What began two years ago as a ’stunt’ in Sydney, Australia, where the local World Wildlife Fund members rallied citizens, politicians, businesses and civic organizations to get lights turned off in Sydney Harbor for an hour, an event they called ‘Earth Hour‘, this year on March 28 grew into a worldwide event with over 1,800 cites around the world and an estimated one billion people participating.

The nature of games is that we do not know the outcomes.  What we know is that the playing of the game will result in communication, learning, and ultimately, transformation.  Through the playing of the game, we gain a better understanding of ourselves, our team, and our place in the larger world.

For GameChangers, playing the ‘Earth Hour game’ in Los Angeles yielded the following results:

- My guitar teacher, Lonnie ‘Meganut’ Marshall, formed the Life Drum Core, consisting of a dozen kids playing drums on recycled plastic buckets.  They performed at the Earth Hour L.A. event downtown.  While they were rehearsing last Wednesday, the USC football coach, Pete Carroll, who happened to be passing by, saw them and came over to say hello and get his picture taken with them.  He invited them to come to a USC football practice and play on the sidelines.

- Relationships with people in the City of L.A., AEG, the World Wildlife Fund and many others involved in the sustainability business.  We are having business conversations we would not otherwise be having.

- Two new GameChangers clients.

- The opportunity to get involved in education programs for L.A.’s public schools using sustainability as the basis for cross-disciplinary learning.  The first game will be an ‘e-Waste Race’ between Santee and Roosevelt High Schools, to see which school can collect the most e-Waste (old laptops, mobile phones, adaptors, etc.) during two weeks in April.  The winning school will get an Eco-Lab consisting of six laptops donated by Asus Computers, solar education kits donated by GoGreenSolar and books about Water and Energy donated by the Los Angeles DWP.  The core teams at the winning schools will get field-level seats to a Dodgers game, and get recognized on the Jumbotron screen during the game.  Jordan Farmar of the Lakers will announce the event at both schools.

- Revival of a four-years-dormant business relationship with The Walt Disney Company via its new Disneynature film label.

- Support from city councilman Tom LaBonge for my efforts to Solar Panel the Hollywood Sign, itself a game I launched several weeks ago on Facebook.

- The Groundlings improv group is creating a comedy pilot based on a video that they produced for Earth Hour, and have asked me to stay involved.

- Publicity for my home theater, I. O. West, which performed a ‘Bat Harold’ (a show done in complete darkness) during Earth Hour.   The Upright Citizens Brigade also participated, so the improv community came out strong in support of the game.  Which was only natural.  They got the game immediately.  They saw its potential.

-  Ron Roecker, head of PR for Earth Hour in L.A., has suggested future collaborations that involve GameChangers.  We like what he’s saying.

And this is just me.  Scale this activity over a billion people and you can imagine all the doors that opened, and all the new conversations that are happening today, because people played the Earth Hour game.

For businesses and brands operating in the networked world, an understanding of what we call ‘the productive game’ is vital.  Most of these games will not be as wide open and unstructured as the Earth Hour game, they will be much more oriented to specific business objectives, but the principles will be exactly the same.

Savvy managers in the new organizational models will know how to quickly identify and nurture productive games while just as quickly editing and eliminating unproductive ones.   Like all good improvisers, these players will know that the outcomes do not have to be known for the results to be predictable and productive.