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

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“And when do you need this done?” sighed the already-dubious employee.

“Yesterday!” said the manager, pivoting abruptly and walking away.

The employee shook her head almost imperceptibly and said to no one in particular, “What am I supposed to do with that?”

Exactly.

‘Yesterday’ is not an answer. It’s an attitude.  And a cliche on top of it. The ‘I need it yesterday’ attitude says to the employee:

“You are now guaranteed to fail. I’m going to be unhappy with you no matter what. You should have thought of this yourself. Do I have to think of everything?” That’s  lot of attitude for one word.

And like the employee said, what is a person supposed to do with it?

Give the people in your scenes information they can put to use! Information that will shed light and bring clarity to the problem at hand. Don’t muck up the scene with your imperious attitude and your unrealistic expectations.

Richard Saul Wurman holds court at USC school of Architecture, 01.10.12

On Tuesday, I went to see Richard Saul Wurman speak to an audience of architecture students and faculty at USC. Afterward he held court outside the classroom for half a dozen students who stayed around and asked him questions. One student asked, “What do you think of urban planning?”

Wurman sized up the student for half a beat then shook his head. “That’s a terrible question,” he scolded. (He pulls no punches.) “It’s too general, too broad. How can I even begin to answer it? It’s like asking a doctor what he or she thinks of medicine, or asking an oceanographer what he or she thinks of water!”

See, there’s learning in the ‘Yesterday’ scene for both players. The employee had an attitude, too. “When do you need this done?” made scheduling the task the manager’s problem. It was therefore not a very useful response to the manager’s request.

Instead of a question that made scheduling the task the manager’s problem (and setting herself up to be a victim) a question or statement that engaged the manager in the scheduling process would have been better:

“I’ve got five to-do’s on my list ahead of your request. Help me prioritize.”

“I can have it done in 48 hours.”

“Rate the urgency from 1 to 5, with 5 being an emergency where I have to drop everything and do it now.”

Whatever you do, whatever role you’re playing, give your scene partners information they can act on, not an attitude that makes it more difficult or even impossible for them to solve the problem of the scene.

In a business environment that changes at the speed of thought, there are lots of issues with this leadership model. Specifically, it’s too slow. it does not let an organization act quickly enough on opportunities or adapt cost-effectively to changing market conditions.

In networked organizations, by contrast, leadership is organic, it grows out of the structure of the scene and its problem-solving process, and not from a presumed hierarchy.

Visibly good leadership is essential to attract employees and customers to a brand and keep them engaged in its narrative, but that visibility can come from anywhere. Sure, it can and should still come from the ‘top.’ It can also come through the side door, from behind, the center, the edge, from out of left field, up from the ashes, or out from the shadows. It can be bombastic, it can be imperceptible, or any dynamic in between.

In networked organizations, leadership is everyone’s responsibility, and there is no single context for it, or one accepted style of leading. It is the scene that determines what leadership looks like, and what purpose it serves.

Further, being a leader is no bigger or lesser a deal than being a follower (i.e. team player). Just as everyone in a networked organization ix expected to be a leader, everyone is also expected to be a follower. A player’s leadership (or followship) status is a condition of the scene and the game, not necessarily a condition of his or her rank in the organization.

Among the questions addressed, on a scene-by-scene basis, in a gamechanging leadership model:

-Whose subject matter expertise, perspective, or professional experience is most important to the scene?

-How well-articulated and shareable is the vision?

-Is your scene’s narrative (and its possible outcomes) scripted ahead of time, or co-created by your team as a result of its problem-solving process?

-Are your team’s roles complementary and supportive, lacking expertise to solve the problem, or overlapping and in conflict?

-What is the balance, and who does the balancing, between listening and speaking? Between information and intuition? Deconstruction and construction? Postmortem and Premortem? Questions and declarations?

-How does a team stay focused on the problem at hand, while at the same time honoring historical and future organizational narratives?

-Who decides? How?

-What’s the game? When is it time to change the game or edit the scene?

And while there’s no one style or way of behaving that defines effective leadership, two things are true of all gamechanging leaders:

1) They listen first. 2) They do not script outcomes.

They understand that there are many ways to solve a problem, and that most of those ways will not be their own. This leadership model is the only way to act quickly enough on market opportunities and adapt cost-effectively enough to changes in the environment to stay competitive in the networked world.

NEXT: How we define Roles

Rome and his radio production team recently played a 20-show game they dubbed “The Rex Game.’ One of his producers noticed one day that they’d had someone named Rex on three consecutive shows. An improviser, seeing such a pattern, has one response: Do more! That’s what Rome and Team did, they kept interviewing Rex’s.

For 20 consecutive shows, they interviewed someone named Rex. Imagine how much bullshit a game like this cuts through in production meetings. How it swept subjectivity, judging, opinionating, credit-claiming and ego out of the room like the Red Sox do the Yankees at Fenway. “We have a guest.” “Who?” “Rex.” “Book it.”

How easy is that? compared to, let’s say…

“We have a guest.” “Who.” “A soccer player. She’s interesting.” “How interesting?” “Real interesting.” “To you she’s interesting because she’s hot. But this is radio. Does she have a take?.”  “She has a take.” “What kind of a take?” “A good take.” “How good?” Etc. etc. etc.

Rome summed up the benefits of the Rex Game like this: “You don’t get to 20 Rexes without stretching a little bit.”

Exactly. Extension is what you want out of a game. Doing something you’ve never done before in order to get where you’ve never gone before. That’s what improvisation is all about.

Interestingly, when Rome got requests from callers and his producers for him to play another similar game, say a Derek Game, Rome riffed on it for a bit, “Derek Jeter, Derek Harper, Derek Coleman, Derek and the Dominoes…” and then quickly decided against it. This is an excellent example of a clean edit, something else Rome does exceptionally well. His transitions are clear. He never meanders.

UPDATE: Though Rome decided against the Derek Game, he and his team are playing a Kyle Game, interviewing someone named Kyle for as many days in a row as they can. Just more proof of how much game the Rome team has. As the great improviser, Craig Cackowski, says, “Don’t look for the game. Look for a game.”

The Jungle is full of game  You can always let go of one vine and grab another. Just make sure you have a take when you do, because the Jungle can be a cruel place when you don’t.

I love this story because it shows how what stifles our ability to solve a problem is less often about the nature or scope of the problem than it is about the quality of the problem-solving process.

Too often, we invest in poor communication practices and processes, characterized by unproductive games like ‘Eight Axes, One Budget,’ that no one enjoys playing, never mind that they are not designed to solve our particular problem in the first place. I call these poor games. ‘Poor’ because they don’t have much ‘play’ in them, either in the sense that they are a happy experience, or that they are flexible. No, they’re grim and rigid, like the dead. Their ROI is poor because the probability of getting to a solution quickly is low. Because they frequently lack focus and energy, they waste time.

There are thousands of characteristics of poor games, and thousands of poor games played in business every second of every working day. ‘Reading Your PowerPoint Deck to Your Audience’ is a poor game. ‘Kissing Ass’ is almost always a poor game. The ‘Eight Axes, One Budget’ game Barb Groth walked into was a poor game. She saw it, and suggested an adjustment. That’s what gamechangers do.

All it took for her to transform the game was changing its objective–from ‘Cut $20K’ to ‘Save $20K.’ One word. A tiny shift in perspective on the problem. Suddenly, the opinionating, negotiating, status-seeking, bragging, positioning, arguing, joking, backstabbing, politicking, gossiping and justifying that plague poor games, were not getting in the way of solving the problem. The new game got played, the problem solved, in the time it takes to Rochambeau.

Barb’s gamechange freed time that could be better invested in activities with more business upside, or in personal time. Any game that lets you swap an hour of arguing about whose budget gets cut for an hour playing with your kids or helping them with their homework?  That’s a rich game.

I’m doing a photo essay on Western Avenue for a client of ours. In walking Western yesterday, I had all kinds of rewarding encounters. A street poet named Ron shared a poem he wrote, called Shine that was amazing; a restaurant owner grilling chicken on the sidewalk shared stories of his adventures in the real estate biz; a beauty shop owner opened the door after hours to pose for a photo; a kid showed me his python; another kid getting a tattoo showed me his cool shoes–PF Flyers, a brand I used to wear when I was a kid!; a clothing entrepreneur named Prince confided his strategy for pumping up slow sales; a dude named Noon and I had a half-hour discussion on privacy issues, the school system, the prison system, and the relations between the police and the people of South Central–all because he wouldn’t let me take his picture.

No matter how deeply we dive into virtual worlds and other dimensions of reality, walking around and having conversations with folks is still the best way to learn something you didn’t know.

As Viola Spolin said, “Act on environment, and environment will act on you.”

I.  Story

Watson and Crick

We create and share stories as a way of interpreting our experiences and making sense of the world. Stories turn chaos into cosmos. Our ’story sense’ guides us through life. Stories are the basis of community. They energize our relationships. Shape our careers. Filter our music. Impact everything from our spiritual beliefs, to the schools we attend, to the products we patronize.

It is through stories that we assign meaning to objects and events.

DNA, for example, became meaningful on a global scale in 1953, in a story told by scientist-storytellers Watson and Crick in a brand-new, double-helixed protein-based language. Before 1953, scientists knew the DNA story existed, but they didn’t have the tools to see it, the language to describe it, or the storytellers to make it mean something to the masses.

The discovery of DNA—as with any kind of breakthrough in human consciousness—poses an interesting ‘tree falls in the woods’ question. Before we tell a story about something, does it have meaning?

Was DNA ‘meaningful’ before 1953? Definitely. Had to be. Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid was doing its thing before we had the words to describe what the thing was. So if we weren’t telling stories about DNA, how was its ‘invisible meaning’ expressed?

II. Narrative

Here is my theory: Before it gets expressed as a story (and after, too) meaning resides in narratives.

A narrative is a flow of events connected to a theme.

A story is the conscious structuring of events to elicit meaning.

Before anybody ever put the letters DNA into a meaningful sequence, there was this theme, call it, ‘What Are We Made Of?’—a theme as old as the first time a mother wondered what made her babies look different from one another.  Any and all events connected to this theme comprise its narrative.

Before DNA came into being, its meaning was already present in the ‘What Are We Made Of?’ narrative.

Before 1953 and the birth of the DNA story, this potent narrative produced such meaningful artifacts as Mendel’s genetics experiments with pea plants, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings’ offspring, X-rays, ancient Egyptian seeds that had been placed in fermenting yeast to alter their growing traits—and the musings of every mother who ever wondered what made her babies look different from one another.

A narrative connected to a meaningful theme like ‘What Are We Made Of?’ has transformative potential.

We need this distinction between story and narrative because thanks to the internet, we have the tools to experience and the language to express meaning as never before. Things that meant something before the internet don’t mean as much now. And things that didn’t exist two years ago mean a lot today. We live an an Age of Meaning, and narratives, as the ultimate source of meaning, are ultra-important to our understanding of the networked world.

How narratives live in networks will a huge factor in how we connect and engage with one another, how we make sense of, and transform, the world in the 21^st century.

III. Artifacts

In addition to stories, narratives deliver meaning in all kinds of other media—memes for example. Memes are not stories, but are important to how we connect with one another in networks. A hamster eating popcorn and a dancing baby are not stories. A rumor is not a story. A headline is not a story. A link isn’t. A tweet isn’t. A status isn’t. A sales transaction, in and of itself, isn’t. Yet these forms and many others can, like stories, hold meaning and therefore they have value. We call stories and all the other meaningful media generated by narratives ‘artifacts.’

Artifacts are memorable, shareable expressions of narratives.

The popular meme of a hamster eating popcorn is an expression of a narrative with a theme we could call ‘Loveable Pets.’ We smile at a dancing baby because it’s a quick glimpse of a narrative with the theme ‘Precocious Children.’

All narratives contain enough meaning to generate a practically limitless quantity of artifacts. What hangs in the balance is the quality of the narrative. Does it inspire or repress? Is it productive or reductive?

IV. Narratology

Our ability to store and experience narratives in networks has opened a new era in the ‘narrative sciences’–filmmaking, journalism, theater, business communication, publishing, branding, education, gaming, etc.—that mirrors what happened to the science of physics in the early part of the previous century.

‘Narratologists’ today are discovering, like Einstein’s community of physicist friends did, that stuff is connected in ways we had not previously had the ability to imagine. Networks abound with invisible and non-linear (the U.S. military calls them ‘asymmetrical’) relationships that have the potential to mushroom in a heartbeat into massive manifestations of energy with the power to create and destroy worlds.  Conceptual worlds. Virtual worlds. Physical worlds.

The distinction between story and narrative is also important because in a networked environment, it is increasingly difficult, perhaps impossible, for any one individual, organization or agency to script, and control stories and other artifacts efficiently. That is how business used to get done. When the number of communication channels were finite, ‘script-and-control’ models were optimal. This is no longer true. Your network’s appetite is bigger than what you can feed it purely in the form of scripted-and-controlled content.

Continual co-creation is essential.

V. Script-and-Control vs. Continual Co-Creation

With an infinite number of channels available to us, narratologists can put new, more flexible story strategies into play. In this environment, ‘co-creation’ models are optimal. Continual improvisation and collaboration are required. In the new narrative-focused models, the emphasis is not on authorship, but on participation. Communication is not a matter of control, but of liberation.  Only a co-creation model can generate enough meaning to satisfy a robust network’s appetite.

A big reason Walt Disney decided to give up filmmaking to focus on his new theme park in Anaheim (coincidentally right around the time of Watson and Crick’s DNA discovery in 1953) was that, unlike his films (”Snow White” had a jiggy couple of frames in it that bothered him the rest of his life), the theme park would, in Walt’s words, ‘always be in a state of becoming.’ With the opening of Disneyland, Walt Disney got into the co-creation business.  Together, Disney and the guests at his theme park explored a narrative you could call ‘The American Dream.’

Since its opening in 1953, Disneyland has hosted over 600 million visitors, and it’s safe to say that most of those guests have generated artifacts in one form or another that depict ‘the American Dream.’ It’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow. It it’s a Small World after all.  It’s an actor’s life for Me!  And a pirate’s life! And a Bug’s Life!

Over the past 56 years, the content Disneyland paid for—in the form of photo shoots, television programming, cast performances, etc.—is Dwarfed by co-created content. Google lists ‘about 58,000,000’ search results for ‘Disneyland.’ How much of that do you think Disney paid to produce?

As Viola Spolin (coincidentally born in Chicago just like Walt Disney), said of improvisation, advice Disneyland and its guests have taken to heart, “Act on environment, and environment will act on you.”

How much meaning can we liberate from a narrative in the form of stories and other artifacts? is a question we should ask ourselves, in one way or another, at the beginning of every working day.

V. Characteristics of Stories and Other Artifacts

They unfold in linear time, with a beginning, middle and end.

They are designed.

They are made for sharing.

They are repeatable.

They are authored.

They have texts.

They tend toward genres and formulas.

They are inhabited by a finite number of players.

They are iterative.

The provide context and structure.

They are mappable in conceptual, physical and/or virtual geography.

They are hierarchical. Characters and objects in them gravitate toward high or low status, events toward high or low importance.

They are ‘causative’ in two ways:

1)  Everything in a story happens because of something else;

2) They can cause predictable emotions and reactions.

In the sense that they are causative, artifacts are Newtonian.

VI. Characteristics of Narratives

They have no beginning, middle or end.

They have infinite beginnings, middles and ends.

They are not bound by time, space or geography.

What is observed of them changes depending on the observer.

They can occupy two or more places in space at the same time–they happen here at the same time they’re happening across the room or the planet.

They are generative.

Themes are the ‘glue’ that hold them together.

They resemble the playing of a game by a vast number of players (think of the artifacts generated by a popular MMORPG and you get the idea) more than they do the dynamic between author and audience.

A narrative is non-causative, that is, everything is related, but how and why things relate depends on the environment and the players.

They emphasize thematic consistency over literalness.  There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to explore a narrative.

Narratives are quantum phenomena.

VII. What’s the future of narrative?

In a complex communication environment, narrative, and the artifacts it generates, are the best way to resolve complexity, and in fact, this is what Gen Why? kids do extraordinarily well.  Their sense of narrative is unprecedented, and their personal narratives are the stars they steer their ships by.

In an interesting post on filtering, Tim Kastelle and John Steen explain that there are five kinds of filtering: Naïve, Expert, Network, Heuristic and Algorithmic, and, further group these five genres of filtering into two categories, Mechanical and Judgment-Based. That’s How we filter. Narrative is What we filter. Most people give no more thought to how they filter than Grandma gives to the air filter in her car. What they think about and act on, the way Grandma steered her Cadillac to a particular destination, is narrative.

The science around all this is still in its infancy. You can see glimmers of it in transmedia, massive multiplayer games, distributed production models, theme parks, social media, alternate reality games, activist brands, smart badges, business in China, remixes and mashups, augmented reality, micro-loans and the video of your dance in the musical, Hair.

As to what the future of narrative is, it’s a trick question, because there is no future to narrative.  Narrative happens in the Now. It is the world as we experience it in this second. This heartbeat. This breath.

The Future and the Past belong to stories. The Now belongs to narratives.

Like Disneyland, narrative is always in a state of becoming.

VIII.  Ze Zen

We are spider-like, connecting our webs and heeding their vibrations.

We are dowsers, feeling for the tug of an invisible stream.

Everything is a coincidence. This is not a coincidence.

When the story is ready, the storyteller will appear.

Our methodology was to ask six exceptional communicators who work with all sizes of organizations in a lot of different verticals what metaphors they hear most often in their business scenes.  Those surveyed included a financial analyst, an academic, an artist, a social media director for a large tech company, a brand strategist and someone I’d describe as a ‘narratologist,’ who coaches organizations on storytelling. We limited the focus of the survey to internal communication for two reasons:

1) External communication like PR, advertising and social media, is how companies represent themselves to the rest of the world.  In this context, metaphors are frequently used as a means of persuasion, and are often more about what a company or brand wants to happen than what is actually happening. Because these metaphors serve a different purpose and have a different trajectory, they have to be analyzed separately.

2) Internal communication, by comparison, describes a company’s process, environment and character.  The metaphors used internally reflect reality, because they are used to initiate or define action.  For this reason they often represent an underlying ethos, and describe how the people in an organization go about their business.

A few of the respondents’ observations:

“Maybe this would change with a few female managers, but most men I work with are all about ‘playing offense’, ‘launching a counterattack’, ‘leading from the front’,  and ‘winning the battle but losing the war’.”

“Way heavier on war references or warlike verbs:  Insert, manage, acquire, degrade, demand, battle, launch, attack, defend…”

“I also wonder as more women get into biz if the primary metaphors change.  Meaning, less sports and war, more family and home metaphors?  Especially if this whole social thing works out? (tongue firmly in cheek)”

“Think of the top headlines, of any ‘this product is killing this product’, ‘death of X’, etc.”

“Sports also present…anything that’s zero sum and can be ‘won’ lends itself.”

“I also hear (more recently) about scientific references like ‘if you observe it, you change it’.”

‘I do hear a bit about chess and board games, typically in terms of ‘looking at the whole board’, ’sacrificing your queen’, and ‘thinking through the endgame’.

The business opportunity is clear.  Over two-thirds of all business communication relies on only two metaphors—war and sports.  Not only have we worn them out, they do not address the voracious appetite of a networked business environment for fresh narratives and new ways of relating to the world. To do that, we need fresh metaphors.  They are out there in the world, and in abundance.  Games are beginning to have their day.  And there have always been organizations that see themselves as Family.  The most upside, I believe, lies in the ‘Other’ category.  Big, expressive, thematically rich subjects—music and dance, cooking, biology, quantum mechanics, farming, to name a few—can invigorate your organizational vocabulary.  They help transform your narrative from the mundane and predictable to the artful and unexpected.  And that’s what you want in a story, any story.  So start planting, and see what grows!

(A coda to this post in light of what happened yesterday in Arizona, when a mentally disturbed gunman killed six people during his attempt to assassinate Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords: The metaphors of war—and the violence they glorify—have polarized the U.S. politically to a dangerous degree. Yesterday’s events add a raw and desperate urgency to the quest for new ways of seeing and engaging with one another. The metaphors of war attract fear-driven fringe characters looking for absolutes, either-ors, and final solutions, to the problems confronting us. To these people, nothing says final like the end of a gun barrel. The narratives of war trample on the tender shoots of new ideas, and marginalize people participating in the new narratives, people like Congresswoman Giffords, who champion peaceful co-existence, believe in yes-and, and who understand that yesterday’s solutions don’t work in today’s world.)

A scene can always gain momentum and depth with support from the wings.  Support can come in almost any form–a walk-on, a tag-in, a sound, a song, a prop–anything that adds context to what’s already happening.  We see this happening with Los Mineros, the 33 Chilean miners trapped 2,300 feet below the surface of the earth in a copper mine.   You could say that the scene has become a kind of flurry of support from the wings.  This is typical of a second (of three) acts in a longform improvisation.  Lots of additions get thrown into the mix.

There were a couple of notable ‘adds’ this week:

The first was a prop, the wire mesh one-man capsule that will bring the miners back to daylight one at a time.  This heightens the scene by helping us get a better picture of what the rescue effort will look like.  The capsule gives us an idea of how wide a hole they’re having to drill to reach the miners.  It will be interesting to see what kind of rule Los Mineros add to their game to determine in what order they come to the surface.  In terms of status and media exposure, especially in the first 24/7 news cycle, first guy up is going to be Neil Armstrong to the 32 Buzz Aldrins who follow him. (POST-RESCUE NOTE:  Not quite accurate.  Every miner had his moment, and the last miner was the highest status player in the scene.)

The second big addition from the wings last week was media training.  According to a story in the Guardian, PR people are coaching Los Mineros on how to comport themselves with the media when the light finally hits them, and, no doubt, how to book themselves on Oprah, get a reality show deal, negotiate endorsements and hire ghostwriters for their books.  This addition to the scene is pure comedy gold.  By the time they reach the surface, Paris Hilton and the Pope will both be there to greet them. (POST-RESCUE NOTE:  It speaks well of everyone involved that the scene, thankfully, never turned into a circus.  Publicity seekers who showed up at the site were promptly sent home.)

Levels of Meaning

With the eyes of the news media fixed on one very specific location, everything about the Los Mineros narrative is tightly focused and vividly portrayed.  There’s no mystery to it, no hidden agenda (with maybe the exception of a mining company looking to avoid liability, which itself would be no surprise).  With the focus so intense right now on the mine itself and the rescue efforts, almost every element of the narrative is visible even to a distant observer like me, who might check the story every day or two on the webs to see how the miners are doing.

It is extremely clear how the narrative is conveyed on three distinct Levels of Meaning.

All communication happens on three levels:  Cosmetic (data, information, quantification, surface descriptions, neutral language), Emotional (passion, mood, empathy, attitude, ups, downs) and Meta (symbolism, context, iconography, metaphor, perspective, interpretation, the subconscious connections).

Observe, and learn from, how the Los Mineros narrative is conveyed on these three levels:

Cosmetic: Tons of information here. Plans and backup plans described in detail.  The three four-inch pipes that have become their lifeline.  The NASA psychologists who’ve arrived to help.  The number of calories they’re eating every day (2,000), and how much water they’re supposed to drink every day (5 litres).  We know about the ’super drill’ being brought in to bore through the rock.  This early in the story, there’s still a lot of cosmetic meaning to be conveyed, an abundance of factual information.  Expect that, at some point, this level of meaning will begin to lose steam, and that the tellers of the story will begin to place more emphasis on the other two levels.

Emotional: As always, this is where the most meaning resides, where the story is most potent, and touches us most profoundly.  We know that some of Los Mineros have been depressed.  We know that they have been able to communicate with their families.  They have shared their frustration.  We feel their claustrophobia.  They have begun to play roles, and these will rouse emotions, too.  Who will give the pep talks?  Who can get them to smile?  Keeping their emotions positive will be key to their mental health during their ordeal, and so, the longer the ordeal goes on, the more crucial the emotional content of the narrative will become.

Meta: The video feed is an existential lifeline.  “I video, therefore I am.”  For this reason, its very existence is a hopeful symbol.  The handsomer guys are getting more facetime on camera.  Stars of the narrative, those who can best hold our attention, will emerge as the Cosmetic flow slows.  Bringing in the NASA psychologists to deal with the miners’ prolonged isolation is a recognition of the global significance of the narrative, and it ennobles Los Mineros by equating them with astronauts, Los Astronautas, and to the heroic qualities we ascribe them.  This blog post is, itself, meta communication about the rescue effort.

Sometimes uncovering the Meta language requires digging beneath the surface, because beneath the surface is where the Meta meaning works.  For example the number of miners, 33, has deep meta significance in the predominantly Catholic country of Chile, because 33 is commonly believed to be Jesus Christ’s age when he died on the cross.  When Los Mineros finally walk into the light, the date on the calendar will not matter, they’ll be celebrating Easter in Chile.