The gamechanger in this narrative is Bob Cilman, who initiated the productive game that has given such huge gifts to its players. (And they to it.) The improvisation in Young@Heart points the way for anyone looking to initiate productive games in their own lives, or their own lines of work:

“Location, location, location” has become “Community, community, community.” In the Industrial Age, location was everything. It was important to be physically adjacent to the highway. In the Networked World, everyone has access to the highway. One day you’re a couple of kids from China wearing Houston Rockets jerseys and lip-syncing hip-hop, the next day you’re stars. So the question is, what do you build? Cilman laid the foundation for a worldwide community by simply giving elderly people around Northampton, Massachusetts, something worthwhile and important to do. Little by little, this community interfaced with larger communities–the Northampton Arts Council where Cilman became the director in 1989, Talkng Heads fans, David Byrne, the music and film communities. Young@Heart has performed with Cambodian choirs, hip-hop dancers, and, in a revue entitled Flaming Saddles, a gay men’s chorus. Their location did not did not matter nearly as much as the remarkable community they built there.

Design games, not outcomes. In the Industrial Age, games were often designed by reverse-engineering outcomes. Doing this in the Networked World is just plain idiotic.  Why narrow the window of opportunity to a single outcome when networks offer so many possibilities for positive outcomes?  Commitment to a good game opens the window of opportunity to many different positive outcomes. Let’s imagine that instead of committing to the ‘rockin’ seniors’ game, Bob Cilman had instead reversed engineered a game to achieve a particular outcome: Let’s say that outcome was meeting one of his heroes, David Byrne of the Talking Heads. The narrative may have resulted in Bob Cilman meeting David Byrne, true, because Bob Cilman is a determined guy, and he probably could have made that happen. But look at all the other positive things–the tours of Europe, the albums, the DVD, the music videos, the donations, the film at Sundance, the enduring friendships–that never would have transpired if they’d locked into a single outcome. In fact, since it’s almost a certainty that none of the seniors had any personal interest in meeting David Byrne, the game probably would have lost energy and commitment from its players early on.

A theme is the glue of the game. Cilman identified a theme, ‘music as the spirit of youth,’ that has fueled the Young@Heart game for 26 years. When you have identified a compelling theme to underpin your game, communities organize, ideas become action, decisions become easy, crises become manageable. When, in the course of making the documentary, several tragedies befell the group, they never lost their determination to carry on. The spirit of youth is resilient in the face of tragedy.

Commit to the moment. No one is more in the moment than a 93 year old woman performing The Clash’s Should I Stay Or Should I Go?. No one is more aware than a group of seniors belting out James Brown’s I Feel Good that tomorrow is not promised to us. (I feel good now. Tomorrow? Who knows?) What’s promised us is now. The Young@Heart singers are in their 70s, 80s and 90s. Many are feeble. Some are near death. But all of them are as alive as a human being can be when they’re pouring everything they’ve got into a song.

Do what you love. Breakthrough could happen in a day. It might take a lifetime. Bob Cilman and his senior singers were playing this game for a long time before world outside Northampton took notice. There is absolutely no way of knowing. The first quality of a productive game is that you love playing along. Love the process and the product will come.

Bob Cilman has made a difference in people’s lives. His journey has been rewarding and fun. It all came about because he never deviated from the game, or from his reasons for initiating it. In an interview on the web site PopSyndicate, Cilman says, “We’re not there to make people feel good, we’re there to make people work on something that will make other people feel like – Wow! I’ve been inspired by what you do, that’s a whole different process.”

Heather Champ and her team at Flickr improvise for a living. A big part of their job, according to the article is deciding whether certain photos belong in Flickr or not. The guidelines are not etched in stone. In fact, aside from a few Flickresque sayings like ‘Don’t forget the children,’ guidelines hardly exist at all. Rulings by Champ and her team arise more from the dialogue they have about an issue than from strict black-and-white policies. Policies are riffs on a theme; the rules of the game can change from scene to scene.

This is a monster distinction between business processes of the Industrial Age, and those suited to business in the Networked World.

Industrial age organizations wrote strict policies designed to codify employee behavior, limit the company’s liability from lawsuits, and ensure fair play between management and labor and between the company and its customers. The policies were written by lawyers to cover every conceivable scenario. When anomalies occurred, policies were amended or new policies written by those same lawyers. Conflicts with policy required interpretation by the lawyers. In other words, when it came to policy you couldn’t make a new move without an opinion from a lawyer.

Rigid policies worked for rigid organizations, but the fluid organizations of the Networked World like Flickr, which hosts billions of images posted by millions of users, call for more fluid processes. Context must be taken into account. Entrepreneurial employees have to make quick and frequent decisions outside the bottleneck and without the added overhead of Legal. This means acting within themed concepts instead of abiding by literal rules. This means improvisation.

“Don’t be creepy,” goes one of Flickr’s guiding concepts. ”You know the guy. Don’t be that guy.”

For some networked organizations, technical infrastructure—what the technology itself will or won’t allow—has become a new kind of policy for rewarding conformity and punishing edge behaviors. Confining interactions to ‘what the software allows’ is just as bad if not worse than ye olde employee handbook. It’s a kind of control that can hinder the continual innovation called for by a networked brand.

The valuable interactions, those that bring new life and wealth to your brand, are human ones. And because they are human ones, they are unpredictable. The improviser welcomes the unpredictable situation as an opportunity to further define reality. An improviser like Champ understands that every interaction holds the potential for transformation. To interact mechanically or by rote is to disregard this potential.

A sense of ‘Flickr, performing’ guides Champ and her team as they discuss and then take action on barrages of unpredictables like barterers in Brazil, vengeful boyfriends from the Bronx and R-rated artists from Belgrade.

“Imprecision is an art here,” writes Colin of Flickr. (An improviser sees it another way: Art resolves imprecision.) Colin writes of the artfulness required for Champ and her team to impose a sense of order on what could otherwise be chaotic, polarized communities.

“I can’t think of any successful online community where the nice, quiet, reasonable voices defeat the loud, angry ones on their own,” Champ says. “The job always comes down to finding the fulcrum in the teeter-totter, the balance that benefits both the individual and the community.”

In other words, not only does Champ’s job call for improvisation, it calls on her and her team to guide and ‘coach’ the ongoing improvisation by the Flickr community.

As I read the article on SFGate, I realized that I know Heather Champ. Her husband, Derek Powazek, founded the pioneering digital storytelling site, Fray in the late 1990s, and he and Heather went on to co-found JPG Magazine. They are among the savviest community builders I’ve met in the young history of the internet. I think the best thing about Heather and Derek is how their work is an expression of what and whom they love, especially each other. Out on the turbulent edge where innovators, explorers and artists play, love is the constant. If you act on love, love will act on you. And that is all the music a human being needs to dance with her destiny.

The small farm is still with us, too, it’s just that the farming most of us do is not agricultural, it’s cybercultural, and the labor is not physical, it’s intellectual. One of the most powerful ideas made possible by the Networked World is ’small farming’ — our ability to claim a small piece of intellectual property as our own and derive wealth from it.

The rows of crops may be lines of code. You may be planting and harvesting algorithms, communities, humor, CAD designs or music instead of beans, corn, barley, hogs and beef…but the principles of what it takes to successfully operate a small farm are still in play.

Here are five of those principles:

LIFESTYLE. As a small farmer, you have chosen independence and personal responsibility. But you’ve also chosen work from which you cannot walk away. It’s with you 24/7. You can take the family to Six Flags, but the entire time you’re there, you’re thinking about what to do about the weevils in your beans (i.e. the bugs in your software) back home.

DIVERSIFICATION. The peaks and valleys of the market can be smoothed out by planting a variety of crops. When wheat is down, sorghum is up. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket., and don’t cry over spilled milk. Spread out your risk. Grow smaller crops with higher yields. Explore new strains.

SEASONALITY. The time frames may be different, but like their rural forerunners, cyber-farmers must manage for seasonal effects. If you find yourself living close to the bone for the winter, you can take some solace in the fact that spring will inevitably follow.

COMMUNITY. Communities are the small farmer’s conduit to the larger world. They provide news, networking and emotional support They determine where and how you socialize with your neighbors. They shape your world view and your character. They help normalize productive behaviors.

PERSPECTIVE. In fifteen minutes one hailstorm takes out an entire year’s worth of crops…a twister takes the roof off your barn…the health of your animals comes before your own…a million stars in the sky at night show you your proper place in the universe. Life on a small farm is one neverending reminder that you are part of something more important than yourself, and that what happens is often beyond your ability to control it. This awareness keeps you humble. Centered. Rooted. At peace.

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