In exploring this theme with him, we came up with eight Empty Arguments that suck up bandwidth and limit a company’s potential to innovate, adapt, and act quickly on opportunity:

1.  Who’s in charge.

The quest for, and maintenance of, one’s status is one of the most prevalent and profligate business behaviors there is.  It results in wasteful games like that old standard, “Kissing The Boss’s Ass.”

In the improvisational model, who has high status in a scene depends not on one’s job title or institutional pedigree, but on the circumstances of the scene.  Leadership does not always have to come from the top.  It is as likely to emanate from the center, in the form of rapid consensus-building, or from the rear, in the form of decisive and enthusiastic support for a scene, a player or a productive game.

2.  Scapegoating (a.k.a. The Blame Game, a.k.a. It Wasn’t Me, a.k.a. I Never Got Your Email)

This Empty Argument is another classic time-waster, a purely political game that’s a huge drag on productivity.  In the improvisational model, teams succeed and fail together.  Everyone is in charge, everyone accepts credit, and everyone shoulders blame.

Just look at how much time and effort BP is spending on assigning blame for the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.  President Obama made a good move yesterday by accepting full responsibility, a move designed to clear the air of this Empty Argument.  Edit. Done. Move on.  Whenever you, as a manager, sense any energy being devoted to scapegoating, edit the scene and move on.

3.  The Big Idea (a.k.a. The Killer Concept, a.k.a. The Gamechanger, a.k.a. The Moby Dick)

The quest for a Big Idea can turn into an Empty Argument in a three ways:  1) Stalking, capturing and processing a Big Idea can blind your team to other opportunities (this was an okay game on a whaling ship in the 1840s, not so much in the networked business environment of today); 2) so many people inside and outside the organization have to weigh in on a Big Idea that its original intention and power gets watered down or lost; and 3) the Big Idea will inevitably get divvied into a series of Little Ideas, so why not simply start with Little Ideas?—all of which will have the potential to morph into Big Ideas! Start small and build, don’t begin big and diminish!  Enhance, don’t dilute!

Focus on purpose and all your Little Ideas will align themselves with Big Themes.  Focus on process and Big Ideas will emerge organically.  Focus on people, because Big Ideas don’t change the game quarterly, people do, on a daily basis.  Big ideas come and go.  Purpose, process and people are the stars you can steer the ship by.

4.  The research.  Research is a snapshot taken in the past.  It can tell you a lot about where you’ve been but very little about where you’re going. It is a dial on the dashboard but is not a way of charting your course or predicting what the weather will be like in the future.  Research can inform a scene, but it should almost never be what the scene is about.

5.  How to spin a story. Scripting, editing, re-writing, getting bottlenecked on approvals, and then spinning a narrative for your audience is a really Empty Argument. As much as I abhor her politics and her prideful ignorance, Sarah Palin gets a lot of credit as an improviser. The reason she can stay relevant and a beat ahead of the news cycles is that, unlike John McCain and most other politicians, she’s not scripting or trying to spin anything, she is relating to her environment in real time, in her own authentic way.  It drives the liberal news spinners crazy.  (President Obama does the same to the righties.)  Nosy neighbor?  Build a fence!  When Palin makes notes on the palm of her hand during a speech, the Ivy League-educated (I do not include Brown grads in this) grademaking machines in the liberal media try to spin it as “Doesn’t do her homework.”  Palin, however, knows intuitively that 90% of the people who see this image will have it made this move themselves.  We can relate.  The lesson:  Living your narrative is more effective than trying to live up to a narrative you’ve scripted, then convincing others to buy into it, too (see Woods, Eldrick “Tiger”).

6.  Labeling. In the Networked World, curation is an essential skill.  The ability to provide context for ubiquitous content is important, and should be an area of constant focus.  The Empty Argument here begins with the notion that everything has to fit into the known universe of the organization or brand, that there will be an institutional meme to deal with every anomaly.  In a networked environment, there are so many anomalies that this is an impossibility.  Don’t waste time arguing about how to label everything. This dampens originality and creative energy.  Approach every situation as its own anomaly.  Act first, label later.

7.   The platform. This is one of the newer Empty Arguments that have gone viral in large organizations.  Decisions about which technology platforms to use has become a high-stakes game that often involves tens of millions of dollars and countless hours of discussion and debate.  Here are a couple of reasons why platform Arguments are often Empty:  1)  There are too many platforms to assess with any certainty, thousands of them.  No one can be an expert in all of them.  For this reason, decisions about platforms often as not come from a personal agenda, and not from any qualified assessment of all the options.  2)  The platform is secondary to the narrative.  By arguing about platforms, a company is pulling focus from its narrative.  This is putting the cart ahead of the horse.  Performance has very little to do with platforms.  Great design is great design whether it’s computer-generated, hand-drawn or modeled in clay.  Narrative first, platform later.

8.  Who’s right and who’s wrong. When you script your narrative, there’s only one ‘right’ way to deal with a problem and every other way (see ‘Labeling’ above) is, by definition, ‘wrong.’ Improvisers understand that there’s always more than one way to solve a problem, and that the ability to collaborate and come up with original solutions to original problems is far more effective than arguing about who’s right and who’s wrong in any given scene.  Improvisers focus on whether or not behaviors are consistent or inconsistent with themes and environment.   This liberates all sorts of possibilities that aren’t present when the argument centers on right vs. wrong.

So…let’s put a cost estimate on these Empty Arguments:

The organization where our friend works, a relatively well-run company by American standards, employs 120K people around the world.  Figure 10K of them are managers who have a say in the direction of the company and its brands.  Our friend estimates that a third of a typical manager’s day (call it 3 hrs/day) is spent engaged in Empty Arguments.  That’s 30K management hours a day across the enterprise.  At an average cost per manager of $100/hr, that’s $3M a day, which equates to approximately $270M worth of wasted time per quarter!

Improvisation gives employees the ability to see and minimize the Empty Arguments listed here, and many others, too.   If the managers at my friend’s company can spend one less hour per day on Empty Arguments, it will save the company $1M per day, or $360M per year in resources that can be  put to better use.

That’s a lot of Empty.

The answer is given by Maureen Dowd in the closing paragraph of her column in today’s NY Times:

 ”Hillary and President Obama look bigger when they share the stage with other talented players,” writes Dowd.

That Bill Clinton and Kim Jong-Il are the stars of this scene is a result of strong supporting moves by players who were not onstage for the photo op.

Today, there are too many productive avenues for action, too many opportunities to move our scenes forward, for one player to be front-and-center in all of them.  A person with a chronic need to be the hero of every scene, the one planting the flag on the mountaintop, or landing on the deck of the aircraft carrier to proclaim that the mission has been accomplished, will find that a hundred other scenes have passed them by, and with those scenes, the opportunity to influence and lead has evaporated, too.

In the Age of Improvisation, leadership consists just as often of supporting one’s fellow players, and of casting players in the right roles, as it does of being the star of the scene.

Sir Edmund Hillary was celebrated around the world as the first man to climb Mount Everest.  As Hillary himself acknowledged, his guide, Tenzing Norgay, was the person who led the way.

“Follow the follower,” is the saying attributed to the legendary improv director, Del Close.  In the Age of Improvisation, we take turns on the mountaintop.  Leadership comes from those who show us a path for getting there.  Performers are at their most powerful when they find ways to share the stage with other talented players.

I get in line to ask a question.  The moderator, Michael Bassik, the Chief Digital Officer for Air America asks me to keep it short.  I say it’s a yes-or-no question.  After explaining what I do, and noting that Hyde Park, where the Obamas lived before the election, is the birthplace of modern improvisation, I ask the Obama people on the panel if, to their knowledge, anyone on the Obama team used ‘improvisation’ to describe their candidate’s methodology.

“No,” says Bassik.

“Thank you,”  I say.

The instant the panel is over, I make a beeline for Bassik, hand him my card and say “What Obama does is learnable.”  This gets his attention.  A week after the conference, Bassik and I are corresponding about how GameChangers can help evangelize and scale Obama’s style and a progressive political agenda.

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.

His and his team’s ability to improvise their way to an election victory against rivals who were, initially, much better funded, more networked and more familiar brand names proved beyond any doubt how skillful improvisation can change the game. Obama is the epitome of what it means to be a gamechanger.

Because they improvised instead of slaving themselves to a script, Obama and team were quicker to act on opportunity. They consistently made better, faster and more authentic decisions than their rivals. It is one thing to be smart, but what difference does it make if you don’t act smart? Obama and team showed how improvisation marries intellect with action. This resulted in breakthrough processes for organizing and raising money, and creative solutions to whatever problems they faced along the campaign trail.

It is no coincidence, to me, that Obama lives in the same Hyde Park neighborhood in Chicago where modern improvisation was born in the 1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression. In Chicago, improvisation isn’t just some thing the artsy-fartsy folks do, it’s a way of life, a fixture in the cultural firmament. A lot of people taking improv classes in Chicago at Second City or I.O. or Comedy Sportz treat it like night school, almost like it’s getting an extra degree that will help them in whatever their walk of life. Obama is one of the best examples ever of how improvisation works outside the confines of theater comedy–how it improves job performance, and has the power to transform the status quo.

Obama listens and communicates on multiple levels, which makes his message extra resonant for his audience. He changes status depending on the scene he’s in without ever losing his essential character, what makes Barack Obama Barack Obama. When he’s with generals he’s leaderly, when he’s with children he’s fatherly, when he’s on the court he’s lefty, and it’s always through the truth of who he is. He’s not posing, acting, or going for effect, or a photo op, or a big move. He’s doing the best he can with what the scene has to offer. That’s improvisation.

He acts on the reality of the scene he’s in, not on some fantasy scenario he’s trying to make come true (see ‘Mission Accomplished’). When, on a blistering summer day in North Carolina during the presidential race, a woman in the audience fainted from the heat during one of his speeches, Obama took one look at what was happening, stopped his speech, and with no hesitation called it to the security team’s attention then reached into his podium for his water bottle and tossed it to the crowd to give to the woman. “They’ll be okay,” he said, in a reassuring voice. It was the most genuine, most helpful thing anyone in his position could have done in that situation. It was not a big deal. It was just the best possible move at that particular moment. That’s is how an improviser rolls. It is not a big deal. It is a lot of little deals, done consistently, with 100% focus and commitment. And these have the potential to add up to a big deal. A really big deal in the case of Obama’s election.

During his campaign he staked out huge and momentous themes–Hope, Change, Equality–and then liberated his team and the voters themselves to explore those themes in as many ways as possible. This meant that Brand Obama could deliver a much livelier narrative than the McCain Brand, which lurched from one lame scripted event (Palin) to another (ride to the rescue on the bailout plan), confusing the audience and the candidate alike.

After January 21, the Obama administration’s ability to riff on big themes will continue to liberate good ideas and innovative thinking to the benefit and betterment of the U.S. and the world. Economic transformation on the massive scale it’s needed cannot be scripted like some Olympic Opening Ceremony. It must be improvised.

They are off to a banging good start in naming people to his team, a ‘team of rivals’, it has been called, echoing what Lincoln said about his own cabinet. The cluckers are already clucking about how hard it will be for Obama to ‘manage’ such strong and independent personalities. To an improviser, it is the most natural thing in the world. Synthesizing different, often radically different, points of view to achieve an objective is what improvisers do.

There is a saying in improvisation, Follow the Follower. This is what Obama means when he says to voters that he’s representing their will, embodying their energy, pursuing their happiness. Pundits have described this as a new kind of leadership, but I believe it’s more accurate to say that Obama’s got outrageously good listening skills. Sometimes it’s necessary to lead, but the best improvisers, like Obama, are the best at following. They raise the level of their own game by raising the level of everyone’s.

On the emotional and meta levels, the levels of communication that matter most, there was only one campaign promise made by Barack Obama. It was not a plank in his platform, but it was implicit in everything the campaign said and did. It was a promise that Americans will all become a little better, a little stronger, a little more improvisational in our own ways for having him as President. We believe it has already happened, is happening, and will continue to happen on an ever-broadening scale, as more and more people — not only in the U.S. but all over the world — get attuned to the new game and start playing along.

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.

So I look at it like this:

The crisis is an Elephant, and everyone wrestling with it–you, me, Hank Paulson and Barney Frank–is a Blind Man of Hindustan.  How we describe it depends on which part of it we’re feeling.  And no matter how we describe it, it doesn’t help us figure out what to do with the Elephant.  It’s just a very large animal standing there while blind people disagree about it.

So six blind men of Hindustan
disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
exceeding stiff and strong;
Though each was partly in the right,
they all were in the wrong! – John Godfrey Saxe

One of the benefits of improvisation in business is that it provides a lens, and a common language, through which we can see and learn from performance.  This triangulates the problem and gives us common ground for solving it.  Barney Frank sees the Wall Street problem from a Massachusetts legislator’s perspective.  I see it from a small businessperson’s perspective. As a person the cameras are pointed at, Barney is probably feeling the tusk, so he describes the Elephant as being ‘like a spear.’  From my perspective, the Elephant ‘feels very like a wall’ between me and capital.  If all we’re going to do is debate our differences, we’re never going to get anywhere.

But if Barney and I both speak improvisation…aha.  We can find agreement in that language. Our disagreement about what the Elephant looks like is no longer important because now our dialogue can be about what to do with the Elephant! 

Here’s an analysis of the ‘Bailout Scene’ seen through the lens of improvisation:

Casting:  It is casting more suited to a comedy than to the dramatic gravitas of the moment.  Hank Paulson looks like a steady hand, a guy who’s going to hold our attention onstage, but then he opens his mouth and it’s like a scene from the Exorcist:  “Can you help an old altar boy, Father?” Make it stop!  Barney Frank is like Uncle Frank in It’s a Wonderful Life.  We expect him to have a string tied around his finger to remember the bank deposit, and he’s still going to lose it.  He probably has a pet crow at home.  Boehner is content to sit and pose like some 1980s ad for men’s cologne.  Pelosi has the impossible objective of getting the Blind Men to agree on what the Elephant looks like and then describing that agreement to the voters.  Bush has jumped the shark a couple of times, and now looks like a guy getting eaten by the shark.

Additions and Edits:  There are so many people running on and off the stage that we in the audience are losing track of who the players are, and what roles they’re playing.  Is Warren Buffet a player in this?  I’m not quite sure.  McCain runs in like he’s got an important role to play, does nothing, runs off.  Bush appears on TV for 20 seconds.  Says nothing.  Exits.  Barney Frank tells us in one breath that the country is facing its biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, and then announces that he’s taking a day off work.

Stage Spacing:  There are so many people crowded into the frame in scenes from the U.S. Capitol that viewers are almost forced to ask themselves, ‘Who are they and what are they doing there?’  It becomes a kind of political trivia contest, and makes it difficult for the person speaking to hold the audience’s focus.

Suggestions From the Audience:  If anyone in this scene had a lick of improvisation training, they’d understand the importance of collaborating with the audience.  Improvisation is predicated on the idea that the audience gets involved.  By failing to understand the audience’s anger at the people who created the current turmoil, the players in this scene now have an audience revolt on their hands.  People are out on the sidewalk demanding their money back, and it is not going to be easy to coax them back into the theater.

I wish I could give this a better spin, but they don’t call it a crisis for nothing.  It is, above all else, a crisis in confidence.  The audience has lost confidence in the performance.

The one bright spot in this is Barack Obama, who is a skillful improviser.  As such, he understood from the start that he did not belong in the Bailout Scene, and wisely remained offstage.  Confusing the Election Scene with the Bailout Scene would not have helped anyone’s performance.

With the current scene devolving into chaos, Obama is editing.  He has initiated the new scene with a statement about the bailout easing restrictions by the FDIC.  This at least addresses the suggestion from the audience that whatever the bailout is, it must be structured to give breaks to the small businessperson.

The improviser’s challenge is not to describe the Elephant, it’s to move it in a productive direction.