Yesterday, a friend who designs sustainability strategies for large municipal groups passed along this classic text exchange he had a couple of weeks ago with a buddy who was attending a seminar in Los Angeles. 
The endorsement is clear enoug. That’s not the ‘business end’ of the text, though. The business end is explicit in the last two lines. What you did was great. What is that you do?
Defining GameChangers value proposition so that we can arrive at a fair trade with our clients has been one of our biggest challenges, because our process morphs around whatever problems we are hired to help solve. The problems themselves are wide-ranging and often, at the beginning of the process, can be deeply rooted in the client’s culture, which can make our process fluid, because we have wander a bit to discover a direction. Sometimes what we are given by our clients are symptoms, not causes. To solve their problems, we have to discover why things are the way they are. That takes some exploration. Only then can we co-create a process that addresses the problem.
Last year, for example, we were asked by a manufacturer to help with its innovation process. “We are weak in that area, help us get better,” is essentially what we were told by the company’s leadership. It was only through a series of improvisation exercises and activities that we began to see a pattern…the company culture was one of impatience, and the most impatient people in the company were in Operations. Time and again, we would see members of the Operations team express their impatience. They didn’t listen. They scripted outcomes. They judged others while remaining oblivious to their own (often sub-par) performance.
It turned out that the Operations team was so good at their jobs, and their personalities so forceful, that the entire organization (20,000+ employees globally) was essentially moving at their tempo, and wheeling around their processes. This meant different things to different divisions, most of it related to missed opportunities to innovate. Because to the Operations team the only ‘better’ was ‘faster and cheaper,’ that became the organizational definition of innovation. The company’s problem wasn’t, as its managers said, that it was weak in innovation. The problem was that it was defining (i.e. allowing its Operations team to define) innovation in a way that weakened the company and made it less competitive, its brands less marketable.
Had we defined GameChangers as an ‘innovation company,’ I’m not sure we would’ve gotten to the problem (and the subsequent solutions) the way we did. I don’t know if the Operations people would have even been in the room.
Our value proposition boils down to this: We are a communication company. We use improvisation to help clients improve communication. Improved communication results in:
-better collaboration and alignment;
-faster solutions;
-meaningful innovation;
-more opportunity recognition and activation;
-deeper audience engagement and customer co-creation.
How’s that?
Catherine Stephens, a Disney executive, coined this phrase last week in casual conversation when she and I were discussing the studio’s new eco-brand, 
‘Flexible’ is what the improvisational brand has to be at the edges of its network. Continuing the tree analogy, flexibility is what you find in the tree’s outermost branches and leaves. For a business operating in the Networked World, the edge is where the action is. It is where creative disruption happens. Where innovation is most likely to find its inspiration. Most importantly, it is where a brand carries on conversations with its customers. This is where you find skunk works, social networks, and tweets. It is where buzz begins.