This morning, my friend David LaPlante (if you want to read something beautiful, see his most recent blog entry) sent me a link to a CNN story and headline:

Here’s my response:

Candidates and media use the word erroneously, as CNN does in this story, when they refer to an EVENT as a gamechanger. A gamechanger is PERSON with the ability to change the game. Like you : ) A gamechanger can also be a brand, as in the focused, networked behaviors of a group of people who share business objectives.

The media have the luxury of predicting the future, reporting after the fact, and pontificating about the meaning of it all. Most of us have to face facts in the present. We don’t deal with things as they were, or as predicted, but as they are, as events unfold and new information comes our way. This is why gamechangers are good improvisers. They make every moment count for something. They don’t focus on outcomes but on process and trust that the outcomes, whatever they are, will be positive, and that their group’s agreed-to objectives will be achieved.

GameChangers change events. If a person does not have the improvisational skill to change an event, the event is sure to change them, and they will have no say in the matter. GameChangers play the game, and don’t let the game play them.

In terms of improvisation, Obama kicked ass last night. He was in tune with the scene and the audience. He listened. Agreed with his scene partner. Matched energy. Heightened. Called back lines. He moved more confidently than McCain. His timing and editing were far superior to McCain’s, who not once but twice walked in front of a live camera like a rookie P.A. on the Amarillo local news. McCain went for jokes, which is a big no-no in improvisation

If CNN had been looking through the lens of improvisation, they would’ve seen their gamechanger in last night’s debate. It was Obama.

Scripting happens when a player tries to steer the outcome of a scene according to the narrative he or she has ‘written ahead of time’. A weak player (like the one in the video below) gets lost immediately when the way he has envisioned the scene goes poof with the first thing that comes out of his scene partner’s mouth. A player who scripts will try to control or dominate the narrative, dictating (and therefore diminishing) the roles and contributions of the other players. This seriously hampers a scene’s potential. It’s like trying to fly without wings. All thrust, no lift or direction.

Pimping, Judging and Fantasizing are other types of behaviors that curb a scene’s productivity. Pimps, judges and fantasizers are just as in need of adjustments as scripters are.

Pimping happens when one player sets up another to look bad in a scene by presenting them with a direction or expectation that can’t be met. “Derek here will stand on his head!” you announce to the crowd, knowing full well that Derek cannot stand on his head. Pimp. Interestingly, pimping is something experienced players will sometimes do just to keep one another on their toes. I was once at a Second City performance in Chicago where the upstage performer kept whispering “You suck!” and “You’re boring!” to his downstage scene partner, just out of sight and earshot of most of the audience. It was a game within a game, a meta-game they played to add edge to their familiarity with one another, to add focus to their performance. Generally speaking, though, pimping is bad for business.

Judging takes place in your head. If you think the scene is going bad while you’re in it, you are helping to fulfill that judgment. The scene will be bad, and you’ll be one of the problems with it. Judging causes hesitation, uncertainty, detachment — all corrosive to a scene’s potential. Good judgment is in fact a complete emancipation from judgment while the scene is happening. You can always evaluate it later. By freeing yourself from any subjectivity about the scene, you become free to make each move productive, positive and supportive of its objective.

Fantasizing is a fine line. It’s good to stretch the boundaries of what’s expected or thought possible. But when a player stops dealing in the reality of a scene and takes the scene into a patch of pure imagination, that’s not good. (My teacher, Michael Bertrando, calls this ‘Going to Crazy Town’.) Skilled improvisers deal only in the realities and the group-imposed limitations of the scene. Keep it real. The breakthroughs happen step by step, conjured up by the necessities of the scene, not with extravagant flights of fancy that sever connections to the reality of one’s scene and one’s fellow players.

Yesterday I had coffee with a friend Andrew, 27 years old, of multi-cultural descent, finishing up his MBA while working full-time as the Director of Marketing for a health care company, engaged to be married this year and on top of all of that, just formed a new band. (He’s a brilliant guitarist.) He told me that his company’s CEO recently invited him and two co-workers to his office, sat them down across from his desk and said to them, “I am like the Dad and you three are like the Children.”

“Do you realize how many things are wrong with that statement?” asked my friend.

Umm, yes, yes I do. There are exactly four things wrong with that statement: Scripting, Pimping, Judging and Fantasizing. The CEO has pretty much tied up all four of the improvisational no-nos listed above into one awful initiation. (If the scene had had comedy as its objective, I’d say it was genius, because it is bursting with conflict, hence comedic potential.)

The CEO scripted by presenting the group with a ‘we are family’ narrative he expected them to follow. He pimped his scene partners by assigning them roles, ‘children’, that he should have known they did not want to play, upon which Andrew began judging the scene as sucking bigtime. The notion that this was going to be a productive, team-building scene was pure fantasizing on the CEO’s part. With one line of dialogue, the CEO demolished any chance for the scene to be productive.

If the CEO wanted to think of himself as a Dad, that’s his thing, and there’s every possibility it can be a good thing. It is his prerogative how he wants to play his role. But any CEO who’s half-awake in the world should know that employees do not think of themselves as Children. In assigning them that role, the CEO lowers their status and discounts the value of their education, experience, and their understanding of the Networked World. He is basically telling them they’re going to sit at a different table from the adults, and that he wants them to keep quiet, do what they are told, not make a mess, and not cause trouble.

In this era of network natives and baby billionaires, it would have been much better for the CEO to have initiated with, “You three are like the Parents, and I am like the Child.” That would have been a scene worth playing.

At a certain point in the proceedings, I notice a five-year-old kid sitting at the conference table, eating pizza and raising his hand to answer quiz questions like everyone else. What the — ?! Turns out it’s Cody LaPlante, son David LaPlante, the CEO of Twelve Horses. Cody is a full-on player. He jumps into the scene and plays the game 100%, even when there are 35 other grown-up players in the scene. For a kid, what’s not to understand about playing a game, right? Everyone’s ambition should be to engage in the world as unconditionally as a five-year-old. Cody’s support gives a definite lift to the group as a whole. He adds fun and lightheartedness to the scene.

Two weeks ago, I get a post on my Facebook wall that Cody is the star of the new Modest Mouse “Little Motel” music video. Sweet. Check it out It’s operatic.

It is the socially networked nature of Twelve Horses that it grooves on moves made by a five-year-old. The Modest Mouse video made the local papers in Reno and the Twelve Horses network lit up with the news. Personal blogs and personal branding, flex time, Facebooking, Twittering, Flickr Groups, local fund-raising events — and GameChangers workshops! — are all part of ongoing conversations the company conducts with itself, and with the Networked World. For Twelve Horses, social networking is not just an area of commercial expertise, it also helps employees foster the group mind that is essential for any team to perform at its best.

David LaPlante, a mountain kid who grew up in Crested Butte, Colorado, and attended the University of Nevada Reno where he skied with the best of them, is a very bright marketer and a savvy navigator of the Networked World. He and Martin Gastanaga, also a world-class skier, partnered in 1995 in a company they originally called Aztech Cyberspace. Steve Spencer, who manages the company’s Salt Lake City-based development team, became a partner in 2002. Today, after gyrating like an X-Games biker to survive the dotcom bubble, Twelve Horses is poised to prosper as business enters the era of social networking.

GameChangers has given a name, brought added depth and turned into a practiced discipline what was already in the Twelve Horses DNA. Gastanaga, the company’s COO, who studied improv theater in college, is himself such a strong and animated improviser that he could perform with most improv theater groups. I asked him recently why improvisation matters to Twelve Horses.

“So much of it is about finding a beat and going with it, keeping the scene moving, asking and answering,” he says. “If you pay attention and find a way to keep participating, you’ll have new conversations, meet new people, and learn things you didn’t know. It’s the same as the give-and-take of the stage.”

I asked him how improvisation made a difference to Twelve Horses’ clients. “We have become much better listeners,” he says. “I don’t go into meetings with canned presentations. I am there first to listen. To see where I can interject. To find a game that’ll lead to everybody winning.”

Gastanaga calls one of his favorite client games Wouldn’t It Be Cool To Have…? “It gets people engaged in the process, in collaborating,” he explains. When I questioned if this game might turn into a dreaded case of ‘Scope Creep’, he pointed out that, just as in improv theater, “not all the new information given in a scene has to be acted on in that scene. It can be a really great ‘callback’ in another scene, an up-sell farther on down the line.”

“I had to walk a client through a contract this week,” relates Gastanaga. “There were some new players on the client side and I had to bring them up to speed. I projected the contract on the screen, but I didn’t let the screen become the center of attention (this was the focus of several workshops I conducted with Twelve Horses). I got animated. I stood up. Walked around the room. Leaned against the wall. I was aware of my facial expressions. I did everything I could to bring that contract to life. This communicated a couple of important things to the client. First, that this was not about a piece of paper, it was about a relationship between people. Second, I wasn’t going to drag them through the details, I was going to invite them into the process, I was saying to them, ‘Let’s get through this together.’ And I think the client came away with a lot better understanding of the big picture, that the contract was just one aspect of an ongoing business relationship.” Gastanaga’s move was a strong one because it lifted the scene out of the status quo and into an area where a ‘new conversation’ could occur. And within that new conversation, new possibilities for the scene.

Last year at the company holiday party, Gastanaga took suggestions from audience and performed (solo!) different scenes from the year at Twelve Horses. This year, we’re talking about getting everyone at the party doing some kind of improvisation. Thunnnnnnnnderdome!