So obvious, it’s funny–no one gets to Carnegie Hall without a ton of practice. It is usually the most ‘talented’ performers who practice most diligently. The talent onstage in Carnegie Hall is, as much as anything, a talent for practicing. A love of the hard work and focus that it takes to master one’s craft.

Rob McNamara writes in Integral Life about ‘The Necessity of Practice.’ Practice, notes McNamara, is preparation. What we are seeing and hearing onstage at Carnegie Hall is a performance informed by preparation. It is the preparation that elevates and defines the quality of the performance.

Everyone has a Carnegie Hall, a place or ideal they’re trying to get to. A vision for the future. And then, quite often, something happens. We get sidetracked. Distracted. Too busy to practice. We stop off at the Carnegie DELI and call it Carnegie HALL. Our ego tells us we have arrived. That’s when the unproductive patterns–sameness, repetition, redundancy, stagnation, smugness—set in. That’s the point where our performances become cyclical, begin to repeat themselves, and our audiences get bored, and begin wondering why they paid their money.

McNamara defines the act of practicing as ‘Engagement.’ The GameChangers Orchestral Model™ identifies six practices that generate productive outcomes in the world. Engagement is one of the six. The other five are:

Heeding (listening, paying attention, observing actively). In the Orchestral Model™, this practice precedes Engagement. As the social media doyenne, Sally Falkow, (@sallyfalkow) says, “You don’t go right up to people having a conversation at a party or social event and just start talking. First you have to hear what conversation is about, and then can you be part of it, and engage with people in a meaningful way.”

Learning. What is revealed to you as a result of your interactions with others, and with your environment? How does your network inform you? How do you turn learning into solutions? All this takes practice.

Creating. How does what you do make a difference? How does it make you unique? How do channel creativity toward innovation?

Performing. What are your criteria? What is your Carnegie Hall? Is it a seven or eight digit number? A place? A whale of a client? A standard you have set for yourself, or that others have set for you? How does your performance differentiate you?

Deciding. How consistent are you? What values do you represent? How clear and shareable are your decisions? What themes are important to you? Who and what influences your behaviors? If your deciding practices are weak, Big Trouble soon come.

Performing and Deciding are what we call the core practices. If you are not good at these–if you don’t have a clear vision of where you’re going, or if you are indecisive and wishy-washy along the way—the rest of the practices will not matter, because you’ll be too busy zig-zagging toward a mirage, rendering meaningless decisions in service of illusory goals.

So call the whole thing Engagement, yes, definitely! Practice it! Be engaged! Be present! Pay attention! Notice! That’s a good first step. Then refine your practices into the six different areas of the Orchestral Model™, like an athlete working on muscle groups or a musician working through different progressions.

And when call comes from Carnegie Hall, you’ll be ready.

We have defined it as “A process for producing consistently positive outcomes from unforeseen circumstances.” We call it “serendipity by design.” “A game, a theme, and an exploration.” “Collaborative problem solving.” “Acting on environment and letting environment act on you.” Listening, Learning and Transformation.” “Agility + Ability.” “Freedom within Structure.” “Creating a cosmos out of chaos.” “Openness to opportunity.” “The Big Yes-And.” “Flexible Vision.” “How Tina and Amy Got Their Grooves,” and “Not comedy.”  Among others.

Leave it to Steve Jobs, interviewed in The Pixar Story, Leslie Iwerks’ 2007 feature documentary, to phrase it with the assured elegance of an Apple design.”Unplanned collaboration” is the phrase he uses.

“We wanted a place that would encourage unplanned collaboration,” said Jobs in describing the design of Pixar’s new studio. He repeatedly cites this this as the architecture’s objective.

He didn’t connect this phrase to improvisation, per se, but it’s as good a definition as we’ve heard. Improvisation is unplanned collaboration. And even though it’s unplanned, it’s all part of the design. In the architecture of improvisation, you fully expect to run into someone unexpectedly. When you do, you are prepared to exchange information, find an agreement, and build a scene together or continue one that had begun earlier. You expect that others might jump into this scene with you, and you are prepared for anything they might add. Through this process, in thousands upon thousands of such unplanned increments, each filled with its own unique potential to be productive, you move your narrative forward.

It’s hard to imagine a better case study for the value of improvisational design than Pixar’s studio, or a better model of what it means to be a GameChanger than Steve Jobs.

Jobs also said it took ten years for Pixar to make any money. We’re just going to ignore that one. Play on.

William Gibson

Where trajectories of fashion, business, government and technology will someday intersect, William Gibson is already there, reporting back in mindbending detail.  His novels are, for me anyway, like books of code, densely-clued mysteries about the near future, that challenge a present-day intelligence to unravel them.  Here is one clue that gets dropped over and over again in Gibson’s newest novel, Zero History:

In the future, improvisation is a must-do.

Page 135:  “Doing it, as a pickpocket had once advised him, as if it were not only the expected but the only thing to do.”  The improvisation:  When you invest in your scene, the scene makes choices for you.  ‘Doing what’s expected’ is someone else’s script for you, it’s a voice in your head that’s not even your own.  ‘Doing the only thing to do’ is the feeling that you are in tune with everyone and everything around you.  It is acting on the clarity of one’s intuition instead of  obeying the voices stored in the RAM of one’s rational mind.  Just don’t be using your new-found powers to pick pockets.  Not all improvisation is put to work for the good of the team.  Beware the bad game!

Page 171:  “THE ORDER FLOW” (Chapter title.)  Gibson’s characters talk about “the inability to aggregate the order flow”—the sum of everything being bought and sold around the world at any given moment in time—as being the dynamic that keeps markets alive.  “Stability’s the beginning of the end,” says the character of Milgrim, a high-level intuitive, quoting an even more intuitive base jumper named Garreth.  “We only walk by continually beginning to fall forward.”  The improvisation:  Always fall forward, never stand still.  Turn fails immediately into positives.  Embrace flow.  Stasis—a static state—is the enemy.  Harness chaos with structure.  Subvert structure with flow.

Page 202:  Garreth talking about whether a phone call that’s crucial to their fates will happen or not:  “Either way, we’ve moved it forward.”  The improvisation:  ‘Something happening’ and ’something not happening’ are both opportunities to move your scene forward.  Don’t worry about what will or won’t happen, do something with whatever happens.

Page 225:  “You’re just doing this to see what happens,” says Milgrim.  The improvisation:  Do something and see what happens.

Page 234:  “…some kind of London PR hive-mind thing,” says a character named Heidi, a biker chick who uses taser-tipped darts as her weapon of choice.  “Wires are hot but there’s no actual signal.  Kind of subsonic buzz.”  The improvisation:  This is a description of the group mind.  Nothing perceptible is communicated.  What the group needs to know is simply, without ever being consciously transmitted, already there, waiting to be shared.

Page 319:  “Follow the accident.  Fear the set plan,”  says Garreth.  “I thought you loved plans,” says Heidi.  “Love planning.  That’s different.  But the right bit of improv makes the piece.”  The improvisation:  Think of your process as a series of scenes, in Gibson’s lingo, ‘pieces.’  Preparation is more important than planning.  Planning goes out the window in the first few beats of your scene, but preparation will be there for you throughout.

Zero History also has juicy insights into the future of marketing and brand strategy, which I’ll post separately.

Now go do something to see what happens.

This slide was presented as part of a seminar in New Orleans attended and photographed by our friend, Ray Nichols:

I love a lot of stuff coming out of New Orleans (current bad news about the oil disaster excepted), but I don’t love this slide.  Those of us who design improvisation for business spend too much time already dispelling misconceptions about what we do, and this is the single biggest misconception, that improvisation is “making it up as you go along” a.k.a. winging it, a.k.a. flying by the seat of one’s pants, a.k.a. spewing whatever comes to mind.

In fact, improvisation is specifically not ‘making it up as you go along.’  It is contrary to the idea of making it up as you go along.  It is, rather, a process for acting on one’s environment in a substantive and productive way to generate positive unforeseen outcomes.  One’s environment is not ‘made up’ as one goes along.   It is real, just as the reality of one’s scene partners is real.  They are not making stuff up.  They are dealing with reality, just like you are.   Deal with it.

There are, in fact, many other ways to “make it up”  besides “as you go along.”  There is making it up ahead of time and trying to get followers to go along.  There is making it up after the fact and hoping history goes along.  And there’s making it up in your head, and trying to get your heart to go along.   All of these are realities that must be addressed in any business narrative.

The quote by Godin suggests a divide between planning and spontaneity, between fact and fiction, when in fact business, and life itself, is a balancing act, a continuum, between the two.  Most actions in business are calculated to a fault, and rely too heavily on planning.  (Maybe that is the point of Godin’s quote.)  The purpose, however, of applying improvisation principles to business is not to say, “Forget your planning and your calculations, ignore your research and your institutional memory, because…hey,  we’re going to make this up as we go along.”  That would be disastrous on many levels.  What improvisation says is do your planning but emphasize preparation, because every plan changes, and it’s your ability to adapt to change that will determine your success.

Business improvisation liberates the unconscious mind, but does not disconnect from an awareness of history, environment or context.  It is informed by, but not totally beholden to the numbers, the data, and the rational mind.

The essential message of improvisation is this:  Don’t make it up.  Make it real.  Then act on that reality.

Mona Hoffman is August’s GameChanger of the Month because her brand is an exploration of themes that matter.  One of her responsibilities at her former company was sustainability, and the company, though appreciated as a major employer in the community where it’s headquartered, was not committed to moving in that direction (its major product lines are made of wood).   Another of her passions is craftsmanship, the ability to turn readily available materials into something extraordinary.   In transforming herself into an artisan who works with concrete, she combines the themes of sustainability and craftsmanship.  The exploration of these two themes creates and informs the Rough Edges brand narrative.

Mona Hoffman is the GameChanger of the Month, because in forming her new company, she acted on what she is passionate about, yet she didn’t leap before looking.   Rough Edges Design is grounded in diligent study and immersive apprenticing in the craft of concrete-shaping.  The transition from cushy-and-corporate to rough-and-tumble is not one to make without a lot of preparation.   Preparation is the key to a successful journey.  Preparation gives you the ability to improvise in a way that a plan, no matter how meticulous and thought-through it is, cannot.   A GameChanger prepares.

Works like The Unknown Craftsman, by Soetsu Yanagi informed Hoffman’s education.   Yanagi’s words, though originally written in another language about artisans from a different culture, described a world familiar to her, one in which everyday objects and materials become sources of what Yanagi calls “calm and friendly beauty.”

Having spent her professional life in a world of zero-tolerance manufacturing and super-repeatable processes, Hoffman has created a brand where the production process, by design, yields unexpected results, where “flaws” are in fact an artifact of the human touch on the material, and are embraced as part of the product’s charm.

Mona Hoffman is the GameChanger of the Month because she interacts with the familiar in a way that makes it new and remarkable.   This is the alchemy of improvisation.  With its artful line of lamps, Rough Edges Design literally turns heavy material into objects of light.  And if that ain’t changin’ the game, we don’t know what is.

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!