The extraordinary improviser, Paul Vaillancourt, gave me a list of sayings that have been compiled and passed around the improv theater community over the years. The great teachers Mick Napier and Del Close get some of the credit, as do Viola “The Godmother” Spolin and ImprovWorks’ Sue “Pond” Walden, though the exact origins of most of these sayings would be pretty hard to trace. What’s clear to anyone who explores improvisation is that the the meaning behind the sayings originates from the same place that accounts for such profound ideas as jazz, the Dao De Jing, Johnny Appleseed and Pixar Animation.  Here is the fifth in a series

Play against cliches. First, play with the cliches of your business.  You all know what they are.  Name them.  Call them out.  Have some fun with them.   And then go against them.  There is a lot of movement in playing against cliches.  Just doing this one thing can transform your scene into something delightful.

Think of the environment as a six-sided sphere, of which the audience is a part. What a brilliant way to determine your marcomm budget!  It’s 1/6 of your total operating budget.  Done.  Next.

The environment also has an outside and an inside. This is a good way of thinking about how your brand’s environment travels with the communication that represents it in the networked world.  Think of your network as a place.  What is that place like?  Who is walking the halls?  How is it lit?  What kind of art hangs in its offices?  What does it sound like?  All these concepts should be consistent and play off one another in virtual space and in reality. A friendly atmosphere in the office extends to the social graph.  Artfulness will be apparent in reality and in virtual space.  Clutter is as clutter does.  Etc. etc.

You don’t have to try to be funny, laughter will happen just by being human.  Being human is funny enough. A common misconception we battle all the time at GameChangers is that improvisation is all about being funny.  So not true!  Improvisation is about communication, learning, and transformation.  It is only by a quirk of genetic fate—Viola Spolin’s son, Paul Sills, brought all the games Viola had conceived with him when he and Bernie Sahlins co-founded Second City—that we in the U.S. associate improvisation so strongly with comedy.  Comedy is just a sliver of the output improvisation is capabl of generating.   It’s like saying all ice cream Praline Pecan.  Taint so.

Playful, direct, co-developed ideas, informations, and dreams will always be far hipper than one person’s alone. This is just a basic human algorithm.  The best ideas of eight people will always be better than the best ideas of one person.  Spare us your genius, and bring us something else.  Your work ethic.  Your brain.  Your smile.  Your song.  Your sense of smell.  Your experience.  But spare us your genius.  Because, you know…our stuff will always be far hipper than yours alone ; )

If the whole is going to be art, the parts must strive not to be.  If we strive to make everything we do precious and perfect and just-so.  If we deliberate and debate the appropriateness of our actions.  If we measure every move.  Craft and eddit every response.  The sum of the parts of what we CrEaTeToGeThEr.  Is.  Surely.  Going.  To be.  Yes.  Oh yes most indubitably and beyond repudiating to the level of a statistical certainty will most definitely be…(Say it!)  A pompous load of crap.

Always bring a brick, not a cathedral into a scene.   We know a businessperson who had built a well-deserved reputation for dropping big ideas on meetings.  That was his thing.  People were in awe of how inspired and forward-thinking his ideas were, by the compelling scenarios he painted for them with his words and emotions.  He liked this role, and didn’t do anything about changing it.  Why would he?  People called him a genius.  A visionary.  What usually happened, though, is that his big ideas died on the vine, or failed to live up to their promise.   His ideas were so big, so singular, that people had trouble adding their own bricks to his architecture.  In our friend’s mind, the cathedral had already been built, all there was for his admirers to do was worship at his altar.  We gave the genius an ‘adjustment’.  All we said was, ‘Don’t be the guy with the big idea.  Be the guy who makes other people’s ideas big.’  This has made all the difference in the world.  He has learned that it’s more satisfying and a lot less stressful to make his scene partners look good, and to not worry so much about proving his own genius  It turns out he’s just as talented at sharing his talent as he is at showing it off, and sharing has proved to be a much more productive way for him to behave.  Today, his reputation is for getting big things done.

Make the strange familiar, the familiar strange.  This is a great philosophy for keeping your brand’s culture lively.  Every business culture benefits from a flow of ’strange’ (i.e. alien to that culture) situations, environments and characters.  Likewise, if we get too familiar with our environment, our process and our fellow players–and most tragically if we quit surprising ourselves–our performance is going to get stale.  When every day is the same we lose our sense of anticipation.  If we dont’ think we’re going find anything, we quit looking, and the flow of new ideas drys up.  It is good to introduce some outside strangness into the workaday mix; it is even more potent to rediscover the strangeness within ourselves.

Don’t prolong the agony of a scene that is slowly dying.  Infuse it with the momentum it needs to end on a positive note.  There are a lot of business scenes ’slowly dying’ these days.  Meetings with HR end in pink slips.  Start-ups lose their funding.  Towns lose their biggest employer.   Often in these situations, the only feasible move is to end the scene quickly and move on.  It makes a huge difference to the rest of your performance if the bad scene ends on a postive note instead of a downbeat one.  A town that greets the news of losing its biggest employer with some kind of community celebration is already on the road to recovery while a town that gets busy telling lots of sad stories to the news about how they got screwed is going to be staying in the doldrums for awhile.

All masks are empty until they are put on and inhabited by the actor.  The same is true with job titles.

A scene is an idea and a comment. Every scene you do should wheel around a central idea or theme. It is every player’s responsibility to explore this idea in a way that enlightens and engages fellow players and audience alike. This exploration of the central idea is what is meant by ‘comment’. Comment is not passive. Improvisers think of ‘comment’ as a verb, not a noun.

Avoid preconceived ideas. Start each improv as a blank canvas waiting to be filled in with detail. Good scenes very quickly get to be ‘about something’. Skilled improvisers can express this ’something’ in single look, or a couple of lines of dialogue and with that they are off and running. There is an important beat at the beginning of every scene that is the ‘blank canvas waiting to be filled’. It may last only as long as it takes two players to make eye contact, but in that instant, a world of possibilities exists. Your call, player. Are you going to lock yourself into a preconceived idea? Or are you going to give yourself options. Are you going to paint by numbers? Or are you going to bring something new into the world?

Accept what your partner says or does as you would a gift, not a challenge. Just say ‘yes and’. Honor the actions and ideas of others. Enough with the asshole unproductive behaviors — like constantly wanting to have the last word, upstaging your partners, steering scenes toward your scripted outcomes so you can prove what a visionary you are, and forcing your questionable aesthetic sense down everyone’s throats. Play nice. You expand the possibilities of the scene simply by showing some gratitude for the contributions of your scene partners.

Don’t talk about your activities, play with them. Show yourself through them. The activity is the focus. Give yourself up to it, and let it guide you toward productive attitudes and behaviors. A two-line email notifying your team that something has been handled is much more productive than a two page email that no one is going to read anyway, because it’s just you trying to prove what a genius you are and what a dunce everyone else is. One of the ways that good managers get results is by encouraging their groups to choose action over talk about action, and always being sensitive to the difference between the two.

If all else fails, describe. (The improv actress and director Elaine May used to say, “If all else fails, seduce” — which just goes to show you that there’s more than one way to bake a cat.) What this saying says is that you can get a stalled scene moving again by adding details to it, getting more specific, adding to the environment. The legendary editor of The New Yorker, Harold Ross often used to scrawl in large block letters across unsatisfactory reporting: “Get facts, will fix!” — meaning if the story dug its claws a little deeper into the meat of reality, that story would realize its objective.

For Spolin’s classic text, Improvisation for the Theater, Sills wrote a section entitled Paul Sills’ Sayings of Viola Spolin, a compilation of wisdom that can be seen as a coach’s advice to her players, and also as a mother’s advice to a son. Here are a few of those bromides. They need no comment, but give them some thought, because they are deep, and offer fresh insight into why improvisation is important to the conduct of business in the Networked World:

Approval/disapproval is keeping you from a direct experience.

That which is not yet known comes out of that which is not yet here.

Don’t initiate! Follow the initiator! Follow the follower!

When you are in a state of reflection you are including another; when you initiate you deny yourself.

Games and story bring out self rather than ego.

Let the magic of the focus work for you. Stay out of it.

Focus is not the content of focus; it is the effort to stay on focus.

Change is not enough. This body of work asks more: transformation.

Movement, interaction, transformation.