If the whole is going to be art, the parts must strive not to be.  If we strive to make everything we do precious and perfect and just-so.  If we deliberate and debate the appropriateness of our actions.  If we measure every move.  Craft and eddit every response.  The sum of the parts of what we CrEaTeToGeThEr.  Is.  Surely.  Going.  To be.  Yes.  Oh yes most indubitably and beyond repudiating to the level of a statistical certainty will most definitely be…(Say it!)  A pompous load of crap.

Always bring a brick, not a cathedral into a scene.   We know a businessperson who had built a well-deserved reputation for dropping big ideas on meetings.  That was his thing.  People were in awe of how inspired and forward-thinking his ideas were, by the compelling scenarios he painted for them with his words and emotions.  He liked this role, and didn’t do anything about changing it.  Why would he?  People called him a genius.  A visionary.  What usually happened, though, is that his big ideas died on the vine, or failed to live up to their promise.   His ideas were so big, so singular, that people had trouble adding their own bricks to his architecture.  In our friend’s mind, the cathedral had already been built, all there was for his admirers to do was worship at his altar.  We gave the genius an ‘adjustment’.  All we said was, ‘Don’t be the guy with the big idea.  Be the guy who makes other people’s ideas big.’  This has made all the difference in the world.  He has learned that it’s more satisfying and a lot less stressful to make his scene partners look good, and to not worry so much about proving his own genius  It turns out he’s just as talented at sharing his talent as he is at showing it off, and sharing has proved to be a much more productive way for him to behave.  Today, his reputation is for getting big things done.

Make the strange familiar, the familiar strange.  This is a great philosophy for keeping your brand’s culture lively.  Every business culture benefits from a flow of ’strange’ (i.e. alien to that culture) situations, environments and characters.  Likewise, if we get too familiar with our environment, our process and our fellow players–and most tragically if we quit surprising ourselves–our performance is going to get stale.  When every day is the same we lose our sense of anticipation.  If we dont’ think we’re going find anything, we quit looking, and the flow of new ideas drys up.  It is good to introduce some outside strangness into the workaday mix; it is even more potent to rediscover the strangeness within ourselves.

Don’t prolong the agony of a scene that is slowly dying.  Infuse it with the momentum it needs to end on a positive note.  There are a lot of business scenes ’slowly dying’ these days.  Meetings with HR end in pink slips.  Start-ups lose their funding.  Towns lose their biggest employer.   Often in these situations, the only feasible move is to end the scene quickly and move on.  It makes a huge difference to the rest of your performance if the bad scene ends on a postive note instead of a downbeat one.  A town that greets the news of losing its biggest employer with some kind of community celebration is already on the road to recovery while a town that gets busy telling lots of sad stories to the news about how they got screwed is going to be staying in the doldrums for awhile.

All masks are empty until they are put on and inhabited by the actor.  The same is true with job titles.

In improv theater, when you’re observing your teammates in a scene and you sense an opportunity to add to the scene — you don’t even have to know what you’re going to add, you just get a sense that the time is right and the scene will gain energy from your addition — you jump in. This did not come easily to me. I am by nature, an observer, a describer of the narrative, and I have to work hard to stay out of my head, trust my gut, move on instinct.

Good business, like good improvisation, is not about describing the narrative, it is about living the narrative, moment to moment. About seizing as many opportunities as possible and being supportive of those who share the stage with you. About knowing in your gut when to add — and also when to refrain, and when to cut to a new scene. When the time comes, a GameChanger knows it, and jumps in. It may be an investment in securities or a trade in the pit at the Chicago commodities exchange. It may be a go/no-go decision on a new supply chain, or the selection of a direction for your new ad campaign. One of the hallmarks of the Networked World is our ability to turn idea into action, pronto. Ideas that generate action are the life’s blood of every business scenario. It naturally follows that the improvisational skill of moving on instinct will come in very, very handy indeed in the new global business arena.

Here’s an example of how the Networked World made it possible for me to improvise well. For at least a year, I had the idea of doing something in memory of my friend, Joe Ranft, the genius storyteller of Pixar Animation, who died in a car accident in 2005. Joe was one of the greatest, funniest, and most generous human beings I’ve ever known. He was a fantastic improviser, a graduate of the Groundlings Theater. My idea was to return improv to its roots as K-12 education — which is where Neva Boyd and Viola Spolin began in the 1930s in Chicago — with a fund named in Joe’s honor.

But how ito make this happen? It’s not like I didn’t have avenues. I know his wife, Su, and had her phone number. I could call her and begin the scene. But Joe had his own causes. In fact, when the accident happened, the three men were on their way to a retreat in Mendocino with a mentoring group called Mosaic. Would I be horning in on Joe’s intentions? I wasn’t sure. I held back.

I thought of going through John Lasseter, one of Joe’s best friends and my friend, too, but John’s running around Disney these days like the mayor of New Orleans on Mardi Gras. It’s all police escorts, sirens and phone calls and whoop-de-whoop. He has no time. And Pixar has already donated a ton of money to Joe’s favorite causes.

I thought of getting my friend Howard Green at Disney involved, but he’s juggling a dozen causes already.

I know Steve Hulett, who runs the Animators Local of the IATSE. He’s a wonderful guy, but scenes with him last for hours, because we get to spinning animation industry yarns, and it just…will…not…end…until…every…last…”What are Sue Frankenberger and Dolly Baker doing these days” story… gets told…

The truth is, I didn’t have the time either. And at the rate we’re pouring money into GameChangers, I didn’t have the spare cash to simply write a check.

And then, this morning, I saw that Marc Burdell, who works for the Notre Dame alumni association and is a friend on FaceBook, signed up for a FaceBook app called Causes. With it, you are able to start or contribute money to a cause or designated charity. Within minutes, I had begun the Joe Ranft GameChangers Fund, proceeds going to Treehouse, a 5013c in Seattle, where Su is from and where Joe and she once lived.

In the Networked World, I was able to turn instinct into action instantly. The barriers of the past — of time and paperwork and politics, of sober thought and meandering conversations — disappear with the appearance of this app on my screen. In a small but socially significant way, I am able to stop describing the narrative and start living it. Improvisation shows me how and the Networked World makes it possible. And all of a sudden others have the opportunity to begin living the ‘Joe Ranft’ narrative, too.

Such are the opportunities of the Networked World. In the Industrial Age, players often had to move three steps forward, two steps sideways, four steps back, a diagonal spin and two bunny hops forward — to make any progress. Today, as the Web Worker Daily puts it, networked entrepreneurs can take “fifty steps sideways and two thousand steps forward.” Sure, most of those two thousand might be baby steps, but even two thousand baby steps cover some significant ground.