A pattern defines a game.

This is what a burning platform looks like:

What’s the story here? Well, let’s see…it’s an environmental disaster…lives are no doubt endangered (many have already escaped in lifeboats, jumped or been killed (e.g. ‘fired’)…the focus is on containment instead of productivity…the PR spinning is beginning…a hundred lawyers are circling…Wall Street is manipulating markets based on shareholder emotions…the media is fanning the fear…the government is organizing committees that will haunt and impede productivity for years to come…cities, states and municipalities are seeking reparations. Whatever good can emerge from this mess will be years, maybe a generation, in coming.

Metaphors like ‘burning platform’ represent a level of meaning that accompanies all communication, the Meta level. (The other two are Cosmetic and Emotional). The Meta level contains metaphor, symbolism, allegory, parable, analogies, etc. Meta meaning is powerful stuff and should be chosen with great care. It’s why brands work so hard, at such great expense, on their identity. Those symbols mean a lot.

At GameChangers, we practice what I call the science of narrative. This science requires specific, deliberate and objective choices about what metaphors we put into play.

The Center for Public Policy and Administration defined the phrase ‘burning platform’ in 2005. ‘Burning platform’ according to the CPPA, came into meaning when a driller on a burning offshore oil-drilling platform calculated that his best chance of survival was a 150-foot jump that he’d never make under normal conditions. A burning platform came to mean an ‘urgent condition requiring bold choices.’ All good, and useful. Context is huge, however, and after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the context for this phrase changed and, along with it, its meaning. Now it means ‘unmitigated disaster.’

Look at the photo again. That’s the image of a burning platform most of your audience will conjure when this phrase is used. Whatever changes come about because of the pictured scenario promise to be painful, litigious, lengthy and costly. This is not what we want when we change the game. We want change that is productive, agreeable, fast and inexpensive to implement.

Clearly, we need a new metaphor to capture this meaning.

It’s like that old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon intro, where Bullwinkle pulls a monster out of a hat and says “No doubt about it, I’ve gotta get another hat.”

We’ve gotta get another hat.

Michael Margolis

Not long ago, thanks to a series of events set in motion by our mutual friend, Michelle James, I had the good fortune to connect with Michael Margolis, the founder of GetStoried.com and the author of Believe Me — “a storytelling manifesto for change-makers and innovators.”

There’s a natural affinity whenever professional storytellers get together.  Everything reminds us of a story, and so the conversation tends to leapfrog from anecdote to observation to insight, and back again.  Michael and I not only leapfrogged.  We hopscotched.  We see-sawed.  We tagged, hide-and-go-seeked and monkey-barred.  We were a couple of kids at recess, playing with our favorite toy.

What I like best about Michael’s approach to storytelling is that it’s active.  Story, seen through his lens, isn’t passive.  It’s not static.  Not fixed in time or immutable.

Story is alive.  It’s dynamic.  In constant motion.  In fact, telling good stories, while it has its place, is not nearly as productive as the living of them.  This is what Michael gets at in Believe Me.  It describes stories as our most powerful way of defining and shaping the world we live in.  Seeing stories in this light gives us the ability to transform them from past-tense or scripted, into a form that is revealed to us in each and every breath, and transmitted to our ‘audience’ in each and every action we take.

This is the learning that emerged for me from Believe Me.  Story is more powerful as a verb than as a noun.

Don’t think of story as a Thing.  Treat it as an Action. The act of Changing.  Innovating.  Revealing.  Inviting.  Reflecting.  Making.  Learning.  Leading.  Contextualizing. Connecting. Understanding.  Liberating. And yes…Playing!

Someday, after the fact, a Story may describe What Happened.  Right now, the only time that matters, Story is What’s Happening.  Knowing this difference will make you more observant and appreciative in the moment, and when it’s time for you to tell your story, it will rock, and your audience will Believe.

“Why’s that?” I asked, immediately more interested in this Wells dude than in the others the publicist listed.

“You never know what he’s going to write. He can’t be controlled,” the publicist said.

Wow.  Now I was really interested.  A few high profile critics aside, entertainment journalists had been, historically, notorious shills for studios and PR agencies, faithfully adding spin to the narratives they were sold.  This ensured them steady access to the all-important star interviews, along with lots of free meals, expenses-paid junkets, and invitations to review screenings and the occasional gala premiere.

That a player like Wells dared to leave this comfort zone said a couple of things.  First, the guy had to have guts, and confidence in his game.  Second,  entertainment journalism, like all journalism, was changing.  The very fact that my friend, the publicist, was forced to confront his concern about a blogger with a mind of his own was a revolution of sorts.  Very soon after speaking with the publicist, I took a look looked at Jeffrey Wells’ site, Hollywood Elsewhere, for the first time, and haven’t really looked away since.

Nothing of importance in the film business goes unobserved by Wells.  He is plugged into its zeitgeist.  His well-written commentary, his obvious passion for the cinema, the reliable frequency of his posts, and the broad spectrum of  sources he cites, make Hollywood Elsewhere a singular visit.  The hilariously-neurotic personal experiences he writes about and the commentary by a smart, often-vicious pack of readers are the icing on the cake.

I don’t work in the entertainment business any more, so I don’t need a lot of industry chatter, what I find useful is to get an early heads-up on films that can impact the industry, its key players, the marketplace, and popular culture.  Wells knows how to separate the story from the hype.  While I don’t always agree with his opinions or his perspective, they are always solid.  A reader can triangulate a position, a point of view, from them.

Jeffrey Wells is the GameChanger of the Month for October because he practices fundamentals that journalists and businesspeople in general can use to succeed in any changing business environment:

Cause change.  It is always better to change the game of your own volition than to have your game changed against your will by forces beyond your control.  Wells left the melting icepack of print journalism for the expanding tundra of online media before the people left on the icepack began pushing one another off like they are today.

Prepare to struggle. The path to any breakthrough is unpaved.  Gamechanging does not guarantee an easy road to fame and fortune.  It is, rather, a methodical series of steps taken in order to learn, adapt, and discover new avenues for productivity.   Hollywood Elsewhere struggled early.  At one point Wells had to solicit donations from his readers to keep the site alive. It now seems on healthier footing financially, but Wells has a penchant for drama, so you never know what kind of bind he’s getting himself into just so we can all enjoy watching him work his way out of it.

Have a point of view. Wells’ take on the business isn’t the fanboy gush of Ain’t It Cool News, or the studio commissary talk you get from Nikki Finke, it’s uniquely his own.  Visiting HE is like sitting in on conversations about films and current events, and panel discussions with lots of film clips at a neverending film festival with Wells as the lead moderator.  If you dig movies like I do, this is invariably a good experience.

Embrace distributed narratives.  In the networked world, narratives are distributed, never piped down a single channel to their audience.  In addition to the overlapping nature of the conversations between the blogger and his readers, Hollywood Elsewhere’s narratives transpire on multiple media platforms.  They link out to other journalists and web sites.  They also unfold differently over time.  Some of the site’s narratives may consist of a single post; others may continue for a year or more.

In the Networked World,  you cannot control the conversation between brand and audience.  The objective, whether you’re a one-person shop like Hollywood Elsewhere or a behemoth brand like Disney, is to add to the conversation.

After losing 42% of their value between 2005 and the end of 2007, publicly traded newspaper stocks lost 83% of their remaining value during 2008.

Most surveys show that 13,000+ U.S. newspaper jobs vanished in 2008.

In 2007, 70% of college Communication and Journalism majors had jobs six months after graduation.  In 2008, 60% did.

No doubt about it, the print journalism profession as we’ve known it is fading fast, and its future is as hazy as the crystal ball of a boardwalk fortune teller.

So why put stock in university students who, in these uncertain times, choose to major in Journalism?—as opposed to, say, the point of view expressed in Sarah Lacy’s smug, self-congratulatory April 09 TechCrunch story that disses journalism schools and anyone majoring in journalism these days.

Here’s why we ought to be bullish on Journalism majors:

1.  They’re optimists.  Feeling good about the future is the first step toward making it so.

2.  They’re self-reliant.  They realize there’s no ready-made career track waiting for them at the end of the diploma.  Their career will be one they carve out for themselves.

3.  They’re creative.  They’re putting themselves in a position where they have no choice but to be creative.  Some of the most creative people I know have used this strategy throughout their careers to grow and prosper.

4.  They’re following their fear.  Garrison Keillor, the writer and radio host, once told me that he built his career by “doing the thing that scared him most.”  Majoring in Journalism is a bold move in the face of a fearsome job market.  On the other side of your fear is potential you cannot discover until you do the thing that scares you.

5.  They’re entrepreneurial.   An entrepreneur sees opportunity where others do not.  Something in these Journalism majors relishes the wave of negative news coming from the marketplace, because it means they can position themselves at the bottom of the market to ride it up.

Educators at the University level, many of them celebrated veterans of old school journalism, share their students’ appetite for the unknown:

Kevin Klose, Dean of the University of Maryland Journalism School, admits he doesn’t know where people will get their news in coming years. “It’s like the early days of radio,” he says. “There was a tremendous amount of feverish invention, trial and error that went on in the 1920s and 1930s.  The outlets or platforms are unclear now — they’re being invented.”

Klose describes himself as a “participant in an ongoing experiment” to find formats for independent journalism.

Geneva Overholser, a Pulitizer Prize-winning editor and journalist, who today is director of the School of Journalism at USC, says, “We seem to feel the only way we can work is to work the way we’ve always done it.  That’s just not true. We will ride these yearnings for the past right down the tube.”   She sees her work as an exploration that will lead to “a reinvention of journalism that is richer and better than the old.”

Raymond Roker, founder and publisher of URB, a print and online publication dedicated to hip-hop and urban culture, believes that the calling of journalism is the one constant in a changing business environment.  “The allure,” he tweeted in a 137-character response to my question, “is wht it’s always bn–regardless of the dramatic changes in the economy of media–to develop, explore & lead the conversation.”

Roker tweet #2:  “The quality of our journalism, in whatever form it takes in a post-print world, will remain a barometer of how informed we are as a society.”

Any brand would be wise to include journalism majors in its conversations about What’s Next and Whom to Hire.  There are lot of reasons why these students, in particular, will be productive players in the changing game.

It has never been more important than it is on July 4, 2009, that we remember the founding of the United States of America as a Revolution, an overthrow of a distant ruling elite that had lost touch with the people.

Because today we need another Revolution.

We need a revolution against the kinds of businesses the U.S. has invested in way too heavily for the past 125 years, the businesses that sustained the oil-and-war economy built by people like George W. Bush’s granddad, businesses that President Eisenhower in the 1950s labeled the military-industrial complex.  Today the news media is complicit in the complex.  After all, what is more likely to keep you glued to the feeding tube than something scary happening right outside your front door?

We need a new kind of independence, from the feeding tubes of fear and oil and war and baseless celebrity.  Freedom from businesses built on killing, sensationalizing, alarming, manipulating, dividing, litigating, politicking, vilifying, dominating, acquiring, misdirecting, clouding, hiding, looting, destroying, drugging, bribing, hoarding, imprisoning, poisoning, torturing, hedging, lip-servicing and ass-licking.

These bad businesses are designed to extract wealth without replacing it.  Designed to accumulate money without earning it.  Designed to exploit labor without honoring it.  Designed to get better than they give.

In fact, businesses that generate wealth and well-being over the long haul are those that give better than they get.  Focusing on short term gains (we now measure our windows of transactional opportunity in milliseconds) cripples our potential for long-term growth.

We need another Revolution.

A revolution to free ourselves once and for all from the fear-based agendas of the distant and disconnected Bush Leaguer elites.   The Bush presidency was a validation of everything gone wrong with America.  Of myopia and mediocrity.  Of arrogance and bullying.  Of the toxic confluence of Church and State.

Here’s something that offers a strand of hope: fools like George W. Bush yield their own brand of wisdom.  He and his administration became like a compass needle that pointed in the exact opposite direction of the one we need to be going in.  This July 4th, we are in a race to heal the planet before the planet decides it’s going to heal itself.   Of us.  Which is why the Revolution needs to be Green.

The divisive ideologies and nonstop claptrap of talk show hosts, pundits, our so-called political leaders and even futurists only preserve the status quo. Obama is not getting the kind of energy and leadership he needs from Capitol Hill—from timid funeral director types like Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid, whose only apparent talent is soft-talking to the aggrieved, or from status-obsessed players like John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi, who always look like they’re counting the minutes to cocktails at the club.  These people stand in the way of progress.  We need legislators who can support a narrative other than their own.  Today, there’s only one narrative that matters when it comes to the federal government, and that’s.  the story of America.  It’s time for an uplifting twist to our story.  A ray of hope shooting through the economic gloom.  Not only do we need the sun to shine, we need it to generate electricity.

Which is why we need another Revolution.

Due in large part to the Bush Leaguers’ misadventures in the Middle East, we have racked up debts—monetary, environmental and political—that we’re going to be paying off for generations.  We have lost our touch for the extraordinary invention, the breathtaking breakthrough.  We have lost our appetite for industry.  Today, the touch that matters most to our economy, and, sad to say, defines us to a lot of the world, is the touch of bullets from an M2 50-caliber machine gun, the touch of a Wall Street banker to a politician’s wallet, or the touch of a camera lens on a dead celebrity.  Something is way, way off about that.  180 degrees off, to be exact.

Just as the Bush compass points due South, you can define the kinds of businesses we should be in as the polar opposites of the games we’ve been playing.  We need businesses made resilient by renewable energy and by peacemaking.  Business guided by themes like healing, educating, building, seeding, coaching, communicating, inspiring, bridging, liberating, converting, restoring, preserving, designing, connecting, transporting, sharing, growing, clarifying, creating.  And let’s not forget remembering.  These new kinds of businesses are our only hope for growing our way out of a malaise brought on by eight years of the reign of Prince George that didn’t add anything of value to the economic equation.  In fact it subtracted value.

It’s time for another Revolution.

The people who revolted against an out-of-touch elite to create the United States, and the people who have come here from around the world in the 233 years since then have literally put their lives on the line because they had an appetite for change and faith in their dreams   The U.S. political and banking systems exist to enable dreams of Americans, not leverage them to their own advantage by playing the kinds of insider games that turn those dreams into a mirage.  Mediocrity and myopia, arrogance and bullying,  mixing religion and politics, these are supposed to be the enemies of the American brand, not its trademarks.

This weekend, we remember the Revolution that became America.  Next week, let’s keep the spirit of that Revolution alive.  It’s the most American thing we can do.

Happy Independence Day!

As natural as change is, there’s no getting around the fact that it can be painful.  Especially when it happens to you and is not authored or initiated by you.  ‘Disruption’ is a word that some managers toss around in a pretty cavalier way as a desirable state  or productive path for businesses and their employees.  Disruption (from the Latin ‘dirumpere,’ meaning to break or burst asunder) is not, however, always such a pleasant thing.  The past can collide with the future in an agonizing present.  Disrupting an unproductive pattern of behavior is not the same as disrupting a hardworking family’s way of life, and we are seeing entirely too much of that these days.Try telling residents of a small Midwestern town that just lost its largest employer in the auto industry downturn that disruption is cool, and nobody’s going to be buying you a beer anytime soon.  In this kind of economy, we often greet disruption with the same enthusiasm we welcome a rusty nail disrupting the bottom of our foot.

When there’s so much natural disruption in the workplace, there’s no need to go looking for it, or fomenting it.  It’s going to happen no matter what.   What GameChangers realize is that times of change are also times of immense opportunity.  When the ground is in upheaval, it’s time to plant.  The same is true with the business environment.  Players who are ’sowing  seeds’ during the disruption are those most likely to benefit when the seasons change.  That doesn’t mean it’s easy, or without its pains and stresses.  But there is a productive path, there is always a produtive path, and a GameChanger is in the best position to make the choices that lead in that direction.

Participating in and managing disruption requires an understanding of what is at the root of it.  You cannot manage your own situation if you don’t understand the larger context in which your situation is happening, and the forces that are in play.  The biggest change, when it comes to the business environment, the single biggest source of disruption, is that we are moving on a global scale away from Industrial Age business models and organizations to models and organizations built to operate in the Networked World.  This shift is so profound that it deserves its own name.  Call it The Disrupture.

Understanding The Disrupture gives you the opportunity to see it, act on it, and benefit from it.

To help you on your journey, here’s a crib sheet.  Here are some characteristics of business in the Industrial Age, and what is going to replace them in the Networked World.

Rigid—>Fluid

Predictable—>Capricious

Controlled—>Liberated

Owned—>Shared

Cosmetic—>Authentic

Market Research—>Trend Analysis

Scripted—>Improvised

Nation Building—>Community Building

Released—>Discovered

Repetitive—>Progressive

Pushed—>Invited

Monologue—>Conversation

Prima Donna—>Team Player

Status—>Happiness

Hierarchy—>Tribe

Doctrinaire—>Heuristic

Memorized—>Understood

Domination—>Support

Advertising—>Narrative

Planning—>Preparation

Ideology—>Reality

Who—>How

Consumer—>Customer

Stakeholders—>Audience

Money—>Wealth 

Greed—>Generosity

Dogmatic—>Karmic

Group Think—>Group Mind

Destiny—>Serendipity

The Big Idea—>The Good Idea

Right—>Consistent

Wrong—>Inconsistent

Move away from the Industrial Age qualities  like they smell bad, because they do, they reek of decay and demise, like a rusted-out steel mill in Wilkes-Barre or a Tennessee slough suffocating with coal sludge.

The characteristics of Networked World, by contrast, smell like Monterey Bay, a farm field in Indiana in the spring, or a forest full of Oregon evergreens after a rain.  It is the smell of new growth.  Be guided by this aroma, it will not steer you wrong.

The excellent Japanese manga and pop culture site Pink Tentacle posted a list compiled by the publisher Jiyu Kokuminsha of the 60 most popular new words and phrases in Japan during this past year. Among them:

- Arafo – Short for ‘around 40′. Taken from Around 40 the name of a popular television series, to describe anyone in their 40s. Spin-off word: ‘Arasu’, coined by Japanese fashion marketers to mean ‘around 30′.

- Asa banana – ‘Morning banana’. Describes a recent fad of eating bananas for breakfast, made more intense by the occasional banana shortage throughout the year.

- Change – Excitement over Obama and also the name of a hit Japanese TV series about a schoolteacher who reluctantly becomes prime minister

- Sabuparaimu – ‘Subprime’. The garbage from the New York-based financial companies eventually washed up on Japan’s shores.-

- Akiba-kei – ‘Akihabara style.’ The geek culture epitomized by Tokyo’s surreally geeky Akihabara electronics district.

- Guu! – A bastardization of the English word ‘Good!’, made popular by comedian Takahiro Yamamoto, who delivers it with an exaggerated two thumbs-up.

- Maiku Regendo – ‘Make Legend’. Slogan for the Yamuiri Giants baseball team, which, against the odds, won the Central Division pennant. (Another Giants team slogan ‘Make Drama’ was, according to Pink Tentacle, voted the Trendiest Saying of 1996.)

Words work at the cosmetic level of communication. When they are new, freshly minted as these are, they can provide a glimpse into deeper levels of emotional and meta meaning, and even touch on the zeitgeist.

Here’s the complete list.

Good improvisers always pay attention to their physical appearance and presence.

Improv theater rehearsals sometimes focus almost exclusively on communication through one’s physical movements and attitudes. Players, for instance, will walk randomly back and forth across the stage as their coach calls out directions that alter their walks. The directions do NOT suggest a physical response (”Your left foot hurts.”) but an emotional one (”You just won the lottery!”) to be reflected in the walk. Each player responds in his or her own way. One player who ‘just won the lottery’ might skip; another will add some bounce to the step or glide to the stride; still another may walk around in a happy daze.

There is no one correct response to the emotional state. Rather, the focus is on players responding as their authentic selves. The question posed by the coach that each player ‘answers’ with a distinctive walk is “How would YOU do act if YOU won the lottery?” Distinctive repsonses by each player make the group portrait a compelling one. There is ‘a lot going on’ in such a performance, it presents many perspectives and avenues of exploration. When every response is the same (’We’re all skipping because we won the lottery’), there is only one thing going on.

Walking is one of many ways players express an emotional state or an attitude. All aspects of appearance, movement, posture, attitude and presence are considered by an improviser. An improviser has no tic, no mannerism, no way of standing or sitting or looking that does not reflect the emotional life of the role being played. Coaches ask players to consider the angle of their spine, their tempo, their chin, and how they use their hands, continually guiding them toward an awareness of a spirit of animation, literally, the movement of life.

By comparison, how many people in business, Bill Gates among them, are stunted in this area of communication? Many. We adopt one posture, one tempo, one way of dressing, and that, for all practical purposes, is our identity. Bill Gates has the classic geek slouch going. He leads with his head. You can tell he spends a lot of time reading or hunched over a computer or slouched on a couch playing videogames. This posture puts a lot of strain on his lower back. It gives him a belly — more strain on the back — that he would not have if he stood up straight. His body is like a fist forming around his heart. His posture and profile are so familiar that they ‘read’ in silhouette. It is his role, one he has obviously played brilliantly, to be the head brain, the leading thinker, the guy with the vision, the trillionnaire tycoon. The posture is in no way out of character, and aside from the healthiness aspect, you can’t argue with it.

It is no coincidence that Gates’ posture perfectly mirrors that of Montgomery Burns of The Simpsons. They’re essentially playing the same role, the only difference is that Gates is somewhat more conniving and malicious than Burns. (j/k, maybe)

The important point about Gates’ posture is this: His edit of his Microsoft scene, and his eventual entrance onto a new stage, present him with an opportunity. Making a move like Yoga can literally change his posture and open his heart. It will give Gates a new characterization for his next scene, one keeping with his new role as philanthropist and all-around do-gooder who leads with his heart.

Industrial Age organizations demanded consistency of behavior. Players danced a dance choreographed by corporate. It was a marching band, a Busby Berkeley MGM Musical.

Today, in the Networked World, players write code in one scene and become international media sensations in the next. No longer do we play one or two roles in a career. We play ten or twenty or thirty. It’s a mashup mentality. It’s Stomp at your neighborhood theater, performed by your neighbors. Players dance their own dances, and if it’s smart, corporate figures out how to dance along.

For Spolin’s classic text, Improvisation for the Theater, Sills wrote a section entitled Paul Sills’ Sayings of Viola Spolin, a compilation of wisdom that can be seen as a coach’s advice to her players, and also as a mother’s advice to a son. Here are a few of those bromides. They need no comment, but give them some thought, because they are deep, and offer fresh insight into why improvisation is important to the conduct of business in the Networked World:

Approval/disapproval is keeping you from a direct experience.

That which is not yet known comes out of that which is not yet here.

Don’t initiate! Follow the initiator! Follow the follower!

When you are in a state of reflection you are including another; when you initiate you deny yourself.

Games and story bring out self rather than ego.

Let the magic of the focus work for you. Stay out of it.

Focus is not the content of focus; it is the effort to stay on focus.

Change is not enough. This body of work asks more: transformation.

Movement, interaction, transformation.

It’s by a quirk of genetics that we have come to associate improv so strongly with comedy. Spolin’s son, Paul Sills, introduced her techniques to Second City, which he co-founded with Bernie Sahlins in 1957. At its roots, however, improvisation is still about what Spolin created — a technique for building environments that foster learning and communication, that hold the potential for what she called ’spontaneous explosions’ of creativity.

Spolin’s great book, Improvisation for the Theater, originally published in 1963, includes a section called ‘Reminders and Pointers’. There are 96 items listed in the section. Here are four, abbreviated, with my notes in italics:

The energy released in solving the problem…forms the scene. It is important to note that improvisers do not enter a scene with a problem to be solved. They pose the problem and resolve it within the scene itself. A ’sales scene’ in business provides a useful analogy. A skilled salesperson, like a skilled improviser, does not enter the scene looking to solve a particular problem for a customer. He or she lets the customer help define the problem, which they then set about solving collaboratively. If the experience is a good one — if ‘the energy released in the solving of the problem’ is positive and productive — the scene is much more likely to have a happy outcome for all the players involved.

Be flexible. Alter your plans on a moment’s notice if it is advisable to do so. The more rigid and dogmatic you are when you enter your scene, the more wedded you are to a particular narrative or outcome, the more likely you are to stumble when things change. And things do change. Always.

Remember that a lecture will never accomplish what an experience will. Like Spolin, all good teachers know and practice this one. This time-honored advice is especially relevant to organizations educating Gen-Why? employees, who have grown up learning how to play the game, navigate the site, phone the friend and hack the solution without reading the instructions.

Act, don’t react. To react is protective and constitutes withdrawal from the environment. Since we are seeking to reach out, a player must act upon environment, which in turns acts upon player, catalytic action thus creating interaction that makes process and change possible. Don’t even try to understand this unless you’ve had some improvisation training. Improvisation is an animal spirit within you. It must be tamed before it can be ridden, otherwise someone’s going to get hurt.