A pattern defines a game. And while this game is more sophisticated than flat-out spamming, and probably gets a higher click-though because of it, it’s worse in a way, because it wastes the time it takes to actually see that it’s spam. I saw the same kinds of ‘Follows’ Gardarian no doubt did. The fictional females in question had reasonably believable names. They were following more than a thousand people, so it wasn’t one of the totally ‘empty’ profiles that often characterize Twitter spams. But when Yolande and Aura both have the same profile photo, you know the ‘un-game’ is on.

The tweets from these fictions had a kind of personality to them, touchpoints to popular culture.

A quick look reveals the commercial objective of selling new technology. Not that there’s anything wrong with selling technology, but to do it using fictions like these only calls the authenticity of the merchandise itself into question. Can I count on the reliability of a product when I’ve been tricked into it by a bot? Spam by any other name is still spamming.

I’d dig deeper into this to find out what agency is behind this faux cleverness, but I’ve already spent enough of my time and intelligence on it, and can only echo David Gadarian. #pleasestop! Brands who play inauthentic games like these are wasting time–their possible customers’ and their own. Deceitful narratives always come with a cost, and the biggest problem is that the deceivers have no way of knowing or controlling what that cost is going to be.

In reality, it was no such thing.

In reality, as David Lee Roth describes in his 1998 autobiography Crazy from the Heat (first edition paperback selling  for $123.41 on Amazon?!), and Ira Glass documented in a story that first aired July 24, 2009, on This American Life, the fine print about the M&Ms was a game designed by Van Halen  to make sure every part of its contract was read and observed by the local promoter and crew, especially the details of stage and stadium safety. Early in the stadium concert era of the 1970s, there was a lot of variance in stadium electrical systems and construction, and the supergroup, who traveled with 9 semi-trailers of equipment, wanted to make certain their concerns about safety were addressed with the same focus and attention to detail that goes into separating the brown M&Ms from the rest.

In the words of Jeff Bartsch on Editmentor.com:

“If the band rolled up to the next venue and found brown M&Ms in the backstage candy bowl, they immediately demanded a full line-item review of the entire rider contract.  Eddie Van Halen specifically buried the M&M Clause, because concert promoters who don’t pay attention to one part of a contract usually don’t pay attention to the rest of it, and resulting technical issues could be disastrous, even deadly.”

In a 2010 Fast Company article, the Heath Bros. describe the brown M&Ms as a ‘canary in a coal mine.’ They interpret it as a kind of red flag used by David Lee Roth to catch careless oversights of details in their contract.

We see it as a game.

The brown M&Ms were the anomaly that defined a game, a game whose objective was to eliminate brown M&Ms, and whose result was safety.

Note that there’s a big difference between the objective of a game and the results achieved by playing it! For example, the objective of chess is to checkmate the opponent’s king. The results of playing it are strategies and counter-strategies, study, focus and the testing and extension of one’s abilities.

A canary in a coal mine doesn’t really define a game, because the results are, for the most part, binary. The canary lives, or the canary dies. The canary in the coal mine tests only one thing—the presence of lethal gas. No fresh dialogue results from it, no unexpected discoveries, the processes following either outcome have already been scripted. The Heaths’ analogy is weak, because a productive game like ‘Brown M&Ms’ has a nearly infinite number of possible outcomes.

Variations of this game can work for any team involved in QA, Safety, Compliance, Supply Chain, Facilities Management, Engineering, etc., where there’s little or no tolerance for error. It’s not a game you can play too often. Played too often, your ‘brown M&Ms’ will no longer be an anomaly, and the game will lose its bite.

The advantage of playing a game like this is that it brings every imaginable detail into play, not just those you and your legal team can stipulate in a contract or manual. When you call attention to the ‘brown M&Ms,’ you initiate a dialogue about the details of your working relationship that holds far more possibilities for problem-solving in real time than the necessary, but inevitably frozen-in-time terms of a contract.

I think there is a similar need for game designers in business today.

Networked structures and systems are as different from Industrial Age systems as a jellyfish is from a jetty. Networked companies must adapt. Continually differentiate their brands. Quickly recognize and act on opportunity in a constantly-morphing business environment.

Networked companies absorb and ride change like seagulls adjust to the wind.

Continuing our trip to the beach…a rigid, hierarchical approach to business has about as much chance in this environment as a sand castle does at high tide. The flow of change is that strong, that tidal. The new structures must be fluid, like the roiling environment they navigate every day. Fortunately for us human beings, we are 90% water. Fluidity is in our nature. It’s there. All we have to do is recognize and embrace it.

Games are among the most dynamic and productive structures that can be introduced to a system. They legitimize authority, lend themselves to accountability and encourage autonomy–energies that must work in concert for a networked organization to succeed.

At GameChangers, we design improvisation games to help clients achieve their business objectives. Our definition of a game is E-R-G-O. Environment, Roles, Guidelines and Objective(s). If you can define those, game on.

Ideas are cheap; execution is hard. Games require execution. An idea is like a game that’s never been played. We never consider an idea–for either ourselves or our clients–without looking at it through the ERGO lens. Whether an idea is any good or not is a a subjective discussion. The experience of playing a game, by contrast, can be analyzed objectively.

In a networked world, the power of an idea, its ultimate meaning, resides in ‘how much game’ it’s got. How much ‘play’ it generates. Games create focus. Elevate performance. Stir emotions. Reward innovation. They result in great stories. The value proposition is the size of Monstro the Whale.

(NEXT: POOR GAME, RICH GAME)

The game consists of nine dice, each die with six different icons, 54 in all. Players roll the dice, line up the nine icons they’ve rolled, and tell a story the icons inspire. There are of course all sorts of variations on this version of the game. When Reyne gave me the Story Cubes at lunch she rolled her dice and told a story that involved her background in improvisation and theater. When my turn came, we changed the rule to be: one person rolls the dice, we take turns putting them in order, and then take turns telling the story, with our turn telling the story coming on the dice the other person has placed in the queue.

A couple of days after Reyne gave the gift, I was with a friend who was working through some difficult career choices. I still had the Story Cubes in my bag. I handed them to the friend, and suggested he roll the dice and tell a story about the next year of his professional life. The story he told was amazing and inspiring. What was muddled in his mind became suddenly very clear. What was clear was not the story itself. What was clear is that no matter what kind of roll of the dice he gets, he will have ability to author his own story. And it can be a good one.

Games are a device for exploring narratives. Good games yield good stories like Ireland grows shamrocks. Thank you, Reyne!  Roll on!

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

Roles: Artists, Buyers, International Disaster Relief Players

Guidelines: Listed here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our methodology was to ask six exceptional communicators who work with all sizes of organizations in a lot of different verticals what metaphors they hear most often in their business scenes.  Those surveyed included a financial analyst, an academic, an artist, a social media director for a large tech company, a brand strategist and someone I’d describe as a ‘narratologist,’ who coaches organizations on storytelling. We limited the focus of the survey to internal communication for two reasons:

1) External communication like PR, advertising and social media, is how companies represent themselves to the rest of the world.  In this context, metaphors are frequently used as a means of persuasion, and are often more about what a company or brand wants to happen than what is actually happening. Because these metaphors serve a different purpose and have a different trajectory, they have to be analyzed separately.

2) Internal communication, by comparison, describes a company’s process, environment and character.  The metaphors used internally reflect reality, because they are used to initiate or define action.  For this reason they often represent an underlying ethos, and describe how the people in an organization go about their business.

A few of the respondents’ observations:

“Maybe this would change with a few female managers, but most men I work with are all about ‘playing offense’, ‘launching a counterattack’, ‘leading from the front’,  and ‘winning the battle but losing the war’.”

“Way heavier on war references or warlike verbs:  Insert, manage, acquire, degrade, demand, battle, launch, attack, defend…”

“I also wonder as more women get into biz if the primary metaphors change.  Meaning, less sports and war, more family and home metaphors?  Especially if this whole social thing works out? (tongue firmly in cheek)”

“Think of the top headlines, of any ‘this product is killing this product’, ‘death of X’, etc.”

“Sports also present…anything that’s zero sum and can be ‘won’ lends itself.”

“I also hear (more recently) about scientific references like ‘if you observe it, you change it’.”

‘I do hear a bit about chess and board games, typically in terms of ‘looking at the whole board’, ’sacrificing your queen’, and ‘thinking through the endgame’.

The business opportunity is clear.  Over two-thirds of all business communication relies on only two metaphors—war and sports.  Not only have we worn them out, they do not address the voracious appetite of a networked business environment for fresh narratives and new ways of relating to the world. To do that, we need fresh metaphors.  They are out there in the world, and in abundance.  Games are beginning to have their day.  And there have always been organizations that see themselves as Family.  The most upside, I believe, lies in the ‘Other’ category.  Big, expressive, thematically rich subjects—music and dance, cooking, biology, quantum mechanics, farming, to name a few—can invigorate your organizational vocabulary.  They help transform your narrative from the mundane and predictable to the artful and unexpected.  And that’s what you want in a story, any story.  So start planting, and see what grows!

(A coda to this post in light of what happened yesterday in Arizona, when a mentally disturbed gunman killed six people during his attempt to assassinate Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords: The metaphors of war—and the violence they glorify—have polarized the U.S. politically to a dangerous degree. Yesterday’s events add a raw and desperate urgency to the quest for new ways of seeing and engaging with one another. The metaphors of war attract fear-driven fringe characters looking for absolutes, either-ors, and final solutions, to the problems confronting us. To these people, nothing says final like the end of a gun barrel. The narratives of war trample on the tender shoots of new ideas, and marginalize people participating in the new narratives, people like Congresswoman Giffords, who champion peaceful co-existence, believe in yes-and, and who understand that yesterday’s solutions don’t work in today’s world.)

He’s an observant man, so the observations come tumbling out of him in a 17-minute torrent, from why coffee shops were important to the Enlightenment, to the debunking of ‘Eureka’ moments.  If you want the full effect, step into the Johnson waterfall and view the video.

If you’re looking for a summing up, well, there’s a one-word answer to the question, ‘Where do good ideas come from?’ The answer is ‘Improvisation.’  Good ideas come from improvisation.  Check this out:

Johnson says, “Don’t protect ideas, share them.” This is precisely the concept behind of yes-anding.  Instead of scripting, blocking, denying, judging or yes-butting–all anathema to innovation–add to the ideas of others.  Walt Disney used to call this “plussing,” a phrase that has been adopted by Pixar Animation Studios.  In doing so, Pixar yes-anded Disney.  That’s how it works.  Ideas evolve.  And when you yes-and by sharing, they evolve faster and more purposefully than if you don’t.

Johnson says, “Ideas are a network.” This equates to the Group Mind of improvisation, where ideas belong not to any one individual, but to the group, and the scene.  Ideas are not isolated phenemona.  They always exist in relationship to other ideas, and other people.  An apple falling on Newton’s head was not his idea.  It was a connection between a number of ideas that described the physical world at that time.  Johnson says, “Chance favors the connected mind.”  He might just as well have said, “Chance favors improvisers.”  It was because he was able to connect it to other phenomena that the chance occurrence of an apple falling on his head became meaningful to Newton.  This is no different than what a good improviser does in a scene.  He or she turns chance into meaning by making connections.  That’s the work.  It’s not easy.  It is a practice that takes study, discipline and time.

Johnson says, “Ideas are a slow hunch.” This equates to the patience some of the best improvisation groups have for finding the game in a scene. My favorite example of this from improv theater is the L.A.-based group, Dasariski.  Those guys take their time about finding the game, this discovery arises organically–though quite predictably–from conversations, and it is a beautiful thing to see.  Good ideas are the equivalent of productive games in improvisation.  They often arise from anomalies or even mistakes.  They’re generative, that is, they led to other ideas.  Even though it makes for better anecdotes, ideas are not like a single frame from a movie, a frozen image—apple hits man on head!—they are montages of images, and jumps back and forth in time.  Ideas are narrative.

Johnson says, “Ideas are a product of environment.” Yes and this, too, is one of the most fundamental ideas of improvisation:  Environment fuels performance.  This is why Belina Raffy conducts improvisation classes in Europe that are based on Biomimicry, where performers mirror biology to help their innovation process.  Today, thanks to our connection with Belina (ideas are a network, remember?) we are beginning to play with biomimicry at GameChangers.   As Viola Spolin said, “Act on environment and enviroinment will act on you.”

In tangling with a subject that’s loco, one runs the risk of going loco oneself. It’s probably why I’ve been struggling with this post, to the point of being driven crazy by it, for a week. Here we go, this time for sure, hoping that some semblance of sanity awaits you and me on the other side of the exercise.

The ‘Wall Street Game’ is destroying the economy. The end? Okay, on the chance that it’s not, that there’s still hope for dealing successfully with the godzillagram knocking on our door, let’s, just for the torture of it, keep going…

The game played by Goldman Sachs and all the predatory satellites in its system goes beyond crooked. It’s criminal. And worse than criminal, it is a crime that can’t be prosecuted. Here’s why: The game has been designed so that it cannot be played by human beings. It can only be played by programs. In milliseconds-long synapses of electrons that can be parsed only by machines, programs perpetrate crimes with no witnesses, no fingerprints, no conscience, no heart. The humanity, and along with it, the culpability, has been bred out of these programs. They are pure, unassailable, law-unto-themselves, math. Data for data’s sake. Programs designed to interact with other programs without any of the patience, tolerance or thought that will give a human being pause.

The originators of these programs are as guilty of their crimes as Smith & Wesson are of the next murder committed with one of their handguns, which is to say they cannot be held accountable. “That’s just the way the game is played,” say the originators. Exactly. This does not mean, however, that the way the game is played is any good, or helpful to the 95% of U.S. households that, together, control as much wealth as the top 1% do. What the programmers call ‘innocence,’ and ‘what no one could have anticipated,’ and ‘God’s work,’ is actually ignorance by design. What comes across as confidence is actually just a con. On Wall Street, nobody really knows anything. The machines are in control. So don’t bother asking.

Here is a good explanation by Ellen Brown of how the Wall Street game is rigged. Brown, author of Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System and How We Can Break Free, does an excellent job of unmasking the mechanics of the game that swings advantage toward the casin–errr–banks. She points a finger in particular at High Frequency Trading (HFT) software (I didn’t know its code originated with the Hollywood Stock Exchange of the dotcom era. Interesting.) that gives Wall Street’s traders the ability to make money in thousandths of a second with programmed trading.

I call this game ‘Global Owning without Local Consent.’ Go Loco, for short. It’s just that crazy.

Because it relentlessly seeks victims to separate from their money like hustlers of a quantum three-card monte game, Go Loco systematically destroys the potential of money to be productive. Money is too busy changing hands and getting hustled to be put to work any other way. In this game, money talks only to itself, like a patient in an asylum.

We see the outcomes of this insanity all around: Foreclosures on every block; constant and permanent erosion in the jobs market; crippling household and national debt; crumbling infrastructure; broke education systems; a dispirited class of permanently unemployed. The game saps entrepreneurship of its passion by punishing risk-taking. It smothers human creativity with machine rationality. Because it is based on consumption, it regards sustainability as an enemy. Because it is pure data, it has no resonance as a narrative. No soul. It is a cousin to the game played by people who sit under a mountain in Utah and fly drones that blow up villages halfway around the world. Hey, it’s all just a game, right? Yes, it is. A terrible, horrible, no good, very bad one.

At GameChangers, we define a game as consisting of Rules, Roles, Environment and Objective(s). Here’s a breakdown of the Go Loco game in terms of these four elements:

Terrible Rules: The rules of a productive game are known by all its players. This is not the case with Go Loco. Far from it. Its rules are so opaque and complex that no one holds an entire playbook. Its most significant rules are programmed like a virus (with no known antidote) to infect every significant, or anomalous, movement of money across the networks that carry financial data. The rules do not determine or care where the money is going, any more than a rattlesnake cares where a mouse is taking a kernel of corn. They are designed only to sense movement like the snake senses the mouse, then, like the snake, strike with blinding speed. The rules are machine-enabled executions of that old business bromide, “Follow the money.” With the added instruction: “And when you catch the money in an unlit alley, jack it and get some.”

Horrible Environment: Viola Spolin, the godmother of modern improvisation, said, “Act on environment, and environment will act on you.” Because the environment for the Go Loco game is ‘inside machines,’ those who ‘act on’ the game naturally begin behaving like machines themselves. The tasteless offices in which they work, the sameness banality of their attire, their fear of creative disruption, and their relentless calculating for advantage, all reflect the electronic latticework across which these players crawl like spiders on crack. Because players’ insides have a machined sameness to them, extra emphasis is placed on surface labeling, on cosmetics and appearance. How you appear becomes much more important than how you actually are, because how you actually are is so…unremarkable. All you talk about is money. Give a man a billion dollars and try talking to him about anything but the billion dollars. It can’t be done.

No Good Roles: Wall Street’s game is to business what pornography is to sex. Don’t for a second believe it has anything to do with love, or with having a relationship. It’s all about volume, baby. It’s as real as reality TV. What do we have that we can sell? How many units can we move? When the autistic boy who senses the world at different frequencies than you and me puts his hands to a machine running a program playing the game, the voice he hears will be saying, “Faster, pussycat, kill, kill!” Is it pure coincidence that Lawrence Fishburne’s daughter sold herself to the Matrix? Or did she hear the voice, too, and simply obey its instructions?

Very Bad Objectives: In improvisation, a game’s objectives are win/win. All the players benefit from the communication, learning, and transformation that result from playing. The Go Loco game is, by contrast, win/lose. Bigtime.

A lot of people will tell you winning and losing is inherent in the nature of trading, someone wins and someone loses, and the objective is to win more than you lose, and that this dynamic drives markets. There are two problems with excusing the Go Loco game for this reason: 1) It ignores the power of collaboration, which is where most of the growth potential exists in the networked business environment; and 2) in this game, the winners win so much (when’s the last time you made $28,000 in milliseconds? For doing nothing?) and the losers lose so much, the game produces extreme cycles of bubble-and-burst, of richer-and-poorer, that only promise to get more extreme, because the more the Go Loco programs eat, the hungrier they get. It is a zero sum game they play, and they will play it until the sum of all accounts not controlled by the programs is zero.

Now what? The big problem we have now is that in one breath we can find agreement that the current game is rotten, in the next breath we will be arguing over what to do about it, and as long as we’re arguing, the rottenness persists. The way to break through this dilemma is to quit worrying about what the new game should be and focus on changing the old one. One way to begin changing the old game is by changing the conversations we have:

From being about money, to being about how money is put to work.
From consumption to sustainability.
From fast food (or fast anything) to local food (or local anything).
From destination to journey.
From connecting the dots to connecting.
From owning the story to sharing the story.
From programmed to human.

Make moves that programs cannot see, with a gait that describes the glorious, inchoate lurching of love! Trust your intuition! Express what’s in your heart instead of your head for a change. Howl with your dog! Prove that it is we, and our beautiful gift of a planet, and not the programs, who are truly alive! Change the game!

A friend of ours who works in sales gets honored often as a leading performer at his company, a large and established organization which is one of the 87 current members of the S&P 500 that have been members since its inception in 1957. The honoring happens at lavish banquets attended by the company’s top managers and featuring a pricey speaker.

Understand that our friend is a madman, who rides his three-wheeled Piaggio motorcycle with the governor of the state where he lives, has 28 tattoos— including one on his (hairy) chest of a man pushing a lawnmower, next to which he shaves a smooth swatch as if the tattooed lawnmower has mowed his chest; and as a hobby he spent a couple of years performing standup comedy as a Catholic priest (he’s Jewish).  None of the tattoos is visible outside our friend’s business suit. Nobody at his company knows he does stand-up under a stage name while wearing a Roman collar.   He plays the company game, but it is far from the only game he plays.

Our friend told us that the speaker at a recent banquet where he was honored as his division’s Salesperson of the Year gave a speech about ‘Finishing First.’ About how nothing else would do. About how a person has a choice between finishing first and being a loser. How in sales, there is no prize for second place, first place is the only place that matters. You either make the sale or you don’t.

Our friend approached the speaker after his speech and struck up a conversation that went like this.

FRIEND: Nice speech.
SPEAKER: Thank you.
FRIEND: What’d you get for it? Forty thousand dollars?  Am I close?
SPEAKER: Uh..that’s in the ballpark.
FRIEND: You know, our first choice for a speaker was Colin Powell, but he wanted two-hundred thousand dollars and we couldn’t afford it.  So it looks like finishing second worked out pretty well for you, didn’t it?

“When I saw the look on his face I felt bad for saying it,” says our friend. “But I couldn’t resist.  It was such an obviously lame premise.  There are all kinds of situations where finishing first has nothing to do with your success.”

So you’re waiting in line for the iPhone or the Twilight.  Cool.  It’s a happening.  A social event.  Remember, though, that meaningful transactions happen in the line, with other people, not at the end of it, with an apparatus or an apparition.

Enjoy the ride and you won’t ever have to worry about whether you’ll be the first to arrive.

Weinstein’s video demonstrates brilliantly how our perceptions shape our opinions.  That’s the obvious learning.

There are other, subtler ideas expressed in this video, too, which is why I really dig it.  It has lots of subtext:

The absence of knowledge makes perceptions more malleable. Because Weinstein is unknown to his subjects, slight adjustments in his appearance seem to cause wild fluctuations in perceptions (the edits themselves also shape perception, but I’ll comment only with subjects’ behavior here).  Anyone or any brand that seeks to limit knowledge?  This is why.  Manipulation of perceptions.  In a business environment where knowledge is so easily shared and transferred, limiting knowledge in order to manipulate perceptions is not good business.

Consistent character encourages learning. Weinstein’s character, a slightly bemused, inquisitive observer of human nature, seems consistent throughout.  As a storyteller, he uses this truth to get honest reactions from his subjects—that is, because he’s consistently in character, we can be pretty sure the subjects’ reactions are their own, and not something he has manipulated them into doing   Imagine if, instead, he’d played different characters in the interviews—aggressive, stupid, coy, flirty—we would not have been half as interested in or trusting of what his subjects had to say.  He and we would not have learned half as much.

Interrogation is not dialogue. The questions all go one way.  Weinstein does this to control the narrative and make a point.  Generally, however, dialogue is much more productive than interrogation.

This is what a lot of market research looks like. Like market research, Weinstein’s film is a series of snapshots.  It is an interrogation of the audience, not a dialogue.  Because of the way the interviews are conducted, the audience’s multi-faceted responses are nearly all flawed.  It doesn’t matter how much data you have if its facets are flawed and unrelated.  Many facets do not a diamond make. It is the interrelationship of the facets, their connection to one another, that illuminates the stone.

Admit your ignorance. Nearly everyone in the video is willing to guess about Weinstein’s identity, and in doing so they accept a ‘rule of the game’ that underscores their ignorance.  This is a fine storytelling device for Weinstein’s video, but it’s a toxic game in business.  For some managers, however, this is THE  game.  A conversation consists of them waiting for a ‘gotcha’ moment, when they can prove you wrong, ignorant, or both.  People pretending to know what they’re talking about are just as much to blame for this game as those who expose them.   Beware of games designed to show up anyone’s ignorance!  Admitting your ignorance is a first step toward learning.  Guessing, or faking knowledge, is not.  Ultimately, Weinstein’s video delivers the goods in the form of questions answered, but not before he demonstrates just how elusive the goods can be.