“And when do you need this done?” sighed the already-dubious employee.

“Yesterday!” said the manager, pivoting abruptly and walking away.

The employee shook her head almost imperceptibly and said to no one in particular, “What am I supposed to do with that?”

Exactly.

‘Yesterday’ is not an answer. It’s an attitude.  And a cliche on top of it. The ‘I need it yesterday’ attitude says to the employee:

“You are now guaranteed to fail. I’m going to be unhappy with you no matter what. You should have thought of this yourself. Do I have to think of everything?” That’s  lot of attitude for one word.

And like the employee said, what is a person supposed to do with it?

Give the people in your scenes information they can put to use! Information that will shed light and bring clarity to the problem at hand. Don’t muck up the scene with your imperious attitude and your unrealistic expectations.

Richard Saul Wurman holds court at USC school of Architecture, 01.10.12

On Tuesday, I went to see Richard Saul Wurman speak to an audience of architecture students and faculty at USC. Afterward he held court outside the classroom for half a dozen students who stayed around and asked him questions. One student asked, “What do you think of urban planning?”

Wurman sized up the student for half a beat then shook his head. “That’s a terrible question,” he scolded. (He pulls no punches.) “It’s too general, too broad. How can I even begin to answer it? It’s like asking a doctor what he or she thinks of medicine, or asking an oceanographer what he or she thinks of water!”

See, there’s learning in the ‘Yesterday’ scene for both players. The employee had an attitude, too. “When do you need this done?” made scheduling the task the manager’s problem. It was therefore not a very useful response to the manager’s request.

Instead of a question that made scheduling the task the manager’s problem (and setting herself up to be a victim) a question or statement that engaged the manager in the scheduling process would have been better:

“I’ve got five to-do’s on my list ahead of your request. Help me prioritize.”

“I can have it done in 48 hours.”

“Rate the urgency from 1 to 5, with 5 being an emergency where I have to drop everything and do it now.”

Whatever you do, whatever role you’re playing, give your scene partners information they can act on, not an attitude that makes it more difficult or even impossible for them to solve the problem of the scene.

The words ‘yes’ and ‘and’ do not have to be spoken literally, of course. It is the spirit of the phrase that matters. A common improv exericise invokes this spirit by having players begin every exchange of dialogue with those two powerful words, spoken literally.

If we are in a scene together and are ‘yes-anding’ one another, by the third line of the scene, it will not be about your reality, or my reality, it will be about our reality. Now we have the ability to work together toward an objective. It is the ‘and’ that makes all the difference. Anyone can say ‘yes’. It might get me a reputation as a being a positive person around the office, but it will not necessarily make me a productive player.

Let’s put it this way: ‘Yes’ is agreeing to a marriage proposal. ‘Yes and’ is agreeing to a life together.

Pay attention to the people in your network who are skilled communicators. Analyze your scenes with successful entrepreneurs and top salespeople. They never deny their scene partners’ reality. They add to it. They augment it. They build on it.

‘And’ is the catalyst, the propellant, the push. What are you going to add to the scene that will advance it toward its objective? It’s not always as easy as it sounds. Business scenes can turn into a battle for control of the narrative. They can fall victim to players who play ’status games’ designed, for example, to give the top-ranking player in the scene the last word. They can get derailed by players who insist on being the naysayer (or the ‘Yes but’ ter), and conversely by players whose flights of fantasy (’Yes and it’s where Israeli girls can go to meet Palestinian dudes’ ) hijack the team for a trip to Crazy Town.

Some tips for ‘Yes-anding’ in your scenes:

1) First listen. If you don’t hear what your scene partner is saying, your ‘and’ won’t mean much.

2) Add in increments. The ‘and’ does not necessarily have to be some earth-shattering addition to the scene. It does not have to have the drama of a marriage proposal. It can be simple. Small. A show of support. In improv theater, this is known as ‘playing slow’. It takes skilled, disciplined, patient players to play slow. Slow and steady progress toward the objective is preferable to lots of dramatic, news-making behavior that ultimately lands you right back where you started.

3) Agree to the underlying game. If you and your scene partners are at cross purposes–you’re in it to learn more about a problem, and they are in it to eliminate the problem–no amount of yes-anding can turn it into a productive scene. First agree to ‘why’ you’re in the scene, then you can deal with ‘what’ the scene is meant to accomplish.

4) Deal in objective reality. There are times when unfettered bouts of brainstorming are helpful. At the beginning of a project, I usually invoke the ‘No Bad Ideas’ Rule, in which any idea, no matter how far-fetched, extravagant or unlikely, can be put into play. But business gets transacted, for the most part, in the Real World. What do I have, how much am I asking, how much are you willing to pay? That’s reality. The yes-anding should acknowledge reality and work with it as the raw material of a scene the way a sculptor works with clay.

Scripting happens when a player tries to steer the outcome of a scene according to the narrative he or she has ‘written ahead of time’. A weak player (like the one in the video below) gets lost immediately when the way he has envisioned the scene goes poof with the first thing that comes out of his scene partner’s mouth. A player who scripts will try to control or dominate the narrative, dictating (and therefore diminishing) the roles and contributions of the other players. This seriously hampers a scene’s potential. It’s like trying to fly without wings. All thrust, no lift or direction.

Pimping, Judging and Fantasizing are other types of behaviors that curb a scene’s productivity. Pimps, judges and fantasizers are just as in need of adjustments as scripters are.

Pimping happens when one player sets up another to look bad in a scene by presenting them with a direction or expectation that can’t be met. “Derek here will stand on his head!” you announce to the crowd, knowing full well that Derek cannot stand on his head. Pimp. Interestingly, pimping is something experienced players will sometimes do just to keep one another on their toes. I was once at a Second City performance in Chicago where the upstage performer kept whispering “You suck!” and “You’re boring!” to his downstage scene partner, just out of sight and earshot of most of the audience. It was a game within a game, a meta-game they played to add edge to their familiarity with one another, to add focus to their performance. Generally speaking, though, pimping is bad for business.

Judging takes place in your head. If you think the scene is going bad while you’re in it, you are helping to fulfill that judgment. The scene will be bad, and you’ll be one of the problems with it. Judging causes hesitation, uncertainty, detachment — all corrosive to a scene’s potential. Good judgment is in fact a complete emancipation from judgment while the scene is happening. You can always evaluate it later. By freeing yourself from any subjectivity about the scene, you become free to make each move productive, positive and supportive of its objective.

Fantasizing is a fine line. It’s good to stretch the boundaries of what’s expected or thought possible. But when a player stops dealing in the reality of a scene and takes the scene into a patch of pure imagination, that’s not good. (My teacher, Michael Bertrando, calls this ‘Going to Crazy Town’.) Skilled improvisers deal only in the realities and the group-imposed limitations of the scene. Keep it real. The breakthroughs happen step by step, conjured up by the necessities of the scene, not with extravagant flights of fancy that sever connections to the reality of one’s scene and one’s fellow players.

Yesterday I had coffee with a friend Andrew, 27 years old, of multi-cultural descent, finishing up his MBA while working full-time as the Director of Marketing for a health care company, engaged to be married this year and on top of all of that, just formed a new band. (He’s a brilliant guitarist.) He told me that his company’s CEO recently invited him and two co-workers to his office, sat them down across from his desk and said to them, “I am like the Dad and you three are like the Children.”

“Do you realize how many things are wrong with that statement?” asked my friend.

Umm, yes, yes I do. There are exactly four things wrong with that statement: Scripting, Pimping, Judging and Fantasizing. The CEO has pretty much tied up all four of the improvisational no-nos listed above into one awful initiation. (If the scene had had comedy as its objective, I’d say it was genius, because it is bursting with conflict, hence comedic potential.)

The CEO scripted by presenting the group with a ‘we are family’ narrative he expected them to follow. He pimped his scene partners by assigning them roles, ‘children’, that he should have known they did not want to play, upon which Andrew began judging the scene as sucking bigtime. The notion that this was going to be a productive, team-building scene was pure fantasizing on the CEO’s part. With one line of dialogue, the CEO demolished any chance for the scene to be productive.

If the CEO wanted to think of himself as a Dad, that’s his thing, and there’s every possibility it can be a good thing. It is his prerogative how he wants to play his role. But any CEO who’s half-awake in the world should know that employees do not think of themselves as Children. In assigning them that role, the CEO lowers their status and discounts the value of their education, experience, and their understanding of the Networked World. He is basically telling them they’re going to sit at a different table from the adults, and that he wants them to keep quiet, do what they are told, not make a mess, and not cause trouble.

In this era of network natives and baby billionaires, it would have been much better for the CEO to have initiated with, “You three are like the Parents, and I am like the Child.” That would have been a scene worth playing.

I had been carrying around the Feb. 17, 2008 New York Times Magazine with the cover story entitled ‘Why Do We Play?’ by Robin Marantz Henig for the past ten days, mildly dreading the time when I’d finally read it, because I sensed that I was going to have issues with it. The cover art was composed solely of children playing. That tipped me off. (If the cover art were to have added some baby otters getting eaten by sea lions, rats with half their brains cut out, and children crying with bloody noses, it would have even more accurately reflected what was within.) Henig’s article starts promisingly, with a psychiatrist explaining to parents why play is important to all ages, but then proceeds to make a series of turns down increasingly narrow passages dealing with parenting and scientific research, and leaving a lot of vital stuff unsaid.

Here’s one passage from it, in which Henig, quoting Brian Sutton-Smith, whom she cites as one of the nation’s preeminent play scholars, writes: “…children learn all those necessary arts of trickery, deception, harassment, divination and foul play that their teachers won’t teach them but are most important in successful human relationships in marriage, business and war.”

Say whaaaat????

While, “trickery, deception, etc.” can be part of a game, they are first of all, not an art, not by any stretch of the imagination. Art is about revealing, illuminating, making known. Precisely the opposite of Sutton-Smith’s definition. The behaviors Sutton-Smith describes as “necessary” are antiquated remnants of an Industrial Age. Harassment? Are you kidding me? Deception? Maybe when Tom Brady fakes the jump pass and hands off to his running back, but in marriage? There is a case to be made for deception in war, I suppose, but there’s also a strong case to be made that we’re not fooling anybody but ourselves these days in Iraq or Afghanistan, and that maybe deception is overrated. As far as business is concerned, this is the era of transparency and collaboration — between countries, organizations, individuals. This is Twitter time, baby. I got your foul play right here, in your DNA.

To be fair, Henig researched her article exceptionally well, interviewing a lot of thought leaders in the field of play. She also describes, interestingly, how many writers and educators like Stephen J. Gould think play enables us to evolve as a species. “The adaptive advantage has often gone to those who ventured upon their possibility with cries of exultant commitment,” Henig further quotes Sutton-Smith.

But here’s the Holland Tunnel-sized hole in the logic of the material: It defines play as something that children do to prepare themselves for adulthood.

Beg your pardon?

The idea that play is the exclusive realm of children (and that it is a purely physical activity) disses the playfulness abiding in every entrepreneur launching a new business, every group of ladies sewing a quilt for the church picnic, every old dog who ever chased a frisbee. In failing to examine the importance of play at every age, by selling short the power of play to bring about positive change in the grown-up realm, Henig and the New York Times dropped the stickball on this one.

Einstein played, and unlocked new worlds. Bill Gates plays, one could say it’s a great big game of Risk, and one could say he’s rich because he’s good at playing it. Julia ‘Butterfly’ Hill played by sitting in a tree for a year, and got the logging industry to change its behaviors. Sam Walton played by wearing a grass skirt and dancing a hula down Wall Street in 1983 to pay off a bet to his employees, and we all know what happened after that. A 100-year old woman plays a drum for an online film, and becomes part of a story seen around the world. You see, far from being useful only to the young, play can be an engine for generating breakthrough behaviors, art, commerce and overall positive energy throughout our lives.

By pigeonholing play, and writing for an audience of ‘parents concerned that their children are maybe not playful enough, with mommy and daddy being so busy all the time and everybody so over-scheduled with their Suzuki violin and SAT prep lessons and and soccer practice and everything that we all need medication’ (my quotes), the Times misses some significant elements of the story. Here are a few of those elements:

Play is culture. Because it is built on agreement, play connects us with one another, our neighborhoods, our communities, in constructive ways. This weekend, I’m attending BarCampLA, two days of informative, loosely-structured play that connects, builds and strengthens geek culture in L.A. Play combines fun with a sense of purpose, resulting in new friendships, new business, new art — in possibilities that did not exist before the game transpired.

Play is productive. With games we understand the rules that make productive participation possible. The rule of law is essential, but it only explains what is illegal. To say that anything productive can come from laws and policies is like saying you can play football by understanding only the penalties. The rules of games, on the other hand, invite us to play to the limits (and extend beyond what we believe to be the limits) of our potential.

Play evolves. Just because we learn behaviors and strategies as children that come in handy as we get older does not mean that play ends with childhood. Quite the contrary. The more experienced we get in the world, the more complex and serious our games become, the deeper the lexicon, the more arcane the rules, the higher the stakes. Ask anyone who has ever gotten a drug approved by the FDA about the game they had to play. Ask anyone who ever needed their passport renewed in a day about the game they had to play.

The question posed in the Times headline, “What do We Learn From Play?” can be answered differently by every one of us. We learn to swim. We learn to fall. We learn teamwork. We learn to avoid trouble. We learn the resourcefulness it takes to get passports renewed in a day. If it’s final answers ye seek, here be mine: We learn who we are, and who we are to one another. We learn to be both realistic and imaginative. We learn to extend life’s possibilities. We learn how to have fun. We learn to improvise. Arrrgh.

What are some of the worst things a person can say in a work setting?

All the Very Best,
Lalita Amos
Total Team Solutions

Setting aside the volumes of sexually graphic or suggestive, offensive, uncouth, uninteresting, drunken, gossipy, charmless, and downright stupid things people are capable of saying in a work setting…there are volumes more composed of statements made every day in workplaces the world over that masquerade as helpful but are actually unproductive or counter-productive. These constitute their own category of ‘Bad’. Here are three of the more insidious that come to mind:

“That’s not how we do things around here.” This implies that “we all do things the same way.’ In today’s workplace, it is the uniqueness of our contribution that creates differentiation, innovation and ultimately, wealth. You don’t want behaviors so different that they become un-moored from the company’s culture — wearing pajama tops to a law firm is behavior you’ll only see on Boston Legal. But it is good to remember that digressive or disruptive or novel behavior can often be productive behavior.

“If it were up to me, we’d do it, but it’s not up to me.” This is the favorite line of the non-supporter who wants to appear supportive. “I’m behind you but not when it counts.” “I believe in you as long as it doesn’t cost me anything.” That’s what you’re really saying. Our ability and willingness to support the ideas and initiatives of others is a large measure of our value as employees. When we are not, or cannot be, supportive, we can be more productive by dealing with the reality of that (”I don’t think this will fly and here’s why…”) than with some theoretical situation (”If I were in charge around here…”).that does not exist.

“Yes.” Saying yes without adding action (i.e. saying “Yes and…”) is the equivalent of saying nothing. It does not move the scene forward. It is acquiescing without participating. It can also constitute judging or rubber-stamping — neither of which is a productive behavior. For a business scene to be as productive as it can potentially be, it is not enough for the participants to say “Yes” without adding something to the dialogue. It is the “and” that makes the difference, keeps the scene alive, collaborative, and moving toward its objective. Saying “yes” a lot may get you a reputation as a positive person, but it does not get the job done.

Thanks for asking the question, Lalita.

Mike

Before I learned to improvise, I wore this game out. It was easy for me – everything reminds me of a story, and I’m good at telling them. I often justified the game by imagining I was ‘bringing the brand narrative to life’. True? Maybe. Maybe I just liked hearing myself talk. Listen, here’s the pertinent truth about telling stories in business meetings, a truth I realized only after I learned improvisation: When someone launches into a long monologue, the scene slows to a standstill. Momentum hits the ditch. Productivity takes a nap. The deliverer of the monologue smothers the back-and-forth communication between players that is essential to a productive, well-improvised scene.

Here’s a demonstration of how the game of ‘That Reminds Me of a Story’ can derail a scene and stop it from achieving its objective: