The extraordinary improviser, Paul Vaillancourt, gave me a list of sayings that have been compiled and passed around the improv theater community over the years. The great teachers Mick Napier and Del Close get some of the credit, as do Viola “The Godmother” Spolin and ImprovWorks’ Sue “Pond” Walden, though the exact origins of most of these sayings would be pretty hard to trace. What’s clear to anyone who explores improvisation is that the the meaning behind the sayings originates from the same place that accounts for such profound ideas as jazz, the Dao De Jing, Johnny Appleseed and Pixar Animation.  Here is the fifth in a series

Play against cliches. First, play with the cliches of your business.  You all know what they are.  Name them.  Call them out.  Have some fun with them.   And then go against them.  There is a lot of movement in playing against cliches.  Just doing this one thing can transform your scene into something delightful.

Think of the environment as a six-sided sphere, of which the audience is a part. What a brilliant way to determine your marcomm budget!  It’s 1/6 of your total operating budget.  Done.  Next.

The environment also has an outside and an inside. This is a good way of thinking about how your brand’s environment travels with the communication that represents it in the networked world.  Think of your network as a place.  What is that place like?  Who is walking the halls?  How is it lit?  What kind of art hangs in its offices?  What does it sound like?  All these concepts should be consistent and play off one another in virtual space and in reality. A friendly atmosphere in the office extends to the social graph.  Artfulness will be apparent in reality and in virtual space.  Clutter is as clutter does.  Etc. etc.

You don’t have to try to be funny, laughter will happen just by being human.  Being human is funny enough. A common misconception we battle all the time at GameChangers is that improvisation is all about being funny.  So not true!  Improvisation is about communication, learning, and transformation.  It is only by a quirk of genetic fate—Viola Spolin’s son, Paul Sills, brought all the games Viola had conceived with him when he and Bernie Sahlins co-founded Second City—that we in the U.S. associate improvisation so strongly with comedy.  Comedy is just a sliver of the output improvisation is capabl of generating.   It’s like saying all ice cream Praline Pecan.  Taint so.

Playful, direct, co-developed ideas, informations, and dreams will always be far hipper than one person’s alone. This is just a basic human algorithm.  The best ideas of eight people will always be better than the best ideas of one person.  Spare us your genius, and bring us something else.  Your work ethic.  Your brain.  Your smile.  Your song.  Your sense of smell.  Your experience.  But spare us your genius.  Because, you know…our stuff will always be far hipper than yours alone ; )

1.  A winning game attracts winning players. By giving participants access to a very sophisticated data set, NetFlix’ contest was designed in a way that attracted highly-skilled programmers from around the worl.   The game itself serves as an organizing mechanism and a magnet for talent.

2.  A winning game invites collaboration.  The winning team, which called itself BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos (pragmatic chaos–a great description of improvisation!) was composed of scientists, statisticians and coders from half a dozen countries who joined forces in the course of the contest.   By collaborating, they all increased their chances of getting to the prize.  Collaboration begins with communication.  It leads to learning.  It results in transformation.

3.  The performance of the team is more important than the performance of any one player. See #2.

4.  Successful outcomes cannot be scripted ahead of time, they must be improvised.  No one member of the Pragmatic Chaos team had the roadmap to victory before the game began.  It was the collaboration, and their ability to improvise, that guided them to the winning solution.

5.  In a winning game, there are no losers. Only one team got the $1 million prize awarded by Netflix, but there were many winners.  If you improve your performance through participation, you win.  If you make a connection, add to your knowledge, or get a fresh perspective on a problem by virtue of playing the game, you win.  The second place team in the Netflix contest, Opera Solutions, a NY-based data analytics company, not only got a lot of coverage for its brand in the Times article, its CEO, Arnad Gupta, described the $1 million prize as “trivial.”  “We’ve already had a $10 million payoff internally from what we’ve learned,” he said.

6.  A winning game is designed to improve everyone’s performance. Viola Spolin, the godmother of modern improv, distinguished between competition and contest.  A competition, by her definition, is designed to separate winners and losers, and inevitably results in an ego-fueled quest for status, dominance, and control of the narrative.  Because walls go up and knowledge gets hoarded, not shared, competition limits opportunities to collaborate and learn.  A contest, Spolin explained by way of differentiating, is a way of competing with oneself, and of improving the performance of one’s team.  It results in what she called extension.  Participating in a winning game makes you and your team better players than you were before.

The Times article mentions several other games that, like the Netflix contest, are designed to yield productive outcomes for all their players, among them the X-Prize Foundation, and InnoCentive, an online forum for collaborative problem-solving and innovation that launched in 2001 and has attracted the attention and participation of big brands like Eli Lilly Co., Avery, and Procter & Gamble.

Footnote:  The article quotes Michael Schrage, a research fellow at MIT’s Sloan School of Business and one of the most brilliant analysts of business innovation I know.  Schrage and I have corresponded about GameChangers and improvisation in business.  He told me in one email that he was an “improv kid,” from the South Side of Chicago, the same neighborhood where Viola Spolin lived and worked.  When he was in high school he built props for Second City shows.  “I cried when Del died,” he wrote.  And if you truly know improvisation, you know what Schrage means by that.

For sure, the game is changing.  And improvisers, in all walks of work and life, are the ones who are changing it.

If the whole is going to be art, the parts must strive not to be.  If we strive to make everything we do precious and perfect and just-so.  If we deliberate and debate the appropriateness of our actions.  If we measure every move.  Craft and eddit every response.  The sum of the parts of what we CrEaTeToGeThEr.  Is.  Surely.  Going.  To be.  Yes.  Oh yes most indubitably and beyond repudiating to the level of a statistical certainty will most definitely be…(Say it!)  A pompous load of crap.

Always bring a brick, not a cathedral into a scene.   We know a businessperson who had built a well-deserved reputation for dropping big ideas on meetings.  That was his thing.  People were in awe of how inspired and forward-thinking his ideas were, by the compelling scenarios he painted for them with his words and emotions.  He liked this role, and didn’t do anything about changing it.  Why would he?  People called him a genius.  A visionary.  What usually happened, though, is that his big ideas died on the vine, or failed to live up to their promise.   His ideas were so big, so singular, that people had trouble adding their own bricks to his architecture.  In our friend’s mind, the cathedral had already been built, all there was for his admirers to do was worship at his altar.  We gave the genius an ‘adjustment’.  All we said was, ‘Don’t be the guy with the big idea.  Be the guy who makes other people’s ideas big.’  This has made all the difference in the world.  He has learned that it’s more satisfying and a lot less stressful to make his scene partners look good, and to not worry so much about proving his own genius  It turns out he’s just as talented at sharing his talent as he is at showing it off, and sharing has proved to be a much more productive way for him to behave.  Today, his reputation is for getting big things done.

Make the strange familiar, the familiar strange.  This is a great philosophy for keeping your brand’s culture lively.  Every business culture benefits from a flow of ’strange’ (i.e. alien to that culture) situations, environments and characters.  Likewise, if we get too familiar with our environment, our process and our fellow players–and most tragically if we quit surprising ourselves–our performance is going to get stale.  When every day is the same we lose our sense of anticipation.  If we dont’ think we’re going find anything, we quit looking, and the flow of new ideas drys up.  It is good to introduce some outside strangness into the workaday mix; it is even more potent to rediscover the strangeness within ourselves.

Don’t prolong the agony of a scene that is slowly dying.  Infuse it with the momentum it needs to end on a positive note.  There are a lot of business scenes ’slowly dying’ these days.  Meetings with HR end in pink slips.  Start-ups lose their funding.  Towns lose their biggest employer.   Often in these situations, the only feasible move is to end the scene quickly and move on.  It makes a huge difference to the rest of your performance if the bad scene ends on a postive note instead of a downbeat one.  A town that greets the news of losing its biggest employer with some kind of community celebration is already on the road to recovery while a town that gets busy telling lots of sad stories to the news about how they got screwed is going to be staying in the doldrums for awhile.

All masks are empty until they are put on and inhabited by the actor.  The same is true with job titles.

When the original idea starts repeating itself, the scene is over. The mandate of the improviser is to help the scene evolve. The great basketball player Bill Russell said he knew it was time to quit playing the game when every play gave him a sense of deja vu. He was talking about changing his career, but this bromide holds true for smaller scenes as well. When you begin your Monday morning meeting with a review of the previous week’s business, the meeting is over when the previous week’s business comes up for a second time.

Start in the middle. It is perfectly okay to begin your Monday meeting with a screening of your brand’s freshest online media.

The rule of threes is inflexible. If something is done twice, it must be done a third time. If you hold two Monday morning meetings, you must hold a third.

Remember give and take. In improvisation, ‘giving’ is the art of offering something (known in the parlance as a ‘gift’) to your scene partners that they can build upon. Initiating a scene with the line, ‘Dude, thanks for coming’ is not much of a gift. Initiating a scene with the line, “Dude, welcome to the Big Lebowski Fan Club.” is good giving. In business, initiating a scene with the line, ‘Thank you all for being here today.” is a worn cliche that does not give your scene partners or your audience anything to hang their hats on. Initiating that same scene with the line, “Lebowski Limited exists to make people happy.” is better. Good improvisers ‘take’ just as skillfully as they give. This means doing something with what one has been given so that the scene continues moving in a productive direction. It means ‘yes-anding’ your scene partners. “That’s good.” is an example of a response that does not take from the line before it. “Well alrighty then, show me the happy.” is an example of how an improviser might take, or yes-and, the ‘Lebowski Limited’ line. The most basic, most foundational, improvisation exercises are grounded in the concept of giving and taking.

Recognize the space, own it, use it, and make it yours. How many times do we ignore the space we’re in? So much of business is conducted in familiar environments — the conference room, the office, the restaurant, the convention floor — that if we do not ‘make the space ours’ we (and our brands) will get lost in the neverending sameness of it all. This is true of PowerPoint presentations, when we let the presentation shine its light on us, instead of the other way around. Maintain your vital human presence in the room. It is also true of digital space, which is a big blank canvas until we put our brands, our networks, into play. It is true of every scene we are in. Understand the space you’re in. Define it. Work it.

Adopt, adapt, improve. If there is a better way to describe what improvisation has in common with business in the Networked World, I have not heard it. This is a beautiful mantra. Scratch these words your desk with an Exacto knife. Write them on random white boards. Take down that ‘Hang In There, Baby’ poster, and have an artist friend paint this phrase in its space.

To improvise is to heighten and expand the discoveries in the moment. I call this process leapfrogging. An idea is only as good as our ability to add to it, delve into it, expand on it. Leapfrog it. This is especially true of brand strategies. To the improvisational brand, a strategy is a call for a continuous exploration of the themes and ideas the brand represents.

Everything is important. Everything matters. In the Networked World, our fates and fortunes are interconnected as never before. The multipliers are intense. It is ultra-important to be consistently aware and respectful of even the tiniest details, because today’s incidentals become tomorrow’s headlines. Ask Eliot Spitzer.

Surrender unto the loss of control. Give up; it’s ok to be confused. If you give yourself permission to wade into the unknown, you are engaging in a process of learning, knowing, creating. Industrial Age behaviors were about the fight for control. In the Networked World our success depends on our ability to create cosmos — consensus, clarity, definition, constellations of meaning! — from chaos. Accept your confusion. Work toward understanding.

Follow the process and the product will come. I was a speaker this week at the Horizons High Performance Computing Conference in Palm Springs. One of my fellow speakers was Tom Lange, Director of Modeling and Simulation for Procter & Gamble, who gave a very engaging presentation on the uses of high performance computing in his company’s manufacturing processes. Among his observations was this: “We don’t sell soap, we sell ‘clean.’” This is a very improvisational concept. Improvisation is a process for exploring themes, and it is the exploration of the theme that yields the performance, i.e. ‘product’.

Realize that the next best thing to perfection is being damn good at whatever you do. Amen.