The extraordinary improviser, Paul Vaillancourt, gave me a list of sayings that have been compiled and passed around the improv theater community over the years. The great teachers Mick Napier and Del Close get some of the credit, as do Viola “The Godmother” Spolin and ImprovWorks’ Sue “Pond” Walden, though the exact origins of most of these sayings would be pretty hard to trace. What’s clear to anyone who explores improvisation is that the the meaning behind the sayings originates from the same place that accounts for such profound ideas as jazz, the Dao De Jing, Johnny Appleseed and Pixar Animation.  Here is the fifth in a series

Play against cliches. First, play with the cliches of your business.  You all know what they are.  Name them.  Call them out.  Have some fun with them.   And then go against them.  There is a lot of movement in playing against cliches.  Just doing this one thing can transform your scene into something delightful.

Think of the environment as a six-sided sphere, of which the audience is a part. What a brilliant way to determine your marcomm budget!  It’s 1/6 of your total operating budget.  Done.  Next.

The environment also has an outside and an inside. This is a good way of thinking about how your brand’s environment travels with the communication that represents it in the networked world.  Think of your network as a place.  What is that place like?  Who is walking the halls?  How is it lit?  What kind of art hangs in its offices?  What does it sound like?  All these concepts should be consistent and play off one another in virtual space and in reality. A friendly atmosphere in the office extends to the social graph.  Artfulness will be apparent in reality and in virtual space.  Clutter is as clutter does.  Etc. etc.

You don’t have to try to be funny, laughter will happen just by being human.  Being human is funny enough. A common misconception we battle all the time at GameChangers is that improvisation is all about being funny.  So not true!  Improvisation is about communication, learning, and transformation.  It is only by a quirk of genetic fate—Viola Spolin’s son, Paul Sills, brought all the games Viola had conceived with him when he and Bernie Sahlins co-founded Second City—that we in the U.S. associate improvisation so strongly with comedy.  Comedy is just a sliver of the output improvisation is capabl of generating.   It’s like saying all ice cream Praline Pecan.  Taint so.

Playful, direct, co-developed ideas, informations, and dreams will always be far hipper than one person’s alone. This is just a basic human algorithm.  The best ideas of eight people will always be better than the best ideas of one person.  Spare us your genius, and bring us something else.  Your work ethic.  Your brain.  Your smile.  Your song.  Your sense of smell.  Your experience.  But spare us your genius.  Because, you know…our stuff will always be far hipper than yours alone ; )

Three weeks ago, I contact a friend, Kurt Kochman, who used to work at Oakley (he’s now the Web Customer Experience Manager for Skechers) who puts me in touch with an executive at Oakley, who puts me in touch with a PR person from Oakley named Diane, who puts me in touch with journalist in Chile named Jonathan Franklin, who Diane says, “Knows the story better than we do.” Hmm. A non-Oakley person who knows the Oakley story better than Oakley does? This is my kind of branding. No wonder I wear Oakleys.

Jonathan Franklin

The Chilean miners, it turns out, come out of that mine wearing Oakleys because Jonathan Franklin works his way through school in the 1980s by selling sunglasses.  There’s a lot more to it than that, of course, but that is how the thread begins. “I’ve always been a fanatic for sunglasses,” says Franklin when we speak on Skype this week. “When I was in college [at Brown University], I made my living selling sunglasses.  I had a company called All I Wear. We had ten or twelve students covering campuses up and down the East Coast. I’ve also been a street vendor of sunglasses.  Good ones. Vuarnets. Ray Bans. Oakley wasn’t on my radar yet.”

Here is what happens between Jonathan Franklin’s college years and the rescue in Chile that results in the miners wearing Oakleys:

2) Twelve years ago, Franklin moves to Chile where he works as a correspondent for The Guardian. He also freelances all over the Americas for publications like GQ, Esquire and Playboy. He embraces the Chilean culture, loves it there, gets married there, begins raising a family there.

3)  In 2003, five years after the move to Chile, while covering a story in North Carolina for GQ about the World SWAT Championships, meets Erik Poston, a sales rep for Oakley. He and Poston bond over their mutual interest in sunglasses technology. “He took time off from whatever he was doing to talk about the optics in sunglasses,” says Franklin. “Oakleys are great in the deserts or the mountains.”

(We call this mutual interest, or agreement, ‘finding the game.’  It is game that will pay off for its players seven years later.)

4)  When he arrives on the scene of the August mine accident in Copiapo, 800 km east of Santiago where he lives, Franklin is the only print journalist given a ‘rescue pass, which means he has full access to the rescue site, and regular conversations with the miners. His pass designates his job on the rescue site as ‘Writer.’

5) A few weeks after the miners get discovered still alive, Franklin sits in on a meeting at which the subject is the design of the rescue vessel [The Phoenix].  “Talk about improvisation,” he says, “there’s never been anything like this. At one point, they said they’d need sunglasses for the guys. They just kind of skipped right over it, said they’d get safety glasses or something.  They had so many things to think about that they just skipped right over the glasses.  I raised my hand and said, ‘Excuse me, I am only a journalist, and I don’t mean to be butting in, but why don’t you get the guys some Oakleys or some real sunglasses?  And they said we don’t care about that.  And I said how about if I’m in charge of sunglasses?  So they said okay, fine, one less thing for us to worry about, you’re in charge of sunglasses.”

(This is classic ‘yes-anding’ by Franklin.  Yes-anding can move a scene in an unexpectedly productive direction.  It can also, as it does here, transform a trivial detail into something important and valuable.  These little twists are the stuff great stories are made of.)

6) “God knows why, but I had saved the guy from Oakley’s business card. So I write him a letter.   I said I’m a journalist, I’m not going to make a penny off this, but if you get me the glasses, I’ll get them to the miners.”

7) Oakley responds immediately. They ask for specs. The Chilean Navy, which is tending to the miners’ health, sends the specs. Anatomical, so that debris and dirt won’t get in. And dark. 1oo% UV and UVB ratings. Research scientists at Oakley go back and forth with the Navy a few times until they get the best lenses on the most appropriate frames. They ship 35 customized pairs to the Copiapo mine.

The glasses arrive at the last minute. A Navy doctor sends them down the rescue chute. When they come back up, they are on smiling faces surrounded by more smiling faces, and the rest…is eyewear history.

“The Chileans were very grateful,” says Franklin. “The miners, before they were released, were very grateful.  And it was good for everyone.  I know Oakley has gotten criticized for exploiting the situation, but the CEO of Oakley, who sent me the glasses, had totally forgotten about it.  He was watching the rescue on TV, and the first miner pops up and he’s wearing Oakleys, and the CEO says to his wife, ‘How about that, he’s wearing our glasses!’  And the second miner pops up, and he’s wearing Oakleys, and the CEO said, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s right, we sent them some of our glasses!’  He’d totally forgotten about it.”

Lots to be learned from the Oakley Coda:

If you add something productive to every situation you’re in, outcomes take care of themselves.

Subject matter expertise is a good point of connection.

Minor roles in one scene can become major roles in the next scene.

Don’t persuade, participate. The best way to influence the game is by playing it.

Give gifts to your scene partners. Your expertise can be a gift.

Be sensitive to context. If you join a scene in progress, have a good reason why.

Meaningful connections have a long shelf life. This is relevant to network economies, where meaningful connections can be ‘parked’ indefinitely, until a scene calls for them.

Narrative trumps nationality.

Do the good thing in the moment, and the better thing will happen down the line.

Damn, I can’t think of them all! There’s a lot! Find something for yourself in this story and put it in play. Good things will happen as a result. There is a science to serendipity.

You cannot script a story like this. You cannot bake it into your media plan. You cannot buy it, for any price. No one at Oakley could have caused it to happen. If they had tried to achieve the same outcome on their own, it would have come across as rank exploitation. They would’ve never penetrated the inner circle at Copiapo. Instead, they had a conversation. Way back when, they planted a seed. When conditions were right, that seed grew and blossomed into something beautiful, something money could not buy—an incredible narrative.

If you’d like to soak up more of the Chilean miners’ story, you’ll want to pick up the book Jonathan Franklin is writing. It comes out February, 2011.

about this JetBlue ad

which is anchored by copy that saysIn my role of Commentor On All Things About Improvisation in Business, I responded to Jeremy’s email with this GameChangers postin 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…

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.  To 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 Ochocinco

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’ game

and further suggested how to initiate the game…

@martysg blocks the game… By 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.

When Bird was 12 years old, she and her older brother, Cam, were playing with a group of children in a park at the foot of the remote mountain in Colorado where they lived.  A gang of men appeared out of nowhere and abducted Bird at gunpoint.  Cam escaped and made it back up the mountain.  Bird’s abduction was all over the news, but she could not be found, and after awhile, everyone assumed she never would be.

For three years, the gang held her hostage.  She was made to do menial labor and was raped repeatedly by men twice and three times her age.  The gang eventually sold her to a Canadian man who was in the fur business, and wanted her for his mistress while he was on business trips.  At the age of 16, she was pregnant with the Canadian’s child.

She named the baby Jay-Bee.

When Jay-Bee was six months old, Bird accompanied the Canadian to a business conference in Iowa, where he crossed paths with Bill and Lewis, managers of a real estate syndicate acquiring and developing raw land west of the Mississippi.  The Canadian could sense that Bill and Lewis were major players, connected at the highest levels of government and the intelligence community.  He also sensed that they were enamored of Bird, who it turns out had a gift for languages and knew a surprising lot about raw land west of the Rockies.  The more Bird contributed to the conversation, the better Bill and Lewis liked the Canadian.  So he let her talk.  And sure enough, they invited the Canadian to join their company.

The Canadian turned out to be a miserable employee, capricious, and ill-suited to the relentless pace of the real estate business.  On top of it, he was a raging alcoholic.  Worst of all, he abused Bird and the baby.  When Bill caught a glimpse of this behavior one day in the company parking lot,  he fired the Canadian on the spot.  Lewis, a lawyer, arranged for Bird to get a divorce.  After the divorce, she got her real estate license, whereupon, to her surprise, Bill and Lewis invited her to join the company.

She brought Jay-Bee to work with her every day, and he soon became the company pet.  Bill, who at that time had no children of his own, took a particular shine to the boy, and nicknamed him ‘Pompous.”  She never told anyone about her life before the Canadian.  She couldn’t.  She had no memory of it.  Somewhere, during the time she’d been held hostage by her abductors, she had perfected her ability to forget.

A number of years later, Bill and Lewis asked Bird to join them on a business trip.  They didn’t tell her where they were going.  They took the Gulfstream, landed on a private field at night, got into a waiting limo and checked into their hotel.  In the morning, when Bird looked out the window of her hotel, her heart fluttered like it had wings.  There, in front of her, like a childhood dream remembered, was the mountain where she had grown up.

Still numb, Bird went with Bill and Lewis to a meeting of local officials, and at the meeting, representing his town council, was her brother, Cam.

It took them a second to recognize each other, but the instant they did, she flew across the room to him and they  hugged and cried.  The meeting wasn’t much of a meeting after that.  It was, instead, a celebration that didn’t end for two days, a big dance around a brother and sister and members of their clan who couldn’t stop crying and smiling at the same time.  Bird’s memories of her happy childhood came back to her during those two days.  She remembered that when she was a child, her very favorite thing was to look at a flower, a bird, anything beautiful, and ask of it, “Who made you?”, and that this is what she had been doing when she wandered off from the other children on the day she got abducted from the park.

Bill and Lewis made a killing on their real estate deals, of course, and Bird played an important role in their success.  Lewis went on to become governor of Louisiana and Bill and his wife, Julia, moved to Washington, where he held a number of high-ranking positions in government.  My suspicion is that Bird and Bill were in love.  We will never know for sure.  What we know is this:

We know that Bird gave away whatever money she’d made to charities that supported the poor rural community on the mountain where she had grown up.

We know that on the ten-year anniversary of its founding, Bill invited everyone who’d ever worked for their real estate company  to join him in Washington, D.C. for a big party.

We know that Lewis, driving alone from Louisiana to D.C. for the anniversary party, stopped at a motel in Tennessee, put a gun to his head and killed himself.

We know that Bird, who was living in Iowa at the time, brought Jay-Bee, who was twelve years old, with her to D.C. for the anniversary party.

We know that during this bittersweet trip, Bird visited Bill and Julia at their large home on the Potomac and ask them to let Jay-Bee live with them and their son, Lewis (named after Bill’s partner) and take care of his education.  We know that Bill and his wife raised Jay-Bee as their own son, and that Jay-Bee himself became a prominent player in Washington, advocating for his mother’s causes.

We do not know for sure what happened to Bird.  Some stories say she died of a broken heart soon after returning from D.C..  Some say she died an old alcoholic, alone, broke, and on the streets.  Some say she lived to an old age, doing social work for her community until the end of her days.

We know that today she is commemorated on a gold American one-dollar coin and that her given name was Sacagawea.

And we know that whoever made the flowers and the birds and anything in beautiful in nature, made her, too.

I have been thinking a lot lately about a story that many of us have heard at one time or another, the one commonly referred to as The Miracle of the Loaves and the Fishes.   For our Muslim/Hindu/Buddhist/Agnostic/Athiest/Whatever friends, it goes like this:  Jesus Christ is speaking to a large crowd.  The teaching goes long into the day, no one has brought food to eat and everyone’s starving.  A kid steps up and offers to share his basket that has a few fish and a couple loaves of bread in it.  Jesus says to his crew, “Pass the kid’s basket out to the crowd,”  and then turns to the crowd and tells them how the kid is going to feed them all.  Presto!  The kid’s loaves and fishes feed everyone!

When I was ten years old, in a book called The Robe, written by Lloyd C. Douglas (later made into a film starring Richard Burton and Jean Simmons) I read an explanation of this particular miracle that let me understand it, has stuck with me ever since, and has probably never been more relevant than it is today.

The way the author describes the scene, many people in the audience that day had, in fact, brought  food to eat, but, fearful that there wouldn’t be enough to go around, they were loathe to share.  It took the generosity of a child, and Jesus invoking that generosity, to inspire the better nature of the crowd.  When people began sharing their food with strangers, it turned out there was more than enough food for everyone.  And that was the miracle.

I sense a similar ‘psychosis of selfishness’ seizing the economy and keeping it in the doldrums today.  We fear there is too little to go around, when in reality there’s more than enough for everyone.  The turnaround will come when we begin to see and experience the world through the eyes of a child.

When we understand that the measure of our success is not what we have, but what we give.

When we confront our fear in order to discover our potential.

When our faith in what is possible overcomes our fixation on what is prudent.

When we celebrate what is pure and disdain what has been adulterated.

When we see that we are all in this together.

And recognize that what we’re looking for has been here all along.

Because have I history in the entertainment business, I have witnessed a lot of (and produced my share of) cosmetic excitement, and I have built up a kind of immunity to hyperbole.  How could this Hurd character possibly live up to the reputation that preceded him?  After all, the bigger they come the harder they fall.  “Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy,” is how F. Scott Fitzgerald described the inevitable drowning of our ideals in the immutable tide of our humanity.  “It is never a good idea to meet your heroes.  Earl Monroe and Groucho Marx are the only two I’ve met who didn’t disappoint me,” says Woody Allen.

That Brian Hurd made such a good impression is all the more amazing in this light.

Impression:  He did not assume his role.   In other words, he was unassuming.   Our ‘lunch scene’ dictated what his role would be.  This created a wider range of possibilities for what could be communicated and learned in the course of our conversation than if he had insisted on playing the role of, let’s say, ‘The King of Solar.’  We talked very little about anything that had to do with his high status in the solar industry, and barely touched on any of the data points on his web site.    No talk about  the employment opportunities he’s created, the curricula he’s designed, the news he’s made.  Secretary Solis’ name didn’t come up once.  The role that he defined for himself during our lunch scene is one you could call ‘Education Booster.’

Impression:  He gives gifts.  Deep Patel and I are collaborating with a team of talented community activists on Solar The Sign, a movement to ithe world-famous Hollywood Sign with solar power the night of the 20111 Academy Awards.  Brian is a big fan of the project.  “If you can solar the Sign, you can solar anything,” is how he puts it.  Before we’d been served our food, Brian had given us ten good ideas for how to move the project along.  In addressing the problems to be solved, his ideas came at us from all kinds of angles and perspectives, he is a high-powered generator of ideas.  Political!  Technical!  Environmental!  Community!  Workforce!  Education!  Deep and I did not have to ask for these gifts, and they were not imposed on us.  They combusted spontaneously from the conversation.

Impression:  He adds information to the discussion.  Facts, figures and numbers about sustainability pour out of Brian Hurd like a second language.  The average size of an home solar installation (3200 watts).  The trees saved yearly by that installation (1 acre).   The yearly carbon displacement of that installation (198,000 lbs.)  A good online resource for straw bale construction (The Canelo Project).  How strawbale houses are cooled (water channeled through ridged concrete under floorboards).  An experiment that restored the grouper population to a one-square mile area of the Gulf of Mexico (his marine biologist brother-in-law, Chris Koenig’s experiment, that’s whose).   I should have used a dictaphone, because I was scribbling notes so fast I could barely read my writing afterward.

Impression:   He is an educator.  He made it clear that while the Obama administration’s heart is in the right place about creating jobs in the renewable energy sector, it cannot happen without aggressive funding for education and jobs training.  Transformation, as Hurd expresses passionately, begins with education.  “There’s a lot of money for sustainability in the Stimulus bill, but they’re shotgunning it out, and hoping it does some good,” he explains.  “That’s not going to work.  We need more players in the game, and that can’t happen without education!”

Impression:  Despite the dismaying stats leaking from the economy these days like crude oil from a grounded tanker, he is an optimist.   He understands that before we can do it, we have to believe it.   He has faith that sustainable industries can become the economic engine to turn things around, and that the city and people of Los Angeles can become pivotal players in the turnaround.    “Anything,” says Brian Hurd, “is possible in Los Angeles.”

There are two issues with focusing exclusively on our goals.  The first is that the people with whom we share our scenes usually have different goals from ours.   The interviewer’s goal is different from the interviewee’s.  A customer is not interested in helping the salesperson meet a sales quota.  A jealous boss might have the goal of turning an up-and-comer into a down-and-outer.  It’s been known to happen.  Focusing only on our desired outcomes can result in a tug-of-war for control of a scene, severely limiting the scene’s progress and potential.  Not good.

The second, and bigger, issue with being exclusively goal-oriented in our scenes, is that we diminish our potential for breakthrough moves.  Breakthroughs reveal unexpected avenues for productivity.  Breakthroughs can only happen if we are willing to let go of our expectations about what a scene needs to achieve.   And what is a goal but an expectation for a scene?

We can give a scene an excellent reason for being (e.g. ‘Review the sales pipeline.’) without locking into an outcome (’Add ten new prospects.’)  This ‘un-goaled’ scene should be like a baseball game in the movie The Sandlot.  Those kids don’t play to keep score.  They play because playing the game causes things to happen that would not happen otherwise.  It breaks through their everyday existence, and as a consequence their lives become remarkable.  The same can happen with our own brand, it can become remarkable if we let go of our preconceived notions about what our scenes need to be.

When the goal is in our head, it has, in effect, already happened, and what we’re doing in our scenes is trying to re-live history, a very personal and private history that our scene partners likely do not share.  When we let a scene define its own goals, we give ourselves and our scene partners the potential to make history together.   Creating a shared history is what branding is all about.

2.  Give a gift to someone who’s not expecting it.   Helping people look good is a GameChangers trademark.  One way to do it is to give gifts.  A gift does not have to be big, or cost any money, and it does not have to be noticed or acknowledged by anyone, even the recipient.  In some ways it’s better if its not.  A gift can be a small kindness that results in a smile, or it can be a grand gesture that results in a whole new career path.   It can be knowing someone’s name who doesn’t expect you to know it, or writing the line of code that makes a teammate a hero to the team and earns them a fat bonus.   It does not matter.  The most important quality of the gift is that it’s unexpected.

Such gifts are the threads of which a business culture is woven.

3.  Avoid the go-to move.   Whether we’re athletes or advertisers, most of us have a go-to move, something we can rely on to make us shine in every scene we’re in.  For a baseball pitcher, it might be the fastball.  For an advertiser it might be ‘CEO as Spokesperson’ spots.  For a manager good at ‘putting out fires,’ it might be starting fires to put out. The problem with relying on a go-to move is that when we make the same move in every scene, it diminishes our potential to grow and improve.

One way to improve our game is to start making moves we don’t usually make.  We give ourselves permission to make moves we don’t usually make by eliminating the moves we usually do make.  If your strength is talking, spend a scene listening.  If you’re known as a leader, follow for a change.  If you’re known for being analytical, express an emotion.  By limiting your reliance on your go-go-move, you’ll add to your self-awareness, build your repertoire and expand your potential.

Knowing who you are is the first step toward becoming who you can be.

Ethan Bauley sent me a link that’s a perfect depiction of the ‘Unsung Hero’ idea. Take a look at this video shot at the recent Sasquatch Music Festival outside Vancouver:

The first dancer, Collin Wynter from Calgary, deserves credit for initiating well. He’s having fun, and he’s high energy, connecting with the music and the rest of his environment and not at all caught up in his own little world. He is acting on his environment (the hillside and the soft grass and the music) and as a consequence, the environment ‘acts on him’ as his dancing becomes infectious. But it doesn’t become a scene, it doesn’t find its game, until the second dancer joins. The second dancer adds and heightens, and from that point on, there’s no stopping this scene.

The second dancer learns the ‘rules of the dance’ from the first dancer, then yes-ands, making dance even more playful by falling to the ground and crawling through the first dancer’s legs. It is the second person who defines the game and plays it in a way (by yes-anding) that others cannot resist joining.

After the third person joins, the joining becomes a wave that lasts until the music ends. (And maybe beyond, that’s where the video cuts.) This same dynamic is characteristic of any productive game. A game played alone has finite potential, while a game that invites joining has unlimited upside. It is the second person to play who signals to the crowd that your game is worth joining.

This article in the Calgary Herald celebrates Collin Wynter as being some kind of hero, but does not mention the second dancer, or even the existence of the unsung hero of the game.

Bethea wrote a letter.  It was what she could do and she did it.  In that letter, she maintained of she and her classmates, “We are not quitters!”  And that letter changed the game.

Abess had $60,000,000 in the bank, proceeds from the sale of his company.  He gave it away to 471 employees and former employees who’d supported him over the years.  That gift changed the game, too.

She gave a small gift that became something big.  With that one letter, she opened a thousand doors that would have not been open to her otherwise.

He gave a big gift that got bigger.  The number ‘60,000,000′ didn’t change, but the potential for that ‘60,000,000′ to make things happen in the world increased overnight by a factor of 471.

We honor Ty’Sheoma and Leonard because they bookend three important elements of gamechanging.

Big gifts and small gifts are equally important to our scenes.   That’s the first piece of what these gamechangers teach us.  All gifts have the potential to inspire profound scenes.

Here is the second piece:   Action flows from character.  Beathea and Abess didn’t just wake up one day and shazaam!—in a puff of genie smoke, suddenly turn into the people with game.

She is a young woman who wants to learn, and doesn’t want to be held back from it.  She is a writer of letters, and a righter of injustice.  She is not a quitter.

He is a friend who values friendships that go all the way back to grammar school, a manager with employee relationships that extend beyond current staff, a player who recognizes that he owes much of his success to others on his team.  He is not greedy.

They took actions that were consistent with their characters.

And here’s the third piece:   We can never know for sure how the game will change.  But if we bring what we can to our scenes…if we are consistent in character and action…we can trust that, as Ty’Sheoma Bethea and Leonard Abess showed us, the game will change, as  unforeseen opportunities bloom into new and fruitful realities.

If the whole is going to be art, the parts must strive not to be.  If we strive to make everything we do precious and perfect and just-so.  If we deliberate and debate the appropriateness of our actions.  If we measure every move.  Craft and eddit every response.  The sum of the parts of what we CrEaTeToGeThEr.  Is.  Surely.  Going.  To be.  Yes.  Oh yes most indubitably and beyond repudiating to the level of a statistical certainty will most definitely be…(Say it!)  A pompous load of crap.

Always bring a brick, not a cathedral into a scene.   We know a businessperson who had built a well-deserved reputation for dropping big ideas on meetings.  That was his thing.  People were in awe of how inspired and forward-thinking his ideas were, by the compelling scenarios he painted for them with his words and emotions.  He liked this role, and didn’t do anything about changing it.  Why would he?  People called him a genius.  A visionary.  What usually happened, though, is that his big ideas died on the vine, or failed to live up to their promise.   His ideas were so big, so singular, that people had trouble adding their own bricks to his architecture.  In our friend’s mind, the cathedral had already been built, all there was for his admirers to do was worship at his altar.  We gave the genius an ‘adjustment’.  All we said was, ‘Don’t be the guy with the big idea.  Be the guy who makes other people’s ideas big.’  This has made all the difference in the world.  He has learned that it’s more satisfying and a lot less stressful to make his scene partners look good, and to not worry so much about proving his own genius  It turns out he’s just as talented at sharing his talent as he is at showing it off, and sharing has proved to be a much more productive way for him to behave.  Today, his reputation is for getting big things done.

Make the strange familiar, the familiar strange.  This is a great philosophy for keeping your brand’s culture lively.  Every business culture benefits from a flow of ’strange’ (i.e. alien to that culture) situations, environments and characters.  Likewise, if we get too familiar with our environment, our process and our fellow players–and most tragically if we quit surprising ourselves–our performance is going to get stale.  When every day is the same we lose our sense of anticipation.  If we dont’ think we’re going find anything, we quit looking, and the flow of new ideas drys up.  It is good to introduce some outside strangness into the workaday mix; it is even more potent to rediscover the strangeness within ourselves.

Don’t prolong the agony of a scene that is slowly dying.  Infuse it with the momentum it needs to end on a positive note.  There are a lot of business scenes ’slowly dying’ these days.  Meetings with HR end in pink slips.  Start-ups lose their funding.  Towns lose their biggest employer.   Often in these situations, the only feasible move is to end the scene quickly and move on.  It makes a huge difference to the rest of your performance if the bad scene ends on a postive note instead of a downbeat one.  A town that greets the news of losing its biggest employer with some kind of community celebration is already on the road to recovery while a town that gets busy telling lots of sad stories to the news about how they got screwed is going to be staying in the doldrums for awhile.

All masks are empty until they are put on and inhabited by the actor.  The same is true with job titles.