When people say ’sustainability,’ they can be referring to a lot of different cosmetic concepts (monetary policy, geothermal energy, funding for education or manufacturing, urban gardening, solar power, vegetarianism, LED lighting, gender and sexual equality, etc. etc. etc.). In fact, we know this ‘multi-causism’ to be characteristic of the OWS scene. The meta concept is, for all these causes, the same: Are you playing constructive or de-constructive games? Zero sum or positive sum games? Are your games sustainable or not? OWS is, ultimately, itself a game, one designed to focus attention on the UGs of Wall Street.

The protesters arrested yesterday on the Brooklyn Bridge represent the most creative generation living in the most creative nation on earth. No doubt they have roots in every language, race, religion, culture, science, art form and evolutionary instinct in the human species. And daily, on Manhattan Island, they are forced to confront the 1-percenters who control 99 percent of the nation’s wealth, people who are, for the most part, not creators, but extractors. That’s what their games are designed to do—-extract. These people getting arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge? they’re doing it to point out the difference between where the money is and where it needs to be for us to get a bigger bang out of the creativity they represent. 99 percent of our creativity belongs to 99 percent of the people. That’s a biological fact, Jack. It’s the ultimate sustainable resource. The protesters know this and are calling it to our attention with one of the games they and their friends originated, flash mobbing.

The OWS players understand that if the ratio of ‘99 percent of the wealth to 1 percent of the people’ ratio stays where it is, we will never get out the doldrums economically, because we’re getting no Return on Creativity. No ROC. Because we are putting most of our money where 99 percent of our creativity isn’t. For the ratio to change, the game must change. The OWS players grew up on games. They are the gamingest people in the history of the world. You think they don’t know a bad game when they see one? Wall Street plays bad games. They want game change.

Game change will come about only when we find ways to invest in the creativity of the 99 percent. We cannot afford to have the most creative Americans sitting on the bench right now. We need them in the game. Just not the old games. New ones. The OWS players are screaming at the coaches to put them into a game they can play.

The old game, in addition to being unsustainable, has left a bitter taste in the mouth of the world. Those protesters sitting on the Brooklyn Bridge? They’re bitter too. They’re bitter because they have the ability to change the game and they know it. They understand the scope of the work ahead, and are in a hurry to get on with it.

They have good taste, let them cook with it, and bring the world to our table again.  They have stories to tell that are not the same old stories, let them tell them. They have visions that are not blueprints of the past, let them build them. They hear music that has never been sung and have crazy ideas that no one else would even think of attempting. Let them sing. Let them try. We need that now. We need them. And every day the ‘1 percent to 99 percent ratio’ stays where it is, we are one step closer to losing them.

They are getting arrested for squatting on a symbol of America’s great creative past like birds who have come home to roost, when what they really want to do is fly.

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:

Brands 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.

I, 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.

The success of an economy depends on its ability to invent and embrace new protocols.

and

Protocols are intangible, so the traits needed to invent and absorb them are intangible, too.

and sums up with

When the economy was about stuff, economics resembled physics. When it’s about ideas, economics comes to resemble psychology.

My comment:

There is a technique for cultures to absorb new protocols. It’s called improvisation. The fundamentals of its practice were developed in the 1930s by a couple of schoolteachers in Chicago, Neva Boyd and Viola Spolin, whose objective was to create a way for children from diverse cultural backgrounds to collaborate productively (sounds like today’s economy, doesn’t it?). The underlying construct is ‘the game,’ which is defined by rules, roles, environment and objectives. The game transcends the cosmetic boundaries of language and culture to create the shared focus that is essential to progress.

Organizationally, economically, linguistically, and even biologically, it is the ability to improvise — to continuously adapt by making pragmatic and productive choices in a changing environment — that allows any culture to evolve. For the past two hundred years, no nation’s culture has been better at improvising than America’s, and more than anything else, it is our ability to improvise that is being tested today. As Charles Darwin said, “It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.”

Poster for The Origin of Species, a play with music written by Lizzie Mitchell that debuted at the 2009 Edinburgh Fringe Fest

A gamechanger identifies and plays a productive game. Focuses on preparation more than planning. Is more concerned with getting results than in producing specific outcomes. Seddiqui could not be playing this game if he hadn’t prepared. And he could not have imagined a particular outcome. (Note that his ‘50/50/50 objective’ for the game is different from its ‘business outcomes’.) What Seddiqui trusted was that he was initiating a game that would produce results, and cause positive things to happen. New relationships would form. There’d be new experiences had. Skills learned. Insights gained. Possibilities awakened.

He is not sitting at home living the inevitable bad economy cliche, sending out job applications and getting rejected. Instead he created a game that generates acceptance in massive doses. David Seddiqui is creating a narrative in which he gets 50 job offers–and he’s going to accept all of them! Good story.

In Living the Map, Daniel Seddiqui is sending a three great big, important messages to the world:

1) All work is honorable. We should not judge a person by what it is they do, but by how they do it. Respect the work, respect the worker.

2) So what if you have 50 different jobs in your life? That’s a goal. Working in one place, at one job forever is drudgery. This is one generation telling another that it can stick the gold watch up its ass.

3) There’s work, lots of it, that needs doing. But you’ve got get out and find it, player. It is not going to find you.

His and his team’s ability to improvise their way to an election victory against rivals who were, initially, much better funded, more networked and more familiar brand names proved beyond any doubt how skillful improvisation can change the game. Obama is the epitome of what it means to be a gamechanger.

Because they improvised instead of slaving themselves to a script, Obama and team were quicker to act on opportunity. They consistently made better, faster and more authentic decisions than their rivals. It is one thing to be smart, but what difference does it make if you don’t act smart? Obama and team showed how improvisation marries intellect with action. This resulted in breakthrough processes for organizing and raising money, and creative solutions to whatever problems they faced along the campaign trail.

It is no coincidence, to me, that Obama lives in the same Hyde Park neighborhood in Chicago where modern improvisation was born in the 1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression. In Chicago, improvisation isn’t just some thing the artsy-fartsy folks do, it’s a way of life, a fixture in the cultural firmament. A lot of people taking improv classes in Chicago at Second City or I.O. or Comedy Sportz treat it like night school, almost like it’s getting an extra degree that will help them in whatever their walk of life. Obama is one of the best examples ever of how improvisation works outside the confines of theater comedy–how it improves job performance, and has the power to transform the status quo.

Obama listens and communicates on multiple levels, which makes his message extra resonant for his audience. He changes status depending on the scene he’s in without ever losing his essential character, what makes Barack Obama Barack Obama. When he’s with generals he’s leaderly, when he’s with children he’s fatherly, when he’s on the court he’s lefty, and it’s always through the truth of who he is. He’s not posing, acting, or going for effect, or a photo op, or a big move. He’s doing the best he can with what the scene has to offer. That’s improvisation.

He acts on the reality of the scene he’s in, not on some fantasy scenario he’s trying to make come true (see ‘Mission Accomplished’). When, on a blistering summer day in North Carolina during the presidential race, a woman in the audience fainted from the heat during one of his speeches, Obama took one look at what was happening, stopped his speech, and with no hesitation called it to the security team’s attention then reached into his podium for his water bottle and tossed it to the crowd to give to the woman. “They’ll be okay,” he said, in a reassuring voice. It was the most genuine, most helpful thing anyone in his position could have done in that situation. It was not a big deal. It was just the best possible move at that particular moment. That’s is how an improviser rolls. It is not a big deal. It is a lot of little deals, done consistently, with 100% focus and commitment. And these have the potential to add up to a big deal. A really big deal in the case of Obama’s election.

During his campaign he staked out huge and momentous themes–Hope, Change, Equality–and then liberated his team and the voters themselves to explore those themes in as many ways as possible. This meant that Brand Obama could deliver a much livelier narrative than the McCain Brand, which lurched from one lame scripted event (Palin) to another (ride to the rescue on the bailout plan), confusing the audience and the candidate alike.

After January 21, the Obama administration’s ability to riff on big themes will continue to liberate good ideas and innovative thinking to the benefit and betterment of the U.S. and the world. Economic transformation on the massive scale it’s needed cannot be scripted like some Olympic Opening Ceremony. It must be improvised.

They are off to a banging good start in naming people to his team, a ‘team of rivals’, it has been called, echoing what Lincoln said about his own cabinet. The cluckers are already clucking about how hard it will be for Obama to ‘manage’ such strong and independent personalities. To an improviser, it is the most natural thing in the world. Synthesizing different, often radically different, points of view to achieve an objective is what improvisers do.

There is a saying in improvisation, Follow the Follower. This is what Obama means when he says to voters that he’s representing their will, embodying their energy, pursuing their happiness. Pundits have described this as a new kind of leadership, but I believe it’s more accurate to say that Obama’s got outrageously good listening skills. Sometimes it’s necessary to lead, but the best improvisers, like Obama, are the best at following. They raise the level of their own game by raising the level of everyone’s.

On the emotional and meta levels, the levels of communication that matter most, there was only one campaign promise made by Barack Obama. It was not a plank in his platform, but it was implicit in everything the campaign said and did. It was a promise that Americans will all become a little better, a little stronger, a little more improvisational in our own ways for having him as President. We believe it has already happened, is happening, and will continue to happen on an ever-broadening scale, as more and more people — not only in the U.S. but all over the world — get attuned to the new game and start playing along.

Farming on a small family farm can be a very cyclical way of life. A ten-minute hailstorm can wipe out a year’s worth of work. Cycles are 12-18 months, and can stretch into a 24-30 month downturn with two years of bad weather in a row. I draw the analogy to the current economic downturn as this–it’s the weather.  In bad-weather scenarios, the wisest path can often be to dress and act accordingly.

In my experience, farmers (I include my mom, Fern, who’s 82 and still living on my family’s farm back in Indiana, still going at a pace that would be considered ‘active’ for someone half her age) are some of the most improvisational people you’ll ever meet. Here are three ways that family farmers typically deal with or hedge against the down cycles:

1) Improve infrastructure. There’s always a fence that needs mending, an implement that could use some re-tooling, an out-building in need of paint.

2) Diversify the portfolio. The farms that best weathered the bad weather had multiple revenue streams: A range of crops and livestock; they produced non-farm income by taking jobs that helped support and maintain the family farm lifestyle. Could mean doing mechanics’ work; could mean playing with a dance band, or auctioneering. I never knew a farmer that didn’t have multiple ways of earning money.

3) Education. The farmers that are most resilient were always learning. Reading, networking, experimenting with new (and old) agri-tech, expanding their horizons — those were habits. One’s mind, like everything else on the farm, had the obligation to grow.

In what seems like a lifetime ago, I worked on the film Country, which stars Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard. It was interesting in a clinical kind of way to be on location outside Waterloo, Iowa, helping tell a story about a family farm that was floundering and doomed. As part of my work, I did video interviews with half a dozen Iowa farmers, some of whom had lost their farms, others who’d figured out a way to survive and and, in some instances, thrive during an economic downturn that put the squeeze on them like other business sectors are getting squeezed today. Along with observing Lange and Shepard, who were falling madly in love at the time, canoodle steamily on exterior sets where the winter temperatures were well below zero, the farmer interviews were the most compelling part of my Country gig.

What I learned about those farmers was an affirmation of what I already knew: The farmers who survived and thrived were nimble, flexible, idiosyncratic in their approach to their business. They were not bound by scripted behaviors–doing things the same way their folks and grandfolks had done it. The farmers who stuck to the old script? Those were the ones who lost their farms. The farmers who got creative and responded to the changing times by changing their behaviors are the ones who lived to farm another day.

I remember talking about this with Wilford Brimley, an actor who was just coming into his own at the time Country got made, at age 65, after many, many years of effort to succeed in his chosen profession. Forty years of taking bit parts, working odd jobs like blacksmithing, and dealing with a level of rejection that most businesspeople cannot even fathom let alone tolerate, had steeled Brimley to the point where he had little sympathy for family farmers or anyone else who gave up–on anything. “These people losing their farms,” he said to me at the time, “are the same ones who’d be losing the dry cleaning store if they owned that.”

Brimley made two points with that statement. First, that a good part of success is simply never giving up. In Iowa, where ‘they’re so by-god stubborn they can stand touching noses for a week at a time and never see eye to eye’, the survivors and thrivers at the time were just as all-around relentless as Wilford Brimley. Second, Brimley’s statement highlights how there are qualities inherent in businesspeople who can navigate through the turbulent waters of a down economy that set them apart from those who get swamped. It doesn’t matter whether your profession is farming, acting or dry cleaning. These qualities can all be grouped under the rubric of…(guess what?)…improvisation.