Posts Tagged ‘Environment’

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Gameless

Monday, November 21st, 2011
Katehi

Katehi

The old games are exactly that. Old. And like anything old, they lack sap, spine, vigor. In many ways, the Occupy Wall Street movement calls this out. Saturday’s Silent Protest against the UC Davis Chancellor, Linda Katehi, is one of the best ways yet of #OWS demonstrating the impotency of old games.

Here’s the scene breakdown:

A day after the notorious on-campus pepper-spraying incident, the UC Davis protesters have the idea of  creating dialogue with Katehi, by forming a stage between the Administration Building and her car. (Note that no one is out front taking credit for this idea, it doesn’t belong to anyone. Ownable ideas are typical of an old game; shareable ideas are typical of a new game.) The stage is a hundred yards long, a catwalk extending the length of the theater, lined by hundreds of students sitting on the ground in order to effectively elevate the stage.

In forming this stage, the protesters change roles, from ‘Quad Occupiers’ to ‘Silent Audience.’ It doesn’t take them much time to do this. There’s no ’spin’ of a story being told or sold, no research to back it up, no ‘official position,’ only a simple intuitive agreement to keep their mouths shut for the duration of the scene. Game on. ‘Silent Protest’ is the name you can give the game. The reality of the scene emerges from the focus on this game, this agreement. It is the absence of protest that will make the protest so dramatic.

After 3 hours of what must have been a lot of hemming, hawing and phone-calling by her team about ‘how to handle it,’ the scene finally begins when the Chancellor enters, accompanied by a couple of non-speaking ‘extras.’ She is lit dramatically by the glow of cameras—-eyes of the world—-tracking her across the stage. Her delaying has made this a nighttime scene, which is even more dramatic, the darkness creating a heavier silence. By taking the stage without a script, i.e. nothing in her head, Katehi is exposed as someone with nothing in her heart. She’s got nothing. Because —-

The script won’t be ready until tomorrow!

The silence of the audience is remarkable.  Its discipline is impressive. No one breaks. The silence is marred by a few unable-to-resist journos whose subdued questions as the Chancellor nears her car only underline the otherwise-completeness of the silence.

Here is what gets revealed by the scene: The Chancellor cannot speak for herself. Her heart is closed, her emotions as frozen as the mask of solicitude frozen on her face. She is afraid of saying the wrong thing. Her institution’s students intimidate her. There is no dialogue between player and audience, between administration and student, between authority and autonomy. No dialogue. Just an old game, getting called out for what it is. Empty.

The protesters didn’t have to say a thing. All they had to do was create an environment in which the old game of ’script and control’ would be displayed in all its inadequacy for the world to see.

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Posted in Agreement Principle, Communication, Dialogue, Education, Emotion, Entrances, Environment, Focus, Games, Initiations, Issues, Leadership, Listening, Scenes | No Comments »

A home for all our stories

Sunday, November 13th, 2011

JasonTerryHeadphones1I’ve written about it before, and it bears repeating, because it is such a beautiful concept. After his team had won the 2011 NBA Championship, Dallas Maverick guard Jason Terry (@jasonterry31) said something truly profound.

An interviewer asked Terry one of the most cliche questions in sports (paraphrasing): “Jason, what made the difference this year? How did the Mavericks finally win the championship?”

Terry gave an answer that was anything but a cliche. “We found a home for all our stories,” he said.  It might be my favorite sports quote of all time.

They found a home for all their stories.

That is such a huge idea, I’m going to write it again, just so I  can savor it once more.

They found a home for all their stories.

I think of Terry’s quote every time I see another inescapable headline or hear another sports radio host mention the scandal at Penn State. See, they found a home for all their stories, too. Happy Valley became a home for stories of geographic isolation, cultural myopia, personal idolatry, money, bigtime college sports, religion, patriarchy, imperialism, egotism, groupthink, pride, fear, careerism, irresponsibility and institutional insanity. And, oh yeah, the horror stories of a child rapist preying on the Happy Valleyness of it all.

(I think Terry’s quote gets to the heart of the Occupy Wall Street movement, too. America is supposed to be a home for more stories than those being imposed on most citizens by the financial oligarchs of Wall Street and the politicians who are their puppets. We are supposed to be a country where the stories we imagine for ourselves have a chance of coming true. Not a 1% chance. More like a 99% chance. For me, Jason Terry was the first person to Occupy Wall Street, because his quote was the first time I’d thought of politics in these terms: As a country, are we creating a home for all our stories? Or just for the so-called-success stories of a privileged and fortunate few?)

When you think about what kind of country or city you want to live in, or what kind of company you want to be, become, or belong to, think about it in Jason Terry’s terms. What stories will call you home?

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Posted in Character, Environment, Narrative, story | No Comments »

Objectives and Outcomes

Monday, October 31st, 2011

Games are structure. They create focus, encourage participation, and stimulate the Group Mind, which gives players the freedom to work at the height of their intelligence toward collaboratively solving a problem. At GameChangers, we define game structure as ‘ERGO’–Environment, Roles, Guidelines and Objective. If you can define these elements in your scene, you’ve called out a game.

A ’scene’ can be a single meeting or a years-long campaign. It can address an immediate crisis or seek lasting change in an organization’s culture. Whatever the reason for your scene, you always have the ability to apply game structure to it.

In addition to defining game structure, we help our clients sort out productive games from the unproductive ones. It should come as no surprise to anyone that there are a lot of unproductive games getting played out there. They can be unproductive for a lot of reasons. Here’s a big one: Games that treat Objectives and Outcomes as the same thing are not good games.

Objectives are structure. Outcomes are performance. These are two very different things. Here’s an example we sometimes use in our workshops to illustrate this point:

What is the Objective of the game of basketball? It’s to put the ball in the hoop. This objective has not changed since Dr. James Naismith nailed a peach basket to the balcony of the gymnasium at Springfield College in 1891. Other elements of the game, the E the R and the G, have evolved dramatically, the O has not. It is remarkable for its unchangedness.

The Objective: same as it ever was

The Objective: same as it ever was

Now…what are the Outcomes of the game of basketball?  Let your mind play with that question for awhile, and see what kind of responses pop up. Here are just a few that I myself have experienced: the Ireland (Indiana) Spuds high school basketball team; Hoosiers; my first pair of Chuck Taylor white canvas high tops; numb fingers from playing in 30-degree weather at recess; the fact that I first learned about Crispus Attucks because Oscar Robertson played for Crispus Attucks High School; Marv Albert’s arrest and subsequent rehabilitation; LeBron James leaving Cleveland; Dude Perfect; Magic and Bird; Rick Mount; George McGinnis; Wilt vs Russell; a rubber band that I wore on my wrist for a year; the Chuck Taylor black leather high tops that Corey Feldman wore in my film, The Lipstick Camera; the Chuck Taylor brand; the relationship between Spike Lee and Michael Jordan; Bobby Knight; Extreme HORSE with my friend Tim; hoops with my sons and their friends; coaching at the Y; the 2002 and 2003 Loyola Cubs CIF Championships; my friendship with Jamaal Wilkes; Ernie Barnes’ paintings…you get the idea…while there’s only one Objective, there are many possible Outcomes. And that’s just me. Your Outcomes are different from mine. Outcomes are an ever-expending set of possibilities.

This same dichotomy between Objectives and Outcomes is applicable to any game structure for your business. The Objective is the constant; the Outcomes are the infinite unknowns, where all the possibilities and all the upside reside.

Focus on your Objective, yes, by all means, absolutely! From a process standpoint, it is the most important thing, the target, the point of the exercise, it can even be your motivation. It is not, however, where the action is. Not where growth and extension occur.  If the only action you’re open to is achieving your Objective, you’re missing most of the possibilities of the game.

The game is put the ball in the basket. The possibility is Oscar Robertson.

"High Aspirations" by Ernie Barnes

"High Aspirations" by Ernie Barnes

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Posted in Coaching, Games, Group Mind, Issues, Metaphor, Objectives, Scenes | No Comments »

What is Leadership?

Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

Last week, Forbes ran a column by Glenn Llopis that poses the question, ‘Is Leadership Irrelevant?’  The unwritten follow-up question probed though not fully answered in Llopis column, is, ‘If leadership is irrelevant, what can take its place?’  This is an issue that comes up all the time in conversations with executives. People understand that their model of leadership is broken, yet they don’t really know what can take its place.

'A Captain of Industry' by Graham McKean

'A Captain of Industry' by Graham McKean

I don’t think it’s a matter of anything ‘taking leadership’s place.’ What are we going to do, remove the word from the dictionary? Are we all going to wait around for someone else to make the first move? (Oh wait, that’s what happens now.) What leaders can do is adapt to a business environment that is different than the one that shaped the textbook definitions of leadership. This environment moves faster, with more, and more fleeting, opportunities for a generation of restless, tech-savvy players entering the global workforce. To prosper in this environment, leaders and the companies under their guidance must adapt. This is not a one-time only thing, adaptation is not a new program that that can be taken off a shelf and ‘acquired.’ It’s a way of life.

We call this new model of leadership Flexible Vision. Naturally it is informed by the principles of improvisation, among them:

Take care of yourself first. This is a phrase popularized by Chicago improvisation master, Mick Napier. It doesn’t mean be selfish, as in ‘get your golden parachute packed, and don’t worry about where the plane is going because you’re jumping off before it gets there.’  Not that. It means come prepared. Have a take. Be someone. Stand for something. Rock your style. What your style is doesn’t matter nearly as much as whether or not you rock it.

Begin with listening. How can you contribute to the conversation if you don’t know what the conversation is about?

Follow the follower. This is a Viola Spolin concept. The narrative was going on before you entered the scene, and it will continue after you’re gone. Don’t ‘try to make things happen.’ Connect with what’s already happening.

Let go of status. In the old leadership models, status followed a person from scene to scene. If you were the CEO that was your role, and you played it in every scene you were in. This model forced a lot of managers into a mode of pretending to know more than they actually did, to feign authority in subjects with which they were not familiar, just to preserve their status. These ‘false narratives’ are a big inefficiency in any organization clinging to old leadership models. Improvisers, by contrast, change roles and status freely from scene to scene. Though your title is ‘The CEO,’ your roles can be ‘Student,’  ‘Fearless Explorer,”Arbitrator,’ ‘Cheerleader,’ etc. Adaptive leaders adjust their role and status to fit the scene, not the other way around. And the higher a person’s rank in the company (however that is gauged), the more adaptive that person can be, because the range of roles he or she can play is wider than that of a lower-ranked person, e.g. a new employee.

Give gifts. This is the phrase improvisers use for supporting one’s scene and one’s fellow players. In improvisation, giving gifts is the most productive move there is. Those who do it most consistently? Those are our leaders.

'Made for Each Other' - Graham McKean

'Made for Each Other' by Graham McKean

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Posted in Environment, Gifts, Issues, Leadership, Listening, Narrative, Networked World, Scenes | No Comments »

Fresh Quote

Sunday, June 12th, 2011
Jason Terry

Jason Terry

Interviewed after his Dallas Mavericks’ victory tonight over the Miami Heat for the NBA championship, their star shooting guard Jason Terry was asked how they did it, and he said (I’m paraphrasing)…

“We found a home for everybody’s stories. Everybody’s story came together here. Dirk (Nowitzki’s), Jason (Kidd’s), mine, Shawn Marion’s, Stojakovich, Berea, Tyson Chandler, Deshawn Stevenson’s–all our stories, together, made this happen.”

This is a really great expression of a team concept, especially, for a pro athlete in the wake of a big victory, when the cliche is to spout cliches, thank God and sponsors, credit the opponent for a hard-fought game, and then say something about going to Disneyland. A quote about the secret to the Dallas Mavericks’ success that they that they built a narrative consisting of all their individual stories? That’s an athlete’s voicing  fresh thought. And it’s an idea that can benefit any organization.

We saw this theme again seconds later when the Mavericks’ owner, Mark Cuban, deferred to the team’s previous owner and founder, Fred Carter, by asking Mr. Carter to accept the championship trophy. When Cuban was interviewed by the TV announcer, he couldn’t get the team’s coach, Rick Carlisle, to the mike quick enough. For someone known to love the sound of his own sound bites, this ‘best supporting actor’ role is a new one for Cuban, and he wears it well.

The Miami Heat, by contrast, are a team of individual stories that have not yet found a way to co-create a championship narrative. In the wake of the season, the stories about them will be all about divisiveness, disappointment and unfulfilled promise,  about who was responsible and who should take the fall.  The team’s stories, in other words, will continue to exist independently of one another, without really benefitting the franchise brand.

Your company, your brand, your team, isn’t a single story, it is a narrative composed of all your stories, and your customers’ stories, too. Evolved leaders like Jason Terry and Mark Cuban don’t inflict their story on the organization, but rather, create an environment in which individual stories can flourish in the shared pursuit of the business objectives.

Well-said, Mr. Terry! Well-played, Mavs!

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Posted in Agreement Principle, Casting, Coaching, Environment, Leadership, Narrative, Objectives, story | 3 Comments »

Walking Western Avenue

Monday, June 6th, 2011

We live and work in what you’d call the northern edge of South-Central Los Angeles, in one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, West Adams.  Western Avenue, the main north-south artery nearest us, is one of my favorite streets in Los Angeles. If you want to get a feel for this city, there’s no better way to do it than to travel the length of Western Avenue.  From the exclusive girls school up in the hills on its northern end to the hustle and flow of the ‘hood in the south, and every immigrant dream in between, Western is a ribbon of culture lining the belly of this beast of a city.

PFFlyers1I’m doing a photo essay on Western Avenue for a client of ours. In walking Western yesterday, I had all kinds of rewarding encounters. A street poet named Ron shared a poem he wrote, called Shine that was amazing; a restaurant owner grilling chicken on the sidewalk shared stories of his adventures in the real estate biz; a beauty shop owner opened the door after hours to pose for a photo; a kid showed me his python; another kid getting a tattoo showed me his cool shoes–PF Flyers, a brand I used to wear when I was a kid!; a clothing entrepreneur named Prince confided his strategy for pumping up slow sales; a dude named Noon and I had a half-hour discussion on privacy issues, the school system, the prison system, and the relations between the police and the people of South Central–all because he wouldn’t let me take his picture.

No matter how deeply we dive into virtual worlds and other dimensions of reality, walking around and having conversations with folks is still the best way to learn something you didn’t know.

As Viola Spolin said, “Act on environment, and environment will act on you.”

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Posted in Communication, Creativity, Dialogue, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Gifts, Issues, Listening | No Comments »

Letter from an Angry Mother

Wednesday, April 13th, 2011

Dear Children,

I know you are busy with your lives and your careers and such, and you know I’m not one to meddle or nag.  Live and let live, that’s my motto.  But as your Mother I’ve got to tell you that your behavior lately has been hurtful to me, and to the rest of our family. You seem to have forgotten that I am a living, breathing being, with real feelings. And right now my feelings are hurt. Badly.

I held you in my arms.  Fed you.  Gave you a nice home. Helped you grow into the people you are today. I guess I have failed, because the people you are today have wounded me.  I want to scream.  Sometimes I do scream.  Of course you don’t hear me, you only hear what’s coming out of your own mouths. How about listening for a change?

I made it possible for you to get an education, so you can do whatever it is you do for a living (I still don’t understand it!???) and yet you take me for granted.  Like I am nothing to you.  This is the treatment I deserve?  This is your response to a lifetime of love?

I do not ask for your thanks.  A Mother’s job is a thankless one.  I accept that.  Spare me the holidays.  Show me some appreciation, that’s all.  I will not be ignored! I will not go gently into the night!!!

How about I cut off your inheritance? You have no idea how close I am to doing it.  You’ve already blown through most of what I intended to leave you, anyway.  Take, take, take, and never give back, that’s you.

If you’re not going to show me respect, I promise you I’ll start taking back what’s rightfully mine.  How did you like it when I took back that piece of Japan last month? That hurt, didn’t it?  You felt that, didn’t you?  It is just the beginning of where this thing is headed unless you get your act together.

At one time, the family owned a million or more varieties of apples, did you know that?  What are we down to now?  Six?  Seven?  It took me ages to save up my precious minerals collection.  You walked off with it, and you’re not bringing it back, you think I don’t notice? It took me 10 million years to build the family oil business, and you’re going to blow through it in a couple of measly centuries?  Some nerve.  Frack me?  No, frack you!!!

The Dodo was my favorite tsotchke , you probably didn’t know that, did you?  Of course you didn’t, because it’s always all about you.  I loved that animal, it made me laugh every time I looked at it, and then you broke it.  I miss my Dodo.  It was one of a kind.  It cannot be replaced.  Too late for an apology.  Don’t even try.  I’m not forgiving you for that one.

Mustard gas?  That any children of mine would make such a thing is one of my greatest heartaches.  Agent Orange?  First of all, I resent like hell that you named it after one of my favorite fruits.  Second, I still have a rash in Southeast Asia, one of the most beautiful parts of my body (one of the few I have left) because of it.  Asbestos?  Awful stuff.  Zylon B? If only it were the bad science fiction it sounds like, instead of the awful reality it was. Still gives me nightmares. And then to top it all off, you take innocent little hydrogen, and turn him into a weapon?!! Honest to Gaia, where do you learn such things?  Who are your friends?

Chernobyl?  Nuclear reactors and vodka? That was a bright idea. First, you poison me with  radiation, then you invite tourists to see the results?  Why?  So you and your kids can laugh at the featherless geese?  Have the geese not been humiliated enough?  (Yes, they have!)

Is anyone ever going to take responsibility for the mess you made in Bophal? Someone did it, and someone is going to clean it up, and we are going to wait right here until that happens, I don’t care how long it takes. And if one of you doesn’t own up to it, all of you will.

How is that cancer thing working out for you? Nobody had cancer before you brought it home, we didn’t even know what the stuff was. Now we can’t get rid of it. What’s the matter with the genes I gave you?  Nothing is ever good enough for you, is it? You’re weaving a tangled web, that’s all I can say. What are those hard red things you call tomatoes, anyway?  The corn was just fine until you came along. What is so bad about four teats on a cow? Why must you try to make six? Stop meddling with my DNA! It’s my responsibility. Keep your noses out of it!

PlanetEarth2Another thing—my air conditioner isn’t working. Why? Because I have you for children, that’s why. You broke it with your incessant smoking, and I don’t see you offering to fix it. Fine! Tell the police they’ll find my body in the kitchen, propped against the open refrigerator, where I went to get one last breath before my lungs turned to ash.

My water!  What has happened to my beautiful water? I turn my back for a minute, and you’ve dumped so much of your crap into it that all I hear is complaints from the other family members. The dolphins and whales won’t shut up about it. The salmon don’t spawn like they used to.  The octopi are pissed.  I’m not even going to go into what the plants have to say. I’ll say it for them. Thanks for nothing!!!

Have you no idea how much pain I am in?  I’m sick.  Last year I had a leak in my gulf that didn’t let up for months, and my turtles and birds are still hurting.  I get the cold sweats.  I cry for no apparent reason, until I can’t cry any more. The doctors don’t know what’s causing the vomiting, which I do with awful regularity.  My nausea is the only constant of my existence.

You have hollowed me out.  Drained me.  The only feelings I have toward you are angry ones.  Maybe venting like this is what it will take to get your attention, or make me feel better anyway.

Don’t make me lose my temper!  The last time I lost my temper, I killed the dinosaurs, you know.  That was me.  Boom!  Just like that. Gone in a heartbeat. It was an accident.  The Creator slugged me and I slugged back, and the poor dinosaurs got in the way.  I am not a cruel woman, as you often claim (don’t tell me you don’t, I’ve read your diaries!!!)  Anger can be a cruel thing, though, the reason being you never know who’s going to get hurt by it. The dinosaurs happened to get caught in the middle of a quarrel between me and the Creator and that was that.  You do not want a repeat of that scene, I promise you.  Or maybe you do.  Maybe we’re going to find out.  That’s how angry I am.  Your behavior is a slap in my face, and don’t think I won’t slap back. I will. Promise.

You’re the only species that has made a practice of killing your own kind, did you know that?  The rest of the family are disgusted by this. To make matters worse, you glorify it in your games and your stories like it’s a good thing.  I hang my head. When I think that children of mine are doing this, I want to die. I do.

You cannot leave your spent rods and your empty drums and your plastic gyres lying around the house like it’s the morning after a frat party and not expect to suffer the consequences!

You cannot not pump me full of your potions like I’m some daft heiress you’re poisoning for her dowry and expect to get away with it!

You cannot not take what is mine and pretend it is yours without waking up someday to the reality that you are a generation of thieves!

Here’s an idea for you.  Leave!  Move out of the house!  If this is the way you’re going to treat me, take your smokestacks off the roof and your jet skis out of the driveway and get out!  The rest of us can use the room. The coyotes would be happy to have your bedroom.  Do you think the trees care whether or not we have cable?  Probably not.

You are my Children, and this should not have to be our relationship. Truly, though, I am at my wits end, at a loss for what to do about the horrible way you are treating me.

Please do better.  There’s still time to heal these wounds, but not a lot.

Love,

Your Mother

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Posted in Character, Emotion, Environment, Games, Listening, Narrative, Relationships, Scenes, Themes | No Comments »

Daily Paintworks Japan Challenge

Tuesday, March 29th, 2011

Daily Paintworks, an online community of working artists, has raised over $21,000 for Japanese Tsunami victims in just ten days with a project they call The Japan Challenge.  They have done it with what we call a productive game.  Here’s the game analysis:

Environment:  Artists studios; Daily Paintworks website, with the starting point being a page hosted by artist Keiko Tanabe.

Roles: Artists, Buyers, International Disaster Relief Players

Guidelines: Listed here.

Objective:  Raise money for the communities in Japan that were devastated, and still are, by the Sendai quake.

I get jazzed by projects like the Daily Paintworks Japan Challenge for a number of reasons:

Sekura III - Watercolor - 8.25x11.5 in. - Artist: Keiko Tanabe

Sekura III - Watercolor - 8.25x11.5 in. - Artist: Keiko Tanabe

It demonstrates how art has the power to connect us. As we rely more and more on technology for the processes by which we communicate, we cannot let the fact that communication itself is a human thing.  The nerve endings of the network are human.  At GameChangers, we call this human-to-human quality of communication ‘heart.’ Nothing connects across the techno-chasm like art.  It speaks a universal language. It keeps our humanity from getting marginalized, or gamed out of the communication equation entirely, by the mechanisms of the virtual world.

It rallies a community. There is something especially inspiring about a game like the Japan Challenge that rouses a community like Daily Paintworks out of ‘business-as-usual’ mode.  When individuals and communities are stirred to become more than what they were before, so are we.

It is a beautiful yes-and. It deals with the realities of the scene directly.  Keiko Tanabe of Daily Paintworks has family in Japan.  Art production and merchandising in a ‘challenge’ format is something Daily Paintworks already did.  It was embracing these two realities that led to the new reality of $21,000+ in ten days.  To change the game, don’t try to come up with a whole new game, tweak a game that’s already there.

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My Grandmother Was a Witch…

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011

Back in the Dotcom era, I’d often get asked to speak on panels about this new thing called the Internet.  The moderator’s final question to the panel would always be something like, “Where’s it all going?”  When my turn came, I’d begin with the line:

“My grandmother was a witch…”

It would get everyone’s attention, for sure.  After a beat filled with lots of blinking eyes, I’d explain that my grandmother knew how to dowse for water with the forked limb of a peach tree, and when I was seven or eight years old I’d asked her one day when she was burning trash in the rusty barrel behind her house how she did it, and she said, by way of explanation, “I’m a witch.  Didn’t you know that?”

After she put it like that, I noticed things about her that, to my young and fertile imagination, seemed like total witchcraft:  How her flowers and vegetables grew to enormous sizes–chrysanthemums like volleyballs and corn on the cob as long as your forearm.  How she would talk to her animals, her hens and her cats, and how they’d talk back.  And how the same voice that could chat with cats could throw off the pitch of an entire congregation singing a hymn in church on Sunday.

I’d tell the audience that I had come to believe that what my grandmother knew was just a tiny part of a whole body of folkways and connections to the Earth that must have, at one time, been whole.  I suggested that centuries of science, rationality and organized religion had shattered and scattered this body of knowledge to the ends of the earth, but that it still existed, as little slivers and remnants, like what my grandmother knew.

I said that what I thought would happen is that the people who are the keepers of these little pieces would be able to use the internet to find one another, and re-connect what they know, and reassemble those slivers in beautiful new ways, and that maybe these new ways would be what saves the planet.

I’d get nothing from the audience.  Blank looks.  Crickets.  Maybe one older woman in the audience nodded in understanding, but that was about it.

And then someone  else on the panel would say something like, “I think e-tail is going to be driver for growth in the tech sector in the foreseeable future…” and you could almost hear the audience sigh with relief as the talk got back to terra cognita.

Today, when I get asked to speak about social media, I will sometimes tell this same story, about My Grandmother the Witch.

Today, almost everyone in the audience nods in understanding.

Next chance you get, plant a peach tree or something.  We’re going to need it.DiviningRod1

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Posted in Character, Environment, Networked World | 1 Comment »

Los Mineros, Part Seven: “And…Scene!”

Thursday, October 14th, 2010

The ‘Los Mineros’ scene ended in Chile this week with a worldwide swelling of joy at the safe rescue of all 33 trapped miners.  They survived for a total of 68 days 2,300 feet under the earth’s surface, the longest anyone is known to have been trapped underground and lived to tell about it.ChileanMinerRescue1

We have been analyzing the scene here since shortly after the miners were discovered alive.  One of the most instructive aspects of the ‘Los Mineros’ scene is that it has very little spin.  The cave where they were trapped was truly a no-spin zone.  Events were not manipulated or interpreted to someone’s economic or political advantage.   There were no conspiracy theories.  No, this was as unadulterated as a media narrative can be.

During their 68 days in the darkness, the miners had time to ponder their lives in ‘the normal world,’ as Joseph Campbell would call it.  Many, if not all, seem to have been enlightened by the experience, emerging with a newfound clarity about themselves and the world they are re-entering.  “I have been with God and I have been with the devil.  I seized the hand of God,” said one, Mario Sepulveda.

“I have changed.  I am a different man,” said another, Mario Gomez.

Here is a post-by-post summary of the GameChangers series about  the ‘Los Mineros’ scene:

PART ONE:  THE TRAPPED CHILEAN MINER GAME (August 26)

Lesson: Don’t be defined by your circumstances.  Be defined by how you behave in those circumstances.

PART TWO:  LEVELS OF MEANING (August 31)

Lesson: Narratives communicate on three levels of meaning:  Cosmetic, Emotional and Meta.

PART THREE:  YONNI’S WAITING PARTY (September 2)

Lesson: Rules of the game must be known to all players.

PART FOUR:  ESPERANZA! (September 17)

Lesson: Additions can heighten a scene emotionally.

PART FIVE:  SUPPORT FROM THE WINGS (September 28)

Lesson: Additions are generative.

PART SIX:  ACT THREE BEGINS (October 10)

Lesson: End energetically.

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Posted in Additions and Edits, Character, Emotion, Environment, Games, Narrative, Objectives, Problem Solving, Scenes | No Comments »

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