Good improvisers always pay attention to their physical appearance and presence.

Improv theater rehearsals sometimes focus almost exclusively on communication through one’s physical movements and attitudes. Players, for instance, will walk randomly back and forth across the stage as their coach calls out directions that alter their walks. The directions do NOT suggest a physical response (”Your left foot hurts.”) but an emotional one (”You just won the lottery!”) to be reflected in the walk. Each player responds in his or her own way. One player who ‘just won the lottery’ might skip; another will add some bounce to the step or glide to the stride; still another may walk around in a happy daze.

There is no one correct response to the emotional state. Rather, the focus is on players responding as their authentic selves. The question posed by the coach that each player ‘answers’ with a distinctive walk is “How would YOU do act if YOU won the lottery?” Distinctive repsonses by each player make the group portrait a compelling one. There is ‘a lot going on’ in such a performance, it presents many perspectives and avenues of exploration. When every response is the same (’We’re all skipping because we won the lottery’), there is only one thing going on.

Walking is one of many ways players express an emotional state or an attitude. All aspects of appearance, movement, posture, attitude and presence are considered by an improviser. An improviser has no tic, no mannerism, no way of standing or sitting or looking that does not reflect the emotional life of the role being played. Coaches ask players to consider the angle of their spine, their tempo, their chin, and how they use their hands, continually guiding them toward an awareness of a spirit of animation, literally, the movement of life.

By comparison, how many people in business, Bill Gates among them, are stunted in this area of communication? Many. We adopt one posture, one tempo, one way of dressing, and that, for all practical purposes, is our identity. Bill Gates has the classic geek slouch going. He leads with his head. You can tell he spends a lot of time reading or hunched over a computer or slouched on a couch playing videogames. This posture puts a lot of strain on his lower back. It gives him a belly — more strain on the back — that he would not have if he stood up straight. His body is like a fist forming around his heart. His posture and profile are so familiar that they ‘read’ in silhouette. It is his role, one he has obviously played brilliantly, to be the head brain, the leading thinker, the guy with the vision, the trillionnaire tycoon. The posture is in no way out of character, and aside from the healthiness aspect, you can’t argue with it.

It is no coincidence that Gates’ posture perfectly mirrors that of Montgomery Burns of The Simpsons. They’re essentially playing the same role, the only difference is that Gates is somewhat more conniving and malicious than Burns. (j/k, maybe)

The important point about Gates’ posture is this: His edit of his Microsoft scene, and his eventual entrance onto a new stage, present him with an opportunity. Making a move like Yoga can literally change his posture and open his heart. It will give Gates a new characterization for his next scene, one keeping with his new role as philanthropist and all-around do-gooder who leads with his heart.

Industrial Age organizations demanded consistency of behavior. Players danced a dance choreographed by corporate. It was a marching band, a Busby Berkeley MGM Musical.

Today, in the Networked World, players write code in one scene and become international media sensations in the next. No longer do we play one or two roles in a career. We play ten or twenty or thirty. It’s a mashup mentality. It’s Stomp at your neighborhood theater, performed by your neighbors. Players dance their own dances, and if it’s smart, corporate figures out how to dance along.

Scene: Microhoogle. A strong player like Microsoft will usually dominate a scene with a weaker player confused about its identity like Yahoo is. By being the more aggressive player, Microsoft has painted Yahoo’s ‘character’ in their scene as, by turns, a ‘collegial acquisition’, ‘a hostile takeover’, ‘an unfaithful tart’, ‘an overpriced stock’ and, as of this week, ‘just friends who talk on the phone a lot but there’s nothing serious going on between us, swear…no seriously, you guys, swear!’ Yahoo tried to ignite a bidding war by introducing Google to the scene, but all it did was diminish Yahoo’s status in the eyes of the audience by reminding everyone that this scene is really about Microsoft vs. Google. The best Yahoo can do is control the timing and style of the edit (i.e. the selling strategy). When a confused player is onstage too long, an edit is inevitable.

Scene: Get It While You Can. What lines of work are the closest and most loyal friends of the Bush administration in? Oil and War. These friends have approximately 230 days before they get edited, and their way-too-cozy contracts go up for review. Variations of the ‘Get It While You Can’ scene will play out over and over and over again in that 230 days, to the chagrin of most taxpayers and increasing stress on the U.S. economy. Petroleum producers will lock up all the mineral and drilling rights they possibly can, and oil prices (and profits) will go as high as Big Oil can push them, drivers be damned. With amplification by their many friends in the media, the players in the war game will present countless worrisome scenarios and justifications for buffering national security, and will load up on inventory that will move off the shelves much more slowly if, God forbid, we’re not fighting at least a couple of wars somewhere in the world. The Scott McClellan book release is a variation of this scene. Mr. McClellan may be assuaging his conscience or getting revenge, maybe both; he is also getting it while he can.

Scene: Inherit the Windmill. On May 15, Mesa Power, an energy company run by longtime oil player, T. Boone Pickens, announced a $2 billion investment in GE wind turbines. Superior improvisers are able to play in the moment while at the same time seeing the big picture. For an oilman like Pickens to invest in the wind takes some improvisation skill, and this looks like an excellent initiation of a new scene for Mesa Power. He and his team are seeking transformation and acting on environment, both of which are fundamentals of good improv. Pickens is taking a long view, while at the same time seeing (and to a certain extent participating in) what’s happening in the next 239 days. Sensing how weary the audience is going to get with the ‘Get It While You Can’ scenes, Mesa is preparing to offer alternatives, not only wind, but natural gas, too. That’s good improv.

Scene: Coca Cola and Honest Tea. The online version of Inc. reports this week that after making an investment in Bethesda, MD- based Honest Tea, the Coca-Cola Company has offered its support to Bethesda Green, a community sustainability program sponsored by Honest Tea. As part of its support, Coke is buying 20 to 30 recycling containers that will be placed in high-traffic areas around the city. Honest Tea says that 300 people turned out to participate in the launch of Bethesda Green’s first container. The analysis: In improv theater, when a normally high-status player plays low-status — a pompous Dignitary gets brought low, or the Housekeeping Staff governs the Governor — the audience loves it. The same dynamic appeals to the marketplace. When a mighty brand like Coke assumes the low-status role of Trash Recycler, our very human reaction is to applaud the move, just like we do when a little brand like Honest Tea grows in status through its partnership with Coke. The other note here is that ‘giving gifts’ of support are the strongest moves an improviser can make. It is what we see Coke doing in this scene. It is a sweet move, with no corn fructose involved.

Scene: Ninety Percent Pessimism. Forbes.com reports this week that a May survey conducted by Reuters and the University of Michigan shows that consumers are feeling worse about the economy that at any time since 1980. 90% of American consumers, the survey says, feel that U.S. economy is in the tank. One of the first things you learn as an improviser is that negativity gets you nowhere. The very fact that you are judging your scene as being bad while you’re in it guarantees that your scene, will, in fact, be bad. Improvisers operate from a positive frame of mind, always. They greet setbacks or mistakes as opportunities to change direction, try new things, find more productive paths. The way a business improviser might see the Forbes survey is that 90% pessimism describes huge marketplace demand for optimism.

It is also a way of understanding scenarios that might not otherwise make traditional business sense, a way of resolving what seems to be a paradox. (Herb Kelleher, the founder of Southwest Airlines, has said that the ability to resolve paradox is a major factor in the organization’s success.) Here is an example of a paradox that’s easily resolved when seen through the lens of improvisation.

My partner in GameChangers, LLC, Dr. Virginia Kuhn, the Associate Director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at USC, pointed me to a recent post on eSchoolNews that contained this information: former MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child organization, which builds and sells a low-cost ($200) computer called the OX that runs on a proprietary system, competes for customers in developing countries with Intel and Microsoft and their their bare-bones Classmate PC, which can run on Windows or Linux. At the same time, all three companies are collaborating. Intel has a seat on OLPC’s board and has invested money and given technical help to the organization. Microsoft is working to make a version of Windows that can run on the OX box.

What gives?

Behavior that would seem like twisted logic to an Industrial Age mindset (”Why should we help a competitor make their product better? We want to own markets, not make more competition for ourselves! Kill! Kill!”) becomes a relatively easy-to-understand scenario when you look at it as business improvisation in the Networked World.

There are three players in this scene: OLPC, Intel and Microsoft.

The players share a business objective: Opening markets in developing countries.

They have agreed upon the game to be played in the scene. The game is called ‘First, Build the Markets’.

The game resolves the paradox. The players have chosen a game that is not win-lose but instead, one that allows them to both compete and collaborate. It is the agreement on the game that explains how players can share resources on the board and engineering levels, then go at it tooth and nail on the sales and marketing front. The agreement centers on the idea that the game they’re playing can move them productively — together! — toward the objective.

Viola Spolin, the godmother of modern improv, differentiated between competing and contesting. She deemed competing as toxic behavior, a win-lose scenario in which ego and dominance are of paramount importance, to the detriment of the players in the scene and the group as a whole. Contesting, on the other hand, she saw as extension, a means of discovering a new and improved version of ourselves. If my fastest marathon ever is 4:55:10 and you and I agree to race one another and I run a 4:45:42 in the effort to cross the finish line before you, what matters to me as a runner is not whether I beat you, but the fact that I have just run the best marathon of my life.

It is important for anyone operating in the Networked World to understand that the most important thing about competition is that it causes us to contest the status quo and extend our own potential.  All three players in this scene will discover aspects of their own unrealized potential as a result of the game they’ve chosen to play, and more children are sure to have computers as a result.

In the Industrial Age, this move would have been perceived by the Microsoft audience as ‘losing a court case’ and in fact that’s how it’s being covered in a lot of media. In the Networked World, however, it’s a move that deserves applause. Here are some of the reasons I think this move is what the scene needed, and why the Microsoft brand will benefit from it:

- It gets a stalled scene moving again. The case had been in the courts for four years. (From the standpoint of audience engagement, negotiating scenes almost never go anywhere.) Plus there was a $357 million fine hanging over Microsoft’s head. Furthermore, MS competitors like Sun Microsystems had already signed the ECC agreement and were gaining ground in the development of third party apps.

- It holds true to the brand’s themes. Hey, what was Microsoft but an upstart company that seized an opportunity afforded them by IBM? That’s their heritage. I don’t see IBM collecting 3% of all MS revenues. ‘Giving the little guy a shot’ is a theme as entwined with the MS brand as improv comedy is with the city of Chicago.

- Third, it signals to the developer community that Microsoft is warming up to the idea of open source programming. This generates a significant amount of goodwill on the ‘cool tech’ front where Apple continually kicks their ass.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer entered the scene and changed the game by saying “Yes and.”

Saying “Yes and” is the most fundamental improvisation move there is. In the book I call the act of yes-anding The Agreement Principle. When you say “Yes and” in a scene, two very important things happen. First, by acknowledging and agreeing to the other player’s reality, you build a bridge of communication between the players in the scene. Microsoft accepted the reality handed to it by the ECC — that its proposed royalty structure was onerous and would kill innovation among smaller developers. By saying yes to this reality, MS agreed to both the (economic) environment for the scene, and to the character of the small developer described by the ECC. That’s the bridge.

Second, and most important, by saying “Yes and” MS adds its own reality to the scene. Namely that it’s flexible enough to change direction and embrace open source. Namely that it’s friendly to the upstarts and innovators of the world. Saying “Yes” is okay. But the improvisational magic happens with “Yes and.” The Agreement Principle transforms a scene that would otherwise be about two separate points of view — a tug of war played out in an expensive and time-consuming court case to the yawns of the audience — into one that’s about a new reality, shared by the players in the scene. A new reality loaded with potential. That’s when scenes get good and the audience applauds.