We have defined it as “A process for producing consistently positive outcomes from unforeseen circumstances.” We call it “serendipity by design.” “A game, a theme, and an exploration.” “Collaborative problem solving.” “Acting on environment and letting environment act on you.” Listening, Learning and Transformation.” “Agility + Ability.” “Freedom within Structure.” “Creating a cosmos out of chaos.” “Openness to opportunity.” “The Big Yes-And.” “Flexible Vision.” “How Tina and Amy Got Their Grooves,” and “Not comedy.”  Among others.

Leave it to Steve Jobs, interviewed in The Pixar Story, Leslie Iwerks’ 2007 feature documentary, to phrase it with the assured elegance of an Apple design.”Unplanned collaboration” is the phrase he uses.

“We wanted a place that would encourage unplanned collaboration,” said Jobs in describing the design of Pixar’s new studio. He repeatedly cites this this as the architecture’s objective.

He didn’t connect this phrase to improvisation, per se, but it’s as good a definition as we’ve heard. Improvisation is unplanned collaboration. And even though it’s unplanned, it’s all part of the design. In the architecture of improvisation, you fully expect to run into someone unexpectedly. When you do, you are prepared to exchange information, find an agreement, and build a scene together or continue one that had begun earlier. You expect that others might jump into this scene with you, and you are prepared for anything they might add. Through this process, in thousands upon thousands of such unplanned increments, each filled with its own unique potential to be productive, you move your narrative forward.

It’s hard to imagine a better case study for the value of improvisational design than Pixar’s studio, or a better model of what it means to be a GameChanger than Steve Jobs.

Jobs also said it took ten years for Pixar to make any money. We’re just going to ignore that one. Play on.

She tweeted back: “<= like this; like going through the process from the other end.”

Bill Kroyer

The animation director Bill Kroyer taught me this game, which I call Kroyering.  It goes like this: To solve a problem look 180 degrees away from the problem. If you can define the problem’s opposite, you will have targeted the problem with just as much accuracy as if you were confronting it head-on.  This ‘exploration of opposites’ makes Kroyering a useful process, especially when you need to come up with an original solution, a creative breakthrough.  Why is this a cool tool?  Three reasons:

First, it gets out of creativity’s way. Like everything that’s natural in the world, creativity wants to happen.  Left to its own devices, it will happen.  If we clear out what gets in its way, creativity will express itself like a plant will find the sun. As Viola Spolin said, “Act on environment, and environment will act on you.”

Second, because a breakthrough is, by definition, something that didn’t exist before, it is not really possible to say what creativity is, or what form it will take, until it actually happens.  It is often more efficient to target what creativity is not.  For this reason, Kroyering offers a disciplined and cost-effective path to innovation.

Third, Kroyering makes institutional memory a positive force instead of an impediment, as it often is (At Disney, where I worked for many years,  the best way to stop any idea dead in its tracks was to say anything that began with, “Well, what Walt would have done…”  It’s why John Lasseter left Disney and ended up with Pixar.  Too many people at the time were telling him what Walt would (or wouldn’t) have done.)  A study by Dusya Vera and Mary Crossan (Organization Science, Vol. 16, May-June 2005, pp. 203-224) reveals that the best problem-solvers in an organization are those with the longest institutional memories, because they are more likely to disregard or subvert institutional memory to solve a problem. In other words, people with long institutional memories are in the best position to see and understand that a system that created a problem cannot be the same one that solves it.  Kroyering helps you identify what you can do differently by getting you out of the attic of your company’s history and into emptier space, where there’s room to expand your vision.

Here are a few qualities that, in my experience, are not conducive to creativity and can be eliminated from your working environment with help from the Kroyering Game:

Randomness; free association; outside-the-box thinking. Creativity craves intent, specificity and structure. Don’t try to get outside the box. Quantum physics tells us that there’s unlimited energy stored inside whatever box we’re in. Or…get yourself inside a different box!

Rigidity, dogma. Whatever creativity is, it’s the opposite of frozen, stuck in place, or with one unyielding position.

Aggression, destruction, violence. The harder you look for it, the harder it is to find.  The next new thing has to be teased and seduced from wherever it’s hiding.  Creativity does not send out invitations, but if we throw a party, Creativity is almost sure to come.  Creativity can’t resist a good party.  Just know that when the fighting starts, and well before the cops arrive, Creativity will be outta there.

Divergence. It is not the separating but the joining of ideas and people that results in innovation.

Dignity, manners. Creativity is impudent. It can be wildly messy. It’s like the weather that way.  Dress appropriately.

Hollowness, heartlessness, lifelessness, cold bloodedness. Sssss.

Eliminating these and other ‘non-conducive’ elements from your environment will help your creativity flow.  When you’re stuck for an idea, your process bogs down, or you can’t seem to get to the heart of a problem, try Kroyering.

The production of animation, as I have long maintained, will point the way toward new models for production for all sorts of products and brands, just as television animation led the way in outsourcing manufacturing to Asia in the early 1980s, ten years before American industry embraced the model en masse. How it works is going to be a key to the creation of jobs and the generation of new wealth in the networked economy.

A little background:

Animation director Kent Butterworth explored the distributed production model with television cartoon series he directed for Saban Entertainment in the mid-1990s. He and a small team in Los Angeles built character models, story and voice tracks, and environments, then distributed these ‘packages’ to animators scattered around the world, from Austin to Adelaide, who’d animate the various scenes described to them.

Entrepreneur and animation producer Karen Johnson of Racine, Wisconsin, whose production company Aha! Studios, was the first to bring professional animation to the Jumbotron scoreboards in modern sports stadiums (at one time they had 26 pro sports stadiums under contract), employs a distributed production model for her animation studio. A team of 15 people based in Racine can manage a virtual collaboration involving hundreds of people aroung the world.

Mass Animation extends the model even further by opening it to anyone who wants to contribute. It’s Smart Mob-imation. As you’d expect for any experiment as ambitious and new as this one, it tends to place its emphasis on the technical aspects of the production. That’s cool. The way it has to be. A necessity for now. As the distributed production model evolves, look for elements of the narrative to move front and center. The narrative, whether its for a brand or an animated film, contains the essential emotional and meta information that bring the narrative to life.

This is going to be the post-tech challenge for distributed production models like Mass Animation, and for any brand looking to communicate effectively in the networked world. How can we communicate in ways that transcend the technology? How will the new narratives resonate emotionally with collaborators and audience alike? Answering these questions will be the next step toward making viable commercial products–animated or otherwise–using the Mass Animation model.

It is no surprise that the Culhane boys are born performers, a couple of very animated characters.

Once, as part of a story John did for the New York Times Magazine, he and the boys enrolled at Ringling Bros. Clown College in Sarasota, Florida, and T. H. and Michael became the youngest clowns ever to perform with Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey big show.

T. H. graduated from Harvard. He taught for four years at Jefferson High School in South Central L. A., where he championed learning games like ‘Dumpster Theater’ for a science class he taught there. He and his students converted an unused dumpster sitting on campus into a stage. Dumpster Theater performances consisted of rapping about science.

With a $6,000 grant from PepBoys, T. H. and a group of mechanically gifted students at Jefferson built a hovercraft.

I once sat in on one of T. H.’s classes at Jefferson High. I couldn’t even begin to tell you what subject he was supposed to be teaching. One group of kids was in the back of the classroom silk-screening t-shirts for a small business they were running out of the high school.

He had turned a large storage closet into a computer room. Half a dozen geeks sat in there with the door closed, hacking away at code to build some kind of game or animation.

Another group of students huddled around a desk blueprinting the hovercraft. The kids who weren’t interested in participating, didn’t. Some girls gossiped and toyed with each others’ makeup, some kids put their heads on their desks and slept. T. H. ignored them. They weren’t in the scene. I didn’t realize it at the time, but T. H.’s educational methods were pure improvisation. In the improvisational model, teachers don’t ‘teach.’ They create environments and games in which learning has to occur for the players to achieve their objective. You cannot build a hovercraft, for example, without first doing your physics homework.

Today, T. H. his wife, Sybille, and their 16-week old son, Kilian, reside in Essen, Germany, the home base for their organization, Solar Cities, which helps install solar power in poor neighborhoods in Cairo (when’s the last time you saw a solar panel in a poor neighborhood in the U.S.?). T. H. spends a lot of time with the people of those Cairo neighborhoods, acting as a kind of pied piper of solar paneling. In his ’spare time’ he’s completing a doctorate in Urban Planning from UCLA.

From 2004 to 2008, with funding from the U. S. State Dept., Sybille, T. H. and Michael toured the Middle East with Michael’s band, Circus Guy, promoting solar energy and other alternative fuels. For daytime performances, they powered their amps with solar panels. T. H. played guitar while unicycling back and forth across the stage. A documentary about their tour, Environmental Circus, directed by their friend James Dean Conklin, will premiere later this year.

There is a difference between the roles we play and our essential character as human beings. We all play many roles in our lives. The challenge is to play them through our character as human beings, through the truth of our authentic selves.

T. H. Culhane’s range of characters–circus clown, singer in the Harvard Krokodiloes, cultural anthropologist, high school teacher, Guatemalan breadnut developer (did I mention that?), alternative energy advocate, doctoral student–is plenty impressive. But that’s just a playlist. What matters is is how a player plays it.

What’s inspiring, what stirs the world around him to action, what changes the game, is the character of T. H. Culhane:

Bridge builder.

Science nut.

Avant-garde educator.

Bringer of water and happiness.

And when I say geniuses, I’m not talking about animation, although that was certainly part of it. These guys were geniuses at life. Their lives were rich in every respect, filled with adventure, fun, passion, family, and drenched in love. Too often, we think of geniuses as people who excel in one thing, when in fact it is life in its entirety that informs us and guides us to our greatness.

Woolie Reitherman was a ‘Hump’ pilot in World War II married to a former motorcycle stunt girl he met when she was a flight attendant and he was a pilot for Philippine Air after the war. He was a cowboy with a ranch in Montana. He was a surfer. (”To understand a wave, and the mechanics at work, before you can surf it, you have to give yourself over to the wave, let it toss you around some,” he said to me.) It was somewhat coincidental to his life that he was the best animator of Disney’s action scenes, and the guy Walt Disney chose to produce the animated features after Walt gave up the gig to focus on his theme parks in the 1950s.

Frank Thomas had these magical hands that literally danced over the keyboard when he played jazz piano. On Fridays at the Disney studio lot in Burbank, he and other musicians would open the loading door to a soundstage and play Dixieland, and for an hour or so, it was the soundtrack to our workaday lives. Keyed on Frank’s piano, that music put bounce in your step. It was the same bounce Frank could put into anything he touched. Animation paper just happened to be one of those things.

Marc Davis was an expert on primitive New Guinean art and culture. He and his wife, Alice, a talented artist in her own right, bought a second house right next to their home in Silver Lake, where Marc kept his stunning New Guinean collection. Marc was a wonderfully refined human being — he and Alice hosted Sunday afternoon salons for young artists to whom they took a shine — and yet he never lost his connection to the most primitive elements of existence, to people and tribes still rooted deeply to mysteries, magics and mythologies. Disney animation was simply a way for Marc Davis to express the extension and breadth of his stride upon the planet.

They could be shockingly ribald, these creators of the gentle Disney characters, and that was part of their secret, I think. Those gentle characters had some very human souls.

Milt Kahl and Frank Thomas competed viciously with one another to prove themselves the best at what they did. (My friend Dave Spafford once drew a caricature of Milt pissing on Frank’s drawings while saying, “Hey Frank, your drawings are looking better all the time.” From what I hear, that pretty much captured their relationship.)

Kahl, generally conceded to be the best pure artist who ever worked as a Disney animator, whose animation style single-handedly changed the art form, was a notoriously feisty individual. When I met him, he gave me a breakneck ride in his sports car then showed me around his home, updated me on several computer chess games he had going, showed me dozens of beautiful, graceful, 3-D sculptures he’d made out of wire. In the master bedroom I noted the beautifully-drawn Japanese erotic art hangng over the bed. “It’s my hobby,” he told me.

“Japanese art?” I asked.

“Fucking,” he said. He was 72 years old at the time. And this was way before Viagra.

Woolie Reitherman, his wife, Janie, the journalist John Culhane, John’s wife, Hind, John Lasseter and I were drinking in the bar of the Mayflower Hotel in Washington D. C. one night. After quite a few rounds, Woolie produced a felt-tipped pen and began drawing on the linen tablecloth that covered our table. The drawings were of Disney characters in, let’s call them ‘compromising positions’. Before the night was over, I saw the drink glasses on the table moving, moving, moving from left to right across the table. It was John Culhane, sliding the tablecloth off the table and into his briefcase to keep as a souvenir, while Hind barred her arm across the table to keep the drink glasses from crashing to the floor.

Ward Kimball was the most consciously cuckoo human being I’ve ever met, a mirthful madman, a one-person Doo-Dah Parade. He was a subversive at heart, godfather to every flower child and acid-tripping Fantasia fan of the Sixties, the original Merry Prankster. The trombone he played was painted white with red flowers. He had a huge rare toy collection, and one of the world’s largest model train collections. In his backyard, he had installed a hundred yards of train track and several steam locomotives that he’d fire up when company came over and give them rides, him wearing his engineer’s or his conductor’s outfit. He had closets full of hats and various costumes that he’d wear on appropriate occasions. Kimball lived with a twinkle in his eye. It was that twinkle that could turn an educational film about music or math into a fantastic romp through images, ideas, history. When the gears turned in Ward Kimball’s head, you could hear the calliope playing and the circus coming to town.

I believe Ollie Johnston was the first of the Disney animators to begin building and collecting trains. Then Kimball got caught up in it, and so did Walt Disney, and it became a kind of competition between them. First, Ollie built a model steam train that could pull passengers along a track laid out around his home in Flintridge. Then Walt built a bigger model train, ‘The Carolwood Pacific’, complete with a tunnel, that you could ride around his home in Holmby Hills. Then Kimball installed the full-sized tracks and trains at his home in San Gabriel. Walt trumped the other two when he built the Disneyland Railroad that circles the theme park in Anaheim. In the mid-1960s, Ollie bought some land in Julian, California, and he and his sons and their friends personally laid half a mile of track, and installed a train with a small wood-burning steam engine Ollie had restored and christened the ‘Marie E.’, that had formerly pulled silver ore cars in the mountains. (John Lasseter has since acquired this train from the Johnston family.)

Ollie Johnston and his next-door neighbor and best friend, Frank Thomas, wrote the classic animation text, The Illusion of Life. But there was nothing illusory about the lives they, or any of the Nine Old Men, led. Their lives were full-throttle, fire-up-the-engines, strike-up-the-band, fly-the-plane-while-taking-enemy-fire, roll-in-the-hay, ride-the-wave, explore-the-jungle adventures. Their art was the mirror they held up to it all. Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride was, in reality, their own.

One of my most vivid memories of Ollie is from maybe ten years ago, one of the last times I saw him before he began the slow descent that ended on Monday. I invited him and Frank Thomas to visit my office and meet some of the young artists working with me who were exploring Flash animation at the time. It was decided that these artists would contribute to the development of an animation web site, frankandollie.com. It was decided to shoot some video of Frank and Ollie at Ollie’s house.

Now, by the time he was 85 years old, Ollie and his wife, Marie, had their stage set pretty much the way they wanted it. Their home was immaculate. Every book in the library was in its place. The model railroad with the coal powered steam engine that could hall a dozen passengers around their estate was in mint condition. The sunlight struck every plant in the landscaping and piece of furniture in the house just so. The design of their homestead was a long time in the making, meticulous in its rendering, palpable in its perfection.

Into this idyll rumbled the young Flash animators, feral children of the web, one of whom was Matt Strangio, a well-groomed, quietly intense student of the animation arts. To shoot reference video for the web site, one of the animators had recruited a gang of earnest amateurs — friends of his — who hauled their equipment in an enormous box truck. Ollie’s home was soon a riot of energetic vid-kids in a state of barely-controlled panic, cables running everywhere, strewn books, re-arranged furniture, blown circuit breakers, and lights that were way too hot for a couple of octogenarians. We finally reined it in enough to get some usable reference footage for a couple of characters Frank and Ollie had named ‘Nilknarf’ and ‘Revilo’. After a couple of hours of shooting, to Frank and Ollie’s obvious relief, we called it a wrap.

But there was still the matter of getting the enormous box truck back down Ollie’s driveway. The vid-kids had gotten it up the driveway okay, but had wedged it into the carport so that it was almost impossible to get it backed around and pointed down the hill. Ollie scooted back and forth, watching, mortified, as the crew forward-and-reversed the truck a couple of inches at a time. And I know that I will never, ever, see an 85-year-old human being move as fast as Ollie did when he heard the truck crunch into a gutter on the side of his house. But wait, there’s more…

A Chinese Elm that had taken Ollie 20 years to nurture into its current state of splendidness overhung the driveway. Somehow, the vid-kids had gotten their truck past the tree on their way up the driveway, but the tree had a kind of funnel shape to it, and it was a different story coming back down. One of the vid-kids had to climb onto the roof of the cab and bend the branches of the Chinese Elm to get the truck’s cargo box past them. And I know to this day that I will never, ever, seen an 85-year-old human being bend over as far backward as Ollie did to watch this scene unfold, practically parallel to the branches the vid-kid was bending. Ollie yelled up at him — as much as the quiet Ollie ever yelled — to be careful not to break any branches. I shouted cautionary advice, too. The vid-kid yelled down at us that everything was under control, and meanwhile you could hear the branches bending and cracking — Snap! Snap! Keeeee……rack! It might have been the sound of Ollie’s back breaking.

It wasn’t.

Remarkably resilient and forgiving about it, Ollie invited the animators — sans the box truck and the vid-kids — back for further collaboration, and he took Matt Strangio, in particular, under his wing. Matt did a lot of development work on Frank and Ollie’s web site, and became a truly outstanding animator in his own right.

He called what he created an illusion, but as long as someone’s stoking a steam train somewhere in the world, as long as someone’s bringing life to a drawing, the life of Ollie Johnston will remain a reality.

Spaff animated key scenes in films like Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, The Little Mermaid and dozens of others. He lived at Francis Coppola’s vineyard for three months while storyboarding Coppola’s version of a live-action Pinnochio. When he returned from his year in London on Roger Rabbit, for five solid years, he hosted Pub Night every Friday at his house in Toluca Lake. It was like the Star Wars Cantina for the animation industry. I don’t know that I have ever laughed harder, or had more fun than I have at Spaff’s house. Most of the animators at Disney are dying to get him back there to work with them on their hand-animated film The Frog Princess, but the CalArts clique at Disney is a little bit intimidated by him, because he is so damn talented and stubborn and he didn’t go to CalArts. He is self-taught. When he was sixteen years old, he would drive up from Orange County nearly every day in the summer and stand outside the Disney Studios gate with his animation drawings, and wave at all the animators, especially the legendary Nine Old Men (Reitherman, Clark, Larson, Thomas, Johnston, Kimball, Lounsberry, Kahl and Davis), until one of them, often Les Clark, would invite him inside the lot, where he would spend the day watching the masters at work, pestering them with questions about their craft.

He designed the characters and did the storyboards for the first film to be produced by Phil (Nike CEO) Knight’s new animation company in Portland before the (CalArts educated) Henry Selick, who runs the joint for Knight, and Spaff ‘parted ways’ last month.

But Spaff is a GameChanger. Which means that he knows how to turn an unexpected situation to his advantage.

Last month, he did a deal with Disney theme parks to sell a little pirate-themed magic trick he designed and built, in which you hold a small wooden coffin in your hand and pop a skeleton out of it on your command. And he just finished making a professional magic trick in which a magician can pick up any kind of knife off any random table, cut open his or her forearm causing blood to gush, then peel back the skin revealing the pulsing veins and muscles inside the arm. He wouldn’t show me how it works, or sell me one, or let me post the link where you can buy one of the tricks online for sixty bucks. “It’s for professional magicians,” he said.

My friend Lisa Judson, president of Warner Bros. Animation, is courting him to bring one of his animation projects to their DVD division.

Spaff and his wife of twenty years are in the process of splitting up. Amicably. But still, you know it’s got to be a pain in the ass. Their house is going to become his studio, and his studio is going to become her house, and there are a million moving details to it all.

And in the midst of all this, he dropped everything last Friday afternoon and made us five kumquats — which were out of season and not available anywhere in L.A. — for our GameChangers video shoot over the weekend.

Damn, I have great friends.

Here’s the reaction from cast members when we showed them Spaff’s kumquats on the set Saturday: