Posts Tagged ‘Audience’

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

-

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

Paddles, Balls and Painted Dogs

Friday, April 16th, 2010

This one goes out to all the storytellers…

Ping Pong wasn’t perceived as a real sport until it became table tennis.  And now that it has its first sex symbol in Biba Golic, it has, let’s say, aroused a certain demographic that paid scant attention to it before.PingPongTableTennis1

The wild dogs of Africa could not be brought back from the brink of extinction until Greg Rasmussen renamed them ‘painted dogs’ (per Nick Kristoff in the NY Times).

And the art of storytelling won’t gain mainstream cred with MBA-educated managers and their brands until professional storytelling gets re-branded and re-positioned.  This came to me while I was reading about how  legendary story consultant Steve Denning changed his working vernacular so he could talk to his clients without them thinking they already knew it all.

Let’s begin by looking at the current status of storytelling in business.  Many managers will tell you that storytelling is too airy to feed the bottom line, or as Denning says, they think they’ve got their story covered.   And they do.  They have it covered.  As in they have a story and they’re sticking to it.  Bringing up the subject of storytelling can be a license to snark.  “Story?  Yeah, we got a story.  We sell our product as often as possible for more than it costs to make and deliver it.   We make our number.  We go get a a drink.  We live happily ever after until the next quarter.  The end.”

As we know, these perceptions cripple a brand.  When a story stops moving forward, it dies.  And when a brand’s story dies, the brand is sure to follow.  Here are three moves professional storytellers can make to break through the crippling perceptions.

1)  Shift the focus from ’story’ to ‘narrative.’ Narrative is our table tennis.  It is our painted dog.  Story is finite.  It has three parts, beginning, middle, end.  Narrative, by comparison, has infinite potential.  It is flow.  It is to organizations and brands what the Ohio River once was to the Shawnee Tribe.  The source of sustenance.  Stories are like the fish that come from the river and feed the family.  Narrative is the river.

2)  Share the narrative. In the networked world, brands can no longer script and control their stories the way they used to when there were only twelve or fifteen media channels for a manager to worry about.  And they can no longer operate on the false assumption that the story that works today is the same one that’s going to work tomorrow.  Today, brands have to find ways to participate in their customers’ stories.  They have to learn to share the brand narrative with customers.  That is a tectonic shift whose implications have just begun to surface in C-suite discussions and executive reading lists.

Sharing the narrative has many benefits.  (We’ve been listing them here for two years, check the archives for backstory.)  One of the big benefits is that narratives that result from collaboration with the customer energize a brand like nothing a brand can do on its own.  And thanks to the proliferation of media platforms, sharing the narrative has the potential to generate ‘positive unforeseen outcomes’ on a massive scale.

3)   Move from scripted to improvised narratives.  Shared narratives cannot be scripted, they have to be improvised into existence. There are too many players in the game to script for all of them, and make no mistake, each and every player plays a role. All it takes is one customer with a bitch and a big network to knock down your market cap like Bluto took out Popeye before he ate his spinach.  Improvisation is to narrative what spinach is to Popeye.  Scripted (and re-scripted and re-re-scripted) scenarios quickly fall out of sync with the customer audience.  Improvisation, by contrast, is about staying in the narrative flow. If you’re not in it, you’re out of it.  Eat your spinach!

Stories are the best way we have of simplifying complexity, of finding common ground.  They provide context that no technology or platform can. In a complex system, context owns.  Because business gets conducted in an environment that’s exponentially more complex today than it was yesterday, story is more important than ever.  But like everyone else does, we have to go about our work differently.  We’re not just storytellers, we are experts in the science of narrative.   We are Shawnee.  We are hot blondes armed with paddles and balls.   We are painters of dogs.PaintedDog1

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Branding, Focus, Games, Narrative | 2 Comments »

Digg the Toyota Scene

Thursday, April 8th, 2010

When Toyota hit the icy patch in their narrative this January, they did not do what most organizations their size would do, they didn’t do what the Tiger Woods brand did when the Escalade hit the fire hydrant:  huddle, confer, strategize, ponder, debate, script, re-write, close ranks, assume a defensive posture, call in damage control experts, and use all of it as an excuse for Not Doing Anything.

No, they improvised.  And by that, I don’t mean they flew by the seat of their pants, or made it up as they went along.  From the CEO on down, they jumped into the conversation with the audience and performed aggressively to build a narrative that countered the media hysteria around the recall and the ambulance-chasing members of the legal profession who fanned its flames.ToyotaLogos1

This is what improvisation is.  A conversation designed to connect the performers with their community.  Not a monologue, a strategy, a script or a campaign.  A dialogue. Observations and comments.  Listening and responding.  Action and reaction.

AdWeek this week highlights one component of Toyota’s conversation with the audience:  a Digg Dialogg with Toyota’s head of U.S. Sales, Jim Lentz.  One of the more telling beats in the article is how skeptical J.D. Power & Associates, the traditional arbiter of performance and quality in the automotive industry is about this tactic.  They don’t see ‘movement’ in their polls, they say.  The jury is still out, they say.  What the J.D. Power people fail to grasp is that the conversation itself is the movement.  The fact that it happened, along with untold other interactions between the brand and audience, constitute a flow of events that defy any one snapshot’s (i.e. poll’s) ability to capture its effectiveness.  Trying to measure one data point in a narrative with a million data points is foolish.  J. D. Powers is trying to apply old school metrics to a new school process.  It’s like taking a poll about how people feel about Rings and using it to gauge the audience’s perception of Lord of the Rings.

No doubt there’s a major problem with Toyota’s process, the company has admitted as much.  Its quantity got ahead of its quality.  It began thinking of its audience as consumers instead of customers.  It’s a big, big, issue, with immense implications for the brand.  What’s impressive is that they didn’t let the immensity overwhelm them.  They didn’t look for an epic solution to the epic problem.  Rather, they began a journey of epic proportions., and they are conducting it one conversation, one scene, at a time.  They are contrite, but they are not backpedaling, or wasting time deliberating.  That would cause the narrative to lose its momentum.  They didn’t script a narrative and then try to force it on the audience.  They improvised, with the conviction that their journey will eventually re-connect them with their community, and win back its confidence and its applause for their performance.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Branding, Communication, Dialogue, Issues, Listening, Narrative, Problem Solving, Sales, Scenes, Themes | 1 Comment »

Power and Powerlessness

Friday, March 5th, 2010

TheNewHow1This is from a blog post by our friend, Nilofer Merchant, author of the new book The New How: Creating Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy:

The challenge with people feeling powerless is this: we don’t see how we can contribute to solve problems. We believe it is “someone else’s” to own rather than something any of us can contribute to. Powerlessness leads to apathy on global issues and disdain on local issues.

Now check out this from Mick Napier’s classic book, Improvise:  Scene from the Inside Out:

Two people…staring at each other and wondering who’s going to make the first move.  Two people being nice to each other and allowing the other to start doing something.  In that short amount of time, two humans have created themselves as powerless…Who has time?  The audience is waiting.  They don’t care about your support.  They care about what you do.  What you do now.

These two statements, made miles and years apart, reflect the timelessness of the concept:  Do something!  Participate!  Add to the conversation!  When you’re just getting started don’t worry about what the solution will be, or where the scene will take you.  No one knows, and your audience doesn’t care.  The most important thing is to bring to the scene whatever you’ve got.

The saying in improvisation is ‘take care of yourself first.’  This is not the same as being selfish.  It is, rather, the recognition that making the first move, even if we are not always the one to make it, is always our responsibility.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Agreement Principle, Communication, Dialogue, Entrepreneurship, Initiations, Innovation, Leadership, Relationships | 1 Comment »

Thumbs-Up Y’all

Saturday, August 29th, 2009

Please give a thumbs-up to the GameChangers panel proposal for South-By-Southwest Interactive 2010. The icon below is your link to the voting apparatus.  Polls have been open for over a week, and we’ve been campaigning about as hard as Fred Thompson did for President.  In fact, until now we haven’t even come out of the air conditioned comfort of the campaign motor home to shake anyone’s hand.  (NOTE:  VOTING IS NOW CLOSED.  THANKS TO ALL WHO THUMBS-UPPED!)

Because this is a campaign, we  need planks in our platform.  Damn the polls, let’s go with these, composed, in Lincoln-en-route-to-Gettysburg fashion, on the back of a cocktail napkin after a couple of mojitos at Casito del Campo: (more…)

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Branding, Networked World, Sales | No Comments »

Workshop Clips

Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

Video clips from GameChangers workshops at Twelve Horses Interactive and an Executive MBA Class at Notre Dame. The Twelve Horses engagements typically have from 8 to 10 people participating. The MBA class had 65 people in it.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Agreement Principle, Coaching, Communication, Fundamentals, Games, Issues, Networked World, Photos & Videos, Suggestions From the Audience, Themes | No Comments »

Choose Your Game Wisely

Tuesday, February 12th, 2008

Ask yourself this question: Would you rather work or play? The answer is easy. If we could afford to, just about all of us would choose play over work because play, by definition, is much more fun. Playing (unless your idea of play is competitive eating, hydroplane racing, bounty hunting or something along those lines) relieves stress, improves your mental and physical health, and fills you with good energy.

Let’s pose the possibility that, through improvisation, work can take on the qualities of play. Imagine that you’re not going to work any more. You’re going to play! We are not glossing over the fundamental facts of business life here. Serious work must get done. Products pick-pack-shipped on time. Papers filed. Satellites launched. Deals closed. Stalls mucked. Connections made. Fires put out. Incomes earned. But how much more exciting would all of that could happen in the context of a game, with you as one of the its primo players? (more…)

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Games | 1 Comment »