los Angeles,” said the Oldest Boy, “He and [his wife] had no money. They pretty much didn’t know where their next meal was coming from. He didn’t even have a decent pair of shoes to wear. So my parents said, ‘Let’s go get you a pair of shoes anyway,’ and we took him to a shoe store and let him pick out a pair of shoes, and he picked out a pair of red shoes! Red shoes! The guy’s going to have one good pair of shoes and he picks out red ones?!’ The Oldest Boy laughed at this as if the Middle Child had done something incredibly stupid, something that was still worth teasing him about, maybe even pounding him for.

Back when it could have changed his life, the truth was right there in front of the Oldest Boy, and he missed it. What he missed was his younger brother’s knack for doing things that were out of the ordinary. Our success comes from consistently making extraordinary choices. Those choices do not have to change the world to be extraordinary, they only have to change the game. When you can only pick one pair of shoes, pick the red ones.

We jump at shadows. A weekend pilot who wanders into the airspace above Camp David (where the President was not staying at the time) is immediately characterized by the media as a possible terrorist; this followed by dire predictions from Homeland Security that the next wave of terrorist attacks will come in small planes.

A mentally ill person armed with an AK-47 shoots up an IHOP in Nevada. The media blend this and other sad events like it into a nonstop drumbeat of fear, marching us inevitably backward in time, toward the paralyzing events of 9/11. We go into hiding from one another. Gate our communities. Update our security systems. Buy more guns. And all this does is blind us to the reality that we live in a country where mentally ill people can get their hands on AK-47s. Instead, we are made to feel powerless that we can anything about it. Except burrow deeper into the darkness.

I’ve got an idea for this week, an antidote for the fear being foisted upon us by people who want to manipulate and profit from it. An idea that doesn’t involve chest thumping, flag waving, or the naming and elimination of our enemies:  Do what the Amish do. Forgive.

When five young girls were executed in a schoolroom by a lunatic with a handgun in Nickel Mines, PA, in 2006, the Amish did the most difficult thing I can imagine. They forgave the gunman and his family. They bulldozed the schoolhouse where the massacre took place, and set about doing the unfathomably hard work of getting on with their lives.

When it comes to 9/11, we haven’t been allowed to forget, and we certainly have not been encouraged to forgive.  Warmongers like Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz saw 9/11 as a business opportunity. And that, with Cheney’s abominably-timed book promotion, continues to this day.

The battles we must fight are not with our enemies but with ourselves. No matter how much we hurt, or how much harm has come our way, we can never find healing in bringing more hurt into the world, or in harming others as we have been harmed.

Forgiveness is the first step out of the shadow of our fear, into the light of a better world.

2006 Site of the Nickel Mines Schoolhouse, Today

Then, as I was scanning my network, a pattern became too obvious to ignore:

Television news missed most of the Hurricane Irene story. Social networks did not. This may be the most visible, tightest-framed example I’ve ever seen of how narratives live differently, more dynamically, in networks than they do in the old inside-out media channels. And why improvisation trumps scripting.

From Wednesday on, the mainstream media beat the drum for a monolithic, fear-based narrative about Hurricane Irene. Don’t get me wrong. Precaution is good, and often necessary. “Worry,” William Inge said, “is the interest paid on trouble before it comes due.” The problem for the scripters of TV News is that this is the only narrative they had, and it became increasingly and visibly detached from most of the storm’s reality.

By Friday, CNN’s Wolf ‘Cry’ Blitzer was bouncing from correspondent to correspondent in search of bad news, and you could sense their desperation at not finding any. They were showing B-roll that could have been any Friday afternoon Raleigh-Durham traffic jam in the rain, and characterizing it as a panicking populace fleeing to higher ground. Politicians, camera whores that they are, played dutifully along.

By Saturday,  kids were dancing around in their underwear behind your intrepid TV c0rrespondents who were doing their best to file Admiral Byrd’s dying words even as the dancing kids spoofed their phony narrative.

Social and local networks, by contrast, were generating an entirely different portrait of the storm. It was not a picture of panic, but of ‘yes-anding’ the situation. Of neighbors connecting, and watching out for one another. Of helpful hyperlocal reporting about downed trees and street closures. Of beautiful photography from the beaches as Irene rolled in. Of friends gathering for a drink at their favorite martini bar, and bikers blazing through empty Manhattan streets.

Hurricane Irene Photo by Paige Minimi

When we play along with the fear-based narratives–be they our own or anyone else’s–there’s no opportunity, no expansion or growth. Irene is a scary bitch, stay inside, don’t answer a knock at the door, and whatever you do, don’t laugh at her or she will terrorize you like her sister, Katrina, did to New Orleans.

The reality of Irene is that she is a Hurricane With a Thousand Faces, and many of those faces are smiling.  Find yourself a smiling Irene and dance.

A pattern defines a game.

This is what a burning platform looks like:

What’s the story here? Well, let’s see…it’s an environmental disaster…lives are no doubt endangered (many have already escaped in lifeboats, jumped or been killed (e.g. ‘fired’)…the focus is on containment instead of productivity…the PR spinning is beginning…a hundred lawyers are circling…Wall Street is manipulating markets based on shareholder emotions…the media is fanning the fear…the government is organizing committees that will haunt and impede productivity for years to come…cities, states and municipalities are seeking reparations. Whatever good can emerge from this mess will be years, maybe a generation, in coming.

Metaphors like ‘burning platform’ represent a level of meaning that accompanies all communication, the Meta level. (The other two are Cosmetic and Emotional). The Meta level contains metaphor, symbolism, allegory, parable, analogies, etc. Meta meaning is powerful stuff and should be chosen with great care. It’s why brands work so hard, at such great expense, on their identity. Those symbols mean a lot.

At GameChangers, we practice what I call the science of narrative. This science requires specific, deliberate and objective choices about what metaphors we put into play.

The Center for Public Policy and Administration defined the phrase ‘burning platform’ in 2005. ‘Burning platform’ according to the CPPA, came into meaning when a driller on a burning offshore oil-drilling platform calculated that his best chance of survival was a 150-foot jump that he’d never make under normal conditions. A burning platform came to mean an ‘urgent condition requiring bold choices.’ All good, and useful. Context is huge, however, and after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the context for this phrase changed and, along with it, its meaning. Now it means ‘unmitigated disaster.’

Look at the photo again. That’s the image of a burning platform most of your audience will conjure when this phrase is used. Whatever changes come about because of the pictured scenario promise to be painful, litigious, lengthy and costly. This is not what we want when we change the game. We want change that is productive, agreeable, fast and inexpensive to implement.

Clearly, we need a new metaphor to capture this meaning.

It’s like that old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon intro, where Bullwinkle pulls a monster out of a hat and says “No doubt about it, I’ve gotta get another hat.”

We’ve gotta get another hat.

A pattern defines a game. And while this game is more sophisticated than flat-out spamming, and probably gets a higher click-though because of it, it’s worse in a way, because it wastes the time it takes to actually see that it’s spam. I saw the same kinds of ‘Follows’ Gardarian no doubt did. The fictional females in question had reasonably believable names. They were following more than a thousand people, so it wasn’t one of the totally ‘empty’ profiles that often characterize Twitter spams. But when Yolande and Aura both have the same profile photo, you know the ‘un-game’ is on.

The tweets from these fictions had a kind of personality to them, touchpoints to popular culture.

A quick look reveals the commercial objective of selling new technology. Not that there’s anything wrong with selling technology, but to do it using fictions like these only calls the authenticity of the merchandise itself into question. Can I count on the reliability of a product when I’ve been tricked into it by a bot? Spam by any other name is still spamming.

I’d dig deeper into this to find out what agency is behind this faux cleverness, but I’ve already spent enough of my time and intelligence on it, and can only echo David Gadarian. #pleasestop! Brands who play inauthentic games like these are wasting time–their possible customers’ and their own. Deceitful narratives always come with a cost, and the biggest problem is that the deceivers have no way of knowing or controlling what that cost is going to be.

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

Themes are Big Ideas. That’s part of it, but only part of it–because ideas can get too big, and, like a balloon so large it cannot be inflated, they will never find their definition, nor serve their purpose.

‘Stardom’ is a Big Idea. So is ‘Food.’ They are not themes. They are un-inflatable balloons, weighted down with so much meaning we can never get them off the ground. What makes a Big Idea buoyant? What gives it definition and gets it off the ground? Explorability.

The Big Idea must be Explorable (by at least two people at any one time). When a theme is Explorable, we can map to it. It can help guide us, and give us our bearings. At any given time, we can assess our position with regards to it. Themes, by virtue of their Explorability, suggest action. We can do something about them, through them, with them.

‘Reality Show Stardom’ is a theme. ‘Food of Love’ is a theme. (’Love of Food’ is another theme altogether.) When a Big Idea is Explorable, we can tell, and others can tell, objectively, whether we are engaged with the Big Idea or not. If we are studying dance at Sarah Lawrence, we are, in all probability, not exploring the theme of ‘Reality Show Stardom.’ It’s easy, by contrast, to imagine a hundred moves that do explore that theme. If we propose marriage over dinner, we’re sailing in the ‘Food of Love’ balloon. If we’re eating Cheerios and checking the box scores from last night’s game, we’re in a different balloon. Explorability gives Big Idea shape and definition, and carries us into new territory.

Which brings us to the business purpose of a theme:

The exploration of a Theme transports us. That, by itself, would be enough to make the exploration of a theme a valuable exercise. The buoyancy inherent in a Big Explorable Idea gives wings to our actions and adds to our sense of purpose. If a theme is strong, rather than get lost in the exploration of an idea,we have the potential to discover ourselves it it.

There’s a second big reason that Themes are important to business and brands: Themes are the glue that bind your brand to your customers. They are common ground that you explore together. Social media are the mechanisms, a garage full of vehicles, so to speak. Themes define the conceptual, physical and virtual territory you and your customers can explore together.

The narrative belongs to the customer. By exploring Themes that are authentic to your brand and relevant to your customers, you increase the probability that your product will play a meaningful role in their lives.

All photos in this post are from http://www.slc.edu/graduate/programs/dance/