Posts Tagged ‘Agreement’
Thursday, January 12th, 2012
Not long ago, I observed a scene in a retail store where a manager requested something from a busy employee. This request was obviously unexpected. An ambush of sorts. The employee was doing something else at the time. We have all been part of a scene like this, in one role or the other.
“And when do you need this done?” sighed the already-dubious employee.
“Yesterday!” said the manager, pivoting abruptly and walking away.
The employee shook her head almost imperceptibly and said to no one in particular, “What am I supposed to do with that?”
Exactly.
‘Yesterday’ is not an answer. It’s an attitude. And a cliche on top of it. The ‘I need it yesterday’ attitude says to the employee:
“You are now guaranteed to fail. I’m going to be unhappy with you no matter what. You should have thought of this yourself. Do I have to think of everything?” That’s lot of attitude for one word.
And like the employee said, what is a person supposed to do with it?
Give the people in your scenes information they can put to use! Information that will shed light and bring clarity to the problem at hand. Don’t muck up the scene with your imperious attitude and your unrealistic expectations.
Richard Saul Wurman holds court at USC school of Architecture, 01.10.12
On Tuesday, I went to see Richard Saul Wurman speak to an audience of architecture students and faculty at USC. Afterward he held court outside the classroom for half a dozen students who stayed around and asked him questions. One student asked, “What do you think of urban planning?”
Wurman sized up the student for half a beat then shook his head. “That’s a terrible question,” he scolded. (He pulls no punches.) “It’s too general, too broad. How can I even begin to answer it? It’s like asking a doctor what he or she thinks of medicine, or asking an oceanographer what he or she thinks of water!”
See, there’s learning in the ‘Yesterday’ scene for both players. The employee had an attitude, too. “When do you need this done?” made scheduling the task the manager’s problem. It was therefore not a very useful response to the manager’s request.
Instead of a question that made scheduling the task the manager’s problem (and setting herself up to be a victim) a question or statement that engaged the manager in the scheduling process would have been better:
“I’ve got five to-do’s on my list ahead of your request. Help me prioritize.”
“I can have it done in 48 hours.”
“Rate the urgency from 1 to 5, with 5 being an emergency where I have to drop everything and do it now.”
Whatever you do, whatever role you’re playing, give your scene partners information they can act on, not an attitude that makes it more difficult or even impossible for them to solve the problem of the scene.
Tags: Agreement, collaboration, Communication, Conversation, Declarative Statements, Dialogue, Employee, Information, Manager, Problem Solving, Productivity, Questions, Richard Saul Wurman, Scene, Scheduling, Yes And, Yesterday
Posted in Additions and Edits, Agreement Principle, Communication, Dialogue, Leadership, Problem Solving, Roles, Scenes | No Comments »
Monday, November 21st, 2011
Katehi
The old games are exactly that. Old. And like anything old, they lack sap, spine, vigor. In many ways, the Occupy Wall Street movement calls this out. Saturday’s Silent Protest against the UC Davis Chancellor, Linda Katehi, is one of the best ways yet of #OWS demonstrating the impotency of old games.
Here’s the scene breakdown:
A day after the notorious on-campus pepper-spraying incident, the UC Davis protesters have the idea of creating dialogue with Katehi, by forming a stage between the Administration Building and her car. (Note that no one is out front taking credit for this idea, it doesn’t belong to anyone. Ownable ideas are typical of an old game; shareable ideas are typical of a new game.) The stage is a hundred yards long, a catwalk extending the length of the theater, lined by hundreds of students sitting on the ground in order to effectively elevate the stage.
In forming this stage, the protesters change roles, from ‘Quad Occupiers’ to ‘Silent Audience.’ It doesn’t take them much time to do this. There’s no ’spin’ of a story being told or sold, no research to back it up, no ‘official position,’ only a simple intuitive agreement to keep their mouths shut for the duration of the scene. Game on. ‘Silent Protest’ is the name you can give the game. The reality of the scene emerges from the focus on this game, this agreement. It is the absence of protest that will make the protest so dramatic.
After 3 hours of what must have been a lot of hemming, hawing and phone-calling by her team about ‘how to handle it,’ the scene finally begins when the Chancellor enters, accompanied by a couple of non-speaking ‘extras.’ She is lit dramatically by the glow of cameras—-eyes of the world—-tracking her across the stage. Her delaying has made this a nighttime scene, which is even more dramatic, the darkness creating a heavier silence. By taking the stage without a script, i.e. nothing in her head, Katehi is exposed as someone with nothing in her heart. She’s got nothing. Because —-
The script won’t be ready until tomorrow!
The silence of the audience is remarkable. Its discipline is impressive. No one breaks. The silence is marred by a few unable-to-resist journos whose subdued questions as the Chancellor nears her car only underline the otherwise-completeness of the silence.
Here is what gets revealed by the scene: The Chancellor cannot speak for herself. Her heart is closed, her emotions as frozen as the mask of solicitude frozen on her face. She is afraid of saying the wrong thing. Her institution’s students intimidate her. There is no dialogue between player and audience, between administration and student, between authority and autonomy. No dialogue. Just an old game, getting called out for what it is. Empty.
The protesters didn’t have to say a thing. All they had to do was create an environment in which the old game of ’script and control’ would be displayed in all its inadequacy for the world to see.
Tags: Agreement, Emotion, Environment, Focus, Game, Heart, Linda Katehi, Occupy Wall Street, Old Game, Protest, Students, UC Davis Pepper Spraying
Posted in Agreement Principle, Communication, Dialogue, Education, Emotion, Entrances, Environment, Focus, Games, Initiations, Issues, Leadership, Listening, Scenes | No Comments »
Monday, June 6th, 2011
We live and work in what you’d call the northern edge of South-Central Los Angeles, in one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, West Adams. Western Avenue, the main north-south artery nearest us, is one of my favorite streets in Los Angeles. If you want to get a feel for this city, there’s no better way to do it than to travel the length of Western Avenue. From the exclusive girls school up in the hills on its northern end to the hustle and flow of the ‘hood in the south, and every immigrant dream in between, Western is a ribbon of culture lining the belly of this beast of a city.
I’m doing a photo essay on Western Avenue for a client of ours. In walking Western yesterday, I had all kinds of rewarding encounters. A street poet named Ron shared a poem he wrote, called Shine that was amazing; a restaurant owner grilling chicken on the sidewalk shared stories of his adventures in the real estate biz; a beauty shop owner opened the door after hours to pose for a photo; a kid showed me his python; another kid getting a tattoo showed me his cool shoes–PF Flyers, a brand I used to wear when I was a kid!; a clothing entrepreneur named Prince confided his strategy for pumping up slow sales; a dude named Noon and I had a half-hour discussion on privacy issues, the school system, the prison system, and the relations between the police and the people of South Central–all because he wouldn’t let me take his picture.
No matter how deeply we dive into virtual worlds and other dimensions of reality, walking around and having conversations with folks is still the best way to learn something you didn’t know.
As Viola Spolin said, “Act on environment, and environment will act on you.”
Tags: Agreement, Communication, Conversation, Creativity, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Immigrant Dream, Issues, Los Angeles, PF Flyers, Western Avenue
Posted in Communication, Creativity, Dialogue, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Gifts, Issues, Listening | No Comments »
Wednesday, May 18th, 2011
Toby Daniels (@tobyd), co-founder of Social Media Week, passed along this video this morning. It’s hilarious, and as the title of Charna Halpern and Kim Howard Johnson’s famous book goes, there’s a lot of Truth in Comedy.
Here’s the Truth in this scene: With the coming of the cloud, there’s going to be so much new information coming online all the time that the invitation is to stay comfortably lost in it all, rambling on about our own stuff without really listening. Ever. We’re full of it. Just like these guys. Truth.
So what are we listening for? For the game we can play together. From a productive game will come a narrative that makes sense of it all. But only after the the game has been played.
Later, when people ask, we can look back and say, “That was our strategy.”
Meanwhile, I sort of agree with the caption on the video: ‘The best strategy is one you don’t understand.’ Funny. True.
Tags: Agreement, Charna Halpern, CollegeHumor.com, Discovery, Game, Humor, Kim Howard Johnson, Narrative, Productive Game, Strategy, Truth in Comedy
Posted in Agreement Principle, Communication, Dialogue, Focus, Games, Listening, Narrative, Sales, Scenes | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 9th, 2011
The basic building block of improvisation is ‘Yes and.’ The premise of every statement improvisers make is one of agreement and addition. Scenes move forward by ratcheting along with the ‘tool’ of yes-and like a climber finding holds on the side of a mountain…
Yes, we are here, and I see a place we can grab over there. Yes! A new crack reveals itself, and we grab it. We see another hold and we make the move. Yes, and now we’re experiencing the mountain from a new perspective. Multiple new holds appear, and one hold at a time, with each move accompanied by a thousand little calculations that are faster than conscious thought, we move up the face of the mountain.
Beginning improvisation students tend to use the phrase ‘Yes and’ literally. Skilled players discover infinite ways to ‘Yes and’ without necessarily using the words themselves. This keeps technique in the background where it belongs. A scene in which every player begins every contribution with the words ‘Yes and’ will get sing-songy in a hurry, and that’s not what we want. We want nuance. Refinement. We want technique to be second nature so that it becomes invisible to our audience, and we can pay attention fully to the realities of the environment and our fellow players. That’s gamechanging leadership.
Gamechanging is the art of doing what’s best for the scene. That means knowing a lot of different ways to yes-and. GameChangers yes-and artfully, with technique taking a backseat to the scene’s objective.
They can do it with a smile and a supporting comment. Or
A reaction and a correction. Or
With constructive criticism. Or
By giving gifts to their scene partners and making them look good. Or
By seeing and adding to the environment. Or
By joining in the shop talk of the scene. Or
By keeping the scene focused on its objective. Or
By supporting the scene from offstage. Or
By making declarative statements instead of interrogating scene partners. Or
By energizing and heightening the emotional level of the scene. Or
By emphasizing convergence on a solution when a divergence of ideas gets unwieldy. Or
By doing what our friend Kristen Parrinello calls ‘invisible work’ (@invisiblework is her Twitter handle), the little moves that are so subtle as to be invisible to the audience.
Walt Disney used to call yes-anding (and Pixar Animation has taken to calling it) ‘plussing.’ Add something to the scene, and if you don’t have anything to add, get off the stage.
Not that you shouldn’t practice yes-anding by literally using those two words. You should. Use them as a kind of warm-up or rehearsal, like you’d practice the basic forms in ballet or the scales in music. When the game is on, and you’re in the heat of a big scene, ‘Yes and’ may not literally pop up in your dialogue, but the technique will be there, invisible and inaudible, doing its work, ratcheting you and your team to the summit of whatever mountain you choose to climb.
Tags: Agreement, Ballet, Forms, Invisible Work, Kristen Parrinello, Leadership, Music, Pixar Animation, Plussing, Scales, Walt Disney, Yes And
Posted in Additions and Edits, Agreement Principle, Creativity, Dialogue, Emotion, Environment, Fundamentals, Gifts, Leadership, Scenes | No Comments »
Monday, August 30th, 2010
Jeremy Redleaf, one of the new physicists of the narrative form and the creator of this brilliant site
initated the scene when he sent me this email
about this JetBlue ad
which is anchored by copy that says
In my role of Commentor On All Things About Improvisation in Business, I responded to Jeremy’s email with this GameChangers post
in which i point out that ‘the first rule of improv’ if there even is such a thing, which itself is debatable, is not to say ‘yes’ but to say ‘yes and.’ ‘Yes’ is a state of mind. ‘Yes and’ is action. The most fertile ground in the world is useless until it’s planted. ‘Yes’ is the ground. ‘And’ is the seed. My blog post inspired Jeremy…
Posi-ffiti! Yes! I love threads like this. As usual, I’d tweeted a link to my blog post. I decided to yes-and Jeremy by calling JetBlue’s attention to its error with a Tweet. I was able to Google their CMO, Marty St. George and find his Twitter account. 
To Marty’s credit, he tweeted back within 15 mins. This already puts @martysg and JetBlue way ahead of most CMOs in brand narrative game. It also tells me that this is one vigilant, sensitive cat. Dude’s running it like Ochocinco
here @martysg commits the improvisation error of denying. He does this by being vague–what does “if you said ‘no quotation marks’ I might be with you” mean, anyway?–and acting as if I’d accused him of misquoting ‘John’, and seems to be saying that the mistake is not theirs, but mine, for calling them out on the wrong thing. I responded by suggesting the ‘Posi-ffiti’ game
and further suggested how to initiate the game…
@martysg blocks the game… 
By acting as if I’d said something I hadn’t–that ‘The Posi-ffiti Game’ would have to be played without ‘John’s’ permission–Marty kills the scene. This was probably his intention. He also implies that quoting people without their permission is MY style. In one statement, he refuses my gift and pimps my character. Nice. This is classic old school management style, a familiar corporate game I call, “Parry and Thrust.” It’s played by stalling, and staying non-committal (”Hm…if….I might…”) and then landing a knockout blow (”Do something unethical? Not us. YOU maybe. Not us.”)
Look, everybody understands that a CMO like @martysg will not alter an ad campaign because some nitpicker tweets him about the word ‘and’ in an ad. Like I said, he gets credit for being open enough to have the conversation in the first place. This is more responsiveness from a tweet than you’d get from 90% of all the CMOs in the world. It is, however, short of the kind of action a person would get from an improvisational brand like Southwest Airlines. Furthermore, what happened when @martysg did respond is precisely the point of my blog post. The conversation didn’t go anywhere because Marty St. George ‘yessed’ and he did not ‘and.’
How might Marty have yes-anded? Anyone who’s gone through a GameChangers workshop can give you a dozen games that would be more productive than ‘Parry and Thrust.’
The good news coming out of this exchange is that all is not lost. Jeremy Redleaf has a new job description for OddJobNation: “Posi-ffiti Artist.”
To an improviser, Lost is just the first step on the way to Found.
Tags: @martysg, Agreement, Blocking, Denying, Game, Gifts, Improvisation, JetBlue, OddJobNation, Scene, Yes And
Posted in Additions and Edits, Agreement Principle, Branding, Character, Communication, Dialogue, Games, Gifts, Initiations, Issues, Listening, Narrative, Scenes, story | No Comments »
Saturday, January 30th, 2010
There’s a great tradition in British government that, if you’ve never seen it, you ought to. It’s called The Prime Minister’s Question Time, and it is wonderful political theater. Watch some of this.
And then compare this.
Quite a difference.
The first is improvised.
The second is scripted.
Improvisation is active. It is alive. Members of Parliament are energetically engaged in the conversation about the matter at hand, supportive of, but not bogged down by, their various ideologies and positions. Their actions and reactions are immediate, emotional and visceral. This honors the problem. American politicians dishonor a problem, and obfuscate it, when they use it as a foil for politicking, which is how almost every problem faced by the federal government is regarded now. An excuse for campaigning.
This is the big point President Obama underlined yesterday in his meeting with the Republicans. That 66-minute conversation may be the best thing that’s happened in American politics since the Watergate hearings. Obama changed the game by calling out the current political game for what it is. Let’s call the current game “Our Way or No Way.” It is played by Democrats and Republicans alike, with equal vigor. This game is toxic. Limiting. Stultifying. Divisive. And ultimately it’s unproductive. This is not about blaming one party or the other. The bad game is to blame.
Yesterday, Obama not only called out the current game for the quicksand pit it is, he suggested a better, more liberating, more productive game. You might call the game he’s proposing, ‘Part of a Pie is Better Than None.’ In other words, the invitation to the Republicans (Dems, you’re next!) is to find an area of agreement and agree on it. Do it knowing that some, but not all, and probably not not 80% of what you’ve got scripted, will come to pass. Don’t be greedy. Be generous instead. Don’t place blame. Accept responsibility. Don’t point fingers. Shake hands. And then come out fighting. Let’s relish the good fight, one where we fight together to solve the problem, not the bad fight, where we fight over who’s right and who’s wrong about how to solve it. Let’s pick battles we can win instead of battles we can make the other guy lose.
Cheers to the GameChanger in Chief for changing the game once again. Our political discourse needs more of the kind of energetic, intelligent, articulate, performances that the Brits demonstrate in their ‘Question Time With the Prime Minister” and Obama and the Republicans staged yesterday. It will be a healthy transformation. And it’ll make great TV. Nothing we Yanks like better than that!
Do not get locked into your script for success. Be prepared, instead, to improvise your way there. Remember that other people have scripts, too. As I can tell you from working in the entertainment business, when all we do is fight over whose script we’re going to follow, the show does not go on.
Tags: Agreement, British Parliament, Democrats, Game, GameChanger in Chief, Issues, Obama, Politics, President's Question Time, Prime Minister, Republicans, Tony Blair
Posted in Agreement Principle, Communication, Dialogue, Fundamentals, Games, Issues, Leadership, Narrative, Scenes | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, January 21st, 2009
(This is a version of a piece I wrote for the Huffington Post early in 2008. The context is even more appropriate today than it was then.)
Barack Obama is an improviser. His campaign, his platform, his history, draws on a spirit kindled in the same Chicago South Side neighborhoods where modern improv was born in the 1930s.
How does Barack Obama improvise?
He says “Yes and…” Like any good improviser, President Obama understands that agreement enables a scene to progress, and new, shared realities to emerge from it. “I know that the hardening of lines, the embrace of fundamentalism and tribe, dooms us all,” he writes in the preface to Dreams From My Father. As an improviser, Obama understands that erasing the lines that divide us–enabling “Your situation” and “My situation” to become “Our situation” is what makes any kind of progress possible. (more…)
Tags: Agreement, Agreement Principle, Barack Obama, Bush, Character, Cheney, Ensemble, Huffington Post, Improviser, Inauguration, Integrity, Listen, Listener, Listening, Theme
Posted in Agreement Principle, Character, Fundamentals, Group Mind, Listening, Narrative, Themes | 1 Comment »
Friday, November 21st, 2008
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. (more…)
Tags: Administration, Agreement, Environment, Improvistion Principles, Listen, Listening, Obama, Significant, Small, Viola Spolin, web site, White House
Posted in Agreement Principle, Casting, Communication, Emotion, Environment, Innovation, Listening, Scenes, Suggestions From the Audience, Themes | No Comments »
Wednesday, October 8th, 2008
I’m hearing it from all over these days, so it must be official–the word ‘gamechanger’ has broken into the popular idiom. Why, I remember back in the day when it was just Pontiac Motors, A. G. Lafley of P & G, a few sportscasters, and me. Six weeks ago, William Safire wrote about the etymology of ‘gamechanger’ in his NY Times column. Now it’s everywhere, especially in politics. I must have heard the words ‘game’ and ‘change’ used together a dozen times last night in relation to the presidential debate.
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. (more…)
Tags: Additions, Agreement, Barack Obama, CNN, David LaPlante, Debate, Edits, Energy, GameChanger, Heightening, John McCain, Media, Timing
Posted in Additions and Edits, Agreement Principle, Games, Issues, Listening, Movement, Objectives, Scenes, Suggestions From the Audience | No Comments »
