Then, as I was scanning my network, a pattern became too obvious to ignore:

Television news missed most of the Hurricane Irene story. Social networks did not. This may be the most visible, tightest-framed example I’ve ever seen of how narratives live differently, more dynamically, in networks than they do in the old inside-out media channels. And why improvisation trumps scripting.

From Wednesday on, the mainstream media beat the drum for a monolithic, fear-based narrative about Hurricane Irene. Don’t get me wrong. Precaution is good, and often necessary. “Worry,” William Inge said, “is the interest paid on trouble before it comes due.” The problem for the scripters of TV News is that this is the only narrative they had, and it became increasingly and visibly detached from most of the storm’s reality.

By Friday, CNN’s Wolf ‘Cry’ Blitzer was bouncing from correspondent to correspondent in search of bad news, and you could sense their desperation at not finding any. They were showing B-roll that could have been any Friday afternoon Raleigh-Durham traffic jam in the rain, and characterizing it as a panicking populace fleeing to higher ground. Politicians, camera whores that they are, played dutifully along.

By Saturday,  kids were dancing around in their underwear behind your intrepid TV c0rrespondents who were doing their best to file Admiral Byrd’s dying words even as the dancing kids spoofed their phony narrative.

Social and local networks, by contrast, were generating an entirely different portrait of the storm. It was not a picture of panic, but of ‘yes-anding’ the situation. Of neighbors connecting, and watching out for one another. Of helpful hyperlocal reporting about downed trees and street closures. Of beautiful photography from the beaches as Irene rolled in. Of friends gathering for a drink at their favorite martini bar, and bikers blazing through empty Manhattan streets.

Hurricane Irene Photo by Paige Minimi

When we play along with the fear-based narratives–be they our own or anyone else’s–there’s no opportunity, no expansion or growth. Irene is a scary bitch, stay inside, don’t answer a knock at the door, and whatever you do, don’t laugh at her or she will terrorize you like her sister, Katrina, did to New Orleans.

The reality of Irene is that she is a Hurricane With a Thousand Faces, and many of those faces are smiling.  Find yourself a smiling Irene and dance.

Michelle has been teaching the principles of improvisation in business for a number of years.  She has assembled a stellar line-up of presenters who are aligned in the belief that creativity is the secret to a rich and satisfying working life, and to the necessary transformation of American business.  The Industrial Age models won’t cut the mustard in a Networked Economy.

I’m hoping to learn at least as much as I teach.

No sector needs more applied creativity and innovation than the federal government.  Obama and the Executive Branch can’t do it alone.   Today, through the lens of the health care debate, it’s easy to see the divide between the fearmongers clinging to a status quo in which insurance companies and big pharma control the U.S. healthcare system…and the champions of change who understand that we cannot continue to go down a path that puts so many barriers between health care providers and patients.

When the providers themselves want reform, you know something is screwy with the current system.  Yet so many people are afraid of change.  Of the unknown.  Here’s the insight for those people:  In resisting change and clinging to the past, you are guaranteeing your own irrelevance.

This is where creativity plays such a huge role in productive change.  Creativity is all about stepping confidently into the unknown, of facing the blank canvas of the future with the skill and preparation to turn it into a remarkable confluence of art and commerce.  It means confronting one’s fears instead of withdrawing from them.

If the objective (as in this instance) is better health care for more Americans, we have unlimited opportunities to make moves in that direction.  But we’re only going to make the moves when we realize that the process can be its own reward, and that in the process, we will discover the options and opportunities that will never come our way when we are ruled by our fear and frozen by our uncertainty.

Make your move, D.C.!  Sign up today!  (before Aug. 31, you get a nice discount)  See you there!

Think about all the things that scared us when we were young.   And how we ‘grew out of our fears.’

Stage fright becomes grace under pressure. Shivering at the edge of the high dive becomes a love of soaring. Fear of ignorance becomes scholarship. Fear for the well-being of others leads to a lifetime of healing.

Fear of being the new kid in school becomes the ability to make friends and find common ground in new situations.

When we are children, we have no choice.  We walk through our fears because we are placed in environments where there’s no turning back.  And then we grow out of it.

As adults, most of us come to believe that getting scared is what happens to children.  Protective of our status as grown-ups, and ‘those in charge,’ we avoid unfamiliar situations and environments.  When, as it is today in the Networked World,  every situation we face is unfamiliar, there’s obviously a big problem with this kind of behavior.  Avoidance of fear does not equate to freedom from fear.  In fact, just the opposite is true.  We need to confront and embrace our fear, because it holds the key to growth, just like it did when we were children and were much more open to life’s possibilities.  We mistakenly believe we have grown out of our fears.  The emphasis is wrong.  We have grown out of our fears.  Out of them, we have grown.

As adults, we develop a desire to cling to what’s safe and familiar. We develop complex grown-up mechanisms for sheltering ourselves from the biggest fear of all, fear of the unknown. We give these mechanisms names like Money, Equity, Fame, Six Sigma, The Club, Prius, 401K, Beverly Hills and Rich Uncle Bernie.

Most Americans have had nothing to fear for so long that our greatest fear has become fearing anything at all.  We pay mercenaries to destroy our fears.  Imprison them.  Torture them so they will never haunt us again.  We bribe our fears to keep their distance.  We produce massive amounts of media and drugs designed to help us believe that fear-less is the way to be. We pay good money to allay our fears about the way we smell, what we eat and whether or not we’ll have an erection when our scenes call for them.  We prefer the certainty of porn to the vicissitudes of love.  We portray ourselves as being fear-less in battle, when we have never shot anyone other than a friend in the face with a shotgun while quail hunting from our chauffeured SUVs.

We’re like zoo animals that have been eating zoo meat for so long that we have forgotten what it’s like to hunt, or be hunted, when in fact, these are the most natural instincts in the world.

The fear we feel when we are thrust into a new economic environment like the one we face today is not unlike that of child in a new school.  We didn’t ask for this.  But we’re stuck with it, and there’s really no way out except a kind of innocent childlike plunge into the whole fresh mess.  In taking this plunge, we have every reason to be optimistic.  Here’s why:  On the other side of our fear is the potential we cannot see or realize as long as we let our fear cloud our vision or keep us from taking action.  On the other side of fear await the knowledge, connections and growth that will make our transformation not only possible, but probable.

If we lean into our fears instead of away from them, we have the ability to turn them into productive action, just the way we did when we were children.

Fear fuels us. We can work longer and harder at a problem than when we’re cozy and un-threatened.

Fear gets us ‘out of our heads’.  We don’t spend as much time talking or thinking about taking action.  We take it.

Fear creates focus.  When we confront our fears we focus on the problem at hand.  Flight is all about confusion and mal-formation.   Facing our fear, by contrast, sharpens our thinking and the performance of our team.  Immediately in the wake of 9/11, when all was unknown, Rudy Giuliani faced his fears.  Bush and Cheney fled from theirs.  Who was more productive?

In December, I attended a forum at the University of Southern California where Ted Turner spoke to business and communications students.  In a answering a question from the moderator, Turner made the following observation:  “I don’t know what’s coming.  No one does.  But I know this.  It’s going to be an adventure, and I intend to participate in it.”  Ted Turner didn’t get where he is today by hiding from his fears.  He got there by taking action in spite of them, by turning his tilt with the unknown into an adventure.

There is a saying in improvisation, attributed to the legendary improv teacher Del Close:  Follow the fear.  He didn’t just say this to neophyte improvisers afraid of performing without a script.  Del taught the best there was.  Bill Murray, John Belushi, Tina Fey, Gilda Radner, Mike Myers – his former students are the improv hall of fame. What he said is that you can use your fear as a kind of divining rod.  Do what makes you uneasy, he taught.  Do the thing that scares you most.  There, Close told his students, you will discover new worlds.   It is a reminder we all can use these days.   Follow the fear.   Out of it, we will grow.

Networks and business in the networked world do not work that way. Companies can no longer afford to eliminate emotion from their lexicon. Here’s the big reason why: Networks thrive on meaningful dialogue, and most of the meaningful dialogue between human beings happens on the emotional level.

Emotions are what move and motivate us. They define our relationships with one another. They inspire (or discourage) us. Recent breakthrough research by scientists like Drs. Hanna and Antonio Damasio show us that emotions are evolutionary triggers. They reward (”feels good”) productive behaviors and punish (”feels bad”) unproductive ones.

Let me give you a very simple distinction between different levels of meaning conveyed in our dialogues with one another. We have a brand. Let’s call it ‘Dog’.

There is cosmetic meaning associated with the brand, the purely factual information about it: ‘Four legs’, ‘Fur’, ‘Canidae Family’, ‘Dog year = Seven Human Years’, etc. etc. etc.

There is meta meaning associated with it, the symbolism used to convey the brand’s role in the world: ‘Lassie’, ‘His Master’s Voice’, ‘Hunter’, ‘Seeing Eye’, ‘Man’s Best Friend’, etc. etc. etc.

And layered into all of the above like oil between deposits of sandstone is the emotional meaning: ‘Loyalty’, ‘Fearlessness’, ‘Friendliness’, ‘Excitement’, ‘Playfulness’ ”Danger’, ‘Love’, etc. etc. etc.

We can say a lot of things about our brand over unlimited numbers of channels, but the things that matter most to the world, that maintain the most vitality, move our audience, and have the potential to grow more meaningful as they traverse our ‘Dognet’, are those aspects of the brand that we convey with emotion.

None of this is to say that emotions are easy to manage or inject into institutionally ingrained processes. This is combustible stuff we’re talking about. Stuff that can sink you just as dramatically as it can elevate you. Let too much emotion seep into a scene with players who view it as a weakness and it will destroy that scene in a heartbeat. Let negative emotions go viral and they will have the same effect on your brand that dogfighting did on Michael Vick.

This, then, is an area where improvisational ability becomes vitally important to business in the networked world. Improvisers understand that productive scenes always involve emotional communication, and they are adept at keeping those emotions positive and focused on the objective. Improvisation provides the discipline and the objectivity necessary to work with the inflammable matters of communication that can bless your brand or mess it up bigtime.