Games are structure. They create focus, encourage participation, and stimulate the Group Mind, which gives players the freedom to work at the height of their intelligence toward collaboratively solving a problem. At GameChangers, we define game structure as ‘ERGO’–Environment, Roles, Guidelines and Objective. If you can define these elements in your scene, you’ve called out a game.
A ’scene’ can be a single meeting or a years-long campaign. It can address an immediate crisis or seek lasting change in an organization’s culture. Whatever the reason for your scene, you always have the ability to apply game structure to it.
In addition to defining game structure, we help our clients sort out productive games from the unproductive ones. It should come as no surprise to anyone that there are a lot of unproductive games getting played out there. They can be unproductive for a lot of reasons. Here’s a big one: Games that treat Objectives and Outcomes as the same thing are not good games.
Objectives are structure. Outcomes are performance. These are two very different things. Here’s an example we sometimes use in our workshops to illustrate this point:
Now…what are the Outcomes of the game of basketball? Let your mind play with that question for awhile, and see what kind of responses pop up. Here are just a few that I myself have experienced: the Ireland (Indiana) Spuds high school basketball team; Hoosiers; my first pair of Chuck Taylor white canvas high tops; numb fingers from playing in 30-degree weather at recess; the fact that I first learned about Crispus Attucks because Oscar Robertson played for Crispus Attucks High School; Marv Albert’s arrest and subsequent rehabilitation; LeBron James leaving Cleveland; Dude Perfect; Magic and Bird; Rick Mount; George McGinnis; Wilt vs Russell; a rubber band that I wore on my wrist for a year; the Chuck Taylor black leather high tops that Corey Feldman wore in my film, The Lipstick Camera; the Chuck Taylor brand; the relationship between Spike Lee and Michael Jordan; Bobby Knight; Extreme HORSE with my friend Tim; hoops with my sons and their friends; coaching at the Y; the 2002 and 2003 Loyola Cubs CIF Championships; my friendship with Jamaal Wilkes; Ernie Barnes’ paintings…you get the idea…while there’s only one Objective, there are many possible Outcomes. And that’s just me. Your Outcomes are different from mine. Outcomes are an ever-expending set of possibilities.
This same dichotomy between Objectives and Outcomes is applicable to any game structure for your business. The Objective is the constant; the Outcomes are the infinite unknowns, where all the possibilities and all the upside reside.
Focus on your Objective, yes, by all means, absolutely! From a process standpoint, it is the most important thing, the target, the point of the exercise, it can even be your motivation. It is not, however, where the action is. Not where growth and extension occur. If the only action you’re open to is achieving your Objective, you’re missing most of the possibilities of the game.
The game is put the ball in the basket. The possibility is Oscar Robertson.
Occupy Wall Street is, I think, a protest against Unsustainable Games (UGs).
When people say ’sustainability,’ they can be referring to a lot of different cosmetic concepts (monetary policy, geothermal energy, funding for education or manufacturing, urban gardening, solar power, vegetarianism, LED lighting, gender and sexual equality, etc. etc. etc.). In fact, we know this ‘multi-causism’ to be characteristic of the OWS scene. The meta concept is, for all these causes, the same: Are you playing constructive or de-constructive games? Zero sum or positive sum games? Are your games sustainable or not? OWS is, ultimately, itself a game, one designed to focus attention on the UGs of Wall Street.
The protesters arrested yesterday on the Brooklyn Bridge represent the most creative generation living in the most creative nation on earth. No doubt they have roots in every language, race, religion, culture, science, art form and evolutionary instinct in the human species. And daily, on Manhattan Island, they are forced to confront the 1-percenters who control 99 percent of the nation’s wealth, people who are, for the most part, not creators, but extractors. That’s what their games are designed to do—-extract. These people getting arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge? they’re doing it to point out the difference between where the money is and where it needs to be for us to get a bigger bang out of the creativity they represent. 99 percent of our creativity belongs to 99 percent of the people. That’s a biological fact, Jack. It’s the ultimate sustainable resource. The protesters know this and are calling it to our attention with one of the games they and their friends originated, flash mobbing.
The OWS players understand that if the ratio of ‘99 percent of the wealth to 1 percent of the people’ ratio stays where it is, we will never get out the doldrums economically, because we’re getting no Return on Creativity. No ROC. Because we are putting most of our money where 99 percent of our creativity isn’t. For the ratio to change, the game must change. The OWS players grew up on games. They are the gamingest people in the history of the world. You think they don’t know a bad game when they see one? Wall Street plays bad games. They want game change.
Game change will come about only when we find ways to invest in the creativity of the 99 percent. We cannot afford to have the most creative Americans sitting on the bench right now. We need them in the game. Just not the old games. New ones. The OWS players are screaming at the coaches to put them into a game they can play.
The old game, in addition to being unsustainable, has left a bitter taste in the mouth of the world. Those protesters sitting on the Brooklyn Bridge? They’re bitter too. They’re bitter because they have the ability to change the game and they know it. They understand the scope of the work ahead, and are in a hurry to get on with it.
They have good taste, let them cook with it, and bring the world to our table again. They have stories to tell that are not the same old stories, let them tell them. They have visions that are not blueprints of the past, let them build them. They hear music that has never been sung and have crazy ideas that no one else would even think of attempting. Let them sing. Let them try. We need that now. We need them. And every day the ‘1 percent to 99 percent ratio’ stays where it is, we are one step closer to losing them.
They are getting arrested for squatting on a symbol of America’s great creative past like birds who have come home to roost, when what they really want to do is fly.
This morning at breakfast, Barb Groth, founder of the ultra-good experiential design company, Big Buddha Baba, told me a story: A few years ago, a client of hers called a meeting, the purpose of which was to cut twenty thousand dollars out of a budget for a project that was nearing completion, when resources were tight. Barb got to the meeting, looked at the eight or so executives in the room and said, “Let’s end the meeting now. That’ll save, what?, ten or fifteen thousand dollars? Then cancel the next meeting. There, we saved twenty thousand dollars.”
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.
The first time I experienced demand for new system architectures was when we had eight ‘information architects’ on the staff of our internet company, iXL, from 1997-2000, and they were booked solid for most of that time. We all loved working with them. It was the ultimate white board exercise. They were the first people in the history of the world to have this particular job, and so, with absolutely no standards to which they had to be held, they excelled. People like Josh Galban (today, a product designer at MatchCraft), Ben Bratton (an urban architecture professor and writer-in-residence at UCSD) and Anuradha Sachdev (an experience designer at iCrossing) were among the infonauts who guided us toward those early user experiences. Because there was no ’stock’ of knowledge about their nascent profession, they had no choice but to learn, and what they learned has been enriching them, their co-workers and their employers ever since.
I think there is a similar need for game designers in business today.
Networked structures and systems are as different from Industrial Age systems as a jellyfish is from a jetty. Networked companies must adapt. Continually differentiate their brands. Quickly recognize and act on opportunity in a constantly-morphing business environment.
Networked companies absorb and ride change like seagulls adjust to the wind.
Continuing our trip to the beach…a rigid, hierarchical approach to business has about as much chance in this environment as a sand castle does at high tide. The flow of change is that strong, that tidal. The new structures must be fluid, like the roiling environment they navigate every day. Fortunately for us human beings, we are 90% water. Fluidity is in our nature. It’s there. All we have to do is recognize and embrace it.
Games are among the most dynamic and productive structures that can be introduced to a system. They legitimize authority, lend themselves to accountability and encourage autonomy–energies that must work in concert for a networked organization to succeed.
At GameChangers, we design improvisation games to help clients achieve their business objectives. Our definition of a game is E-R-G-O. Environment, Roles, Guidelines and Objective(s). If you can define those, game on.
Ideas are cheap; execution is hard. Games require execution. An idea is like a game that’s never been played. We never consider an idea–for either ourselves or our clients–without looking at it through the ERGO lens. Whether an idea is any good or not is a a subjective discussion. The experience of playing a game, by contrast, can be analyzed objectively.
In a networked world, the power of an idea, its ultimate meaning, resides in ‘how much game’ it’s got. How much ‘play’ it generates. Games create focus. Elevate performance. Stir emotions. Reward innovation. They result in great stories. The value proposition is the size of Monstro the Whale.
We live and work in what you’d call the northern edge of South-Central Los Angeles, in one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, West Adams. Western Avenue, the main north-south artery nearest us, is one of my favorite streets in Los Angeles. If you want to get a feel for this city, there’s no better way to do it than to travel the length of Western Avenue. From the exclusive girls school up in the hills on its northern end to the hustle and flow of the ‘hood in the south, and every immigrant dream in between, Western is a ribbon of culture lining the belly of this beast of a city.
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.”
Japan is a chrysanthemum. Many petals. One flower. The meta language of the chrysanthemum is deeply rooted in Japanese history and culture. It is the official mark of the Japanese Emperor’s family. It symbolizes happiness.
A disaster like the quake that literally shifted the planet on Friday in Japan gets us to focus on what is most important. At times like these improvisation—a system for generating positive outcomes from unforeseen circumstances—is especially critical.
I have a feeling that in the coming days, we are going to see the power of the flower. As the Japanese people face the challenges confronting them, we will see the creative potential of the group mind, especially when a group as large and connected as the Japanese are are given a sense of purpose like the one they have now.
Already, we can see that there is structure to the process defined by TOT. The objectives, environment, roles and rules of the game are clear. Process is clean. Everything is achievable and scalable. In short, the advice consists of:
Give money–being present in spirit is more important right now than being present in person; Give blood–to be healthy is an obligation to care for the infirm; Conserve electricity–the people are in this together.
Though it’s seldom as sudden and concentrated like it was on Friday in Japan, natural destruction is happening at all times, all over the world. Lives end. Rivers flood. Mountains slide.
At the same time, nature’s creativity is expressing itself with equal energy. Lives begin. Rivers heal. Mountains rise.
How can we improve the odds that our creativity will triumph over our destruction?
We can play the Chrysanthemum Game. Find our purpose. Believe in happiness. Bloom as one.
This is a demonstration of how connections are made in the Networked World. And some observations about how Creativity and Destruction go hand-in-hand.
Because GameChangers followed and contributed (seven blog posts) to the narrative of the Chilean Miners…because we were curious about how the 33 miners happened to be wearing Oakley sunglasses when they emerged from the mine after their 69-day ordeal…because we made a connection with Jonathan Franklin, the correspondent for The Guardian, who was the only print journalist with complete access to the rescue site in Copiapo, and was responsible for the Oakley connection…because Penguin Press has just published Franklin’s book, 33 Men, the definitive account of the miners’ ordeal…and because a lot of companies are asking him to share his experiences and insights…
We have co-created a new GameChangers program inspired by Franklin’s observations during the 69 days at Copiapo. The program will be offered in the U.S. and Europe. We will present it for the first time on March 2, at a Global Leadership Conference sponsored by Diversey, Inc. We are rehearsing it this Sunday in New York City, when Jonathan Franklin and I will meet for the first time in person.
We cannot stress this enough: Narratives are the ultimate organizing principle in the networked economy.
Traditional news reporting and the internet made us aware of ‘Los 33.’ Social media–Facebook, Twitter, this blog, etc.–helped us track and participate in their story. Skype, email and telephone made personal conversations and collaboration between us and Jonathan Franklin possible. The Applied Improvisation Network helped us extend the program to Europe. Geo-locating apps–I can’t even tell you what they were– helped us locate and provide directions to our rehearsal studio in NYC. I used a virtual concierge to book my travel. And of course personal relationships made things possible that no technology or platform could.
Through it all, it was the narrative that guided us. With a narrative as your guide, the choice of platforms becomes an objective process, a series of consistently logical decisions. How best to participate in a narrative is an entirely different, and more productive, discussion from how best to deploy a platform. Choose narrative!
Interestingly (and typically) the mainstream media, beginning with 60 Minutes last Sunday, have focused on the more sensational aspects of the ‘Los 33′ narrative—on the fact that in their darkest hours, when they had no idea if they’d ever be found, a few of the miners began to think about cannibalism, or that since their rescue they’ve been suffering from PTSD (this is news because?…). In Where Are You Stuck? we focus on the positive aspects of the rescue. On the heroic qualities of the miners and their rescuers. Teamwork. Altriusm. Sacrifice. Leadership. Creativity.
In every crisis there is opportunity. In every crisis, there is destruction. For something to be created, something must be destroyed. Doors open and close in unison. Shiva is the god of creation AND destruction. Productive change entails creative destruction.
When the times are a-changin’, getting stuck can become a chronic problem, because individuals and organizations get frozen deciding (or avoiding deciding) how to respond to the changes they are experiencing. The challenge confronting anyone looking to get ‘unstuck’ is all about focus. Will your focus be on the creative or the destructive aspects of the change? Will you see the opportunity, or obsess on the loss? Will you bang on closed doors or walk through open ones? Will you cling to the status quo until you realize, perhaps too late, that what worked in the past isn’t necessarily what will work in the future? Interestingly, this is the challenge facing the Miners today. Working deep underground isn’t an option any more. That is a closed door. What got them out of the mineshaft isn’t the same process that will get them out of the ‘mindshafts’ in which they find themselves trapped today. When context changes, everything changes. Including the nature of heroism.
What made the Miners heroic in the eyes of the world is still within them, but like anyone else, they will have to change their game to suit their new situation. This time, unlike the 69 days they spent in the mine, they have a choice. Choosing to move consistently in the direction of creativity, opportunity and the newly-opened door is a challenge each of them will have to confront in his own way.
Check out the Where Are You Stuck? program, and fill out the response form to let us know how we can best help you.
Our friend, @InvisibleWork a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and UC-Irvine’s MBA school, tweeted last week to ask my definition of creativity. I responded: “the systematic elimination of everything not conducive to creativity.”
She tweeted back: “<= like this; like going through the process from the other end.”
Bill Kroyer
The animation director Bill Kroyer taught me this game, which I call Kroyering. It goes like this:To solve a problem look 180 degrees away from the problem. If you can define the problem’s opposite, you will have targeted the problem with just as much accuracy as if you were confronting it head-on. This ‘exploration of opposites’ makes Kroyering a useful process, especially when you need to come up with an original solution, a creative breakthrough. Why is this a cool tool? Three reasons:
First, it gets out of creativity’s way. Like everything that’s natural in the world, creativity wants to happen. Left to its own devices, it will happen. If we clear out what gets in its way, creativity will express itself like a plant will find the sun.As Viola Spolin said, “Act on environment, and environment will act on you.”
Second, because a breakthrough is, by definition, something that didn’t exist before, it is not really possible to say what creativity is, or what form it will take, until it actually happens. It is often more efficient to target what creativity is not. For this reason, Kroyering offers a disciplined and cost-effective path to innovation.
Third, Kroyering makes institutional memory a positive force instead of an impediment, as it often is (At Disney, where I worked for many years, the best way to stop any idea dead in its tracks was to say anything that began with, “Well, what Walt would have done…” It’s why John Lasseter left Disney and ended up with Pixar. Too many people at the time were telling him what Walt would (or wouldn’t) have done.) A study by Dusya Vera and Mary Crossan (Organization Science, Vol. 16, May-June 2005, pp. 203-224) reveals that the best problem-solvers in an organization are those with the longest institutional memories, because they are more likely to disregard or subvert institutional memory to solve a problem.In other words, people with long institutional memories are in the best position to see and understand that a system that created a problem cannot be the same one that solves it. Kroyering helps you identify what you can do differently by getting you out of the attic of your company’s history and into emptier space, where there’s room to expand your vision.
Here are a few qualities that, in my experience, are not conducive to creativity and can be eliminated from your working environment with help from the Kroyering Game:
Rigidity, dogma.Whatever creativity is, it’s the opposite of frozen, stuck in place, or with one unyielding position.
Aggression, destruction, violence. The harder you look for it, the harder it is to find. The next new thing has to be teased and seduced from wherever it’s hiding. Creativity does not send out invitations, but if we throw a party, Creativity is almost sure to come. Creativity can’t resist a good party. Just know that when the fighting starts, and well before the cops arrive, Creativity will be outta there.
Eliminating these and other ‘non-conducive’ elements from your environment will help your creativity flow. When you’re stuck for an idea, your process bogs down, or you can’t seem to get to the heart of a problem, try Kroyering.
The author Steven Berlin Johnson, recently gave a TED talk on the subject of his next book, which will be his seventh: Where do good ideas come from?
He’s an observant man, so the observations come tumbling out of him in a 17-minute torrent, from why coffee shops were important to the Enlightenment, to the debunking of ‘Eureka’ moments. If you want the full effect, step into the Johnson waterfall and view the video.
If you’re looking for a summing up, well, there’s a one-word answer to the question, ‘Where do good ideas come from?’ The answer is ‘Improvisation.’ Good ideas come from improvisation. Check this out:
Johnson says, “Don’t protect ideas, share them.” This is precisely the concept behind of yes-anding. Instead of scripting, blocking, denying, judging or yes-butting–all anathema to innovation–add to the ideas of others. Walt Disney used to call this “plussing,” a phrase that has been adopted by Pixar Animation Studios. In doing so, Pixar yes-anded Disney. That’s how it works. Ideas evolve. And when you yes-and by sharing, they evolve faster and more purposefully than if you don’t.
Johnson says, “Ideas are a network.” This equates to the Group Mind of improvisation, where ideas belong not to any one individual, but to the group, and the scene. Ideas are not isolated phenemona. They always exist in relationship to other ideas, and other people. An apple falling on Newton’s head was not his idea. It was a connection between a number of ideas that described the physical world at that time. Johnson says, “Chance favors the connected mind.” He might just as well have said, “Chance favors improvisers.” It was because he was able to connect it to other phenomena that the chance occurrence of an apple falling on his head became meaningful to Newton. This is no different than what a good improviser does in a scene. He or she turns chance into meaning by making connections. That’s the work. It’s not easy. It is a practice that takes study, discipline and time.
Johnson says, “Ideas are a slow hunch.” This equates to the patience some of the best improvisation groups have for finding the game in a scene. My favorite example of this from improv theater is the L.A.-based group, Dasariski. Those guys take their time about finding the game, this discovery arises organically–though quite predictably–from conversations, and it is a beautiful thing to see. Good ideas are the equivalent of productive games in improvisation. They often arise from anomalies or even mistakes. They’re generative, that is, they led to other ideas. Even though it makes for better anecdotes, ideas are not like a single frame from a movie, a frozen image—apple hits man on head!—they are montages of images, and jumps back and forth in time. Ideas are narrative.
Johnson says, “Ideas are a product of environment.” Yes and this, too, is one of the most fundamental ideas of improvisation: Environment fuels performance. This is why Belina Raffy conducts improvisation classes in Europe that are based on Biomimicry, where performers mirror biology to help their innovation process. Today, thanks to our connection with Belina (ideas are a network, remember?) we are beginning to play with biomimicry at GameChangers. As Viola Spolin said, “Act on environment and enviroinment will act on you.”
In noting President Obama’s rallying cry for a program to support small businesses in America, the White House published the following in the President’s Facebook news feed:
A minority in the Senate is standing in the way of giving our small-businesspeople an up-or-down vote on the jobs bill. That’s a shame. We need to decide whether we’re willing to rise above the election-time games and come together—not just to pass a jobs bill that is going to help small businesses hire and grow but al…so to rebuild our economy around three simple words: “Made in America.”
While we wholeheartedly support a jobs bill that will help small businesses like ours, ‘Made in America’ is an Industrial Age idea that has very little resonance in the Networked World. Nothing substantial can be built around anything as meaningless as that statement. Here’s why…
The problem is that making stuff is not what America does any more, not exclusively to ‘Brand America’ anyway. Stuff gets made all over the world. What’s the most ‘American’ brand you can think of. Disney? Coca Cola? Nike? ‘Made All Over the World’ is the truth of these brands, and the same is true for any other brand vibrating on a network frequency. The Budweiser Clydesdales are Belgians now. Deal with it. In light of these new truths, ‘Made In America’ becomes just another piece of empty political rhetoric, designed to dampen disagreement rather than to foster any large-scale agreement around a new economic narrative.
What we need is an idea that will generate new narratives, and new ideas about how to stimulate the economy.
One of our favorite American companies, ABRO Industries, based smack dab in the heartland of America, South Bend, Indiana, with 25 employees and projected 2010 sales exceeding $150M, does over $40M of sales a year in Nigeria alone with products it manufactures in South America. Most of ABRO’s products are made outside America, and yet most of the wealth it generates comes back to this country. How? It originates the business cycle and the brand. It creates networks to market its products around the world.
“Made in” is no longer an differentiator for American business. ‘Created in’ still is.
What makes American business unique, what we can count on every time, is Creativity. The true American brew isn’t Budweiser, it’s the idiosyncratic brew of cultures and personal histories that make the American narrative unique in the world.
What matters about Disney is not where it’s made. After all, its primary product, happiness, can be conjured up anywhere in the world. What’s unique and irreplaceable about the Disney brand is that it was created in America, born out of the imagination of a Scotch-Irish Socialist-Farming Depression-Era Cartoon-Making Hollywood-Bound Space-Racing Commie-Fearing Polo-Playing Chain-Smoking Family-Loving Chili-Eating Anti-Semitic Dandy From Kansas City Who Dreamed He Was a Mouse.
Making stuff means replicating it, and that means commoditizing. Anybody can do that. Originating stuff–growing Walt Disneys and Apples and Pixars and Lady Gagas and ABROS–that’s what America still does best.
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.
In a networked world, the power of an idea, its ultimate meaning, resides in ‘how much game’ it’s got. How much ‘play’ it generates. Games create focus. Elevate performance. Stir emotions. Reward innovation. They result in great stories. The value proposition is the size of Monstro the Whale.
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–
I have a feeling that in the coming days, we are going to see the power of the flower. As the Japanese people face the challenges confronting them, we will see the creative potential of the group mind, especially when a group as large and connected as the Japanese are are given a sense of purpose like the one they have now.
This is a demonstration of how connections are made in the Networked World. And some observations about how Creativity and Destruction go hand-in-hand.
Because GameChangers followed and contributed (seven blog posts) to the narrative of the Chilean Miners…because we were curious about how the 33 miners happened to be wearing Oakley sunglasses when they emerged from the mine after their 69-day ordeal…because we made a connection with Jonathan Franklin, the correspondent for The Guardian, who was the only print journalist with complete access to the rescue site in Copiapo, and was responsible for the Oakley connection…because Penguin Press has just published 
Traditional news reporting and the internet made us aware of ‘Los 33.’ Social media–Facebook, Twitter, this blog, etc.–helped us track and participate in their story. Skype, email and telephone made personal conversations and collaboration between us and Jonathan Franklin possible. The Applied Improvisation Network helped us extend the program to Europe. Geo-locating apps–I can’t even tell you what they were– helped us locate and provide directions to our rehearsal studio in NYC. I used a virtual concierge to book my travel. And of course personal relationships made things possible that no technology or platform could.
