Barack Obama is an improviser.  His campaign, his platform, his history, draws on a spirit kindled in the same Chicago South Side neighborhoods where modern improv was born in the 1930s.

How does Barack Obama improvise?

He says “Yes and…” Like any good improviser, President Obama understands that agreement enables a scene to progress, and new, shared realities to emerge from it.  “I know that the hardening of lines, the embrace of fundamentalism and tribe, dooms us all,” he writes in the preface to Dreams From My Father.   As an improviser, Obama understands that erasing the lines that divide us–enabling “Your situation” and “My situation” to  become “Our situation”  is what makes any kind of progress possible.

He Listens.  Every politician claims to listen to the voters, but what they mean is that they listen to what their pollsters tell them voters are saying, and script accordingly.  “I listened to people talk about their jobs, their businesses, the local school; their anger at Bush and their anger at Democrats; their dogs, their back pain, their war service, and the things they remembered from childhood,” Obama writes in The Audacity of Hope.  “Most of them were too busy with work or their kids to pay much attention to politics, and they spoke instead of what they saw before them: a plant closed, a promotion, a high heating bill, a parent in a nursing home, a child’s first step.”  An improviser listens and responds not only to the literal meaning of what is being said, but to the emotional meaning and metaphorical significance as well.  To the pollster and the scripted campaign, “a child’s first step” means child care legislation.  To Obama, it means starting down a new path, and whatever that first step down the new path means to you.  And me.

He explores themes.  By exploring themes instead of sticking to a script Obama runs a much more nimble, energetic and responsive operation than the scripted and toxic narratives of the Bush-Cheney years.  This ability to respond quickly and instinctively while remaining true to one’s themes is a quality we need in the President of the United States.  More important than that, it is a quality we need to discover and nurture in ourselves.

He performs with integrity.  Like all politicians, President Obama will be expected to play many roles.  A President plays a different role in front of the Joint Chiefs of Staff than he does in front of an auditorium full of children.  A skilled improviser like Obama has the ability to play these different roles, but always informed and supported by his authentic self, faults and all.  He has a sense of who he is, and how that’s different from who other people might want him to be, and even how it’s different from the person he himself might want to be.  “If you are paying attention,” writes Obama in The Audacity of Hope, “each successive year will make you more intimately acquainted with all of your flaws–the blind spots, the recurring habits of thought that may be genetic or may be environmental, but that will almost certainly worsen with time, as surely as the hitch in your walk turns to pain in your hip.  In me, one of those flaws had proven to be a chronic restlessness; an inability to appreciate, no matter how well things were going, those blessings that were right there in front of me. It’s a flaw that is endemic to modern life, I think–endemic, too, in the American character–and one that is nowhere more evident than in the field of politics.”  This can only have been written by an improviser.  You acknowledge the bad with the good, your strengths and your weaknesses, and you bring it all with you, to every performance.

He sees himself as part of an Ensemble.  The narrative form defines who the star players are, and who plays the supporting roles.  It identifies heroes and villains.  Improvisation, by contrast, calls for an ensemble, in which everyone has the potential to be a star or a supporting player, depending on the situation.  In the ensemble, our fate is shared, we succeed or fail together.  Obama’s ability to see himself as part of a vast ensemble of Americans qualifies him in yet another way as a stellar improviser.  “For alongside our famous individualism, there’s another ingredient in the American saga, a belief that we are all connected as one people,” he said in his 2004 keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention.  “If there’s a child on the south side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for their prescription and having to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandparent. If there’s an Arab-American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It is that fundamental belief– it is that fundamental belief–I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sisters’ keeper–that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family: ‘E pluribus unum,’ out of many, one.”

We elected Barack Obama for the same reasons that believers in equality and liberty voted for Lincoln; for the same reasons immigrant families sided for Franklin Roosevelt, for the same reasons dreamers voted for John F. Kennedy and marched with Martin Luther King; because he describes a future we believe in.  A future that makes things better for succeeding generations.  A future where opportunity outwits defeatism, and hope overwhelms despair.

President Obama understands that no one script, no single narrative, can carry us there. If there is one idea that will guide this administration, one neverending avenue for productive behavior, it’s the understanding that the future we share will, as always, be improvised.

His and his team’s ability to improvise their way to an election victory against rivals who were, initially, much better funded, more networked and more familiar brand names proved beyond any doubt how skillful improvisation can change the game. Obama is the epitome of what it means to be a gamechanger.

Because they improvised instead of slaving themselves to a script, Obama and team were quicker to act on opportunity. They consistently made better, faster and more authentic decisions than their rivals. It is one thing to be smart, but what difference does it make if you don’t act smart? Obama and team showed how improvisation marries intellect with action. This resulted in breakthrough processes for organizing and raising money, and creative solutions to whatever problems they faced along the campaign trail.

It is no coincidence, to me, that Obama lives in the same Hyde Park neighborhood in Chicago where modern improvisation was born in the 1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression. In Chicago, improvisation isn’t just some thing the artsy-fartsy folks do, it’s a way of life, a fixture in the cultural firmament. A lot of people taking improv classes in Chicago at Second City or I.O. or Comedy Sportz treat it like night school, almost like it’s getting an extra degree that will help them in whatever their walk of life. Obama is one of the best examples ever of how improvisation works outside the confines of theater comedy–how it improves job performance, and has the power to transform the status quo.

Obama listens and communicates on multiple levels, which makes his message extra resonant for his audience. He changes status depending on the scene he’s in without ever losing his essential character, what makes Barack Obama Barack Obama. When he’s with generals he’s leaderly, when he’s with children he’s fatherly, when he’s on the court he’s lefty, and it’s always through the truth of who he is. He’s not posing, acting, or going for effect, or a photo op, or a big move. He’s doing the best he can with what the scene has to offer. That’s improvisation.

He acts on the reality of the scene he’s in, not on some fantasy scenario he’s trying to make come true (see ‘Mission Accomplished’). When, on a blistering summer day in North Carolina during the presidential race, a woman in the audience fainted from the heat during one of his speeches, Obama took one look at what was happening, stopped his speech, and with no hesitation called it to the security team’s attention then reached into his podium for his water bottle and tossed it to the crowd to give to the woman. “They’ll be okay,” he said, in a reassuring voice. It was the most genuine, most helpful thing anyone in his position could have done in that situation. It was not a big deal. It was just the best possible move at that particular moment. That’s is how an improviser rolls. It is not a big deal. It is a lot of little deals, done consistently, with 100% focus and commitment. And these have the potential to add up to a big deal. A really big deal in the case of Obama’s election.

During his campaign he staked out huge and momentous themes–Hope, Change, Equality–and then liberated his team and the voters themselves to explore those themes in as many ways as possible. This meant that Brand Obama could deliver a much livelier narrative than the McCain Brand, which lurched from one lame scripted event (Palin) to another (ride to the rescue on the bailout plan), confusing the audience and the candidate alike.

After January 21, the Obama administration’s ability to riff on big themes will continue to liberate good ideas and innovative thinking to the benefit and betterment of the U.S. and the world. Economic transformation on the massive scale it’s needed cannot be scripted like some Olympic Opening Ceremony. It must be improvised.

They are off to a banging good start in naming people to his team, a ‘team of rivals’, it has been called, echoing what Lincoln said about his own cabinet. The cluckers are already clucking about how hard it will be for Obama to ‘manage’ such strong and independent personalities. To an improviser, it is the most natural thing in the world. Synthesizing different, often radically different, points of view to achieve an objective is what improvisers do.

There is a saying in improvisation, Follow the Follower. This is what Obama means when he says to voters that he’s representing their will, embodying their energy, pursuing their happiness. Pundits have described this as a new kind of leadership, but I believe it’s more accurate to say that Obama’s got outrageously good listening skills. Sometimes it’s necessary to lead, but the best improvisers, like Obama, are the best at following. They raise the level of their own game by raising the level of everyone’s.

On the emotional and meta levels, the levels of communication that matter most, there was only one campaign promise made by Barack Obama. It was not a plank in his platform, but it was implicit in everything the campaign said and did. It was a promise that Americans will all become a little better, a little stronger, a little more improvisational in our own ways for having him as President. We believe it has already happened, is happening, and will continue to happen on an ever-broadening scale, as more and more people — not only in the U.S. but all over the world — get attuned to the new game and start playing along.