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Objectives vs. Outcomes cont’d

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

Tuesday night, we staged an invitation-only workshop for 25 friends, acquaintances and interested folks to let them experience the marvel that is GameChangers. After reviewing our performance, the GameChangers team’s consensus is that on this particular night we were not marvelous. We started 15 minutes late, got slow in the middle and rushed at the end. We felt that the experience was, at times, less than riveting for our audience.  A couple of people spent an inordinate amount of time on their mobile devices, and we know for a fact they were not tweeting about how great it all was.

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

Post-event conversations were the most productive part of the evening

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Posted in Coaching, Communication, Education, Fundamentals, Games, Gifts, Issues, Narrative, Objectives, Problem Solving, Scenes, Social Media, Suggestions From the Audience, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Life is Long

Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012

ET1One night when my son, Alex (who’s leaving tomorrow for a job in NYC) was five years old, we watched the movie E.T. together at home. When E.T. left Elliot to return to his home planet, Alex cried. He was still sad when I tucked him into bed a little later.  “Why did E.T. leave?” he asked.

“E.T. had to go home,” I said. “To his family, on the planet where he lives.”

“I didn’t want him to go. I wanted him to stay with Elliot.”

“E.T. and Eliot were sad about it, too. But they love each other. And as long as they love each other, they’ll never really be apart. In their hearts, they’ll always be together.”

A pause, as Alex ponders.

“So you and I will always be together?”

“Yes, Son, you and I will always be together.”

Of all the motivational sayings used in business my least favorites express the idea that  ‘Life is Short.’

Because you see, Life is not short. Life is long. Our own lives are short, for sure. Birth, fornication and death—as the poet Ogden Nash so succinctly put it—are the facts when you get down to brass tacks. A human being’s life—or a whale’s or a bacterium’s—is a tiny spark in the night of eternity. But to say or act as if life itself is short generates the kinds of  hurrying and worrying that can cause us to miss much of what life actually is, or can be.

Life is long like the love a parent has for a child. There is nothing short about that. Nothing hurried. Time ceases to matter when we are proving our love.

Life is long like the warmth of a fire on a cold night. We are warmed as much by an experience as old as humankind as by the fire itself.

No matter what mountain we have chosen to climb, or what sudden twist of fate confronts us, when we behave as if life is short, we begin to hurry, and that’s when mistakes happen. As the basketball coach John Wooden said, “Be quick, but don’t hurry.”

My wish for 2012 is that we all find ways to appreciate the idea that life is long…

That the reason we make footprints on the planet is to mark a path for who comes after, and that it’s not the size of the footprint that matters, but the direction of the path.

That we are patient with one another, and not short, abrupt, rude, inconsiderate, unkind—all the stuff we do intentionally or not, when we get impatient, when we are driven by the ticking of an internal clock that no one else can hear.

That we embrace the notion that our Success is inevitable, and so is our Failure.

That the Birth-Fornication-Death thing is fleeting, but poetry endures.

That we remember that nothing of value was ever harmed by the taking of time. (I thought Abraham Lincoln said it, but can’t find the citation. What’s likely is that even if Abe Lincoln did say it, someone said it before Abe. Because life is long.)

That we see growth not as something that takes time, but as something that transcends time, because growth is happening now and always has been. What can take time is our own ability to see and make sense of it. The Disney animator Ken Anderson once pointed out to me, about the great old California Oak trees in Descanso Gardens near his home in Flintridge, CA, “The trees are dancing. If you could look at them over a long, long time you would see them dancing.” Life-is-short sees a tree. Life-is-long sees a dance.

That while our time here is limited, our ability to love one another is not. And that as long as we act out of love, our footprints will mark a path worth following.

Have a lively 2012! Don’t be the Tree, be the Dance!

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Posted in Emotion, Issues, Metaphor, Movement, Narrative, Problem Solving, Relationships, Themes, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Gamechanging Leadership

Thursday, December 1st, 2011

MountainTeam1AIn hierarchical organizations, leadership moves primarily from the top down. That’s its sole direction. In this model, the CEO is automatically the leader in every scene that doesn’t  involve the Board of Directors. The people who report to the CEO are the leaders in every scene that does not involve the CEO or the Board etc. etc. etc. until you get to the janitor, who is the leader of the broom. Every scene has a pecking order, and the pecking order has been decided before the scene begins.

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

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Posted in Communication, Creativity, Leadership, Narrative, Objectives, Problem Solving, Scenes, Uncategorized | No Comments »

A GameChanger Visits Disney

Wednesday, July 20th, 2011

Yesterday, our friend and business partner, Jonathan Franklin, the author of 33 Men, a beautifully-observed account of the Chilean Miners dramatic 2010 rescue, and I did a one-hour presentation for 40 people at Disney Animation.

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

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

Legendary Disney Animation director John Musker draws for the Franklin girls

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Posted in Additions and Edits, Coaching, Communication, Environment, Fundamentals, Games, Objectives, Themes, Uncategorized, story | No Comments »

Zero History Lessons

Friday, November 12th, 2010
William Gibson

William Gibson

Where trajectories of fashion, business, government and technology will someday intersect, William Gibson is already there, reporting back in mindbending detail.  His novels are, for me anyway, like books of code, densely-clued mysteries about the near future, that challenge a present-day intelligence to unravel them.  Here is one clue that gets dropped over and over again in Gibson’s newest novel, Zero History:

In the future, improvisation is a must-do.

Page 135:  “Doing it, as a pickpocket had once advised him, as if it were not only the expected but the only thing to do.”  The improvisation:  When you invest in your scene, the scene makes choices for you.  ‘Doing what’s expected’ is someone else’s script for you, it’s a voice in your head that’s not even your own.  ‘Doing the only thing to do’ is the feeling that you are in tune with everyone and everything around you.  It is acting on the clarity of one’s intuition instead of  obeying the voices stored in the RAM of one’s rational mind.  Just don’t be using your new-found powers to pick pockets.  Not all improvisation is put to work for the good of the team.  Beware the bad game!

Page 171:  “THE ORDER FLOW” (Chapter title.)  Gibson’s characters talk about “the inability to aggregate the order flow”—the sum of everything being bought and sold around the world at any given moment in time—as being the dynamic that keeps markets alive.  “Stability’s the beginning of the end,” says the character of Milgrim, a high-level intuitive, quoting an even more intuitive base jumper named Garreth.  “We only walk by continually beginning to fall forward.”  The improvisation:  Always fall forward, never stand still.  Turn fails immediately into positives.  Embrace flow.  Stasis—a static state—is the enemy.  Harness chaos with structure.  Subvert structure with flow.

ZeroHistory1Page 202:  Garreth talking about whether a phone call that’s crucial to their fates will happen or not:  “Either way, we’ve moved it forward.”  The improvisation:  ‘Something happening’ and ’something not happening’ are both opportunities to move your scene forward.  Don’t worry about what will or won’t happen, do something with whatever happens.

Page 225:  “You’re just doing this to see what happens,” says Milgrim.  The improvisation:  Do something and see what happens.

Page 234:  “…some kind of London PR hive-mind thing,” says a character named Heidi, a biker chick who uses taser-tipped darts as her weapon of choice.  “Wires are hot but there’s no actual signal.  Kind of subsonic buzz.”  The improvisation:  This is a description of the group mind.  Nothing perceptible is communicated.  What the group needs to know is simply, without ever being consciously transmitted, already there, waiting to be shared.

Page 319:  “Follow the accident.  Fear the set plan,”  says Garreth.  “I thought you loved plans,” says Heidi.  “Love planning.  That’s different.  But the right bit of improv makes the piece.”  The improvisation:  Think of your process as a series of scenes, in Gibson’s lingo, ‘pieces.’  Preparation is more important than planning.  Planning goes out the window in the first few beats of your scene, but preparation will be there for you throughout.

Zero History also has juicy insights into the future of marketing and brand strategy, which I’ll post separately.

Now go do something to see what happens.

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Posted in Fundamentals, Group Mind, Movement, Narrative, Networked World, Scenes, Speed, Uncategorized, story | No Comments »

GameChangers Glossary, H to N

Tuesday, August 24th, 2010

Adapted from GameChangers–Improvisation for Business in the Networked World, by Mike Bonifer:

Heighten–To build emotional involvement and energy in a scene

Improv–See ‘Improvisation‘

Improvisation–spontaneous communication designed to generate positive outcomes from unforeseen circumstances; interpersonal and group communication that is instinctive and informed by experience, knowledge, serendipity and respect for environment; improv, as performed in theaters, such as with improv comedy; a conversation with the community; the pedagogy, philosophy and process defined by Viola Spolin in her 1963 book, Improvisation for the Theater; a games-based methodology for generating communication, learning and transformation

Initiation–The first meaningful words or lines spoken during a scene; in this case, ‘meaningful’ refers to anything that directly involves the group’s progress toward achieving the scene’s objective(s).

Interrogation–A performance-related issue, often arising in interviews or employee reviews, that arises when one player only asks questions and never acts on the information revealed by the answers;

Invention–A performance-related issue that occurs when players work with speculative or subjective information instead of the reality of the scene.

Invocation–An exercise that lets players examine a subject from the third-person (”It is”), second-person (”You are”) and first-person (”I am”) perspectives in order to identify themes for a performance.

Issue–Any performance-related problem which can be remedied by better execution of GameChangers business communication techniques.

Judging–A performance-related problem that occurs when a player subjectively assesses a scene while the scene is taking place.

Justifying–A performance-related problem that occurs when a player self-consciously explains his or her (or their team’s) actions in a scene, especially when the behavior does not align with the GameChangers principles.

Liminal–relating to the threshold of perception that players break through by participating in a game; relates to perceptions of one’s own abilities and to what one’s perceptions of what is generally possible; transcending the status quo

Meta Communication/Meaning–A symbolic or allegorical representation of ideas and concerns that exist on a societal, cultural or archetypal scale; the symbolic representation of a macro trend, widely held belief, or aspect of the human condition; (See ‘Cosmetic Communication/Meaning‘ and ‘Emotional Communication/Meaning‘)

Monologue–A speech given by a single player in a scene; a speech shared amongst multiple players in the course of a scene or presentation.

Narrative–A flow of thematically-connected events that can be related after the fact as a story; organizational memory and vision of the future that inform scenes performed in the present; a purposeful alignment of ideas and events, such as for a brand.

Negativity–Traits, ideologies and behaviors that halt a scene’s progress through skepticism and a disagreeable inclination to oppose, deny and/or resist the ideas or involvement of other players; pessimism; the antithesis of the attitude required for productive collaborations.

Network–The communications matrix of an organization, brand or individual; those who are connected by a communications matrix or belong to an organization; defined by John Seely Brown, John Hagel et al as consisting of ‘core’ and ‘edge’

Networked World–The highly communicative, internet-supported global stage on which business gets conducted

Objective–The desired outcome of a scene; the stated purpose of playing a game; the business goal of a scene; one of the four elements that comprise a Game

Opening–An ‘overture’ prior to a scene or series of scenes in which a player or a group develops the themes for an upcoming performance; usually triggered by Suggestions From the Audience

Organization–The manifestation of a business or brand to its audience; the operational structure of a business or brand; a company or group with a shared mission and business objectives (see ‘Network‘)

TO BE CONTINUED…

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Posted in Branding, Communication, Dialogue, Emotion, Environment, Fundamentals, Initiations, Issues, Narrative, Objectives, Themes, Uncategorized, story | No Comments »

The Game is the Frame

Sunday, June 13th, 2010

In a conversation with John Seely Brown and Erick B this past week at a party in Westwood hosted by the Deloitte Center for the Edge, we talked about creating value at the edges of networks, where the flow of information is fiercest.  (The new book, The Power of Pull, co-written by JSB with John Hagel and Lang Davison, explores this subject in depth.  My review to follow.)

JSB asked Erick and me how social networks (Erick’s area of expertise) and improvisation (mine) create value.

I asked rhetorically in return, “Why do pictures have frames?”

The conversation continued for a minute or so and then JSB repeated, “Why do pictures have frames? That’s a good subject for an article!”

So here it is, JSB.  An improviser’s answer to the question, “Why do pictures have frames?”  (Erick B?  You got anything?  Bring it!)

Frames impose discipline. How many times have we all heard the phrase, “Think outside the box”? Scary many.  Over the past ten years, it has succeeded “paradigm shift” as the #1 business cliché.  Worse than a cliché, it’s bullshit, because it implies that a good creative process is not subject to restrictions.  That it’s totally free. Random and unfettered.  A good process, in fact, begins with restrictions.

A sculptor chooses a rock.  The rock is a frame. The sculpture is already in the rock, and it’s the artist’s job to coax it out.  The rock tells the artist what tools to use.  How much time to allocate.  How much force to apply to the coaxing process.  The nature of the rock suggests where the sculpture will eventually live.  The artist can only create within the limitations of the rock, and yet, within those limitations, there is unlimited potential to bring something delightful to life.  The artist uses the frame of the rock to test his or her own limitations to make something of value.  Our limitations are not in the rocks we choose, but in ourselves.

For improvisers, the game is the frame.  The game liberates potential because players know that everything required for a great performance is already in the game, waiting to be discovered.  In terms of business, ‘framing games’  put the emphasis where it belongs, on human potential, and not on a particular system or platform.

ArtFrame1Frames create focus. The eye knows where to go.  The geometry of the frame introduces–to both the artist and the beholder–spatial and temporal relationships.  These relationships between the art and its environment, and between elements of design within the frame, give meaning to what’s inside the frame.   Likewise, the act of framing helps define relationships within networks; and between a network and the business environment.

Frames provide context. Unless the immense amount of communication coursing through a network is given context, it tends to be read as raw data by platform- and metrics-obsessed managers.  Data is not narrative.  Data is not theme.  Data without a framing game to give it context is meaningless, like water without a container.   All it does is evaporate.   The molecules are still there, but its usefulness vanishes into thin air.

Frames invite valuation. Let’s face it, business needs numbers.  The margins must be there.  How much is the time of a employee at the edge, in steady communication with players outside the company’s network,  worth?  Framing games make valuation possible.  (Not easy.  Possible.)

In The Power of Pull, JSB, Hagel and Davison describe ‘shaping strategies’ for networked organization, which are analogous to the framing games described above.

If this has whetted your appetite for the subject of ‘why pictures have frames,’ you can deepdive into this conversation between the renowned academics, David Bordwell and Henry Jenkins, part 3 of a series about framing transmedia narratives.

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Posted in Communication, Creativity, Environment, Focus, Games, Innovation, Narrative, Relationships, Themes, Uncategorized, story | 1 Comment »

Are You a Narratologist or a Platformist?

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

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Narratologists, as the name implies, obsess over narrative.  What makes a good story (and a story good)?  What are the emotional stakes?  What’s the relationship between characters?  Between text and subtext?  Who are the players?  What roles to they play, and do these roles reveal or conceal their true natures?  What motivates them?  What needs to they seek to fulfill?   How does narrative create dialogue between players and audience?  These are the questions keeping Narratologists awake at night, and earning their keep during the day.

Platformists obsess over apps. How solid is an app?  How does it scale?  What language is it written in (and how many does it speak)?  Who uses it and why?  What is the feature set?  What is the ROI?   What is the social component?  How compatible is it?   What’s the relationship between reliability and flexibility?  What differentiates it from its competitors?  If you can answer these questions for more than five apps, you’ve got a lot of Platformist in you.

AppsShot1Narratologists and Platformists can collaborate with one another, but one cannot be both.  Not at the same time anyway.  We all have to choose.  To help with your decision-making, here are a few things to consider:

Narratives are designed to make sense of the world by distilling information into meaning.  Most platforms are, by contrast, designed to distribute information. ”Information,” Viola Spolin once said, “is a poor form of communication.” Choose.

Narrative is inherently more unique, and therefore scarcer and ultimately more valuable than any platform.  As information gets commoditized across platforms–33.5 billion tweets about brands in 2009 (Forrester),  120 million videos hosted on YouTube with an average of 200,000 more added every day (Yahoo Answers), and 400+ million profiles on Facebook (Business Week)–using narrative as a way of organizing and extracting meaning from information grows more relevant all the time.  Would you rather wrestle with one meaningful narrative, or 33.5 billion mostly meaningless tweets?   Call it while it’s in the air.

Narratologists deal in the relationships between people. Narrative wants to be human.  Wants to engage. Wants to move its audience. Yes, it can be messy and unpredictable, but that’s life.

Platforms, on the other hand, deal in the relationships between people and technology.  Platforming may be more predictable, but it’s antiseptic.  It wants to be germ-free. That’s not life. ‘Sterile’ is most likely not an association you want for your brand.

Maybe what matters most is that narratives are a lot more fun for participants.  They generate energy and emotion, manifest purpose, offer possibilities.  They elevate their audience from the drone of daily life. 

Platforms, from the days of Gutenberg’s first printing press, have always been and will always be a pain in the ass. They spawn frustration and induce headeaches.  We find ourselves chained to them.  It’s the nature of the beast. 

Would you rather entertain the possibility of having fun, or guarantee yourself a certain amount of frustration?   Are you a ‘glass-is-half-full-drink-up’ kind of person, or a ‘this-glass-will-automatically-notify-me-via-SMS-when-its-fill-factor-is-above-50%’ kind of person?  You can only drink from one glass at a time.

Narratives define what platforms cannot.  Narratives last longer than platforms.  Mean more. Engage more deeply. Evolve more quickly.  Earn more money in the long haul.

Choose.

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Posted in Creativity, Dialogue, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Innovation, Leadership, Narrative, Relationships, Uncategorized | 6 Comments »

Work Your Way to the Bottom

Monday, February 15th, 2010

Thanks to our friend, Nilofer Merchant, founder of Rubicon Consulting in San Francisco and author of the insightful new book, The New How, for fanning this New York Times interview with Vineet Nayar, CEO of HCL Technologies.  HCL is a 54,000-person IT services company based outside Delhi with 2009 revenues of $2.3 billion.

Vineet Nayar Leads With Modesty

Vineet Nayar Leads With Modesty

Nayar’s ‘employees first, customer second’ philosophy aligns with a basic concept of improvisation:  Take care of yourself first.  Mick Napier hits this hard in his book, Improvise:  Scene from the Inside Out.  If you wait for the other people in your scenes to have an idea, to initiate, you’re making yourself powerless, and you leave your scene partners and the audience hanging.  And if the other person in your scene waits on you, you’re lost, and so is the audience.  Nayar’s point is the same:  HCL can only be as good to their customer/audience as its employees are to one another.  These behaviors cannot be separated.  You cannot be one way to your scene partners and another to the audience.  It is all part of the same space-time continuum.  And productive action can only begin with you.

Other quotes by Nayar that are consistent with improvisation, and my notes in italics:

“I did not know where I had to go, and I was projecting as if I knew. I assume that you expect me to know where I am going, and you will respect me for that, and the day I tell you both of us are in the same boat, we would fail. That was a very big learning for me.”  Pretending is not illusion  if it is a step on the path to being.

“If you see your job not as chief strategy officer and the guy who has all the ideas, but rather the guy who is obsessed with enabling employees to create value, I think you will succeed.”  Support, the giving of gifts, is the most powerful tool in the improviser’s repertoire.

“How do I communicate to employees to not look up to me, but to look within, to communicate that I’m one of you, to destroy that hierarchy? So I decided I’m going to go into this big gathering of employees dancing to a very famous Bollywood song. And I can’t dance for nuts, right? I was dancing in the aisles with these employees and making lots of noises. What happened? It completely destroyed the gap.”  When you want to communicate something important, use more than information to do it.

“The failures are far in excess of successes.”  Failure is not defeat if it is a step on the path to understanding.

“I don’t want people who are coming here and teaching me something or teaching the organization something. I don’t want teachers. I want people who are not only charged up because they like it, but because they will learn from this experience. I’m looking for people who see experience as a continuum and not as an end in and of itself.”  Improvisers are not teachers.  We are builders of  environments in which communication, learning and transformation can happen.

IMPORTANT FOOTNOTE!

When we tried linking to the HCL URL with Mozilla Firefox 5.0, we got this message:

HCLFail1

We noted this ‘FAIL’ in the post.  Within minutes of publishing the post, an HCL employee, Aruj Kapoor, wrote to say he was sorry they’d been down, that they’d fixed the bug and the site was restored.  And not only that, he ‘yes-anded’ by asking what specific information we were seeking when the site went down.  Aruj’s awareness of what my experience must’ve been when I hit the dead link–frustration, confusion, puzzlement–led him to offer his support to the scene I’d initiated with HCL. Be sensitive to your environment and it will tell you what you need to know. By yes-anding, Aruj converted a mistake into an opportunity to extend the dialogue between the HCL brand and me.  Nice move.  Every mistake is an opportunity to do something useful.

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Posted in Casting, Coaching, Communication, Education, Environment, Gifts, Initiations, Leadership, Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

The Beautiful Game

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

SoccerGame1_BorderSports is a recurring subject for GameChangers.  How can it not be, with our work so tightly bound to the playing of games?  All you have to do is thread back through this blog to see how many times sports and their players produce a ‘learnable moment’ that can be applied to business.  Most sports provide a useful model for how structure (e.g. the rules, roles, environment and objectives that constitute the game) liberate performance, creativity and innovation.

Sports is also a recurring theme for the culture and politics of the times.  There is a lot of meta meaning bound up in sports.  For example…

Jackie Robinson’s is the story of de-segregation, and of breaking through any significant barrier in your chosen profession.

Rudy is the story of anyone who has to overcome long odds to achieve a dream.

Esther Williams‘ and Johnny Weismuller’s stories are about the marriage of sports and entertainment.

The recent film, Invictus, starring Matt Damon and Morgan Freeman, is about a visionary who sees a way to resolve a serious conflict via the playing of a game.

The Invictus theme is more or less mirrors what The Ball is all about:  Beginning this Sunday, January 24, three football (soccer for us Yanks) enthusiasts, Christian Wach, Phillip Wake and Andrew Aris, will kick a football from Battersea Park in London, the site where modern soc– er, football began in 1864, to Johannesburg, South Africa, site of this year’s World Cup, the first ever held on the African continent.  Their trip will take five months, and will run through 25 countries and 10,000 miles.

GameChangers: On The Ball

GameChangers: On The Ball

The Ball is sponsored by DHL-Africa, Special Olympics-Africa, the Freestyle Football Federation (think of them as the Harlem Globetrotters of football), and Alive and Kicking, which distributes footballs to kids in poor villages around the world.  Alive and Kicking is donating 1,000 balls for the guys to distribute on their trip.  DHL is handling logistics, including ground transpo, express mail, visa approvals, border crossings and internet and mobile phone connectivity.  Africa 10, a documentary produced by Julian Cautherly and Will.I.Am of the Blackeyed Peas, has donated an HD camera and flash memory cards, and is co-hosting The Ball content on its website for the duration of the trip.  GameChangers is a patron, too.  Our role is to support the The Ball narrative.

At the January 24 kickoff, ‘The Beautiful Game’ will be played with ‘no rules’ (pre-1864 version of mayhem in the streets with a ball); ‘old rules’ (c. 1864 genteel and casual, if it strikes your fancy, smoke a pipe while you play); and ‘modern rules’ (the athletic, free-flowing game of today).  Following the kickoff event, Dan Magess of the Freestyle Football Federation will attempt to set a world record for ‘keepy-uppy’, keeping a football in the air without touching it with your hands.  Current record is over 23 hours.  And with that, The Ball will begin its journey to Jo-burg for the World Cup.

This will be the third and most ambitious World Cup journey for the group, which operates under a non-profit organization, Spirit of Football.   Wach and Wake kicked The Ball from London to Seoul in 2002 and London to Munich in 2006.  This is Aris’ first year with the group.

The meta story of The Ball is how a simple idea can sweep aside our differences, and lead the way toward a shared sense of purpose, and the pitch on which all can play.

Kick away, lads, kick away!SOFKickoff1

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Posted in Branding, Creativity, Education, Entrances, Environment, Games, Initiations, Narrative, Networked World, Themes, Uncategorized | No Comments »

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