Posts Tagged ‘Dialogue’

Objectives vs. Outcomes cont’d

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

Tuesday night, we staged an invitation-only workshop for 25 friends, acquaintances and interested folks to let them experience the marvel that is GameChangers. After reviewing our performance, the GameChangers team’s consensus is that on this particular night we were not marvelous. We started 15 minutes late, got slow in the middle and rushed at the end. We felt that the experience was, at times, less than riveting for our audience.  A couple of people spent an inordinate amount of time on their mobile devices, and we know for a fact they were not tweeting about how great it all was.

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

Post-event conversations were the most productive part of the evening

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The Cliche of ‘Yesterday’

Thursday, January 12th, 2012

Not long ago, I observed a scene in a retail store where a manager requested something from a busy employee. This request was obviously unexpected. An ambush of sorts. The employee was doing something else at the time. We have all been part of a scene like this, in one role or the other.

“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

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.

The Brown M&Ms Game

Saturday, July 30th, 2011

EddieVanHalenM&M1Van Halen famously had an item in their concert contracts that required brown M&Ms removed from the rest of the M&Ms in their dressing room and backstage.  “No brown M&Ms’ has been often re-interpreted by pop psychology as narcissistic indulgence or obsessive control. It is remembered as a demand associated with rockstar vanity.

In reality, it was no such thing.

In reality, as David Lee Roth describes in his 1998 autobiography Crazy from the Heat (first edition paperback selling  for $123.41 on Amazon?!), and Ira Glass documented in a story that first aired July 24, 2009, on This American Life, the fine print about the M&Ms was a game designed by Van Halen  to make sure every part of its contract was read and observed by the local promoter and crew, especially the details of stage and stadium safety. Early in the stadium concert era of the 1970s, there was a lot of variance in stadium electrical systems and construction, and the supergroup, who traveled with 9 semi-trailers of equipment, wanted to make certain their concerns about safety were addressed with the same focus and attention to detail that goes into separating the brown M&Ms from the rest.

In the words of Jeff Bartsch on Editmentor.com:

“If the band rolled up to the next venue and found brown M&Ms in the backstage candy bowl, they immediately demanded a full line-item review of the entire rider contract.  Eddie Van Halen specifically buried the M&M Clause, because concert promoters who don’t pay attention to one part of a contract usually don’t pay attention to the rest of it, and resulting technical issues could be disastrous, even deadly.”

In a 2010 Fast Company article, the Heath Bros. describe the brown M&Ms as a ‘canary in a coal mine.’ They interpret it as a kind of red flag used by David Lee Roth to catch careless oversights of details in their contract.

We see it as a game.

The brown M&Ms were the anomaly that defined a game, a game whose objective was to eliminate brown M&Ms, and whose result was safety.

Note that there’s a big difference between the objective of a game and the results achieved by playing it! For example, the objective of chess is to checkmate the opponent’s king. The results of playing it are strategies and counter-strategies, study, focus and the testing and extension of one’s abilities.

A canary in a coal mine doesn’t really define a game, because the results are, for the most part, binary. The canary lives, or the canary dies. The canary in the coal mine tests only one thing—the presence of lethal gas. No fresh dialogue results from it, no unexpected discoveries, the processes following either outcome have already been scripted. The Heaths’ analogy is weak, because a productive game like ‘Brown M&Ms’ has a nearly infinite number of possible outcomes.

Variations of this game can work for any team involved in QA, Safety, Compliance, Supply Chain, Facilities Management, Engineering, etc., where there’s little or no tolerance for error. It’s not a game you can play too often. Played too often, your ‘brown M&Ms’ will no longer be an anomaly, and the game will lose its bite.

The advantage of playing a game like this is that it brings every imaginable detail into play, not just those you and your legal team can stipulate in a contract or manual. When you call attention to the ‘brown M&Ms,’ you initiate a dialogue about the details of your working relationship that holds far more possibilities for problem-solving in real time than the necessary, but inevitably frozen-in-time terms of a contract.

Fern and Betty

Friday, May 7th, 2010

I got my love of playing games from my mother, Fern.  When I was growing up, we watched all the TV game shows that our manually-adjusted outdoor antenna (with TV watchers inside the house shouting outside to the antenna-turner, “Too far!” or “Keep turning!” or “You had it!  Turn back!”) and our black-and-white Philco allowed.  One of our favorites was Password, and our favorite Password shows were those that featured Betty White as one of the guest celebrities.  We loved Betty.  She was smart, beautiful, funny, and Fern never failed to point out that she was married to the host of Password, Allen Ludden.  Having a husband who hosted a TV game show on which you were a celebrity guest was, I always figured, Fern’s dream marriage, not, as reality would have it, marriage to a farmer from Indiana who rehabilitated castoff horses by turning our farm into a riding stable open to a public that by and large did not know how to ride.  Fern’s game was much harder to play and, for her, not nearly as much fun as Betty’s was.

BettyWhite1A few years ago, I was asked by a network executive to videotape interviews with the alumnae of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, including Betty White.  The show had been off the air for many years but Mary clearly maintained her star status, and the rest of the cast deferred to her as such.  I, however, only had eyes for Betty.  Then, as now, she lit up the room with those smiling, sparkling eyes, and the sincere attention she gave to those around her.  Listening, I am more convinced all the time, is the secret to relating to the world, and Betty listens with the best.  Her ego does not get in the way of her reception, and as a result, her picture is always crystal clear.  What you experience is not the illusion of a human being, it is human.  It is not a portrayal, not a role.  It is true character.

After we had completed our interview, Betty and I had a chance to talk, and I got to tell her the one thing I really wanted to tell her, how my mom had been a big fan of hers since the Password days, and how she celebrated the relationship between Ms. White and her dream husband, Allen Ludden.  Then, on pure impulse, I asked Betty she’d mind calling Fern on my mobile phone and saying hello.  This was a no-no for someone doing my job, a line you did not cross, it was like kitchen help taking a seat at the dinner table.  But all I could think about was how happy Fern would be to get a phone call from Betty White.  “Of course I will”  Betty said.

Fern was not home.  The call went to voice mail.   Betty didn’t miss a beat.  “Fern, this is Betty White,” she said.  “I’m standing here with a handsome young man who claims to be your son, and he tells me you’re a Password fan.  That is so sweet of you.  We had so much fun on that show, didn’t we?…”  I don’t remember the rest of what she said, but I remember that the tone of her message was as if she and Fern were old high school classmates who hadn’t seen each other in ages.  Which, in a way, they were.

A couple of days later, the network executive called and the conversation eventually came around, as I figured it would, to the subject of the call I’d asked Betty to make to Fern.  “At first, I thought what you did was okay, and later I thought it wasn’t okay,”  said the exec.  She said she had no choice but to fire me.  I could not have cared less.  The happiness in my mother’s voice when she phoned to tell me about the voice mail from her BFF, Betty, was worth a thousand gigs.

I imagine that Betty White’s life has been a series of encounters just like this one, in which she has given the gift of herself, and treated her fans as her equals, her collaborators in a joyful conversation.  (”We had fun, didn’t we, Fern?”)  This is why she is still young and her world is still unfolding at the age of 88, and she’s hosting Saturday Night Live tomorrow night.

FernMeCasino1

3 AM, French Lick (Indiana) Casino

I see this same spirit in my mother, who, at the age of 82, still lives on the farm in Indiana, quilts, bowls, plays bingo, gambles in Vegas, sings in the choir, gardens, cooks amazing meals, mows the huge yard and can drink with the young folks at the Shamrock Pub until closing time.  When I talk to her on the phone, she’s usually the one who ends the conversation because, hey, she’s got things to do and has to get going.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mother!  Break a leg, Betty!  We love you both!

The Consumer is Dead, Long Live the Customer

Friday, April 2nd, 2010

This is an important distinction for brands to make:

No more Consumers.

Customers.

Every time you refer to your ‘paying audience’ as Consumers, subtract one point from your brand’s Adaptability Index (AI). Every time you refer to them as Customers, add one point.

Here’s why:

Consuming stuff is so last century. The piggery and gluttony that came with relating material goods and conspicuous services to one’s status is totally unsustainable. It is a zero sum game.

Customizing stuff (and oneself), on the other hand, the honoring of customs and customers, is the engine that drives the sustainable economy. It is a generative process designed to conserve and make more efficient use of increasingly scarce resources.

Consumers consume. Customers customize. That’s it in a nutshell.

Here are some of the implications:

Nathans1Brands who emphasize consumption contribute to obesity, both mental and physical. They represent an ever-larger drain on the planet’s resources. They introduce a lot of useless crap onto the world by manufacturing illusory needs. They associate levels of consumption with status. The biggest of this. The most of that. The hardest. The shiniest.  The latest and greatest. These brands pay for the audience’s attention. Most significantly, they define the relationship between the brand and the audience using numbers.

I, Consumer, am a number of numbers. This is my number of average waking hours per day. A percentage of those waking hours belongs to you, a brand. During the percentage that belongs to you, I consume a percentage of the yearly sales of your product in my demographic. You spend a number to hold my attention. If that number stays below a certain acquisition price relative to the yearly value of the percentage of my day that I devote to you, you will keep spending it. If it gets too high, you will let my attention drift elsewhere. A computer program will tell you what to and then cover your tracks so that you’ll be blameless.  No one will be able to lay a hot dog on you.

Brands who customize largely participate in customs that already exist, customs into which they’ve been invited by a customer.  (The attempt to manufacture a custom is costly, with very low ROI.)  The relationship between a brand and a customer is a conversation, a dialogue. These brands serve causes that cannot be defined by numbers (even as numerical values for what they contribute and receive as a result of their participation, can and must be assigned and evaluated continuously). Brands with customers understand that consumption of the brand’s product or service represents part of, but not the entirety of, their value to the customer.  Consumption is one an element of a narrative that has many elements, most of which are outside the brand’s control. These brands prefer earning attention from their audience to paying for it.

Wurstkuche2I, Customer, am an individual. One of a kind. All my friends are one of a kind. I got my thing, you know, just like you got yours, just like everybody’s got their own. I am basically awake 24 hours a day, because I got plates in the air, you know. My homies in Bulgaria are coding some tracks we’re going to run off a honeypot server for which we are getting paid by a new label in Atlanta call Tso-Tso that does B-Boy tracks for mall shows and competitions all over the Southern U.S., Australia and the Philippines. Shit is off the hook. We get a dollar per download, and already this month we’ve made five thousand dollars. First thing in the morning, I am catching a plane to Fort Meyers to work with some friends down there who have a band and play clubs at night, and weatherize houses during the day for twenty bucks an hour. I’m producing their next album and they are paying me by getting me a job weatherizing houses for the summer. And on the weekends we take out one guy’s girlfriend’s family’s boat and party like animals. Any brand that’s down for this scene is welcome to roll with me.

In a sustainable economy, how we roll is going to be much more important than how much we roll.  It used to be about the size your boat.  Now it’s about boating like only you (and your crazy friends) know how.

Wurstkuche1

Are You a Narratologist or a Platformist?

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

Untitled-1

Narratologists, as the name implies, obsess over narrative.  What makes a good story (and a story good)?  What are the emotional stakes?  What’s the relationship between characters?  Between text and subtext?  Who are the players?  What roles to they play, and do these roles reveal or conceal their true natures?  What motivates them?  What needs to they seek to fulfill?   How does narrative create dialogue between players and audience?  These are the questions keeping Narratologists awake at night, and earning their keep during the day.

Platformists obsess over apps. How solid is an app?  How does it scale?  What language is it written in (and how many does it speak)?  Who uses it and why?  What is the feature set?  What is the ROI?   What is the social component?  How compatible is it?   What’s the relationship between reliability and flexibility?  What differentiates it from its competitors?  If you can answer these questions for more than five apps, you’ve got a lot of Platformist in you.

AppsShot1Narratologists and Platformists can collaborate with one another, but one cannot be both.  Not at the same time anyway.  We all have to choose.  To help with your decision-making, here are a few things to consider:

Narratives are designed to make sense of the world by distilling information into meaning.  Most platforms are, by contrast, designed to distribute information. ”Information,” Viola Spolin once said, “is a poor form of communication.” Choose.

Narrative is inherently more unique, and therefore scarcer and ultimately more valuable than any platform.  As information gets commoditized across platforms–33.5 billion tweets about brands in 2009 (Forrester),  120 million videos hosted on YouTube with an average of 200,000 more added every day (Yahoo Answers), and 400+ million profiles on Facebook (Business Week)–using narrative as a way of organizing and extracting meaning from information grows more relevant all the time.  Would you rather wrestle with one meaningful narrative, or 33.5 billion mostly meaningless tweets?   Call it while it’s in the air.

Narratologists deal in the relationships between people. Narrative wants to be human.  Wants to engage. Wants to move its audience. Yes, it can be messy and unpredictable, but that’s life.

Platforms, on the other hand, deal in the relationships between people and technology.  Platforming may be more predictable, but it’s antiseptic.  It wants to be germ-free. That’s not life. ‘Sterile’ is most likely not an association you want for your brand.

Maybe what matters most is that narratives are a lot more fun for participants.  They generate energy and emotion, manifest purpose, offer possibilities.  They elevate their audience from the drone of daily life. 

Platforms, from the days of Gutenberg’s first printing press, have always been and will always be a pain in the ass. They spawn frustration and induce headeaches.  We find ourselves chained to them.  It’s the nature of the beast. 

Would you rather entertain the possibility of having fun, or guarantee yourself a certain amount of frustration?   Are you a ‘glass-is-half-full-drink-up’ kind of person, or a ‘this-glass-will-automatically-notify-me-via-SMS-when-its-fill-factor-is-above-50%’ kind of person?  You can only drink from one glass at a time.

Narratives define what platforms cannot.  Narratives last longer than platforms.  Mean more. Engage more deeply. Evolve more quickly.  Earn more money in the long haul.

Choose.

Hurd is the Word

Monday, July 13th, 2009

HandsOnSolar1For months before we met for lunch last week, I had been hearing about Brian Hurd, mainly from Deep Patel of GoGreenSolar.  Deep claims that Hurd is one of the sharpest tools in the shed.  Has more experience than just about anyone in the solar industry.  Knows as much as anyone in the world about the state of solar technology.  Started the solar installation program at the East L.A. Skills Center, where he has trained more certified solar technicians than anyone in the U. S.   Helped write the State of California certification tests for solar installers.  Is a protege of Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis, the former Congresswoman from California who admires the work he’s done to create jobs in the community.  The web site for the company he founded, Hands On Solar, and the Google results page for ‘Brian Hurd Solar Technology’ bear out all this and more. (more…)

Yes is Not Enough

Wednesday, January 7th, 2009

MarriageProposal1The most basic concept in all of improvisation is ‘Yes and’. If we are in a scene together and you make a statement, it is my obligation as an improviser to ‘yes-and’ your statement. By ‘yes-anding’ you, I not only agree to your reality, I add to it with perspective of my own. In this way, we can ‘triangulate’ on the problem to be solved, and also bring dimension, and new levels of collaboration to the scene.

The words ‘yes’ and ‘and’ do not have to be spoken literally, of course. It is the spirit of the phrase that matters. A common improv exericise invokes this spirit by having players begin every exchange of dialogue with those two powerful words, spoken literally.

If we are in a scene together and are ‘yes-anding’ one another, by the third line of the scene, it will not be about your reality, or my reality, it will be about our reality. Now we have the ability to work together toward an objective. It is the ‘and’ that makes all the difference. Anyone can say ‘yes’. It might get me a reputation as a being a positive person around the office, but it will not necessarily make me a productive player. (more…)

Neologizing

Sunday, July 6th, 2008

As the Networked World continues to define and influence the business environment, there is a need, evolving in parallel, for language to describe the new memes. The website Wordspy, which came to my attention courtesy of my friend Elif Beall of Brand Neutral, does a great job of crawling the web for fresh lexicon. As a longtime Thesaurus junkie with a Scrabble habit, I found Wordspy to be a very cool resource. So maybe a Scrabbler can’t score with words like ‘requel’ (a film that shares subject matter with previous films in a series) or ’staycation’ (a stay-at-home vacation). There’s a river of language flowing through the Networked World. Wordspy helps keep it fresh.

Wordspy1

Wordspy inspired me to coin a few words myself, to describe concepts and behaviors that currently (that I know of) have no word of their own: (more…)