And then compare this.

Quite a difference.

The first is improvised.

The second is scripted.

Improvisation is active.  It is alive.  Members of Parliament are energetically engaged in the conversation about the matter at hand, supportive of, but not bogged down by, their various ideologies and positions.  Their actions and reactions are immediate, emotional and visceral.  This honors the problem.  American politicians dishonor a problem, and obfuscate it, when they use it as a foil for politicking, which is how almost every problem faced by the federal government is regarded now.  An excuse for campaigning.

This is the big point President Obama underlined yesterday in his meeting with the Republicans.  That 66-minute conversation may be the best thing that’s happened in American politics since the Watergate hearings.  Obama changed the game by calling out the current political game for what it is.   Let’s call the current game “Our Way or No Way.”  It is played by Democrats and Republicans alike, with equal vigor.  This game is toxic.  Limiting.  Stultifying.  Divisive.  And ultimately it’s unproductive.  This is not about blaming one party or the other.  The bad game is to blame.

Yesterday, Obama not only called out the current game for the quicksand pit it is, he suggested a better, more liberating, more productive game.  You might call the game he’s proposing, ‘Part of a Pie is Better Than None.’  In other words, the invitation to the Republicans (Dems, you’re next!) is to find an area of agreement and agree on it.  Do it knowing that some, but not all, and probably not not 80% of what you’ve got scripted, will come to pass.  Don’t be greedy.  Be generous instead.  Don’t place blame.  Accept responsibility.  Don’t point fingers.  Shake hands.  And then come out fighting.  Let’s relish the good fight, one where we fight together to solve the problem, not the bad fight, where we fight over who’s right and who’s wrong about how to solve it.  Let’s pick battles we can win instead of battles we can make the other guy lose.

Cheers to the GameChanger in Chief for changing the game once again.  Our political discourse needs more of the kind of energetic, intelligent, articulate, performances that the Brits demonstrate in their ‘Question Time With the Prime Minister” and Obama and the Republicans staged yesterday.  It will be a healthy transformation.  And it’ll make great TV.  Nothing we Yanks like better than that!

Do not get locked into your script for success.  Be prepared, instead, to improvise your way there.  Remember that other people have scripts, too.  As I can tell you from working in the entertainment business, when all we do is fight over whose script we’re going to follow, the show does not go on.

Dr. Aaron Blackledge opened his San Franscisco clinic, CarePractice, in 2008.  Today it is the fastest-growing primary care practice in the Bay Area.   We have ideas about how the new community-based, patient-centered models will do more than any legislation to define the future of health care in the U.S., but we cannot express it any better than Aaron Blackledge can.  In his own words, he describes what he did to change the game:

“In the beginning I told my employee–at the beginning there was only one–that if he had friends or family that needed to be seen that he had the authority to set the price on his own without asking me for permission depending on how much they could afford or how much of a deal he wanted to give them.  This may seem crazy to some people, but I think I benefited in so many ways from this practice and feel lucky I came up with at the beginning of Care Practice. It really helped to empower my staff and bring in clients that loved Care Practice.  It reminds me now that since we have grown so much in the past 3 months I am not sure if all the new staff are aware of this ‘policy.’  I will have to remember to tell people about this tomorrow.

“I went to Sarah Lawrence for my undergrad degree.  I was a dance major.  My background is artistic as well as medical.  I have taken many improv classes.  My artistic background helps me look at medicine as a design, a feeling, an experience, that the current medical establishment so horribly lacks.  I know Jay (Parkinson of HelloHealth) is a very accomplished photographer.  I don’t think it’s a coincidence.  Artists are used to facing the unknown, the blank canvas or the empty stage.  We’ve done the same with the medical profession.  What we’re doing didn’t exist before we did it.

“I come from a social activist background.  I never desired to be an entrepreneur.  Never desired to own my own company.  I left my last job and was canvassing for Obama in California.  I heard that Super Tuesday speech, where he said,  I’m paraphasing, ‘Be the change you seek.’  And I thought why isn’t anyone doing this?  And I finally realized you know what, this is my moment, this is my time.  And if I’m going to do it, I’m not going to do it partially.

“I tapped into my altruistic desires, into what it meant, and then I risked everything.  Every dollar I owned, or that I’d ever saved, and put it all into this.  If I needed to spend money on something to make this happen, I spent it.

“All my friends thought I was absolutely crazy.  They couldn’t believe it.  Some of them thought it was going to be some raggedy little space, not the big facility that we have.  Everyone else is closing up shop and joining Kaiser.  And they’re like, ‘What, you’re opening a clinic?!  What are you thinking?!  But I looked at it like this:  There’s no access to care in this city.  There are vice presidents of companies that can’t get in to see a doctor for like a week.  If do it transparent, intuitive, and don’t charge a lot…and I really wanted to show that the future of networking and connecting with patients was through social media.

“I put it in a place where there were lots of young people who’d talk about it.  Mention it on their Facebook, on their Twitter, on their Yelp.  I chose the neighborhood I’m in, Mission Dolores, specifically for that purpose.  I’d heard the story about Tommy Hilfiger opening stores in urban areas and basically letting people shoplift from him, and that was sort of my thinking.  Everything has to exceed expectations.  It’s not what you come in with that matters, it’s about what you walk out with.  We’re building CarePractice as an entity that resonates in the community.  Giving free care to the busboy at the little restaurant who cuts his hand…taking care of one of the guys at the bike shop who has an eye infection.  I wanted to express the view that taking care of people is about more than money, and that is how we’ve grown.

“My place looks kind of fancy, but it’s equipment and furniture I’ve bought from doctors closing their practices, CraigsList, Ikea and eBay.  Everything I have is used.  I put the money into the space, because I wanted that experience.  People don’t even know why it is that it’s different, but it is powerful.  The people who designed it (Indicate Design Groupe) design a lot of restaurants and retail spaces.  They’re used to saying to their clients, ‘Okay this is definitely going to be popular, people are going to come here, you focus on the food.’  And that’s the way we think about CarePractice.  They said to me, ‘You take good care of your patients, because we’re going to bring the people.’  So we focused on the roll-out like a restaurant opening.  People identify with that.   We are like a favorite restaurant.  People point us out as their clinic.

“I want to give you real examples of neighborhood care.  Basically it usually involves simple things for people with little money or struggling that we know through the neighborhood.  The Latino laborers of the contractor who helped to build Care Practice always come to me for their bumps and illnesses and I see them for free.  There is also a shop right next to us and I see a lot of the employees for simple stuff for free or significantly reduced prices and they always tell me if my car is chalked or run up to my car when it is about to get ticketed and pretend like it is their car when the DPT comes.   They are always ready to help me carry in supplies when I need help, which is often.  Another example is the security door guy at a neighborhood shop who I always talk to on the street.  He wanted to quit smoking and asked me to get him some Chantix so I ordered him some at cost and he just yelled out to me a week ago when I walked by that it had been 5 months since his last cigarette.  I didn’t charge him anything besides the cost of the meds. When you create that type of sentiment in a neighborhood it is a powerful component to branding a business.

“You (i.e. GameChangers) talk about the beginner’s mind, improvisation, and not being afraid to feel like a dumbass and make mistakes the first time around.  That’s the way I look at it, too.  Build a company that serves patients first.  I want every one of my employees to see that we’re generous.  Every interaction is an opportunity to show your character.  And in an age of social media, it is magnified by ten.

“I think the health care system is so ready for change, and people are so unhappy, and the amount of money being spent is so huge that I think can happen very quickly, and not necessarily through legislation, but through individual action.  Ten thousand doctors getting up and walking out of the room and saying we’re not going to do it that way any more, we’re going to do it differently, can change it.  That is my goal.

“People often ask me about health care reform, ‘What if we have single payer?  What if we have this or that?’  My response is that I don’t care.  I can turn on a dime.  I can turn the entire practice around and move in a different direction, and I can do it in a day.  If we went to a Canadian style health care model, pfff, I don’t care, I’d change overnight.”

Michelle has been teaching the principles of improvisation in business for a number of years.  She has assembled a stellar line-up of presenters who are aligned in the belief that creativity is the secret to a rich and satisfying working life, and to the necessary transformation of American business.  The Industrial Age models won’t cut the mustard in a Networked Economy.

I’m hoping to learn at least as much as I teach.

No sector needs more applied creativity and innovation than the federal government.  Obama and the Executive Branch can’t do it alone.   Today, through the lens of the health care debate, it’s easy to see the divide between the fearmongers clinging to a status quo in which insurance companies and big pharma control the U.S. healthcare system…and the champions of change who understand that we cannot continue to go down a path that puts so many barriers between health care providers and patients.

When the providers themselves want reform, you know something is screwy with the current system.  Yet so many people are afraid of change.  Of the unknown.  Here’s the insight for those people:  In resisting change and clinging to the past, you are guaranteeing your own irrelevance.

This is where creativity plays such a huge role in productive change.  Creativity is all about stepping confidently into the unknown, of facing the blank canvas of the future with the skill and preparation to turn it into a remarkable confluence of art and commerce.  It means confronting one’s fears instead of withdrawing from them.

If the objective (as in this instance) is better health care for more Americans, we have unlimited opportunities to make moves in that direction.  But we’re only going to make the moves when we realize that the process can be its own reward, and that in the process, we will discover the options and opportunities that will never come our way when we are ruled by our fear and frozen by our uncertainty.

Make your move, D.C.!  Sign up today!  (before Aug. 31, you get a nice discount)  See you there!

It has never been more important than it is on July 4, 2009, that we remember the founding of the United States of America as a Revolution, an overthrow of a distant ruling elite that had lost touch with the people.

Because today we need another Revolution.

We need a revolution against the kinds of businesses the U.S. has invested in way too heavily for the past 125 years, the businesses that sustained the oil-and-war economy built by people like George W. Bush’s granddad, businesses that President Eisenhower in the 1950s labeled the military-industrial complex.  Today the news media is complicit in the complex.  After all, what is more likely to keep you glued to the feeding tube than something scary happening right outside your front door?

We need a new kind of independence, from the feeding tubes of fear and oil and war and baseless celebrity.  Freedom from businesses built on killing, sensationalizing, alarming, manipulating, dividing, litigating, politicking, vilifying, dominating, acquiring, misdirecting, clouding, hiding, looting, destroying, drugging, bribing, hoarding, imprisoning, poisoning, torturing, hedging, lip-servicing and ass-licking.

These bad businesses are designed to extract wealth without replacing it.  Designed to accumulate money without earning it.  Designed to exploit labor without honoring it.  Designed to get better than they give.

In fact, businesses that generate wealth and well-being over the long haul are those that give better than they get.  Focusing on short term gains (we now measure our windows of transactional opportunity in milliseconds) cripples our potential for long-term growth.

We need another Revolution.

A revolution to free ourselves once and for all from the fear-based agendas of the distant and disconnected Bush Leaguer elites.   The Bush presidency was a validation of everything gone wrong with America.  Of myopia and mediocrity.  Of arrogance and bullying.  Of the toxic confluence of Church and State.

Here’s something that offers a strand of hope: fools like George W. Bush yield their own brand of wisdom.  He and his administration became like a compass needle that pointed in the exact opposite direction of the one we need to be going in.  This July 4th, we are in a race to heal the planet before the planet decides it’s going to heal itself.   Of us.  Which is why the Revolution needs to be Green.

The divisive ideologies and nonstop claptrap of talk show hosts, pundits, our so-called political leaders and even futurists only preserve the status quo. Obama is not getting the kind of energy and leadership he needs from Capitol Hill—from timid funeral director types like Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid, whose only apparent talent is soft-talking to the aggrieved, or from status-obsessed players like John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi, who always look like they’re counting the minutes to cocktails at the club.  These people stand in the way of progress.  We need legislators who can support a narrative other than their own.  Today, there’s only one narrative that matters when it comes to the federal government, and that’s.  the story of America.  It’s time for an uplifting twist to our story.  A ray of hope shooting through the economic gloom.  Not only do we need the sun to shine, we need it to generate electricity.

Which is why we need another Revolution.

Due in large part to the Bush Leaguers’ misadventures in the Middle East, we have racked up debts—monetary, environmental and political—that we’re going to be paying off for generations.  We have lost our touch for the extraordinary invention, the breathtaking breakthrough.  We have lost our appetite for industry.  Today, the touch that matters most to our economy, and, sad to say, defines us to a lot of the world, is the touch of bullets from an M2 50-caliber machine gun, the touch of a Wall Street banker to a politician’s wallet, or the touch of a camera lens on a dead celebrity.  Something is way, way off about that.  180 degrees off, to be exact.

Just as the Bush compass points due South, you can define the kinds of businesses we should be in as the polar opposites of the games we’ve been playing.  We need businesses made resilient by renewable energy and by peacemaking.  Business guided by themes like healing, educating, building, seeding, coaching, communicating, inspiring, bridging, liberating, converting, restoring, preserving, designing, connecting, transporting, sharing, growing, clarifying, creating.  And let’s not forget remembering.  These new kinds of businesses are our only hope for growing our way out of a malaise brought on by eight years of the reign of Prince George that didn’t add anything of value to the economic equation.  In fact it subtracted value.

It’s time for another Revolution.

The people who revolted against an out-of-touch elite to create the United States, and the people who have come here from around the world in the 233 years since then have literally put their lives on the line because they had an appetite for change and faith in their dreams   The U.S. political and banking systems exist to enable dreams of Americans, not leverage them to their own advantage by playing the kinds of insider games that turn those dreams into a mirage.  Mediocrity and myopia, arrogance and bullying,  mixing religion and politics, these are supposed to be the enemies of the American brand, not its trademarks.

This weekend, we remember the Revolution that became America.  Next week, let’s keep the spirit of that Revolution alive.  It’s the most American thing we can do.

Happy Independence Day!

On one hand, we had Obama, our wedding and the Brady Bunchiness of a new family, my book, Costa Rica, yoga, guitar lessons at Flea’s Silver Lake Conservatory, some fantastic clients and new conversations, and the ever-flowing love between us and the wonderful people in our lives.

On the flip side of the coin we minted in 2008 there was Bush and Cheney and their decrepit Industrial Age ‘war economy’ and the general malaise that came over and corrupted so much American business during their reign. At the end of the year, with Bush madly justifying his abhorrent stewardship of the country since 9/11, and Israel and Hamas burning through their munitions inventory like it’s a holiday sale at WarMart, we are gasping for air like we’ve been standing too long in a garage with a smoking Peterbuilt. One of 2009’s themes is going to be about getting out of that garage and breathing the fresh air of new narratives, new ideas for generating wealth in a networked economy. The engine has to run on something other than oil.

The good news coming out of 2008 is that the toxic cloud has a sustainable lining. Because we learn a lot from failure, most of us are a lot smarter than we were when this year began.

Necessity being the mother of invention and all, 2009 is going to be a great year for creativity. We have no choice. We cannot continue down the path we’re on, consuming everything in sight and not even coming close to putting back what we take. We cannot let the destructive narratives continue. They will bleed us dry.

The crooked and unproductive games have to change. Enough with the pyramid and ponzi schemes and insider games that benefit those at the top and shaft everyone else. Enough with the opaque communication. Hierarchical thinking. Politics over process. Class hegemony. Beholdness to the old boy networks. For the economy to rebound, the new networks must be allowed to breathe, and along with them, the ideas, players and connections they are capable of bringing to life.

From conspicuous consumers, we must become prodigious producers. From sappers of the earth’s resources, we have to become replenishers. From seeking to dominate the narrative, we must become supporters of it, contributors to it, because in the networked world, a narrative does not ‘belong’ to anyone. The new narratives are not ‘ownable’. They are not ‘controllable’. They cannot be scripted. They are the co-creations of communities, groups, brands, networks. They are collaborations between performers and audiences.

The good ideas, the innovation, the inspiration it will take to clean up the mess Bush and Co. created–all of it is out there for us, waiting to be discovered. As Obama has so ably demonstrated, the way we discover these possibilities is by continually improvising.

Happy New Year, everyone! Initiate strongly. Know your themes. Play with conviction. And have a productive and healthy 2009!

Back in January of this year, Barack Obama tossed out an aside at a coffee talk with a couple dozen senior citizens in Indianapolis, an aside that was probably lost on most of the audience listening in person: If he got elected, he and his team were going to re-design the White House web site to become more of a utility for citizens. I pointed out at the time what a brilliant initiation this was, with implications related to technology, jobs creation, art and design, and citizen activism, to name a few of the themes that could be explored as a result of it.

In yet another example of how the Obama administration will use the internet to put the principles of improvisation into play, the people that brought us a truly gamechanging campaign site (and are no doubt already hard at work on the White House web site re-design) have rolled out www.change.gov, a utility that connects people with government in new and productive ways.

Improvisation principles at play in Change.Gov.

ENVIRONMENT. As Viola Spolin used to say, if you act on the environment, the environment will act on you. The ‘environment’ for Change.Gov is much friendlier and more inviting than a typical government site. Which means that people are more likely to engage with it (’the environmment acting on’ its authors) The clean, cogent, artful design of the site presents a huge contrast with a typical government web site. Take a look…

SMALL IS SIGNIFICANT. Improvisers learn not to over-reach for big moves or big jokes, but to let their performance evolve from the events that occur organically in the scene. A particularly potent move can be to elevate a little idea or aside to prominence, like the little robot Wall-E becoming the most animated character on the planet Earth. The air bag sensors in automobiles that are sensitive to passenger weight, for example, came from a castoff little experiment at the MIT Media Lab whose only commercial application, until it was spotted and adapted by Honda engineers, was as part of a prop in a Penn & Teller magic show. In the improvisational sense, it is significant that Change.Gov’s stated mission is to make things ‘a little bit better’ for our children. This is not only more realistic and achievable, it honors all contributions, all ideas, and acknowledges their importance to the mission. Stopping global warming? That’s an overwhelming, daunting, super-human task requiring super-human effort, and you’ve got company coming over for dinner. But making things a little bit better? Everyone can do that. A little less gravy on those potatoes? Good move.
AGREEMENT. In casting its ensemble, the new administration has been ultra-quick to send signals that there are no vendettas in play–that loyalties to a shared objective transcend personal or political loyalty. Joe Lieberman keeps his chairmanship. Hillary Clinton looks like she’s coming aboard. Treasury Secretary nominee Timothy Geithner is apparently more conservative than Obama on economic issues. It is, as Lincoln described his own cabinet, a team of rivals. Obama understands that his job is not to sway or strong-arm other folks into his way of seeing things, but to synthesize two distinct points of view into a third, shared point of view, which then paves the way for productive action. Finding agreements that bridge disparate viewpoints and desires which may seem, on a cosmetic level, to be at odds with one another, is the improviser’s job.

LISTEN! Improvisers use suggestions from the audience to kick off a performance, and so does the Obama team. Listening, to the Obama team, is not just lip-service, and it is not just about reading poll numbers. It extends beyond cosmetic data, to the more emotional and meta levels of communication that come about through conversations and the sharing of stories. From conversations and stories come themes that inspire and inform the performance. The ability to listen is one of Obama gifts as a politician, and if Change.Gov is any indicator, it will be one of the many gifts he and his band of able improvisers bring to his administration.