“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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

about this JetBlue ad

which is anchored by copy that saysIn my role of Commentor On All Things About Improvisation in Business, I responded to Jeremy’s email with this GameChangers postin 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.

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.

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.

He Listens.  Every politician claims to listen to the voters, but what they mean is that they listen to what their pollsters tell them voters are saying, and script accordingly.  “I listened to people talk about their jobs, their businesses, the local school; their anger at Bush and their anger at Democrats; their dogs, their back pain, their war service, and the things they remembered from childhood,” Obama writes in The Audacity of Hope.  “Most of them were too busy with work or their kids to pay much attention to politics, and they spoke instead of what they saw before them: a plant closed, a promotion, a high heating bill, a parent in a nursing home, a child’s first step.”  An improviser listens and responds not only to the literal meaning of what is being said, but to the emotional meaning and metaphorical significance as well.  To the pollster and the scripted campaign, “a child’s first step” means child care legislation.  To Obama, it means starting down a new path, and whatever that first step down the new path means to you.  And me.

He explores themes.  By exploring themes instead of sticking to a script Obama runs a much more nimble, energetic and responsive operation than the scripted and toxic narratives of the Bush-Cheney years.  This ability to respond quickly and instinctively while remaining true to one’s themes is a quality we need in the President of the United States.  More important than that, it is a quality we need to discover and nurture in ourselves.

He performs with integrity.  Like all politicians, President Obama will be expected to play many roles.  A President plays a different role in front of the Joint Chiefs of Staff than he does in front of an auditorium full of children.  A skilled improviser like Obama has the ability to play these different roles, but always informed and supported by his authentic self, faults and all.  He has a sense of who he is, and how that’s different from who other people might want him to be, and even how it’s different from the person he himself might want to be.  “If you are paying attention,” writes Obama in The Audacity of Hope, “each successive year will make you more intimately acquainted with all of your flaws–the blind spots, the recurring habits of thought that may be genetic or may be environmental, but that will almost certainly worsen with time, as surely as the hitch in your walk turns to pain in your hip.  In me, one of those flaws had proven to be a chronic restlessness; an inability to appreciate, no matter how well things were going, those blessings that were right there in front of me. It’s a flaw that is endemic to modern life, I think–endemic, too, in the American character–and one that is nowhere more evident than in the field of politics.”  This can only have been written by an improviser.  You acknowledge the bad with the good, your strengths and your weaknesses, and you bring it all with you, to every performance.

He sees himself as part of an Ensemble.  The narrative form defines who the star players are, and who plays the supporting roles.  It identifies heroes and villains.  Improvisation, by contrast, calls for an ensemble, in which everyone has the potential to be a star or a supporting player, depending on the situation.  In the ensemble, our fate is shared, we succeed or fail together.  Obama’s ability to see himself as part of a vast ensemble of Americans qualifies him in yet another way as a stellar improviser.  “For alongside our famous individualism, there’s another ingredient in the American saga, a belief that we are all connected as one people,” he said in his 2004 keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention.  “If there’s a child on the south side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for their prescription and having to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandparent. If there’s an Arab-American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It is that fundamental belief– it is that fundamental belief–I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sisters’ keeper–that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family: ‘E pluribus unum,’ out of many, one.”

We elected Barack Obama for the same reasons that believers in equality and liberty voted for Lincoln; for the same reasons immigrant families sided for Franklin Roosevelt, for the same reasons dreamers voted for John F. Kennedy and marched with Martin Luther King; because he describes a future we believe in.  A future that makes things better for succeeding generations.  A future where opportunity outwits defeatism, and hope overwhelms despair.

President Obama understands that no one script, no single narrative, can carry us there. If there is one idea that will guide this administration, one neverending avenue for productive behavior, it’s the understanding that the future we share will, as always, be improvised.

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.