The Life Drum Core, as Lonnie named the group, was a big hit.  They got coverage on all the local TV stations, and on the night of Earth Hour, their four-minute performance was well-received.  They ended up afterward jamming with the mayor, who grabbed his own recycled bucket and began banging out a beat.  (He wasn’t bad.)

A week before the event, the ten kids in the Drum Core got covered by three local TV stations as they rehearsed downtown at L.A. LIVE.  While we were waiting for the TV crews to arrive, one of the dads pointed out USC football coach, Pete Carroll, sitting on a bench near the entrance to the Nokia Theater.  He was with a couple of young assistants, texting on a Blackberry. I walked over to Pete and asked if he’d mind saying hi to the Life Drum Core.  “Sure.  Give me a minute,” he said, and went back to his Blackberry.

In a minute, he came over, talked with the kids, and got his picture taken with them.

And then Pete Carroll said something he did not have to say.  He said, “Have them come out to football practice one day and play on the sidelines.  Call my office and we’ll make it happen.”

We made it happen.  Last Saturday, Lonnie and five of the Drum Core kids attended a USC football scrimmage at the Coliseum and played on the sidelines while the USC football team practiced.  It was a good day for everyone involved.

You’d expect a successful coach like Pete Carroll to be solid on the fundamentals.  He is.  Let’s break it down like a football coach would break down a well-run play:

Understanding the game.  Carroll quickly picked up on the Life Drum Core game.  These are students who don’t have music or arts programs in their schools.  Professional artists and musicians like Lonnie donate their time to give the students art and music instruction. It is project-based learning.   Carroll immediately understood the game and the players involved.  He got the concept that these are students who don’t have a school to schedule performances for them.  Their performances are, in a word, improvised.  This understanding of the game informed everything that happened afterward.

Teamwork.  Improvisation is not designed as a solo act or soliloquy.  It is most effective and teaches us the most when performed in groups.  Carroll, in effect, put the Life Drum Core ‘on the team’ for an afternoon.  While at the Coliseum, they were treated like members of the family.

Additions.   Because the group was formed to perform at Earth Hour, and would normally have disbanded after the event, Coach Carroll’s invitation made it possible for the scene, and the group, to continue playing for a surprising new reason.  Additions to a scene are great if they move the scene forward like this one did.  The Life Drum Core’s performance was, likewise, an addition to practice, a kind of gift from Carroll to his players.  More than one player came up to the kids and Lonnie afterward and thanked them.  “It really got me pumped up,”  offensive lineman Garrett Nolan told them.

Listening.  It was Carroll’s good listening skills that let him absorb what the Life Drum Core is all about, and act quickly and intuitively on that information. He could have gone into ‘pep talk mode’ and given the kids big-ups and left it at that.  Letting the kids and Lonnie do a lot of the talking gave Carroll his opportunity to add to the scene.

Environment.   Carroll had a ‘business objective’ in inviting the Life Drum Core to practice.  Their presence added to the environment he builds during scrimmages to simulate game conditions where sound is concerned.  As the team runs its plays, speakers on the sidelines are cranked up to deafening volume with crowd noise. Drummers pounding drums on the sidelines made the ‘hostile crowd’ simulation more realistic.

Working with Status.  As with just about every scene he’s in, Pete Carroll was high status in this one.  (Meaning he has more resources at his command, more prominence in the world than his fellow players.)  Now, high status players, whether it’s an arrogant athlete or a pompous CEO, can often be condescending.  Much of their focus goes to maintaining their status, and behaving in ways that call their status to other players’ and the audience’s attention.  (If you’re a football fan, think Terrell Owens.  If you’re in business, think every other manager you’ve ever had.)  As Pete Carroll showed, this does not have to be the case.  By listening and giving gifts as Carroll did, a high status player can confer status on other players in the scene.   This is not always productive for improv comedy where the objective is to make fun of arrogant atheletes and pompous CEOs, but in business and in life, it is always a powerful and productive move.  It’s the move Pete Carroll made.  He used his status to elevate the other players in the scene. (Speaking of which, note the book he’s holding in his right hand.  Thank you, Pete!)

What began two years ago as a ’stunt’ in Sydney, Australia, where the local World Wildlife Fund members rallied citizens, politicians, businesses and civic organizations to get lights turned off in Sydney Harbor for an hour, an event they called ‘Earth Hour‘, this year on March 28 grew into a worldwide event with over 1,800 cites around the world and an estimated one billion people participating.

The nature of games is that we do not know the outcomes.  What we know is that the playing of the game will result in communication, learning, and ultimately, transformation.  Through the playing of the game, we gain a better understanding of ourselves, our team, and our place in the larger world.

For GameChangers, playing the ‘Earth Hour game’ in Los Angeles yielded the following results:

- My guitar teacher, Lonnie ‘Meganut’ Marshall, formed the Life Drum Core, consisting of a dozen kids playing drums on recycled plastic buckets.  They performed at the Earth Hour L.A. event downtown.  While they were rehearsing last Wednesday, the USC football coach, Pete Carroll, who happened to be passing by, saw them and came over to say hello and get his picture taken with them.  He invited them to come to a USC football practice and play on the sidelines.

- Relationships with people in the City of L.A., AEG, the World Wildlife Fund and many others involved in the sustainability business.  We are having business conversations we would not otherwise be having.

- Two new GameChangers clients.

- The opportunity to get involved in education programs for L.A.’s public schools using sustainability as the basis for cross-disciplinary learning.  The first game will be an ‘e-Waste Race’ between Santee and Roosevelt High Schools, to see which school can collect the most e-Waste (old laptops, mobile phones, adaptors, etc.) during two weeks in April.  The winning school will get an Eco-Lab consisting of six laptops donated by Asus Computers, solar education kits donated by GoGreenSolar and books about Water and Energy donated by the Los Angeles DWP.  The core teams at the winning schools will get field-level seats to a Dodgers game, and get recognized on the Jumbotron screen during the game.  Jordan Farmar of the Lakers will announce the event at both schools.

- Revival of a four-years-dormant business relationship with The Walt Disney Company via its new Disneynature film label.

- Support from city councilman Tom LaBonge for my efforts to Solar Panel the Hollywood Sign, itself a game I launched several weeks ago on Facebook.

- The Groundlings improv group is creating a comedy pilot based on a video that they produced for Earth Hour, and have asked me to stay involved.

- Publicity for my home theater, I. O. West, which performed a ‘Bat Harold’ (a show done in complete darkness) during Earth Hour.   The Upright Citizens Brigade also participated, so the improv community came out strong in support of the game.  Which was only natural.  They got the game immediately.  They saw its potential.

-  Ron Roecker, head of PR for Earth Hour in L.A., has suggested future collaborations that involve GameChangers.  We like what he’s saying.

And this is just me.  Scale this activity over a billion people and you can imagine all the doors that opened, and all the new conversations that are happening today, because people played the Earth Hour game.

For businesses and brands operating in the networked world, an understanding of what we call ‘the productive game’ is vital.  Most of these games will not be as wide open and unstructured as the Earth Hour game, they will be much more oriented to specific business objectives, but the principles will be exactly the same.

Savvy managers in the new organizational models will know how to quickly identify and nurture productive games while just as quickly editing and eliminating unproductive ones.   Like all good improvisers, these players will know that the outcomes do not have to be known for the results to be predictable and productive.