She tweeted back: “<= like this; like going through the process from the other end.”

Bill Kroyer

The animation director Bill Kroyer taught me this game, which I call Kroyering.  It goes like this: To solve a problem look 180 degrees away from the problem. If you can define the problem’s opposite, you will have targeted the problem with just as much accuracy as if you were confronting it head-on.  This ‘exploration of opposites’ makes Kroyering a useful process, especially when you need to come up with an original solution, a creative breakthrough.  Why is this a cool tool?  Three reasons:

First, it gets out of creativity’s way. Like everything that’s natural in the world, creativity wants to happen.  Left to its own devices, it will happen.  If we clear out what gets in its way, creativity will express itself like a plant will find the sun. As Viola Spolin said, “Act on environment, and environment will act on you.”

Second, because a breakthrough is, by definition, something that didn’t exist before, it is not really possible to say what creativity is, or what form it will take, until it actually happens.  It is often more efficient to target what creativity is not.  For this reason, Kroyering offers a disciplined and cost-effective path to innovation.

Third, Kroyering makes institutional memory a positive force instead of an impediment, as it often is (At Disney, where I worked for many years,  the best way to stop any idea dead in its tracks was to say anything that began with, “Well, what Walt would have done…”  It’s why John Lasseter left Disney and ended up with Pixar.  Too many people at the time were telling him what Walt would (or wouldn’t) have done.)  A study by Dusya Vera and Mary Crossan (Organization Science, Vol. 16, May-June 2005, pp. 203-224) reveals that the best problem-solvers in an organization are those with the longest institutional memories, because they are more likely to disregard or subvert institutional memory to solve a problem. In other words, people with long institutional memories are in the best position to see and understand that a system that created a problem cannot be the same one that solves it.  Kroyering helps you identify what you can do differently by getting you out of the attic of your company’s history and into emptier space, where there’s room to expand your vision.

Here are a few qualities that, in my experience, are not conducive to creativity and can be eliminated from your working environment with help from the Kroyering Game:

Randomness; free association; outside-the-box thinking. Creativity craves intent, specificity and structure. Don’t try to get outside the box. Quantum physics tells us that there’s unlimited energy stored inside whatever box we’re in. Or…get yourself inside a different box!

Rigidity, dogma. Whatever creativity is, it’s the opposite of frozen, stuck in place, or with one unyielding position.

Aggression, destruction, violence. The harder you look for it, the harder it is to find.  The next new thing has to be teased and seduced from wherever it’s hiding.  Creativity does not send out invitations, but if we throw a party, Creativity is almost sure to come.  Creativity can’t resist a good party.  Just know that when the fighting starts, and well before the cops arrive, Creativity will be outta there.

Divergence. It is not the separating but the joining of ideas and people that results in innovation.

Dignity, manners. Creativity is impudent. It can be wildly messy. It’s like the weather that way.  Dress appropriately.

Hollowness, heartlessness, lifelessness, cold bloodedness. Sssss.

Eliminating these and other ‘non-conducive’ elements from your environment will help your creativity flow.  When you’re stuck for an idea, your process bogs down, or you can’t seem to get to the heart of a problem, try Kroyering.

Narratologists, as the name implies, obsess over narrative.  What makes a good story (and a story good)?  What are the emotional stakes?  What’s the relationship between characters?  Between text and subtext?  Who are the players?  What roles to they play, and do these roles reveal or conceal their true natures?  What motivates them?  What needs to they seek to fulfill?   How does narrative create dialogue between players and audience?  These are the questions keeping Narratologists awake at night, and earning their keep during the day.

Platformists obsess over apps. How solid is an app?  How does it scale?  What language is it written in (and how many does it speak)?  Who uses it and why?  What is the feature set?  What is the ROI?   What is the social component?  How compatible is it?   What’s the relationship between reliability and flexibility?  What differentiates it from its competitors?  If you can answer these questions for more than five apps, you’ve got a lot of Platformist in you.

Narratologists and Platformists can collaborate with one another, but one cannot be both.  Not at the same time anyway.  We all have to choose.  To help with your decision-making, here are a few things to consider:

Narratives are designed to make sense of the world by distilling information into meaning.  Most platforms are, by contrast, designed to distribute information. ”Information,” Viola Spolin once said, “is a poor form of communication.” Choose.

Narrative is inherently more unique, and therefore scarcer and ultimately more valuable than any platform.  As information gets commoditized across platforms–33.5 billion tweets about brands in 2009 (Forrester),  120 million videos hosted on YouTube with an average of 200,000 more added every day (Yahoo Answers), and 400+ million profiles on Facebook (Business Week)–using narrative as a way of organizing and extracting meaning from information grows more relevant all the time.  Would you rather wrestle with one meaningful narrative, or 33.5 billion mostly meaningless tweets?   Call it while it’s in the air.

Narratologists deal in the relationships between people. Narrative wants to be human.  Wants to engage. Wants to move its audience. Yes, it can be messy and unpredictable, but that’s life.

Platforms, on the other hand, deal in the relationships between people and technology.  Platforming may be more predictable, but it’s antiseptic.  It wants to be germ-free. That’s not life. ‘Sterile’ is most likely not an association you want for your brand.

Maybe what matters most is that narratives are a lot more fun for participants.  They generate energy and emotion, manifest purpose, offer possibilities.  They elevate their audience from the drone of daily life. 

Platforms, from the days of Gutenberg’s first printing press, have always been and will always be a pain in the ass. They spawn frustration and induce headeaches.  We find ourselves chained to them.  It’s the nature of the beast. 

Would you rather entertain the possibility of having fun, or guarantee yourself a certain amount of frustration?   Are you a ‘glass-is-half-full-drink-up’ kind of person, or a ‘this-glass-will-automatically-notify-me-via-SMS-when-its-fill-factor-is-above-50%’ kind of person?  You can only drink from one glass at a time.

Narratives define what platforms cannot.  Narratives last longer than platforms.  Mean more. Engage more deeply. Evolve more quickly.  Earn more money in the long haul.

Choose.

In our crazy race to escape these kinds of vortexes, we can turn direction-blind.  We pick a course of action, or someone picks a course for us, and in our all-out effort to escape a certain fate, we go heads down as hard as we can for as long as we can in that direction, like barn-sour horses galloping toward a distant barn.  A strategy, as Umair Haque points out in his latest HBR post, can be just as bad as a locked-in direction, because it can confine or limit one’s options instead of liberating them.

What Haque advocates, and what we could not agree with more, is adopting a set of behaviors (he calls these behaviors ‘Wisdom’) that foster liberation of the ideas and the ethical actions that can deliver us from the Goldman-Sachs Singularity, and whatever else sucks.  These behaviors have no time frame, because they are timeless.  They cannot be quantified, because they are potentially limitless in number.

One of these behaviors (me, adding to Haque’s list) is to Envision.   And by that I don’t mean Ayn Rand’s old Burt Lancaster-as-One-Of-A-Kind-Genius concept of vision but what I call ‘Viola Vision’, which consists of ’seeing and sharing what we see.’  This kind of envisioning expands our horizons, and gives us infinitely more options for escaping what sucks.  So in your quest for solutions, don’t forget to:

Look over. It’s how you get perspective on a problem.

Look under. Play with the dynamic of concealment and revelation.  Respect roots.  Dig deep.

Look sideways. My friend, the animation director John Musker, talks about stories as ‘taking an unexpected left turn.’  A sideways move can shake up your narrative in a way that keeps you on your toes and your audience engaged.

Look down. Who needs a helping hand?  Some days, this the only question worth answering.

Some of the clean-up work is so vast in scope, the banking industry shitstorm that shows so sign of abating , for example, or our crippling dependence on fossil fuels, that nothing short of a federal government strategy can begin to dig us out of it.

Every one of us, however, can find ways to support the clean-up work on a personal and practical level.  Cleaning house presents us with opportunities.   A chance to evaluate inventory, and eliminate waste.  It can be the impetus for a much-needed remodeling.

Here’s a GameChangers checklist for what to Toss and what to Keep as we clean up and remodel an economy that has been Skulled and Boned into the pathetic shape it’s in today:

TOSS:  Status games.  Business meetings and processes that are all about establishing who’s boss, who’s the Decider, about who has the last word or about stroking someone’s ego, should be sent to the dumpster.

KEEP:  Teamwork.  Meetings and processes that focus on ideas and objectives, in which players support one another and seek agreement instead of dominance, are needed across the business spectrum to rebuild this mess.

TOSS:   Cosmetic transactions.  When money is made by slicing up and repackaging debt without anything tangible getting produced in the process, the product is bad meat that would make even Bluto Blutarsky sick to eat it.  Get rid of the notion that manipulating data is a contribution to your community.  It’s not.

KEEP:  Emotional transactions.   Transactions that connect data to meaningful, emotionally resonant activity like education, energy independence, health care, or even getting people to sing or laugh, belong back up on the mantle.

TOSS:  Excess Consumption.  Having something may be a symbol of achievement, but it is no achievement.  Lots of people have things they did not earn.  Lots of people take more than they need.  Lots of people eat too much.   It’s time to take our focus elsewhere.

KEEP:  Production.  What one builds with what one has is a far better measurement of achievement than what one has.  What you build, not what you own, is how you make your mark in this new world.

TOSS:  Specific outcomes.  Locking into a specific outcome for a process will deny you and your team all the possibilities afforded by the endless matrices of the Networked World.  Burn your expectations and assumptions before they burn you.

KEEP:  Predictable results.  Business success demands a reliable, consistent performance in the marketplace, just as it always has.  the difference is that brands built for the new economy will focus on getting results, not outcomes.  Focusing on results instead of outcomes gives you and your brand exponentially more opportunities for success.

TOSS:  Preaching.  This housecleaning exposes the crooked preachers, biased pundits and smiling Ponzi schemers of the world.  Their word is not gospel, and the gospel is not their word.  Word.

KEEP:  Conversation.  Conversations, especially with people who see a situation from a different perspective than our own, result in the kinds of new ideas it will take to fix the new problems we face together.  From juicy conversations, juicy possibilities flow.

TOSS:  Rigidity.   How could we have kept it around so long?   It’s so ugly.  So poorly designed.  So stiff and uncomfortable.  Get rid of it!

KEEP:  Fluidity.  Ahh.  It fits every situation so perfectly.  It’s relaxing.  We’re so free to move.  Can’t live without it!

TOSS:  Scripting.  The script, along with the hoary concept of the scripted brand narrative, ran out of gas with the  ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ and ‘Mission Accomplished’ scenarios scripted by the Bush-Cheney team.  No script can keep pace with the fast flow of events in the Networked economy.

KEEP:  Improvisation.  In the Networked economy successful brand strategies don’t stick to a script, they align with themes.  By inviting players and audience alike to improvise (e.g. act entrepreneurially) on those themes, brands can build a consistently compelling narrative.

TOSS:  Dogma.  Believing that’s there’s only one way to look at a situation or solve a problem, or insisting that everyone on your team see the world the way you do, is deadly to the process and eliminates a lot of the potential for solving the problem.

KEEP:  Faith.  Every scene you’re in has the potential for greatness.  Believe it.  See it.  Live it.

It’s by a quirk of genetics that we have come to associate improv so strongly with comedy. Spolin’s son, Paul Sills, introduced her techniques to Second City, which he co-founded with Bernie Sahlins in 1957. At its roots, however, improvisation is still about what Spolin created — a technique for building environments that foster learning and communication, that hold the potential for what she called ’spontaneous explosions’ of creativity.

Spolin’s great book, Improvisation for the Theater, originally published in 1963, includes a section called ‘Reminders and Pointers’. There are 96 items listed in the section. Here are four, abbreviated, with my notes in italics:

The energy released in solving the problem…forms the scene. It is important to note that improvisers do not enter a scene with a problem to be solved. They pose the problem and resolve it within the scene itself. A ’sales scene’ in business provides a useful analogy. A skilled salesperson, like a skilled improviser, does not enter the scene looking to solve a particular problem for a customer. He or she lets the customer help define the problem, which they then set about solving collaboratively. If the experience is a good one — if ‘the energy released in the solving of the problem’ is positive and productive — the scene is much more likely to have a happy outcome for all the players involved.

Be flexible. Alter your plans on a moment’s notice if it is advisable to do so. The more rigid and dogmatic you are when you enter your scene, the more wedded you are to a particular narrative or outcome, the more likely you are to stumble when things change. And things do change. Always.

Remember that a lecture will never accomplish what an experience will. Like Spolin, all good teachers know and practice this one. This time-honored advice is especially relevant to organizations educating Gen-Why? employees, who have grown up learning how to play the game, navigate the site, phone the friend and hack the solution without reading the instructions.

Act, don’t react. To react is protective and constitutes withdrawal from the environment. Since we are seeking to reach out, a player must act upon environment, which in turns acts upon player, catalytic action thus creating interaction that makes process and change possible. Don’t even try to understand this unless you’ve had some improvisation training. Improvisation is an animal spirit within you. It must be tamed before it can be ridden, otherwise someone’s going to get hurt.