Back in January of this year, Barack Obama tossed out an aside at a coffee talk with a couple dozen senior citizens in Indianapolis, an aside that was probably lost on most of the audience listening in person: If he got elected, he and his team were going to re-design the White House web site to become more of a utility for citizens. I pointed out at the time what a brilliant initiation this was, with implications related to technology, jobs creation, art and design, and citizen activism, to name a few of the themes that could be explored as a result of it.

In yet another example of how the Obama administration will use the internet to put the principles of improvisation into play, the people that brought us a truly gamechanging campaign site (and are no doubt already hard at work on the White House web site re-design) have rolled out www.change.gov, a utility that connects people with government in new and productive ways.

Improvisation principles at play in Change.Gov.

ENVIRONMENT. As Viola Spolin used to say, if you act on the environment, the environment will act on you. The ‘environment’ for Change.Gov is much friendlier and more inviting than a typical government site. Which means that people are more likely to engage with it (’the environmment acting on’ its authors) The clean, cogent, artful design of the site presents a huge contrast with a typical government web site. Take a look…

SMALL IS SIGNIFICANT. Improvisers learn not to over-reach for big moves or big jokes, but to let their performance evolve from the events that occur organically in the scene. A particularly potent move can be to elevate a little idea or aside to prominence, like the little robot Wall-E becoming the most animated character on the planet Earth. The air bag sensors in automobiles that are sensitive to passenger weight, for example, came from a castoff little experiment at the MIT Media Lab whose only commercial application, until it was spotted and adapted by Honda engineers, was as part of a prop in a Penn & Teller magic show. In the improvisational sense, it is significant that Change.Gov’s stated mission is to make things ‘a little bit better’ for our children. This is not only more realistic and achievable, it honors all contributions, all ideas, and acknowledges their importance to the mission. Stopping global warming? That’s an overwhelming, daunting, super-human task requiring super-human effort, and you’ve got company coming over for dinner. But making things a little bit better? Everyone can do that. A little less gravy on those potatoes? Good move.
AGREEMENT. In casting its ensemble, the new administration has been ultra-quick to send signals that there are no vendettas in play–that loyalties to a shared objective transcend personal or political loyalty. Joe Lieberman keeps his chairmanship. Hillary Clinton looks like she’s coming aboard. Treasury Secretary nominee Timothy Geithner is apparently more conservative than Obama on economic issues. It is, as Lincoln described his own cabinet, a team of rivals. Obama understands that his job is not to sway or strong-arm other folks into his way of seeing things, but to synthesize two distinct points of view into a third, shared point of view, which then paves the way for productive action. Finding agreements that bridge disparate viewpoints and desires which may seem, on a cosmetic level, to be at odds with one another, is the improviser’s job.

LISTEN! Improvisers use suggestions from the audience to kick off a performance, and so does the Obama team. Listening, to the Obama team, is not just lip-service, and it is not just about reading poll numbers. It extends beyond cosmetic data, to the more emotional and meta levels of communication that come about through conversations and the sharing of stories. From conversations and stories come themes that inspire and inform the performance. The ability to listen is one of Obama gifts as a politician, and if Change.Gov is any indicator, it will be one of the many gifts he and his band of able improvisers bring to his administration.

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.

The ComputerWorld article underscores yet again how vital improvisation is to business in the Networked World — after all, what is improvisation if not ‘agile development’? The article also shows how ‘performance’ in business does not refer solely to folks standing up and holding forth in front of other folks. Apps are performance for an audience, too. The Five App Dev Lessons cited by ComputerWorld are straight from the improvisers’ playbook. Here they are. Our comments are in italics:

1) Break the barrier between developers and end users, and involve users in quality assurance processes. Like all good improvisation, agile development begins with suggestions from the audience. When users become players in your game (e.g. QA processes) they are much more likely to have a rooting interest in your performance (e.g. remain loyal to your brand).

2) Keep it simple. Poorly improvised business scenes often get sabotaged by too much extraneous information. That includes the development of apps with functionality that 99% of your audience doesn’t want or care about. If two players are performing an improvised theater scene set on their wedding night in the car on the way to the airport for their honeymoon…and they toss things into the scene like ‘her mother’, ‘his love of baseball’, ‘what happened at the reception’ and ‘who makes them jealous’…that is going to be one unwieldy and not very compelling scene. But that’s exactly what a lot of apps are like. “Feature Creep” is a horror movie we’ve all sat through.

3) Stick to the script. Okay, right, we know, sticking to a script is the opposite of improvisation, but CW is referring to dynamic scripting languages that, according to a recent Forrester study, can cut development time by 30-40%. Anytime the window between when you think about something (functional specs) and when you can do it (release date) closes, you have become more improvisational.

4) Release early and often. Many agile developers update their apps several times a day (the article cites Wesabe, a San Francisco-based money management site as one of these; Mixx.com, a social news site based in MacLean, VA, as two such developers). Think about yourself as being ‘in the audience’ for money management and social news apps: Are you more likely to applaud a site that evolves organically based on your suggestions, or one that announces upgrades periodically but with lots of fanfare, in the MS Explorer style? In cloud computing land, versioning seems stodgy and unresponsive compared to continuous, audience-minded tweaking.

5) Let the users, not the developers, determine new features. We would amend this slightly to read “Let users and developers working in collaboration determine new features.” The spirit of the tip is correct — take suggestions from your audience — but developers know things that users cannot, and vice versa. The collaboration between developer and user should no more discriminate against a developer’s idea than it should against a user’s. And hey, not every idea from every boss’s wife is automatically a bad one. Stay open to where the good ideas come from, because they can come from anywhere.

P.S. A commenter on the article, a guy named ‘Grant’, notes that the ‘agile development’ described by Havenstein is nothing new, and has been around for a couple of years. He rejects the idea of branding any app a ‘Web 2.0′ thing. Grant has a very good point, not only about the concept that there actually is no such thing as a ‘version 2.0′ of the Web, but also about versions generally. With agile development, versioning loses meaning. Versions of apps are like the same movie with many remakes. An agile app, by contrast, is one long neverending movie. An agile app never repeats itself, while versions repeat themselves all the time. Another advantage to agile development over versioning: Users have for too long been forced to pay for versions of software that are either way overbuilt or mostly cosmetic. With cloud computing and agile development, that game is changing in a hurry. Why should I care what version of an app I’m using as long as it does what I need it to do, and enables me to work today more productively than I did yesterday?

In the Networked World, as the costs of producing media and other forms of intellectual property dwindle, and your blog about your dog has the potential to reach as many people as Maureen Dowd’s column in the New York Times, the big business opportunities for brands and entrepreneurs are not so much in the creation of content, but in creating and owning context. In other words, you can have the swellest piece of content — a great product, an incredible film, a breakthrough technology — but if no one can find you or your content does not connect in a meaningful way with your audience, your tree will fall in the forest and will not make a sound. In the Networked World, context is king. Context makes the falling tree mean something to the forest, gives it its sound, its flavor, its grain, its significance.Creating context has, in fact, become a whole new occupation, one that didn’t exist three years ago: the Pollinator. Pollinators are experts (or fast-becoming that way) in cobbling together social networks and communities of interest that connect brands with their audiences. Pollinators are skilled listeners, and know how to turn ’suggestions from the audience’ into productive brand behaviors. They understand a brand as a fluid experience for the customer, an experience that requires continual nurturing to evolve. Pollinators design the context in which these experiences can transpire. They are professional contextualizers.

YouTube and Google are the highest-profile examples of brands that create and own context. They do not create content or experiences, but give content a home and make useful experiences possible. Everywhere you turn these days, you see brands shifting their focus from static content to the fluid context that keeps their narrative lively and engaging.

Here are three other companies who are in the business of creating context:

Mochila is an application with widgets that let owners of content connect with distribution channels and advertisers in a win-win-win scenario. Mochila’s Chairman, Ben Chen, describes his company as a ’syndication engine’ that automates and simplifies what would otherwise be an enormously complicated process of defining relationships and revenue streams between large numbers of producers, distributors and advertisers. What had been difficult if not downright impossible for the average content-creator gets made easier by Mochila. The enormous 24/7 appetite of distributors gets fed. Advertisers can tie into channels and content that contextualize their brand.

Morf Mobile is a mobile content provider founded by Van Jepson, who created the well-known site, Hot or Not? That web phenomenon invited its audience to contextualize random photos. Morf, geared toward a young adult audience, contextualizes content by parsing it into mobile channels and communities of interest. It adds context by tying real world experiences to online ones. Impulses to buy, connect, alert, comment — action! — become more immediate options when mobility gets added to the mix. For further context, Morf enables its licensees to private label their channels. Your brand can use the Morf technology to create its very own context. For example, fans of Artist X can dial up the Artist X channel to share news and keep current with the community and its favorite performer. Artist X, meanwhile gets a channel that lets everyone at a concert become an ambassador for the brand, or buy Artist X’s music and merch before they leave the parking lot.

It’s not only newbie brands who are generating value via context. Procter & Gamble’s Connect + Develop site lets people outside the company have a shot at making money by developing new products and innovative ideas. Applicants can browse a list of P & G’s ‘Needs,’ which includes items like “Packing for Cylindrically Packaged Food,” “Pain Free Hair Removal From the Roots” and my favorite, a call for a “Unique In-Mouth Experience.” P & G calculates that there are 1.5 million people in the world who have engineering and product design skills comparable to the skills of its own engineering and product development staff of 7,500. Changing the context of its development process by opening it up to the world and incentivizing participation enables P & G to increase its potential development staff by 7,500x. They call them ‘Game-Changing’ deals, which is not a very unique in-mouth experience, but we are flattered by the imitation flavor ; )

What’s not so obvious or lame is how Google’s culture is built on fundamental concepts of improvisation.

Here are some of those concepts:

Performances begin with suggestions from the audience. From search queries, on through the many ways the brand listens to the world’s voices and and participates its cultures, Google’s performance as a brand begins with input from its audience. Search queries are, in effect, suggestions. Results to queries have themes, and those themes have the potential to turn objective (”what I want”) into action (”how I get it”). And that, ladies and gents, is the essence of improv.

Conversational language invites dialogue. By looking for opportunities — often as subtle as a single well-chosen, perfectly-placed word — to bring the brand’s language into a friendly, colloquial style, Google encourages conversation. In Googletalk, email threads are, exactly that — ‘conversations’ . Those conversations are varying degrees of ‘old’. Phrases like “Still working…” “I’m feeling lucky” “Search for stuff to buy…” and “You don’t pay a nickel” pop up casually throughout Google’s dialogues with searchers. That apparentl casualness is not casual at all. It is an alchemy of art and science. They don’t overdo it, and they don’t do it in an effort to be linguistically hip or unique. They do it to create little points of commonality, wispy hints of relevance, that make interactions more friendly, easygoing and natural. Those traits are, very much by design, part of the brand’s character.

Dialogue works on multiple levels. Google’s language algorithm folks delve deeply into the meaning of language on the cosmetic, emotional and meta levels. What does a user really mean? What are the associations created by queries? What emotions are in play? How does code divine meta meaning from language? Is a dialogue about an ailing dog about the location of a nearby vet or the best way to treat the dog? An improviser pays attention to subtext, so does Google, and it’s no coincidence.

The company’s culture includes a great big playful streak. They like having people on the team who once worked for the WNBA, who play volleyball, swim, bike, run, Segway. The Googleplex is a warren of physical activity, of music and yoga poses and people sitting on their office floors bolting new trucks to their long skateboards or playing with slot cars. Franz Weber, who once the held the world record for skiing down a mountain, escorts company managers on extreme skiing trips. Google knows that physical activity is a productive counterpoint to all the time its employees spend in the metaverse. The reason Google gets the Gamey, however, is that it’s impossible to improvise without playing. The brand’s spirit of of play morphs naturally into the spirit of improvisation, and vice versa.

Poaching is allowed. Thanks to ‘Chief of Confusion’ John Seely Brown for pointing this out to me. Just as JSB allowed poaching — i.e. recruiting players from other teams to join your own — at Xerox PARC when he was Chief Scientist there, Google also allows it. This is a very nuanced line in the business improvisation code, and it goes like this: Your scene is only as good as the game you are playing. If you’re playing a productive game, in which everyone is content with his or her role, and objectives are being achieved, all is cool. If your game is unproductive, players will sense it, coaches will see it, and the scene will get an adjustment in the form of an addition or edit, at the very instant of recognition. If you play a game that’s so productive and so engaging that other players want to join in, joining in should be an option. Good games attract good players. It’s true in improvisation, it’s true in pick-up basketball, it’s true in business. That attraction holds immense performance potential, but it’s potential that can only be realized if those good players are allowed to play along.

The environment is well-defined. Improvisers pay careful attention to everything about the environments in which their scenes transpire, and so does Google. Everyone is familiar with the stark Google home page design with its 30-something word count and the themed artwork that often adorns the logo. Other pages have a similar clean aesthetic. Nothing is wasted or extraneous to the scene. The Googleplex, likewise is a distinctive environment, with all sorts of romping around going on at all times of day, and a creatively cluttered quality to the office areas. Meals are served, massages given, games are played non-stop. A couple of years ago, after doing some business at the Googleplex, I asked my host if I could stop at the company store and pick up a t-shirt. “We don’t have a company store,” she said.

“Where do you sell Google t-shirts?” I asked.

“We don’t,” she said. “Sometimes people have them made for conferences and occasionally they have some left over.”

“Where are those?” I asked, getting enamored with the idea of having a rare, hard-to-acquire Google-T.

She led me past an office hall where several engineers were inspecting the gears on a very expensive looking mountain bike, to a large amoire sitting in an otherwise-empty corridor. “If there’s anything left over from a conference, people usually stick it in here, but the stuff always disappears pretty fast.” She pointed to an ‘eye on the amoire’ webcam mounted on the ceiling, no doubt connected to some internal Google schwaghund network. “Word gets around,” she said.

The amoire, as you’d expect, was bare, but my host had given me a bigger gift. Our t-shirt/company store/cycling engineers/amoire/webcam scene had conveyed to me the very essence of the Google spirit. Word gets around and energetic action follows.

What do Jif Peanut Butter and the commedia dell’artes of the Renaissance have in common? Both are improvised performances that are informed by suggestions from the audience.

A suggestion is the word(s) or idea(s) given by the audience to an improv group from which the group develops themes for a performance. Suggestions are important to improvisation because they make the audience an active collaborator in the show. Watching a group springboard from a suggestion into an exploration of themes inspired by that suggestion is one of the most engaging aspects of an improv performance. It engenders a natural rapport between audience and performers, and gives the crowd a rooting interest in the outcome of the show. After all, if something is our idea, we want it to be good.

The business improviser also acts on suggestions from the audience. The purpose is the same: to bring the audience into active collaboration on your performance and give it a rooting interest in your success.

In the commedia dell’artes, an early form of improvised theater, small troupes of performers traveled from town to town in Italy and central Europe, giving spontaneous shows on street corners. These troupes used satire as a way of appealing to the locals’ sense of humor. Before the show began the performers would gather as much information as they could about the town and its people. Who the bigshots were. The name of the constable. The concerns of the citizens. The performance would then arise organically from this ‘conversation with the audience’. Because the troupe had been given useful information and invariably had a repertoire of stock (usually masked) characters that figured into the life of every small town, they could perform scenes that hit home with the audience.

Entrepreneurs and business executives like Jim Stengel, the Chief Marketing Officer for Procter & Gamble, maker of Jif peanut butter and a hundred other familiar consumer brands, understand that brands in the Networked World are, in effect, improvisational performances for the marketplace, and spend much of their strategic focus ‘listening to the community describe itself’. These days marketers like Stengel call on their brands to reflect to an unprecedented degree what the community is saying. A multi-billion-dollar company like Procter & Gamble and a centuries-gone commedia dell’artes company from Italy have this same vital fact of life in common: The success of each depends on how adept they are at acting on suggestions from their audiences. In business, the community describing itself instigates what I call an Umbilical Loop of interactions between audience and performer by which brands are built and sustained in the marketplace.

Business-related suggestions are usually complex and come in a multitude of forms via many channels and, if the organization is wired at all, in massive volume. On the other hand, sometimes suggestions can be slap-you-in-the-face simple.

In 1998 Dr. Taryn Rose was an orthopedic surgeon practicing in San Francisco. Her patients included quite a few stylish, shoe-loving women who frequently complained to Dr. Rose about and needed treatment for foot pain – pain caused by those stylish shoes. Dr. Rose, too, wore fashionable shoes, and her feet would suffer during the long hours she spent building her practice. The complaint was so chronic that Rose took it as a suggestion from the audience. From the suggestion of ‘hurting feet’, the entrepreneurial physician arrived at a theme of ‘comfortable fashion’ and began designing shoes that appealed to her audience’s sense of style and her doctor’s sense of good health. Suffice it to say that Rose no longer practices medicine. Today, she is a well-documented business success story, the founder and CEO of Taryn Rose, Inc., which in 2007 will enjoy retail sales worldwide in excess of $20 million.

Or let’s say you’re a third-grader on a school outing in Fukagawa and wander away from your group and are suddenly confronted by some big boys from the Sumo School. You know if they spot you they’ll eat your rice cakes, no questions asked. What will you do?

You’ll put on your Hiding Clothes of course…

Tokyo fashion designer Aya Tsukioka, in an homage to the old Superman in the Phone Booth gag (well, half of it anyway — you go into the booth but don’t come out) has designed a line of clothes that convert into vending machines. The New York Times and photographer Torin Boyd broke the story in the U.S. in mid-October and it quickly went viral.

Tsukioka gets the GameChanger of the Month Award for acting on suggestions from the audience (Japanese taste for whimsical inventions and a propensity for turning away from confrontation), a strong initiation (thanks to her bold move the world now knows her name, what she does and where she’s from), use of characters (the timid young woman in the big city and the schoolkid threatened by bullies), painting a vivid environment (a street populated by dangerous characters — and vending machines), use of metaphor (fashion design as a superpower), and for giving a big gift (invisibility) to a player in scene where he or she is threatened.