Posts Tagged ‘Game’

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JetBlue Scene

Monday, August 30th, 2010

Jeremy Redleaf, one of the new physicists of the narrative form and the creator of this brilliant siteOJN1initated the scene when he sent me this emailJBJeremy1

about this JetBlue adJetBlue1

which is anchored by copy that saysJBJeremy2In my role of Commentor On All Things About Improvisation in Business, I responded to Jeremy’s email with this GameChangers postJBGameChangers1in which i point out that ‘the first rule of improv’ if there even is such a thing, which itself is debatable, is not to say ‘yes’ but to say ‘yes and.’   ‘Yes’ is a state of mind.  ‘Yes and’ is action.  The most fertile ground in the world is useless until it’s planted.  ‘Yes’ is the ground.  ‘And’ is the seed.  My blog post inspired Jeremy…JBJeremy2C

Posi-ffiti!  Yes!  I love threads like this.  As usual, I’d tweeted a link to my blog post. I decided to yes-and Jeremy by calling JetBlue’s attention to its error with a Tweet.  I was able to Google their CMO, Marty St. George and find his Twitter account.  JBTweet2To Marty’s credit, he tweeted back within 15 mins.  This already puts @martysg and JetBlue way ahead of most CMOs in brand narrative game.  It also tells me that this is one vigilant, sensitive cat.  Dude’s running it like Ochocincomartysg1

here @martysg commits the improvisation error of denying.  He does this by being vague–what does “if you said ‘no quotation marks’ I might be with you” mean, anyway?–and acting as if I’d accused him of misquoting ‘John’, and seems to be saying that the mistake is not theirs, but mine, for calling them out on the wrong thing.  I responded by suggesting the ‘Posi-ffiti’ gameJBTweet3

and further suggested how to initiate the game…JBTweet11

@martysg blocks the game… martysg2By acting as if I’d said something I hadn’t–that ‘The Posi-ffiti Game’ would have to be played without ‘John’s’ permission–Marty kills the scene.  This was probably his intention.  He also implies that quoting people without their permission is MY style.  In one statement, he refuses my gift and pimps my character.  Nice.  This is classic old school management style, a familiar corporate game I call, “Parry and Thrust.”  It’s played  by stalling, and staying non-committal (”Hm…if….I might…”) and then landing a knockout blow (”Do something unethical?  Not us.  YOU maybe.  Not us.”)

Look, everybody understands that a CMO like @martysg will not alter an ad campaign because some nitpicker tweets him about the word ‘and’ in an ad.  Like I said, he gets credit for being open enough to have the conversation in the first place.  This is more responsiveness from a tweet than you’d get from 90% of all the CMOs in the world.  It is, however, short of the kind of action a person would get from an improvisational brand like Southwest Airlines.  Furthermore, what happened when @martysg did respond is precisely the point of my blog post.  The conversation didn’t go anywhere because Marty St. George ‘yessed’ and he did not ‘and.’

How might Marty have yes-anded?  Anyone who’s gone through a GameChangers workshop can give you a dozen games that would be more productive than ‘Parry and Thrust.’

The good news coming out of this exchange is that all is not lost.  Jeremy Redleaf has a new job description for OddJobNation: “Posi-ffiti Artist.”

To an improviser, Lost is just the first step on the way to Found.

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Posted in Additions and Edits, Agreement Principle, Branding, Character, Communication, Dialogue, Games, Gifts, Initiations, Issues, Listening, Narrative, Scenes, story | No Comments »

The Trapped Chilean Miner Game

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

Several years ago, in a Level One improv class at I.O. West, I did a scene with Parvesh Cheena where he and I were given the situation of being trapped together in an elevator.   I immediately began McGuyvering my way out of the situation.   (”You got a paper clip?  We’ll pick the lock on that panel and…blah blah blah.”)  Big rookie mistake.  Our teacher, Sarah Gee, said to me, “If you get out of the elevator the scene’s over.  Show us who you are to one another while you’re trapped!”

TrappedMiners1This broke today over CNN. The 33 men trapped in a Chilean copper mine have begun to assume different roles that will help them survive the time, estimated to be months, it will take rescuers to drill through 2300 feet of solid rock to rescue them.  This is brilliant.  They’re designing a game to help them get out alive without going batshit crazy while they’re waiting to be rescued.  This is going to give us all a good look at how a game works, and how it informs and inspires group strategies.  One thing is already clear:  There are some good improvisers trapped in that mine.

To review, here are the elements of a game: Environment, Roles, Rules, Objective(s).

Let’s begin with the Objective.  Simple:  ‘Get out of here alive without going crazy.’  Same as most survival strategies.

The Environment of the Trapped Chilean Miner Game could not be more starkly defined:  A pool of darkness deep beneath the surface of the earth, and the rest of the world watching up above.  The contrasts between the Down Below and the Up Above are extreme, an archetype embedded deep in every human’s subconscious.  The Well, the Fallen Rubble, the Cave, the Mine–all tap deep into our unconscious, where our memories of the womb are stored.   As my friend Richard Wynn Taylor says, “It will remind us of something we’ve never seen before.”

The Roles, as stated in the CNN story, are developing.  One of the miners has become a spiritual leader.  Another an entertainer who sings Elvis songs.  Expect that all or most of the miners will eventually define roles for themselves, some as group characters (’peacekeepers,’ ’storytellers,’ ’spokespeople,’ ‘mediators’ etc. etc.)  Some of the miners will play more than one role, depending on the scene they’re in.  Eventually some of them may trade roles, taking turns speaking to the media, for example.  What’s also interesting about the roles element of the game is that all 33 men trapped in the cave will, for the duration of their rescue, abandon the roles they were playing when they went Down Below: None of them will be playing the role of a miner.  Note also that ‘trapped miner’ is not a role.  It’s a circumstance.  Your circumstance does not define your role; it’s your behavior in your circumstance that defines your role.

Expect that in the coming weeks, we’ll be hearing about the Rules of the TCMG. These Rules will be designed to create agreement and establish ground rules for the miners’ interactions.  The rules will initially address the fundamentals such as sleeping, eating, sharing resources, communicating with Up Above etc., and then get more detailed.  The rules of a game will not be designed to create sameness or repetition, but to liberate performance, by empowering players to play their roles well.  The miners cannot afford to get weary of their roles.  It will be interesting to see how many rules will be set or influenced Up Above.

Unlike a reality TV show like Jersey Shore, where editors manipulate the juxtaposition of shots to create scenes and the sequence of events to construct a narrative, the ‘live-ness’ of this scene will demand improvisation, and that means the miners will be the primary architects of their narrative.

The intense focus on this particular scene by the world media, is going to make the elements of the game highly visible.  We will be able to track how well the trapped miners are doing by how focused and productive they are in playing their game.

What’s going to hold our interest about the Chilean Miner scene will not be the drama of whether or not they make it out alive.  The objective, the ‘Will they or won’t they’ aspect of the narrative, will only carry it so far.  What will hold our interest is how the miners behave in the meantime.  How well we get to know them.  Who they are to their families, and to one another.  What kind of character traits emerge. This is true of any narrative.  If you want to hold your audience’s interest, don’t focus on how you want it to end, but on how you want it to be.

When the miners’ survival becomes imminent, their game will transform from a survival strategy to a business strategy.  To the objective of ‘Get out of here alive without going crazy,’ they will undoubtedly add, ‘Make Money.’  When the miners finally walk into the light, the game may change, but it will not end.

Buena suerte, Mineros!

ChileanMiners2

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Posted in Agreement Principle, Casting, Character, Environment, Focus, Fundamentals, Games, Group Mind, Narrative, Objectives, Scenes, story | 1 Comment »

Fools With Rules

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

This one’s for the golfers…

I used to joke with our neighbor back in Indiana, Euline Kieffner, that the reason she and I loved golf so much was that there was nothing more alluring to folks who’d grown up on farms like we had than a mown field with no manure in it.  Until four or five years ago, I was enchanted by the game of golf, and literally could not get enough of it.  I played and practiced it religiously, at one point working my way all the way down to a four-handicap, which is pretty damn good.  I could play.

Golf is a great game that can teach a person a lot about patience, persistence, imagination, focus, character, and the difference between trying to force positive outcomes and letting positive outcomes emanate from an open mind.  As my business focus has changed, so has my relationship with the game.  Today, I play rarely, maybe two or three times a year, and only on social occasions.   The romance is gone.  Occasionally, my Taylor-Mades and I stare wistfully at one another across a crowded garage, and remember how it used to be between us.

What fascinates me most about the sport of golf today, sad to say, is the wreckage to its most visible brand experience–the PGA Tour.  We’re talking multi-vehicle pile-up. Its shiningest star has lost most of his luster and its TV ratings have tanked in tandem with the Tiger brand.  The Tour’s newcomers have apparently had no life experiences to differentiate them from one another–all they know is golf.  Its core demographic is aging.  Its most interesting personalities have retired.

Last Sunday, while I did a little work in the office, more out of habit than anything, I had the PGA Championship—the last of the four ‘majors’ of the season—on the TV in the background. It held no inherent interest for me. And then, all of a sudden, it did.  Several of the game’s young lions—Rory McElroy from Scotland(?), a long-hitting lefthander with high follow-through named Bubba, a cool German named Kaymer I’d never heard of before, and Dustin Johnson, who hits it insanely long, were all fighting for the lead, along with a caddyshacker named Wen-Chong from China, who learned to play on that country’s first golf course, which was built only 20 years ago.  All of a sudden, it was a story worth following.

DustinJohnson1Over the last five or six holes the tournament’s drama became palpable.  None of the young guys were holding back, no one was playing not to lose, they were all winding up, letting it rip, and playing for the win, and it was riveting.  The tournament came down to a tie between two players, Bubba and the German, Kaymer, with Johnson playing the final hole of the tournament with a chance to win it.  He missed his par putt to win.  We were looking at a three-player, three-hole playoff for the championship.

And then, all of a sudden, we weren’t.  A PGA Tournament official pulled Johnson aside as he walked off the 18th green and told him that he had violated a rule by grounding his club in a hazard along the 18th fairway, one of the 1000+ sand bunkers that lined the course.

I’m not going to get into the specifics here, except to say that technically the officials were correct—Johnson had, in fact, let his club touch the sand prior to making his second shot.  Narratively, however, the PGA people blew it like I’ve never seen a call blown in a lifetime of watching sports.  There was no possible way for Johnson to know that the spot where his ball sat—a spot that had been trampled by tens of thousands of people during the tournament, and was tightly framed by hundreds in the gallery as he made his swing—was a hazard.  Besides that, if there had once been a border to the sand bunker, that border had been erased by the week’s crowds to the point where it no longer existed.  Given this, there was no way for the PGA officials to know for sure from looking at a replay whether the ball was ‘in’ a bunker or not.

This wasn’t some snap judgment in the heat of the moment by a referee or ump.  This was a deliberation.  A review.  A consideration.  And then, a horrible decision that took all the life out of the story.  Johnson was penalized two strokes, and eliminated from the playoff.

The tragedy of this decision goes way beyond any personal setback to Mr. Johnson.  The PGA brand desperately needed this story, needed the drama to keep building with the playoff between three of its new stars.  They had it.  It was happening.  The audience was engaged.  There was real enthusiasm from the broadcasters.  It was turning into the most interesting finish to a tournament in years.  All the PGA officials had to do was stay out of its way.  Instead, they committed the golfer’s most grievous mistake: they over-thought the shot.  And then they shanked it.

This was not the behavior of people concerned about what’s best for the game of golf, about supporting their brand’s narrative, or about nurturing the next generation of golfers.  This was vainglorious meddling by middle-aged men desperate for attention and fearing nothing as much as their own impotence.

Oh yeah, Kaymer won the playoff, but who cared?  Nobody outside of Kaymer’s girlfriend is talking about it.  All the fan conversation is about the idiotic ruling.

We see this a lot in business.  A compelling narrative begins to unfold, or an idea seems to be gathering momentum, and then, from out of nowhere, an expressionless manager with a rule book derails it.  It sucks for everyone involved except the person with the rule book.

If the rules don’t support your brand’s narrative, don’t change the narrative, change the rules.  If your managers, like those PGA officials, aren’t nuanced enough to understand what it takes to support your narrative, change managers.  This is what the PGA needs to do, pronto, to get its ailing game back on track.

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Posted in Branding, Character, Focus, Games, Issues, Narrative, story | No Comments »

GameChangers for Sales

Monday, March 29th, 2010

WorldsGreatestSales1Every business conversation that’s unscripted–and that’s about 99% of them–is an improvised scene.  How ably we improvise usually determines the success of the scene.  In sales, the audience for the scene is the customer, and the ultimate ‘applause’ is a sale. Furthermore, in sales scenes, the customer is not just the audience, her or she is also a player in the scene.  This is important for salespeople to understand, because it means you are asking the customer to judge their own performance in your scene together.  If they they give their performance in your scene a thumbs-up, chances are you’ve got yourself a sale.

Big Note:  The customer judges his or her performance, not yours, in the context of the scene you co-create.

The implications of this are huge.  Here are a few:

1.  Learn the script, then throw it away. The single biggest mistake salespeople make is trying to follow a script.  The customer doesn’t know your script!  In trying to stick to a script known only to you, you’re putting your customer in the worst possible position–that of a performer who doesn’t know his or her lines.  The playwright Christopher Durang built an entire play, The Actor’s Nightmare, around this premise.  You following your script and trying to get your scene partner to play along with it is The Customer’s Nightmare.

1A.  Don’t show your script to the customer. If the customer does know your script, because, let’s say, you’ve sent them your PowerPoint deck in advance of your presentation, you cause a whole other set of problems.  For one, you’re not giving them anything new.  You are, in essence, asking them to play a role you have written for them, which fosters a kind of built-in resentment.  Another problem with showing your hand ahead of time is that it burdens the audience with expectations.  By knowing ahead of time where you’re going, they will be measuring the scene against what they imagine it will be–good or bad.  Thanks to the internet, the customer already has access to plenty of data about your product.  Save something for your sales scene!

2.  Your number-one concern is getting your customer to feel good about your scene. You do this by helping them look good.  You help them look good by ‘giving gifts,’ to use the parlance of improvisation. There are unlimited ways to give gifts in a sales scene, ranging from sharing a dinner at a great restaurant to enlightening a customer with knowledge, to conferring status on them by having them enlighten you with knowledge.  Whether they ‘applaud’ your scene by making a down-payment on a timeshare, driving off your lot in a new car, or by clicking to buy a better mousetrap, chances are they’ll be doing it because they felt good about the interaction with your and your brand.

3.  A scene is not a soliloquy. You are sharing the stage with the customer.  It’s a dialogue.  Give and take.  OgilvyOne recently announced a contest to find the World’s Greatest Salesperson.  They’re asking contestants to ’sell’ a commonplace item, a red brick, using YouTube.  The winning video will not be the best soliloquy, but the one that’s best at generating and sustaining a dialogue with its audience–via YouTube comments, Twitter, Facebook and other platforms.

4.  Begin by listening. As with longform improvisation, a good way to get things rolling is to take a ’suggestion from the audience.’  When you begin your scene by listening instead of speaking, you give your audience/customer the opportunity to invest themselves in the scene.  Their satisfaction at seeing an idea they’ve given you turn into action will earn their applause.

5.  Build and heighten.  A scene should be designed to expand, its energy elevate, its theme evolve.  Surpass where you started.  Never end up back where you began.  Don’t be afraid to start your scene with the seed of an idea and let it grow.  Be afraid of starting with a grand vision that diminishes during the course of the scene.

6.  Agree on the game. What you’re looking for in your scene is quick identification and agreement on what we call ‘the underlying game.’  We define a game as:  Roles, Rules, Environment and Objective.  The sooner you can define these, the sooner you can agree on them, and the sooner you agree on them, the more likely you are to close the sale.  ‘Yes-anding’ the customer is the single best sales technique there is.

6A. The customer’s objective is not a sale. The customer isn’t in the scene to help you hit your quota or earn a commission.  A sale may be your objective but it’s not theirs.  Theirs may be to prove their love, earn the respect of their peers, look good to a boss, save money, gain status with their neighbors, or ensure the birth of a healthy baby.  Your objective is to help them achieve their objective.

CONTACT US TODAY TO BOOK A ‘GAMECHANGERS FOR SALES’ SESSION FOR YOUR TEAM!

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Posted in Agreement Principle, Dialogue, Games, Gifts, Issues, Listening, Sales, Scenes, Themes | No Comments »

‘The President’s Question Time’ Scene

Saturday, January 30th, 2010

There’s a great tradition in British government that, if you’ve never seen it, you ought to.  It’s called The Prime Minister’s Question Time, and it is wonderful political theater.  Watch some of this.

And then compare this.

Quite a difference.

The first is improvised.

The second is scripted.

Improvisation is active.  It is alive.  Members of Parliament are energetically engaged in the conversation about the matter at hand, supportive of, but not bogged down by, their various ideologies and positions.  Their actions and reactions are immediate, emotional and visceral.  This honors the problem.  American politicians dishonor a problem, and obfuscate it, when they use it as a foil for politicking, which is how almost every problem faced by the federal government is regarded now.  An excuse for campaigning.

ObamaRepubs1This is the big point President Obama underlined yesterday in his meeting with the Republicans.  That 66-minute conversation may be the best thing that’s happened in American politics since the Watergate hearings.  Obama changed the game by calling out the current political game for what it is.   Let’s call the current game “Our Way or No Way.”  It is played by Democrats and Republicans alike, with equal vigor.  This game is toxic.  Limiting.  Stultifying.  Divisive.  And ultimately it’s unproductive.  This is not about blaming one party or the other.  The bad game is to blame.

Yesterday, Obama not only called out the current game for the quicksand pit it is, he suggested a better, more liberating, more productive game.  You might call the game he’s proposing, ‘Part of a Pie is Better Than None.’  In other words, the invitation to the Republicans (Dems, you’re next!) is to find an area of agreement and agree on it.  Do it knowing that some, but not all, and probably not not 80% of what you’ve got scripted, will come to pass.  Don’t be greedy.  Be generous instead.  Don’t place blame.  Accept responsibility.  Don’t point fingers.  Shake hands.  And then come out fighting.  Let’s relish the good fight, one where we fight together to solve the problem, not the bad fight, where we fight over who’s right and who’s wrong about how to solve it.  Let’s pick battles we can win instead of battles we can make the other guy lose.

Cheers to the GameChanger in Chief for changing the game once again.  Our political discourse needs more of the kind of energetic, intelligent, articulate, performances that the Brits demonstrate in their ‘Question Time With the Prime Minister” and Obama and the Republicans staged yesterday.  It will be a healthy transformation.  And it’ll make great TV.  Nothing we Yanks like better than that!

Do not get locked into your script for success.  Be prepared, instead, to improvise your way there.  Remember that other people have scripts, too.  As I can tell you from working in the entertainment business, when all we do is fight over whose script we’re going to follow, the show does not go on.

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Posted in Agreement Principle, Communication, Dialogue, Fundamentals, Games, Issues, Leadership, Narrative, Scenes | 2 Comments »

Tiger’s Unplayable Lie

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

Six years ago, after playing hooky from work on a Friday to watch The Best Golfer in the World play nine holes at Riviera Country Club, I wrote this about him for my company’s blog:

Tiger hit one shot that I will remember for a long time, one of the best I’ve ever seen.   220 yards from the green after an errant drive, out of deep rough, he hit a high draw inches to the right of a big tree ten yards in front of him, inches to the left of two bigger trees 30 yards farther up, a couple of feet over a bunker fronting the green, to within ten feet of the pin.  People in the gallery ooohed and aaahed and applauded, then gathered around the divot he made in the rough like so many TV cops peering down at a murder victim.   “Look at how long it is,” they muttered of the divot.  “Look how wide he took his swing path.”  “Did you see how hard he went down after it?  Damn!”

And…

His focus is the most intimidating thing about his game.  There is an unshakeable calmness to him that you don’t see in the other pros.  Earl named him well, because he plays golf like a big cat stalking its prey.   The confidence he has in the inevitability of his success is absolute.

And…

And yet…and yet…it’s strange to stand near another human being and not sense any more humanity in him than you would in a thoroughbred in the paddock at Santa Anita.   What makes us vital—all that brawling, longing, laughing, crying, hurting and loving—all that bitching and moaning and mucking around most of us do on a daily basis–is bad for a person’s golf game.  And so none of it seems to be part of Tiger’s make-up.  He is, on the golf course anyway, inhuman.

The Scripted Narrative

The Scripted Narrative

Today, the Eldrick “Tiger” Woods story, scripted for him by his father, Earl, since before he was born, is falling apart quicker than a 20-handicapper’s swing on the back nine of the club championship.  In two weeks, Tiger has gone from paragon to pariah, and has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that a brand can no longer script the humanity out of its narrative and expect the world to play along.  In the billion-channel cosmos of the Networked World, sooner or later reality will outflank any brand’s ability to script and control its story the way brands could when there were three TV networks and a couple of major newspapers to be reckoned with, and story material was limited to what happened inside the ropes at Riviera.

As this is written, the Tiger Woods brand burns out of control like a California wildfire, and embers from Tiger’s Inferno have landed on the roofs of Nike, Gatorade, Gillette and Accenture, and they’re in flames, too.  Buick’s house of straw (did anybody ever really believe Tiger drove a Buick?) is probably burned beyond salvaging.

What’s fueling this fire isn’t the the commonplace tabloid fodder of marital infidelity, it’s not about whether you side with a justly aggrieved wife or forgive a superstar his transgressions.  This story is much bigger than that.  It is a story as old as Achilles, the story of a hero’s fall from grace.

It’s in our nature to want to see a story completed.  Tiger’s story will hold the audience’s attention at least until the downfall is assured, the disgrace complete.  The light at the end of Tiger’s tunnel—and the hope for any brand that has lost its way—is that the journey does not have to not end with the fall from grace.  It may be impossible for the audience to turn away from a tragedy, but what the audience turns to of its own volition, and embraces more fervently than anything, is the hero’s return.  As Joseph Campbell chronicles in Hero With A Thousand Faces, ‘falling to the Temptress(es)’ is one of many twists in the journey toward true heroism.  Tiger Woods can redeem himself in the eyes of his audience, but he’s got to want to be an authentic hero, not one playing a role that has been scripted for him.

The Networked World Defies the Script

The Networked World Defies the Script

Here are five productive moves he (or any other burning brand) can make in that direction:

1.  Accept the Unplayable Lie.

For you non-golfers, a Lie is Unplayable when the ball is in a position where not even Tiger Woods can take a productive swing at it.  At that point, you’ve just got to accept the penalty and play on.  This is the situation in which Tiger finds himself today.  There is no excuse that will satisfy.  No spin that can put the scandal to rest.  He’s got no swing at this one.  He’s got to cop to being a pig and a dog and apologize with more than words for whatever hurt his family, and get on with whatever’s next.  Too many brands waste time talking about how or whether to play the unplayable lie, instead of quickly agreeing that it’s unplayable.  They will consult with caddies and seek ruling from judges.  They will pull different clubs out of the bag.  They will check the wind.  They will roll up their pants legs and walk into the hazard.  Sometimes, they will even go all Van De Velde (for you golf fans) and take a stupid swing at the ball and make things much, much worse.   And all along, the best thing would’ve been to simply accept the penalty and play on.

2.   Be entrepreneurial.

I always thought Tiger missed an opportunity when he signed with Nike for so much of his gear.   Nothing against signing with Nike for the clubs, shoes and whatever, but giving them the clothing line, too, turned him into their mannequin.  Nike dresses him like a second grader in a private school.  His golf clothes are billboards with swooshes.  He could be wearing clothes designed by people like Bill Johnson’s Transient label in D.C., or eco-friendly brands like Nau or Vital Hemptations. Small businesses of all kinds need help these days, and Tiger is just the guy to give it to them.  He can help take a small minority-owned solar energy company national.  He can sign with up-and-coming companies as sponsors, and not charge them a dime.   Instead, he can own equity in them.   This will have the added benefit of re-energizing the fan base, as pulling for Tiger will mean that you are pulling for a host of deserving upstart companies, too.  The hero’s journey requires allies along the way.

3.   Embrace your Cablinasianism.

Tiger has made a big deal about being what the brand calls ‘Cablinasian.’  Caucasian-Black-Indian-Asian.  Okay cool.  But the scripted Tiger only explores a very narrow strand of that, the strand that is privileged, plays a lot of golf, owns a yacht and apparently hits on anyone carrying a cocktail tray.   All brands can tap creative energy by exploring their multiculturalism.   Tiger’s ethnic makeup is one thing besides being a great golfer that can differentiate the brand, but he has to show the audience what Cablinasian means beyond the clever cosmetic of a made-up word.

4.   Be a supporting player for a change.

From the time he was born, Tiger Woods has seldom been in a scene in which he was not the star.  His father basically abandoned his other children to focus on young Eldrick.  By age two, Tiger was on national television hitting golf balls.  When he was a junior, he played with the grown-ups, when he was in college, he played with the pros, as a pro, he plays against the history of the game itself.   That is a pretty lonely path.  He needs to focus on sharing the narrative with others for awhile.  This does not mean going into hiding.  It means consciously taking a backseat in someone else’s scene.  Raise your children.  Work with your charities.  Find a protégé to coach.  In the Networked World, we are measured every bit as much by what we contribute to others as by what we amass for ourselves.  No brand is an island.

5.   Get better at something you’re bad at.

We all develop go-to moves.  If you are good at something, and receive a ton of approval and money for doing it, what is your motivation for doing anything else?   Here is your motivation:  In the Networked World, the narrative is not only multi-channel, it is multi-dimensional.  Relying on your go-to move has the effect of limiting your brand’s value, because it limits the dimensions of the brand that have the potential to improve and grow.  When you have won the Masters by 12 strokes and the U.S. Open by 15 and are probably The Greatest Golfer Who Ever Lived, golf is not an area of growth.  It is a flat line at best.  The growth areas are the dimensions of the brand that have not yet been explored.   For Tiger Woods, this could probably mean just about anything other than playing golf and getting girls’ numbers.  What does it mean to you?

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Pragmatic Chaos and the Winning Game

Friday, September 25th, 2009

NetFlix1In the Business section of its September 22 edition, the New York Times featured an article by Steve Lohr about a Netflix-sponsored contest with a $1 million prize for the best solution for helping the movie rental service improve its recommendation system (”If you like Movie X, we recommend Movies Y and Z…”)  The article included a number of insights into what we call a Winning Game:

1.  A winning game attracts winning players. By giving participants access to a very sophisticated data set, NetFlix’ contest was designed in a way that attracted highly-skilled programmers from around the worl.   The game itself serves as an organizing mechanism and a magnet for talent.

2.  A winning game invites collaboration.  The winning team, which called itself BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos (pragmatic chaos–a great description of improvisation!) was composed of scientists, statisticians and coders from half a dozen countries who joined forces in the course of the contest.   By collaborating, they all increased their chances of getting to the prize.  Collaboration begins with communication.  It leads to learning.  It results in transformation.

3.  The performance of the team is more important than the performance of any one player. See #2.

4.  Successful outcomes cannot be scripted ahead of time, they must be improvised.  No one member of the Pragmatic Chaos team had the roadmap to victory before the game began.  It was the collaboration, and their ability to improvise, that guided them to the winning solution.

5.  In a winning game, there are no losers. Only one team got the $1 million prize awarded by Netflix, but there were many winners.  If you improve your performance through participation, you win.  If you make a connection, add to your knowledge, or get a fresh perspective on a problem by virtue of playing the game, you win.  The second place team in the Netflix contest, Opera Solutions, a NY-based data analytics company, not only got a lot of coverage for its brand in the Times article, its CEO, Arnad Gupta, described the $1 million prize as “trivial.”  “We’ve already had a $10 million payoff internally from what we’ve learned,” he said.

6.  A winning game is designed to improve everyone’s performance. Viola Spolin, the godmother of modern improv, distinguished between competition and contest.  A competition, by her definition, is designed to separate winners and losers, and inevitably results in an ego-fueled quest for status, dominance, and control of the narrative.  Because walls go up and knowledge gets hoarded, not shared, competition limits opportunities to collaborate and learn.  A contest, Spolin explained by way of differentiating, is a way of competing with oneself, and of improving the performance of one’s team.  It results in what she called extension.  Participating in a winning game makes you and your team better players than you were before.

The Times article mentions several other games that, like the Netflix contest, are designed to yield productive outcomes for all their players, among them the X-Prize Foundation, and InnoCentive, an online forum for collaborative problem-solving and innovation that launched in 2001 and has attracted the attention and participation of big brands like Eli Lilly Co., Avery, and Procter & Gamble.

Footnote:  The article quotes Michael Schrage, a research fellow at MIT’s Sloan School of Business and one of the most brilliant analysts of business innovation I know.  Schrage and I have corresponded about GameChangers and improvisation in business.  He told me in one email that he was an “improv kid,” from the South Side of Chicago, the same neighborhood where Viola Spolin lived and worked.  When he was in high school he built props for Second City shows.  “I cried when Del died,” he wrote.  And if you truly know improvisation, you know what Schrage means by that.

For sure, the game is changing.  And improvisers, in all walks of work and life, are the ones who are changing it.

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The Productive Game

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

EH1

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. (more…)

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SXSW #5 – TWEETING STAR WARS

Sunday, March 22nd, 2009

It might be the geekiest thing I’ve ever done.  And it was one of the more enjoyable and instructive experiences I’ve ever had online.On Day Two of SXSW, Jay Bushman (@jaybushman), an interactive storytelling consultant and the founder of the experimental narrative site, www.loose-fish.com, approaches me and asks if I’ll play Obi-Wan Kenobi in a tweet-up of the Star Wars Death Star scene he and a group of his friends are staging the next day.  (Jay got the idea after an exchange of tweets with the actor and geek Wil Wheaton.)  This little ‘game’ takes place concurrently with the SXSW keynote speech by Nate Silver and while we are doing it, ‘#swstarwars’ becomes the second highest-trending subject on Twitter, ahead of Silver’s keynote, behind only ‘#sxsw’ itself.

sxstarwars1

While it proves nothing, nor does it take into account the person-to-person interactions of the hundreds of people who attended Silver’s keynote, it does demonstrate the power of active participation over passive observation.  People from all over the world begin playing along, in multiple languages.  After an hour and a half, we finish tweeting the Death Star scene.  The group following the thread picks up right where we leave off and begins tweeting scenes from The Empire Strikes Back.  This game continues for at least five more hours, demonstrating the power of a productive game to take on a life of its own.  This playful scenario conceived by Jay models how brands doing business in the Networked World have boundless opportunities for inviting participation in their narratives.  For me personally, as only a Twitter dabbler, it was an education in the tweetswarming around subject matter that can take a game from unknown to known around the world in an hour on its platform.

You can follow the entire thread (63 pages worth of tweets!) beginning here.  For the duration of the game of us who played a role in it replaced our Twitter profile pics with photos of the characters we were playing.

SWTweet1

What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-fish?
What all men’s minds and opinions but Loose-Fish?
What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish?
What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish?
What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish?
And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?

- Moby Dick, Herman Melville

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GameChanger of the Month – January 2009

Thursday, February 5th, 2009

PFNC1

PFNC stands for ‘Por Fin Nuestra Casa,’ Spanish for ‘Finally, a Home of Our Own.”  Founded in 2007 by Brian McCarthy, Pablo Nava and Mackenzie Bishop, the for-profit company converts used shipping containers into low-cost housing for poor families in Juarez Cuidad and other Mexican border communities.  Each PFNC unit costs around $10,000 US. (more…)

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