Specific notes:

- After cautioning the audience at the beginning of the presentation about long monologues as a means of communicating, I wrapped up the presentation with a long monologue.

- Our direction was soft on a couple of the exercises. This resulted in a kind of sponginess in the middle of the two-hour session, with drawn-out explanations by Antonio and me, less focus by the teams, and a rushed ‘third act’ in the last 15 mins.

- As any improviser can tell you, you have to work on pieces of the process at a time. You cannot drop everything you know on your audience all at once. In my explanation of what we call ‘the orchestral model’ of business communication, and the concept we call ‘quantum narrative,’ I got into more detail than the audience was able to absorb in such a short window. ‘Too clever by half,”as they say in Blighty. ‘Ten pounds of potatoes in a five pound bag,” as they say in Boise.

- The teamwork that usually happens during our workshops was not so much apparent in this one. Things stayed more individualized, and less knit-together than we would like.

- The tempo at which we conducted the session was inconsistent. If I had been conducting a piece of music, it would have been in about 20 different time signatures, with me conducting at least part of the performance with my back to the orchestra. Missing cues. Dynamics roller-coastery instead of scenic.

These notes are related to our business objective for the workshop, which was to explain GameChangers and give attendees a sampling of what we do with our clients. At achieving this objective, we give ourselves a 50%. We were only about half as effective as we believe we’re capable of being.

So why are we not upset?

Two reasons: One is that because our process lets us see so clearly where the issues are, we have already taken steps to remedy them before the next open workshop.

The other, bigger, reason is that the outcomes of the session have been extraordinary, better than the outcomes of many workshops where our performance was actually  much better than it was Tuesday. A lot of credit for this goes to the people who were in attendance. One of the points we make in these introductions to GameChangers is to distinguish between objectives of the game, and the outcomes of the game, and wow, has that been our experience since Tuesday.

These are some of the outcomes:

- Our friend Ron Finley, the ‘renegade urban gardener’ connected with our friends Jenna and Adam from TakePart, who were in attendance. TakePart is the digital division of Participant Media. They are going to do a story about Ron.

- Erin Reilly, the creative director of USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, spoke yesterday to her faculty committee about having us do a one-day workshop there in March.

- Marcy and Strath Hamilton of Tri-Coast Studios, which is producing a lot of e-books, met a Ruby on  Rails coder named Patrick Maddox, who was in attendance Tuesday.  They’ve been looking for a coder. Now they’re talking to Patrick.

- T.H. Culhane and David Groder, who are working on a robotics education program funded by the U.S. Naval Research Dept., are making a presentation today (Wednesday) at Washington High School in Los Angeles, and are being joined by Ron Finley, who is a Washington High graduate. This is happening as a result of them connecting on Tuesday night.

- T.H. and Groder will soon get introduced by GameChangers associate Jamal Williams, who was in town from D.C. for the Tuesday workshop, to Nii Simmonds, the ‘Nubian Cheetah,’ a Ghanian-born D.C. resident and former investment banker who funds a program called Afrobotics, a robotics competition for African schoolchildren.

- Kevin Wall, who is producing the opening ceremonies and concert for the 2014 World Cup in Rio, was in attendance. Kevin learned for the first time that Fernando Godoy, who used to be an intern in at one of Kevin’s companies, is today a successful internet entrepreneur in Sao Paulo and is a partner in Spirit of Football 2014. Kevin and Fernando are going to meet the next time Kevin is in Brazil.

- Tri-Coast Productions and GameChangers are meeting this coming Monday to discuss two projects–a GameChangers ebook and a video series that would be produced and performed by people from our network of world-class improvisers.

- Andy Sternberg has since Tuesday introduced us to two friends of his whom he believes will be interested in our work.

- We were able to continue a conversation with Nicholle McClelland Betelier, a marketing officer from IdeaLab, that began at a yoga retreat in December.

- A crypto-hipster named Som showed up uninivited, and asked some of the best questions and offered some of the most thoughtful comments of the evening. Thank you, Som, whoever and wherever you are! Please stay in touch!

- My favorite outcome of the evening came about thanks to a ‘gift’ from David Groder. At the very end of the session, after my long-winded closing monologue, Groder asked if we could go around the room and have everyone introduce themselves. All 25 people introduced themselves and described the work they’re doing. It was really remarkable, not only because it completely subverted the normal order of things—introductions at the end instead of the beginning!—but also because the people in attendance are doing brilliant things in the world. Attendees are working in robotics, social media, community development, urban gardening, fashion, cause-related marketing, transmedia storytelling, architecture, criminal law, venture capital, entertainment, academia, e-books, tech, watercraft stabilization, app development, etc. etc. etc. Introductions at the end became a very enjoyable kind of reveal. Almost everyone stayed and talked for half-an-hour or more after the session, and I believe most of that conversation would not have happened if not for David’s gift to the scene.

Never get objectives confused with outcomes. Objectives are what we use to assess and improve our performance. Outcomes happen as a result of having performed. Objectives are finite. Outcomes are unlimited. Objectives create focus. Outcomes generate value.

Post-event conversations were the most productive part of the evening

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Nobody, including Young Dillon, had to ask what this meant.

The old role model of leadership was about control.  How do I get what I want when I want it?

Leadership in a networked world is not nearly as much about control as it is about adaptability. How does a team get the resources it needs to solve the problem?

Now—-

Just because leadership is highly adaptive doesn’t mean it is without structure. In fact, it’s the opposite: Because what it means to lead can change from scene to scene, it  calls for even more structure and definition than the old models did, when one org chart covered every leadership scenario.

We call our role model the 3A Role Model. Here’s why: There are three A’s to every role: Accountability, Autonomy, and Authority. When the 3 A’s are clearly defined and understood by all the players in a scene, and when they are complementary between players, leaders will emerge organically and authentically from that team and its scene.

When the 3 A’s are muddled, overlapping or disputed, leadership can get territorial and ’status-y.’ When this happens, leadership  arises from something that’s not part of the scene—qualifiers like job titles, seniority, family ties, company politics, intimidation, scapegoating, etc.—all of which are unrelated to the problem to be solved in the scene and therefore offer only an illusion of leadership, not the real deal.

The 3A Role Model:

Accountability. We are Accountable to our team, and to the ‘game’ of solving the problem at hand. We are also Accountable to our company, to the agreement that we are engaged (one hopes) in generating something worthwhile in the world, and in caring for families, loved ones, communities, and ourselves. These are the most important aspects of Accountability, because they are intrinsic to teams and individuals. Beyond that, Accountability does, in fact, mean organizational responsibility–who reports to whom? This structure is extrinsic, though, and does not guarantee a good flow of communication. In fact, if leadership is extrinsic, scenes often produce a one-way flow of communication, which is a big no-no. Good leaders make it clear they are every bit as Accountable to their team as their team is to them. And so it flows…

Autonomy. If Accountability is the root system of an organization, nourishing and sustaining it from within, Autonomy is the leaf system, which has the potential to energize and give it life by drawing in outside resources and opportunities.  Autonomy means the freedom to decide and act on one’s own, without any other player’s approval or oversight. Nobody tells a leaf which way to turn! A company’s spirit of entrepreneurship and ability to innovate are liberated by Autonomy. Its ability to turn these energies into growth rests with Accountability and….

Authority. Authority—-which stems from a 13th-Century Old French word, autorite, meaning “a book or quotation that settles an argument”—–is the ability to empower and disempower. It governs the other two A’s. To extend the permaculture metaphor, this is the planter or designer who decides what grows where. In the parlance of IT departments and gamers (and IT departments), this is ‘god’ or ’superpower’ status.’ This ‘A’ regulates the other two ‘A’s’, by deciding, for instance, the makeup of a team. Authority also means Authorship—of strategies, plans, vision, letters to employees, and the game elements of Environment, Roles, Guidelines and Objectives. It can also mean Authorization and Authentication: Who has access to accounts? Lists? Records and reports? Facilities? Fellow employees? Who can call a meeting? End a meeting? Okay a budget?

Ultimately, leadership is the art of role-modeling. When a team’s roles are modeled artfully, its leaders will emerge when and where they are needed.

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.

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

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

I could give you a million reasons why Laurie Reuttimann is a gamechanger, I’ll give you one. She understands the difference between business objectives and business outcomes. So often, we muddle the two, and think they are the same thing. They are not.

Laurie’s objective with ‘The Cynical Girl game’ is to,”build a portfolio career. You should build one, too,” she writes in her last Punk Rock HR post.

The outcomes will be things like people changing their own games, finding work, passing her links around, friending and following her online, sharing an occasional smile, and using our newfound cynical outlooks to not automatically buy into the bullshit, especially our own.

Objectives are singular. Outcomes are infinite. Focus on objectives to realize outcomes.

Or don’t. The Cynical Girl doesn’t give a damn. She’s too busy babysitting cats to babysit you.

Rome and his radio production team recently played a 20-show game they dubbed “The Rex Game.’ One of his producers noticed one day that they’d had someone named Rex on three consecutive shows. An improviser, seeing such a pattern, has one response: Do more! That’s what Rome and Team did, they kept interviewing Rex’s.

For 20 consecutive shows, they interviewed someone named Rex. Imagine how much bullshit a game like this cuts through in production meetings. How it swept subjectivity, judging, opinionating, credit-claiming and ego out of the room like the Red Sox do the Yankees at Fenway. “We have a guest.” “Who?” “Rex.” “Book it.”

How easy is that? compared to, let’s say…

“We have a guest.” “Who.” “A soccer player. She’s interesting.” “How interesting?” “Real interesting.” “To you she’s interesting because she’s hot. But this is radio. Does she have a take?.”  “She has a take.” “What kind of a take?” “A good take.” “How good?” Etc. etc. etc.

Rome summed up the benefits of the Rex Game like this: “You don’t get to 20 Rexes without stretching a little bit.”

Exactly. Extension is what you want out of a game. Doing something you’ve never done before in order to get where you’ve never gone before. That’s what improvisation is all about.

Interestingly, when Rome got requests from callers and his producers for him to play another similar game, say a Derek Game, Rome riffed on it for a bit, “Derek Jeter, Derek Harper, Derek Coleman, Derek and the Dominoes…” and then quickly decided against it. This is an excellent example of a clean edit, something else Rome does exceptionally well. His transitions are clear. He never meanders.

UPDATE: Though Rome decided against the Derek Game, he and his team are playing a Kyle Game, interviewing someone named Kyle for as many days in a row as they can. Just more proof of how much game the Rome team has. As the great improviser, Craig Cackowski, says, “Don’t look for the game. Look for a game.”

The Jungle is full of game  You can always let go of one vine and grab another. Just make sure you have a take when you do, because the Jungle can be a cruel place when you don’t.

República Popular do Corinthians

Our friends at Flex Interativa in Brazil have launched República Popular do Corinthians. This is a beautiful game, as Brazilians call their beloved sport of football. It is a professional sports team’s fan site (Corinthians is the most successful and popular football club in Brazil) designed as a government, with elections, a constitution, currency and an architecture that seamlessly connects fans (citizens) and Corinthians F.C. (government).

The game will produce all kinds of positive outcomes like brand loyalty, merchandise and ticket sales, cross-platform connectivity, enthusiasm, dialogue, identity, community development, and unplanned business opportunities. In a networked world, the audience and brand co-create brand narratives, and a game structure like this is a great environment for that co-creation.

How to get elected to the Corinthians Congress

Ole! Ole! Ole! for Fernando Godoy and Flex Interativa. Play on!

Actually, Jonathan did the presentation. He told all the stories. I designed a game that engaged the audience with the material in a way that it would not have if Jonathan had used the standard format of ‘45 minute speech + 15 minute Q&A.’

Jonathan Franklin in conversation with Disney Animation

The game was called ‘15 Themes in 45 Minutes’. Here’s how it went:

I dumped images from the Chilean Miners’ rescue that we have permission to use (abt 90 of them) into Prezi.

Then I arranged the images by Theme. We settled on a number of themes, 15, that divided evenly into 60, because that would give structure to the hour.  (10 would have worked just as well, or 12) The Themes were ideas like, ‘Extreme Conditions,’ ‘Top Drill,’ and ‘Flexible Vision’  which I know, from knowing him and reading his  book, Jonathan can illuminate with great story after great story.

Then I added animation to the images, which is super easy to do on Prezi and showed some respect for the animators in the Disney audience. A presentation with no movement is an insult to animators.

So now we had three of the four elements of what we call the ‘ERGO’ structure for a game: Environment (Disney Animation Theater, Prezi); Roles (Storyteller, Audience, Prompter); and Objective (explore 15 themes). We still needed the ‘G’ in ERGO: Guidelines. I gave the game three:

1) Audience member can at any time request a description of an image (by calling “Caption”)

2) Audience member can, at any time ask a question (by calling “Question”)

3)  Audience member can, at any time, request a new Theme (indicated by calling “Scene”)

For most audiences, I would have added another guideline or two, to encourage editing by everyone in the Audience, not just a few people, but because these were professional storytellers, there was no need to do this.

It was an excellent experience for all of us. The game took 55 minutes to play, which left 5 minutes for a few follow-up questions.  Our time together had a much better flow, it was more of a conversation with the Audience, than if everyone had tried to save their question for a 15 min. Q&A at the end.

In exploring the 15 Themes, the conversation danced through subjects like President (of Chile) Pinera’s leadership strategy, NASA technology, the physics of hard rock drilling, Chilean culture, post-traumatic stress psychology, blow-up dolls, chocolate, tactical news leaking, the saving grace of humor, the fickle nature of celebrity and similar stories of people  trapped underground or underwater (Ace in the Hole, Jessica McClure, the Soviet Sub,  Kursk). The ideas for what to talk about belonged as much to the Audience as to Jonathan. And even though we were free to explore in all directions, we did it within the structure of the game.  We never lost track of where we were because we always knew what Theme we were in.

I made a couple of adjustments to the game while we were playing it. Initially the role of Prompter (mine) was only to explain the game structure to the audience and click through the Prezi images. Once or twice, when I felt the editing by the audience was lagging relative to the time we had left, I’d call ‘Scene’ myself.

Jonathan, his wife, and their six daughters, are in Southern California for two weeks, courtesy of Oakley, who is returning the favor Jonathan did for them when (without any kind of quid pro quo) he got Oakley to design and donate the sunglasses for Los 33 to wear and protect their eyes from the severe reaction they’d have to daylight when they were freed from mine last October.

Five of the Franklin girls–Fancisca, Kimberly, Amy, Susan and Maciel–accompanied Jonathan to Disney. Afterward, the director, John Musker (”Little Mermaid,” “Aladdin,” “Princess and the Frog”), along with Howard Green, Stephanie Morse and Kelsi Taglang of Disney, treated us to lunch in the ABC commissary and a tour of the Disney Animation studio. John drew little sketches of characters from his films for each of the girls.

A good game was had by all.

Legendary Disney Animation director John Musker draws for the Franklin girls

I love this story because it shows how what stifles our ability to solve a problem is less often about the nature or scope of the problem than it is about the quality of the problem-solving process.

Too often, we invest in poor communication practices and processes, characterized by unproductive games like ‘Eight Axes, One Budget,’ that no one enjoys playing, never mind that they are not designed to solve our particular problem in the first place. I call these poor games. ‘Poor’ because they don’t have much ‘play’ in them, either in the sense that they are a happy experience, or that they are flexible. No, they’re grim and rigid, like the dead. Their ROI is poor because the probability of getting to a solution quickly is low. Because they frequently lack focus and energy, they waste time.

There are thousands of characteristics of poor games, and thousands of poor games played in business every second of every working day. ‘Reading Your PowerPoint Deck to Your Audience’ is a poor game. ‘Kissing Ass’ is almost always a poor game. The ‘Eight Axes, One Budget’ game Barb Groth walked into was a poor game. She saw it, and suggested an adjustment. That’s what gamechangers do.

All it took for her to transform the game was changing its objective–from ‘Cut $20K’ to ‘Save $20K.’ One word. A tiny shift in perspective on the problem. Suddenly, the opinionating, negotiating, status-seeking, bragging, positioning, arguing, joking, backstabbing, politicking, gossiping and justifying that plague poor games, were not getting in the way of solving the problem. The new game got played, the problem solved, in the time it takes to Rochambeau.

Barb’s gamechange freed time that could be better invested in activities with more business upside, or in personal time. Any game that lets you swap an hour of arguing about whose budget gets cut for an hour playing with your kids or helping them with their homework?  That’s a rich game.

Here’s the Truth in this scene: With the coming of the cloud, there’s going to be so much new information coming online all the time that the invitation is to stay comfortably lost in it all, rambling on about our own stuff without really listening. Ever. We’re full of it. Just like these guys. Truth.

So what are we listening for?  For the game we can play together. From a productive game will come a narrative that makes sense of it all. But only after the the game has been played.

Later, when people ask, we can look back and say, “That was our strategy.”

Meanwhile, I sort of agree with the caption on the video: ‘The best strategy is one you don’t understand.’ Funny. True.