Several years ago, O’Neil had a job demolishing and re-constructing the interior of a large building outside Chicago.  While doing the demolition work, they discovered that ground under the building was contaminated.  Before they could re-build, they’d have to de-contaminate the soil.  This would result in a delay of 3 months, pushing the work into the winter, and a budget overage of $150,000.  The client balked.  The $150K was not in its budget for the demolish/re-build.  O’Neil and the client were at odds, facing what seemed guaranteed to become a no-win scenario, until Rich posed this question:  “If the soil hadn’t been contaminated and the job were to be completed on the original estimated date, what would your winter heating bill for the building have been for the three months we’re going to be delayed?”

The answer to the question?  $150,000.   When the environment in which the problem took place was expanded to include not just the foundation but the entire building, and was not fixed in time but spanning a three-month period in the life of the building, the money was suddenly available.  The client with no qualms, paid the overage out of its building maintenance budget.

Myopia is the enemy.   To shed new light on a problem, expand the environment in which you’re looking at it.  Remember that the problem isn’t the broken wing, the problem is that the bird cannot fly.

The Lundins’ daughter, Carey, a TV and documentary producer (Citizen Kate)in Chicago, read my book recently and got in touch to tell me how many parallels she sees between her parents’ work and GameChangers.  She sent me a copy of The Healing Manager.  I’ve been reading it intermittently, and the more of it I read, the more, I am reminded of a favorite saying of, Derek Miller, one of my improv teachers.  “The story is always happening,” he says,  “before we’re here and after we’re gone.  We’re here to participate in it for awhile.”  Derek is talking about improv performances, but his words could apply to the work we do, or to life itself.  The depth of Derek’s saying really hits home when I read the The Healing Manager.

Ideas about working together collaboratively, of setting ego aside for the good of the community, of honoring everyone’s contributions and developing ‘quality relationships’ with one another–these are nothing new.  They’ve existed since the first six cave dwellers gave themselves a team name (Sabre Teeth?  Fire Monkeys?  Uggtopuss?) and assigned themselves roles and rules for hunting together.

Human beings have always known how to communicate on the emotional level the Lundins describe in The Healing Manager and that I write about in GameChangers.  Our most ancient ancestors had it in them to share important information with honest emotions–the beauty of cave wall drawings, the shamed slouch of a homo erectus shunned by the tribe, the alarmed howl of a sentry announcing an unwanted visitor.

And so I am given this great gift by Carey Lundin, an eloquent reminder written by her parents that we are forever seeking the same truths.  Following the same instincts.  Living the same story.  And that our obligation as human beings is to seek and express the best aspects of what we can be, and to make happiness always a possibility, even in the midst of the sadness we must inevitably encounter along the way.

Words from The Healing Manager by William and Kathleen Lundin:

“Ever since the industrial revolution employees and managers have been compelled to live a cultural myth that says emotions and feelings should not exist at work.”

“People change.  They find capacities they didn’t know they had.  They find their voices.  They look and sound brighter.  They begin to believe that values such as affection, mutual trust, and support have an important role to play at work.”

“While the big conflicts make headlines, the little, scratchy ones make the difference between profit and loss.”

“The ground rules (of the Lundins’ TQR sessions, my note) do not recognize status levels, and all employees are intermixed.  That’s the going-in bargain.  Confidentiality is agreed upon.  What people see or hear is no one else’s business.  No one can do or say anything that is judged to be wrong or stupid.  The sessions are so outlandishly different–breaking many of the usual taboos of work relationships–that they become hyper-reality.  They are powerful workplace theater.” (their itals)

“Trust is based upon discovery, of which there are two kinds.  There is the discovery of new ideas and feelings about oneself and there is the discovery of favorable attributes about others.  Employees will trust only those events of which they are part, not hearsay”

“There is potential for chaos as cultures change.  There is also potential for personal and corporate growth.  Know that culture change is a dynamic event, not always smooth.  Some former heroes will prove to be shams.  Some previously unnoticed people will become the new heroes.”

Other books by the Lundins:

When Smart People Work for Dumb Bosses

 Working with Difficult People

Today (Wednesday) at breakfast, we sat in Manhattan Beach with two guys named Rick, one from L.A., one from Chicago, and mapped out how the movie studios can change the game with distributed production models made possible by a new broadband network called Darkstrand that comes online in January and can move data at 40 gigabytes per second. Darkstrand is the newly-privatized network that until now has been the exclusive domain of the Defense Dept. and university research scientists. See, the two Ricks were literally describing how to turn swords into plowshares. Or Disney shares anyway.

Today, we hung out in a garage in East L.A. with a friend of ours from Florida, a Taiwanese-American entrepreneur living in Santa Monica and two mechanics from Colombia flown in by our Florida friend to install an Italian-made hydrogen fuel conversion system called JiffyGas in a car originally manufactured in Japan. All the players in the scene had connected with one another via Google. Later this week, the friend from Florida and the two Colombians will do a JiffyGas conversion on a test car for NASA.

Before the end of the day we introduced the friend from Florida to an acquaintance from Denver who is a partner in iCAST, which creates jobs for impoverished communities in the U.S. and abroad. Next week, our Florida friend will talk to iCAST about how to build a jobs-creation scene with gasoline-to-hydrogen conversions as the game.

And now here you are. Welcome. Feel free to connect and play along.

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.

One of my favorite metaphors for the Networked World comes from a source I can’t attribute. I believe I came across it in Wired Magazine in the late 1990s. In the article, the writer cited a sci-fi story that describes a future in which game kiosks have been installed on busy street corners. The kiosks alert passersby when there’s some kind of rotten thing happening to the human organism — a famine, a war, a currency devaluation, a water shortage, etc. When the alert is issued, pedestrians take to the kiosks and play a massively multplayer game designed so that the playing generates whatever kind of energy or economies are needed to correct the imbalance in the world.

If anyone remembers the Wired article or the original sci-fi story cited by the article’s author, please let me know. I’d like to give proper credit. (Thus correcting an imbalance : )

I am reminded of this article/scenario a lot these days, because we are seeing it happen for real. As a generation of gamers enters the workforce, gaming is getting more serious. In the next five years, the levels of participation and consequences of game play will be one of the most profound changes we will see in the networked economy.

As games and gamers have matured and evolved, the culture of gaming has gotten more sophisticated, and the levels of engagement have become more meaningful. Flight simulators are an example of a serious game that have gotten much more realistic in the 3o+ years their existence. The guilds in Worlds of Warcraft can be like family to their members. Facebook’s cause-related apps, Procter & Gamble’s online innovation lab, and the massively multiplayer game Superstruct, which the Institute for the Future launches later this month, are examples of games with a serious purpose. Procter & Gamble wants to externalize more of its creative engineering and in the process expand the pool of productive ideas entering its network. Superstruct is designed to forecast and positively impact a future that will improve the lives of cerebral palsy victims around the world. Serious games, those. Backed by serious money and talent.

Of course the serious consequences of games are not going to be 100% beneficial. The dark destruction of Yin always accompanies the bright optimism of Yang. The line between playing a war simulation game and actually killing other human beings is perilously thin, if it even exists any more at all.

So what purpose should games serve? What objectives should the playing of games achieve? The sci-fi story cited above expressed an idea about it. Post-Apocalyptic MMORPG games like Fallout set players in gloomier futures. Microsoft has one take on the question, the Pentagon another, Electronic Arts another. Here’s how an improviser sees it: We play games to solve problems.

Modern improvisation began in the 1930s, with theater games devised by two schoolteachers, Viola Spolin and Neva Boyd, to help children from multi-cultural backgrounds on Chicago’s South Side — first generation Serbs and Croats and Poles and Germans and Jews and Blacks and Czechs — find ways to communicate and learn from one another instead of beating each other over the head with bowling pins. For Spolin and Boyd and their students, improvisation became a way to transcend fear, ego and ethnic differences so that productive collaborations could occur. Improvisation was the conduit to learning, and games were the basis of improvisation.

The improvisation required by the playing of games — the spontaneous interactions between players — lets players collaboratively discover innovative solutions to problems. It’s true in theater, true in business. True for children, and for grown-ups, too.

Improvisation as conceived by Viola Spolin and Neva Boyd holds that the playing of games equates with doing some good in the world. Games are a means of supporting one another, and connecting with our communities.

The founding teachers believed in no uncertain terms that our interactions should arise from a spirit of hopefulness instead of being necessitated by our fears, and that the choice is always ours to make.

Obama ‘08.

Flash forward to last week. Our friend Shannon Porter shows me around Nau, the sustainable clothing store (men’s and women’s) in Chicago where she is one of the managers. (Nau is based in Portland.) The store where Shannon works is at 2118 North Halsted Avenue, smack in the heart of a great part of a great city. Shannon has a Wharton School degree and impeccable taste in music and friends and just about everything else, and so I want to think Nau is going to be cool before I ever set foot in it. But there is a shadow of a doubt in my mind. I mean, I’d had the unsatisfactory experience with the smokable clothes, and she did say a lot of their stuff is made from recycled polyester and, well, you know, the original polyester ain’t so great to begin with, so how could recycled — ???

And then I crossed the Nau threshold, and within minutes, my experience with sustainable clothing had changed, just the way the brand intended.
The clothes are fantastic. The material, the design, the concept, the technology, the emotion. Everything works. The store experience guides you through the brand’s narrative with a constant sense of discovery and appreciation.

The bathroom has the mission statement posted. Given this environment, any scene set in here is almost guaranteed to explore a theme one could describe as ‘Reflecting on One’s Brand at a Time One Normally Would Not’. (A GameChanger changes the game whenever and wherever the opportunity presents itself.)

Nau stores are, in effect, showrooms. They carry minimal stock, reducing the needed retail space and the carbon emissions associated with shipping from warehouses to stores. Savings are passed along. Ordering directly from the warehouse saves you 10%.

To learn more about an item, you take a card from a holder where the item is hanging and scan it.

To order an item, you wave that same card at a different scanner.

5% of every purchase you make goes to a cause you choose at checkout.

From the conscious designs of buttons on the clothing to the quality of the video on the Nau web site, every choice made by the brand resonates with heart and reeks with aesthetic wonderfulness.

I bought lots of clothes for spring, donated 5% to Kiva in the process, and was kicking myself by the time I got back to L.A. that I did not buy more. Oh well. Nau’s L.A. store opens in April, and I’m sure that will be a good time, too.

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?

Modern improv theory began with the playing of games. In the 1920s, Neva Boyd, a Northwestern University professor in sociology, and her protégé, Viola Spolin, used simple games to help immigrant children of many different nationalities on Chicago’s South Side communicate and assimilate into their new culture. (Spolin’s son, Paul Sills, would later co-found Second City, where he and his troupe used his mother’s foundational work with games to create and perform improvised comedy.)

It was Spolin who observed that a remarkable transformation took place during the playing of group games. At the heart of this transformation is something akin to spiritual transcendence – the setting aside of oneself and one’s ego for a higher purpose. When a game is played, all of a sudden it’s not about you or me. It’s about us. And because it’s about us – not about an individual, but about the activity of a group – the playing of games generates an experience that is engaging and rewarding, not only to the players, but to their audiences as well. In business, when your team/company/brand plays the game well, there’s a magnetic quality to this play that will have your customers — the most significant segment of what we call your ‘External Audience’ — wanting to play along.

Good improvisers — in theater and in business — can identify what I call in GameChangers ‘good’ and ‘bad’ games. They know and promote the difference between games that are productive, and lend themselves to the progress of your scenes, and games that get you nowhere.

Here are a couple of (abbreviated) examples of games being played in business scenarios. The first is that timeless classic, ‘Kissing Ass’. Because the objective of this game is usually to curry favor with one player, it almost always limits a scene by obscuring important or relevant information. Players who don’t recognize or join in the game are going to pay a price, like the intern in the video. The second video illustrates a more productive game, call it ‘Crazy Like a Fox’. Note how the playing of this game elicits information that’s useful to the scene. Again, the intern earns a glare from the CEO, but now it’s the CEO who must be careful to keep the scene productive, not let it veer into some kind of status game or turn into a two-person scene about the conflict between him and the intern. That would be good for an improv comedy scene, but conflict and comedy are not what you want from a business situation.)

(EDITOR’S NOTE: We had these videos up with this post a day ago, and found to our chagrin that the default YouTube player associated the business game of ‘Kissing Ass’ with various porn-related or YouTubesque clips with titles like ‘Jared Kisses Chamath’s Ass at the Office Party Then Spits’. To those who witnessed and were offended by the witless vocabulary of this, we apologize. To those who are disappointed that we yanked it, you know where to go. YouTube’s cool custom player lets a player manage and brand a player’s playlists, check it out…)