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

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.

Heather Champ and her team at Flickr improvise for a living. A big part of their job, according to the article is deciding whether certain photos belong in Flickr or not. The guidelines are not etched in stone. In fact, aside from a few Flickresque sayings like ‘Don’t forget the children,’ guidelines hardly exist at all. Rulings by Champ and her team arise more from the dialogue they have about an issue than from strict black-and-white policies. Policies are riffs on a theme; the rules of the game can change from scene to scene.

This is a monster distinction between business processes of the Industrial Age, and those suited to business in the Networked World.

Industrial age organizations wrote strict policies designed to codify employee behavior, limit the company’s liability from lawsuits, and ensure fair play between management and labor and between the company and its customers. The policies were written by lawyers to cover every conceivable scenario. When anomalies occurred, policies were amended or new policies written by those same lawyers. Conflicts with policy required interpretation by the lawyers. In other words, when it came to policy you couldn’t make a new move without an opinion from a lawyer.

Rigid policies worked for rigid organizations, but the fluid organizations of the Networked World like Flickr, which hosts billions of images posted by millions of users, call for more fluid processes. Context must be taken into account. Entrepreneurial employees have to make quick and frequent decisions outside the bottleneck and without the added overhead of Legal. This means acting within themed concepts instead of abiding by literal rules. This means improvisation.

“Don’t be creepy,” goes one of Flickr’s guiding concepts. ”You know the guy. Don’t be that guy.”

For some networked organizations, technical infrastructure—what the technology itself will or won’t allow—has become a new kind of policy for rewarding conformity and punishing edge behaviors. Confining interactions to ‘what the software allows’ is just as bad if not worse than ye olde employee handbook. It’s a kind of control that can hinder the continual innovation called for by a networked brand.

The valuable interactions, those that bring new life and wealth to your brand, are human ones. And because they are human ones, they are unpredictable. The improviser welcomes the unpredictable situation as an opportunity to further define reality. An improviser like Champ understands that every interaction holds the potential for transformation. To interact mechanically or by rote is to disregard this potential.

A sense of ‘Flickr, performing’ guides Champ and her team as they discuss and then take action on barrages of unpredictables like barterers in Brazil, vengeful boyfriends from the Bronx and R-rated artists from Belgrade.

“Imprecision is an art here,” writes Colin of Flickr. (An improviser sees it another way: Art resolves imprecision.) Colin writes of the artfulness required for Champ and her team to impose a sense of order on what could otherwise be chaotic, polarized communities.

“I can’t think of any successful online community where the nice, quiet, reasonable voices defeat the loud, angry ones on their own,” Champ says. “The job always comes down to finding the fulcrum in the teeter-totter, the balance that benefits both the individual and the community.”

In other words, not only does Champ’s job call for improvisation, it calls on her and her team to guide and ‘coach’ the ongoing improvisation by the Flickr community.

As I read the article on SFGate, I realized that I know Heather Champ. Her husband, Derek Powazek, founded the pioneering digital storytelling site, Fray in the late 1990s, and he and Heather went on to co-found JPG Magazine. They are among the savviest community builders I’ve met in the young history of the internet. I think the best thing about Heather and Derek is how their work is an expression of what and whom they love, especially each other. Out on the turbulent edge where innovators, explorers and artists play, love is the constant. If you act on love, love will act on you. And that is all the music a human being needs to dance with her destiny.

The following list appears in my book, GameChangers. It was handed out at the beginning of a class I took at I. O. West in Los Angeles, by our teacher, Jason Pardo. The list came to Jason by way of improv legend Mick Napier, under whom Jason had studied in Chicago. (Napier is Artistic Director of the Annoyance Theater in Chicago and author of Improvise: Scene from the Inside Out. ) The GameChangers translation of each tip appears in italics .

TIPS FOR BEING A KICKASS STUDENT AND POWERFUL PERFORMER

1. Be someone who is always on time. Chronic lateness or lallygagging is a form of control, passive-aggressive behavior that’s pure ego. Being on time is common courtesy to the rest of your team, it acknowledges that time has a money value, it allows the scene to begin and end on schedule, keeping the day’s performance on track and moving in a productive rhythm.

2. Be someone who says yes. Our accomplishments, our character and our wealth are brought about by what we cause to happen, not by what we deny or keep from happening.

3. Be someone who listens more than they talk. Listening is learning, and ensures that when you DO talk, you’ve got something worthwhile to say.

4. If you must talk, be someone who knows what they’re talking about. See #3.

5. Screw your fear. Be someone who makes strong choices. Fear is what keeps us from trusting our instincts, what causes us to hold back and shy away from choices that express our fullest potential. Don’t be a wuss. Knock on fear’s door, and when fear answers, sock fear in the jaw and walk on through. A smokin’ hot choice will be there waiting for you to free it from captivity, and will forever show its gratitude in ways you cannot imagine and will never realize as long as you let fear stand in your way.

6. Be someone who isn’t tired or hot or scared. Be vital and engaging. The nature of our work experience is up to us. It is a matter of discipline and focus to discover those qualities in ourselves that are conducive to performance, breathe life into them, and allow them to inform our character and our scenes.

7. Be someone who will try anything. See if it works. As the business world evolves, the boundaries of what is and what is not possible are changing like the maps of Eastern Europe. In this environment, experimentation and exploration get rewarded much more so than when everything is static, hunky-dory, status-quo.

8. Be someone who isn’t an asshole, even if you are. We’re in this together. There’s a school of thought, forged in the ultra-acquisitive ethos of the Industrial Age, that one must take in order to have. This has resulted in a lot of asshole behavior, and some of the assholes who perpetuated this behavior are now paying the piper for it. In the Networked World, we recognize that to generate wealth, we must connect, collaborate and create. We understand that our fates are shared, and that what helps one helps all. As improv icon Shelley Berman likes to say, “The taking is in the giving.”

9. Be courteous off stage. if you interrupt, apologize. One of the most useful aspects of improvisation as it relates to business is that it gives us the keys to productive behaviors and performances. Subjective judgments give way to critical assessment. In becoming more self aware we also become more respectful and aware of others. Improvisation gives us a diopter for distinguishing between interruption and interjection, between diversion and digression, between conflict and contribution.

10. Be honest. There’s no substitute. If we are honest with ourselves and others about our motives, desires and dreams, our behaviors will be authentic, our goals achievable, and our contributions unique and therefore valuable. The road to wealth and well being begins with an understanding of oneself.