Are your epaulets–whatever you ‘carry on your shoulders’–tied so heavily to obligations that it causes you to bend over in your carriage with eyes down instead of keeping your spine straight, and your vision up the road? Look at those braids and ropes latticed into Harry’s epaulets! They used to pay Houdini big money to escape from messes like like that.

What kind of collar do you wear? Is it stiff and tight like Harry’s ? Does it restrict your range to the ‘Voice of the Monarchy’ that His Hankness has been taught to repeat? Or is it loose and open, so that your voice can express all the colors and range of the voice of an opera star like Juan Diego Flórez?

Does your outfit sport ribbons and medals that require a degree in Heraldry to interpret? Or do you walk into scenarios unadorned, prepared to adapt to whatever best suits the situation and the problem at hand?

And speaking of hand…does your outfit give everything and everyone the white glove treatment–no dirt, and no skin except for a penny-sized patch in the fat of your palm? Or is your sense of touch free to achieve its full potential? In a digitally-mediated world, touch is a hugely appreciated experience.

If you put a lid on your outfit, do you do it in an old-school marching band style like the unfortunate Harry, who presumably had no choice in the matter? Or do you make it a lid that people might actually choose to wear themselves? Can you imagine a non-Halloween event where you’d want to wear a lid like Harry’s?

Now..in contrast with the Best Man’s outfit, take a look at what Pippa Middleton, the Maid of Honor, is wearing:

Everything about Pippa’s outfit contrasts with Hank’s. It is open, subtle, simple, and elegant. For such a momentous occasion, it is surprisingly casual. Most of all, what comes through is the personality of the wearer. There’s nothing in its design to distract us from her Pippa-ness, which is downright lovely, even the tension around her mouth, which says she’s putting up with the pomp, maybe she’s even amused by it, but she’s not reveling in it.

Who’s playing a role and who is showing character?  Who is trapped in the past and who is living in the moment? Who is free to move, and who is tied down by an institution? Who’s going to look good in shoes or barefoot? Who could go for a swim without drowning? Whose attire wouldn’t damage you physically you if you slow dance together?

Improvisation results in an outfit like Pippa’s, one that best suits the occasion, and shows you in your best light.  A totally-scripted outfit like Harry’s sits around in the closet, waiting for an occasion to suit it. That’s a lot of overhead. Unless you’re His Royal Highness Prince Henry of Wales, you probably can’t carry it. And even if you can, why would you want to?

It was like this, see...

One of them was a teenaged girl lugging a big suitcase. Her cheeks were painted in glitter. She looked tired. She ordered a water, then got a book out of a suitcase that looked to be crammed with rave clothing, smelled the book, and began reading.  On occasion, as she was reading, she would laugh out loud.

I figured I had the story.  Practically a cliche.  Underage girl, probably a runaway, goes to Hollywood rave, crashes with people she meets there, and when everyone is no longer amused, they kick her onto the street.  Now she was headed back to San Bernardino or Topeka, or wherever.

To confirm all this, I initiated a conversation with her.  It turned out that her name is Amber.  She works with a group in the Bay Area called Magic Princess that does party performances.  A couple of days earlier, they had gotten a phone call from the Make-a-Wish Foundation in L.A., and Amber happened to be in the office when the call came.  An eight year old girl from Los Angeles with a terminal illness had made a wish to see a fairy.  Amber volunteered to play the fairy.  She rode a bus for 12 hours from Oakland to L.A., spent the afternoon being the little girl’s fairy and was waiting for the bus, to ride 12 hours back home.

The light of Amber’s beautiful story exposed the wrongness of my pathetic preconception. How often do we do this? We perceive things to be a certain way because we see them from the perspective of our own experiences, when in reality, our own experiences are a very narrow lens, like trying to see the world through a pinhole camera. When we manage to put down that lens and really look around, we discover that every interaction holds the potential for something new and wonderful.

It is only when we let go of our own narratives, our scripts for what we think we want our lives to be, our prejudices preconceptions and fears, that we can truly experience the beauty of what life actually is. We don’t have to make the magic. It’s all around us. And if we’re open to it, it will happen.

Wael Ghonim

Wael Ghonim, Google’s marketing manager for the Middle East and North Africa, had been held captive by the Egyptian government for 12 days.   Recently released, he has been doing interviews describing what’s going on his country in which he describes it as an internet revolution, ‘Revolution 2.0′  is the name he has given it.  Here’s a 5-minute CNN interview with him (sorry for the link out, embedding has been disabled).

‘Revolution 2.0′ is a classic example of how a scene breaks down when a leader doesn’t share the narrative with a team.  It doesn’t matter whether the scene plays out over 30 years, as with Mubarak’s reign, or whether it’s the duration of your company’s offsite, the dynamic is the same:  Scenes in which one player tries to script and control the narrative are doomed to fall apart in a networked environment.

Not that I’m putting myself in the same lame league as a world-class scene hog like Hosni Mubarak, but ’scripting’ is my own biggest challenge as an improviser performing on stage.  For much of my career, I got paid for telling stories.  I made a career out of coming up with ideas that others on my team were tasked with implementing.  I led by articulating a vision that others would follow.

And then…

Through improvisation I have come to see that when you participate in a narrative without controlling it, the stories tell themselves.  I understand now that collaboration is the shortest path to implementation.  I realize that vision is only as good as what you can see in the moment, and that the best leadership is actually skillful following in disguise.

‘Revolution 2.0′ is a demonstration of the power of a shared narrative, and a global referendum on what leadership will look like in the Networked World. The Egyptian narrative belongs to the Egyptian people and the harder Hosni Mubarak works at controlling it, the more obvious this fact is going to become.

(UPDATE:  AT 8 AM PST ON FEB 11, 2011, HOSNI MUBARAK RESIGNED.  THE PEOPLE OF EGYPT ARE OVERJOYED.  CONGRATS TO WAEL GHONIM AND ALL EGYPTIANS ON THE END OF A BAD SCENE AND THE BEGINNING OF A NEW ONE!)

It does, however, get a lot more complex, and in a hurry.  Here’s why:

In selling scenes, the customer plays two roles:  Audience and Scene Partner.  You, as a seller, co-create your selling scene with your customer as your scene partner.   He or she will then, stepping into the role of your audience, pass judgment on your performance.  Thumbs up or thumbs down?  Worth the price of admission or not?  Good collaboration or rocky relationship?  Will you generate positive word of mouth or negative reviews?  Your earnings depend on how your performance is received.

There’s no script for these scenes–at least not one your customer is going to be memorizing and reciting verbatim anytime soon.  You’re going to be improvising.  And this is a fact:  The best salespeople are the best improvisers.

Here are some ways in which good salespeople collaborate with customers on scenes that get a thumbs-up from those same customers:

They keep their scenes lively. They keep the dialogue moving along at a productive tempo.  They yes-and promptly.  They heighten by upping the tempo, the emotional pitch, or both.  They add useful information.  They perform with the awareness that a ‘dead spot’ in the scene now will be judged harshly by the customer-as-audience later.

They make their customer the hero of the scene. An improvisational salesperson is a Sherpa to the customer with some kind of allegorical mountain to climb.  The sales Sherpa has useful knowledge.  Charts a practical course to the summit.   Reads the weather.  Calculates the odds.  Comes well-equipped.  The sales Sherpa gives the gift of support, and in doing so, makes the customer look good.  The role of the sales Sherpa is not the same as playing a second-banana, a sidekick, a best friend, a wing man, a femme fatale or a fall guy.  These are Hollywood movie roles.   The sales Sherpa is exactly what the name defines: a Sherpa.  It’s a Himalayan thing.

They listen. Wow, do improvisers listen.  They hear things the casual listener doesn’t.  They remember the nuances, and use the throw-aways.  They know that the most important conversation of the day may happen on an elevator ride between the first and sixth floors before a sales presentation begins.  They listen with more than their ears.  They observe with all the senses.   And then, maybe then…they speak.   They understand that being silent and being mute are two completely different things, and that sometimes one sees more with one’s eyes closed than with them open.

They respect environment. In selling scenes, you, the seller, are usually a visiting performer in someone else’s theater.  In many ways, the ‘theater’ of a customer’s company is like any other theater.  Theaters have traditions and history that must be respected.  They are influenced by politics and patronage and star players with competing agendas.  They are invariably facing some kind of financial threat.  They are only as good as their last hit, and they have ridiculously high hopes for the next project.  They can be half-looney with romantic intrigue.  The improvisational salesperson sees and respects the arena in which the customer operates.  When performing at the Apollo, touch the Tree of Hope.  When visiting Ireland, kiss the Blarney Stone.

They build relationships. Relationships are the basis of all improvisation.  The relationships between players, between players and environment, and between players and audience, are all intertwined.  The best way to move toward a sale, to generate positive outcomes regardless of the circumstances, is to build and nurture these relationships.   Relationships will see you through the kinds of adversity, and capitalize on the opportunities, that no scripted sales program can predict or anticipate.

In selling scenes, the networked customer is a more potent player than ever.  He or she often knows as much about your product as you do.  Relationships with customers are frequently more sensitive, more fluid and more demanding than they were in the Industrial Age.  Customers use social media to converse frequently amongst themselves in scenes to which you, the seller, are not invited.  You can no longer impose your narrative on the customer, you’ve got to earn an invitation to participate in the customer’s narrative.

So be a Sherpa.  Know the mountain, and your customer will see that the climb is impossible without you.

Ping Pong wasn’t perceived as a real sport until it became table tennis.  And now that it has its first sex symbol in Biba Golic, it has, let’s say, aroused a certain demographic that paid scant attention to it before.

The wild dogs of Africa could not be brought back from the brink of extinction until Greg Rasmussen renamed them ‘painted dogs’ (per Nick Kristoff in the NY Times).

And the art of storytelling won’t gain mainstream cred with MBA-educated managers and their brands until professional storytelling gets re-branded and re-positioned.  This came to me while I was reading about how  legendary story consultant Steve Denning changed his working vernacular so he could talk to his clients without them thinking they already knew it all.

Let’s begin by looking at the current status of storytelling in business.  Many managers will tell you that storytelling is too airy to feed the bottom line, or as Denning says, they think they’ve got their story covered.   And they do.  They have it covered.  As in they have a story and they’re sticking to it.  Bringing up the subject of storytelling can be a license to snark.  “Story?  Yeah, we got a story.  We sell our product as often as possible for more than it costs to make and deliver it.   We make our number.  We go get a a drink.  We live happily ever after until the next quarter.  The end.”

As we know, these perceptions cripple a brand.  When a story stops moving forward, it dies.  And when a brand’s story dies, the brand is sure to follow.  Here are three moves professional storytellers can make to break through the crippling perceptions.

1)  Shift the focus from ’story’ to ‘narrative.’ Narrative is our table tennis.  It is our painted dog.  Story is finite.  It has three parts, beginning, middle, end.  Narrative, by comparison, has infinite potential.  It is flow.  It is to organizations and brands what the Ohio River once was to the Shawnee Tribe.  The source of sustenance.  Stories are like the fish that come from the river and feed the family.  Narrative is the river.

2)  Share the narrative. In the networked world, brands can no longer script and control their stories the way they used to when there were only twelve or fifteen media channels for a manager to worry about.  And they can no longer operate on the false assumption that the story that works today is the same one that’s going to work tomorrow.  Today, brands have to find ways to participate in their customers’ stories.  They have to learn to share the brand narrative with customers.  That is a tectonic shift whose implications have just begun to surface in C-suite discussions and executive reading lists.

Sharing the narrative has many benefits.  (We’ve been listing them here for two years, check the archives for backstory.)  One of the big benefits is that narratives that result from collaboration with the customer energize a brand like nothing a brand can do on its own.  And thanks to the proliferation of media platforms, sharing the narrative has the potential to generate ‘positive unforeseen outcomes’ on a massive scale.

3)   Move from scripted to improvised narratives.  Shared narratives cannot be scripted, they have to be improvised into existence. There are too many players in the game to script for all of them, and make no mistake, each and every player plays a role. All it takes is one customer with a bitch and a big network to knock down your market cap like Bluto took out Popeye before he ate his spinach.  Improvisation is to narrative what spinach is to Popeye.  Scripted (and re-scripted and re-re-scripted) scenarios quickly fall out of sync with the customer audience.  Improvisation, by contrast, is about staying in the narrative flow. If you’re not in it, you’re out of it.  Eat your spinach!

Stories are the best way we have of simplifying complexity, of finding common ground.  They provide context that no technology or platform can. In a complex system, context owns.  Because business gets conducted in an environment that’s exponentially more complex today than it was yesterday, story is more important than ever.  But like everyone else does, we have to go about our work differently.  We’re not just storytellers, we are experts in the science of narrative.   We are Shawnee.  We are hot blondes armed with paddles and balls.   We are painters of dogs.

Big Note:  The customer judges his or her performance, not yours, in the context of the scene you co-create.

The implications of this are huge.  Here are a few:

1.  Learn the script, then throw it away. The single biggest mistake salespeople make is trying to follow a script.  The customer doesn’t know your script!  In trying to stick to a script known only to you, you’re putting your customer in the worst possible position–that of a performer who doesn’t know his or her lines.  The playwright Christopher Durang built an entire play, The Actor’s Nightmare, around this premise.  You following your script and trying to get your scene partner to play along with it is The Customer’s Nightmare.

1A.  Don’t show your script to the customer. If the customer does know your script, because, let’s say, you’ve sent them your PowerPoint deck in advance of your presentation, you cause a whole other set of problems.  For one, you’re not giving them anything new.  You are, in essence, asking them to play a role you have written for them, which fosters a kind of built-in resentment.  Another problem with showing your hand ahead of time is that it burdens the audience with expectations.  By knowing ahead of time where you’re going, they will be measuring the scene against what they imagine it will be–good or bad.  Thanks to the internet, the customer already has access to plenty of data about your product.  Save something for your sales scene!

2.  Your number-one concern is getting your customer to feel good about your scene. You do this by helping them look good.  You help them look good by ‘giving gifts,’ to use the parlance of improvisation. There are unlimited ways to give gifts in a sales scene, ranging from sharing a dinner at a great restaurant to enlightening a customer with knowledge, to conferring status on them by having them enlighten you with knowledge.  Whether they ‘applaud’ your scene by making a down-payment on a timeshare, driving off your lot in a new car, or by clicking to buy a better mousetrap, chances are they’ll be doing it because they felt good about the interaction with your and your brand.

3.  A scene is not a soliloquy. You are sharing the stage with the customer.  It’s a dialogue.  Give and take.  OgilvyOne recently announced a contest to find the World’s Greatest Salesperson.  They’re asking contestants to ’sell’ a commonplace item, a red brick, using YouTube.  The winning video will not be the best soliloquy, but the one that’s best at generating and sustaining a dialogue with its audience–via YouTube comments, Twitter, Facebook and other platforms.

4.  Begin by listening. As with longform improvisation, a good way to get things rolling is to take a ’suggestion from the audience.’  When you begin your scene by listening instead of speaking, you give your audience/customer the opportunity to invest themselves in the scene.  Their satisfaction at seeing an idea they’ve given you turn into action will earn their applause.

5.  Build and heighten.  A scene should be designed to expand, its energy elevate, its theme evolve.  Surpass where you started.  Never end up back where you began.  Don’t be afraid to start your scene with the seed of an idea and let it grow.  Be afraid of starting with a grand vision that diminishes during the course of the scene.

6.  Agree on the game. What you’re looking for in your scene is quick identification and agreement on what we call ‘the underlying game.’  We define a game as:  Roles, Rules, Environment and Objective.  The sooner you can define these, the sooner you can agree on them, and the sooner you agree on them, the more likely you are to close the sale.  ‘Yes-anding’ the customer is the single best sales technique there is.

6A. The customer’s objective is not a sale. The customer isn’t in the scene to help you hit your quota or earn a commission.  A sale may be your objective but it’s not theirs.  Theirs may be to prove their love, earn the respect of their peers, look good to a boss, save money, gain status with their neighbors, or ensure the birth of a healthy baby.  Your objective is to help them achieve their objective.

CONTACT US TODAY TO BOOK A ‘GAMECHANGERS FOR SALES’ SESSION FOR YOUR TEAM!

Tiger hit one shot that I will remember for a long time, one of the best I’ve ever seen.   220 yards from the green after an errant drive, out of deep rough, he hit a high draw inches to the right of a big tree ten yards in front of him, inches to the left of two bigger trees 30 yards farther up, a couple of feet over a bunker fronting the green, to within ten feet of the pin.  People in the gallery ooohed and aaahed and applauded, then gathered around the divot he made in the rough like so many TV cops peering down at a murder victim.   “Look at how long it is,” they muttered of the divot.  “Look how wide he took his swing path.”  “Did you see how hard he went down after it?  Damn!”

And…

His focus is the most intimidating thing about his game.  There is an unshakeable calmness to him that you don’t see in the other pros.  Earl named him well, because he plays golf like a big cat stalking its prey.   The confidence he has in the inevitability of his success is absolute.

And…

And yet…and yet…it’s strange to stand near another human being and not sense any more humanity in him than you would in a thoroughbred in the paddock at Santa Anita.   What makes us vital—all that brawling, longing, laughing, crying, hurting and loving—all that bitching and moaning and mucking around most of us do on a daily basis–is bad for a person’s golf game.  And so none of it seems to be part of Tiger’s make-up.  He is, on the golf course anyway, inhuman.

The Scripted Narrative

Today, the Eldrick “Tiger” Woods story, scripted for him by his father, Earl, since before he was born, is falling apart quicker than a 20-handicapper’s swing on the back nine of the club championship.  In two weeks, Tiger has gone from paragon to pariah, and has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that a brand can no longer script the humanity out of its narrative and expect the world to play along.  In the billion-channel cosmos of the Networked World, sooner or later reality will outflank any brand’s ability to script and control its story the way brands could when there were three TV networks and a couple of major newspapers to be reckoned with, and story material was limited to what happened inside the ropes at Riviera.

As this is written, the Tiger Woods brand burns out of control like a California wildfire, and embers from Tiger’s Inferno have landed on the roofs of Nike, Gatorade, Gillette and Accenture, and they’re in flames, too.  Buick’s house of straw (did anybody ever really believe Tiger drove a Buick?) is probably burned beyond salvaging.

What’s fueling this fire isn’t the the commonplace tabloid fodder of marital infidelity, it’s not about whether you side with a justly aggrieved wife or forgive a superstar his transgressions.  This story is much bigger than that.  It is a story as old as Achilles, the story of a hero’s fall from grace.

It’s in our nature to want to see a story completed.  Tiger’s story will hold the audience’s attention at least until the downfall is assured, the disgrace complete.  The light at the end of Tiger’s tunnel—and the hope for any brand that has lost its way—is that the journey does not have to not end with the fall from grace.  It may be impossible for the audience to turn away from a tragedy, but what the audience turns to of its own volition, and embraces more fervently than anything, is the hero’s return.  As Joseph Campbell chronicles in Hero With A Thousand Faces, ‘falling to the Temptress(es)’ is one of many twists in the journey toward true heroism.  Tiger Woods can redeem himself in the eyes of his audience, but he’s got to want to be an authentic hero, not one playing a role that has been scripted for him.

The Networked World Defies the Script

Here are five productive moves he (or any other burning brand) can make in that direction:

1.  Accept the Unplayable Lie.

For you non-golfers, a Lie is Unplayable when the ball is in a position where not even Tiger Woods can take a productive swing at it.  At that point, you’ve just got to accept the penalty and play on.  This is the situation in which Tiger finds himself today.  There is no excuse that will satisfy.  No spin that can put the scandal to rest.  He’s got no swing at this one.  He’s got to cop to being a pig and a dog and apologize with more than words for whatever hurt his family, and get on with whatever’s next.  Too many brands waste time talking about how or whether to play the unplayable lie, instead of quickly agreeing that it’s unplayable.  They will consult with caddies and seek ruling from judges.  They will pull different clubs out of the bag.  They will check the wind.  They will roll up their pants legs and walk into the hazard.  Sometimes, they will even go all Van De Velde (for you golf fans) and take a stupid swing at the ball and make things much, much worse.   And all along, the best thing would’ve been to simply accept the penalty and play on.

2.   Be entrepreneurial.

I always thought Tiger missed an opportunity when he signed with Nike for so much of his gear.   Nothing against signing with Nike for the clubs, shoes and whatever, but giving them the clothing line, too, turned him into their mannequin.  Nike dresses him like a second grader in a private school.  His golf clothes are billboards with swooshes.  He could be wearing clothes designed by people like Bill Johnson’s Transient label in D.C., or eco-friendly brands like Nau or Vital Hemptations. Small businesses of all kinds need help these days, and Tiger is just the guy to give it to them.  He can help take a small minority-owned solar energy company national.  He can sign with up-and-coming companies as sponsors, and not charge them a dime.   Instead, he can own equity in them.   This will have the added benefit of re-energizing the fan base, as pulling for Tiger will mean that you are pulling for a host of deserving upstart companies, too.  The hero’s journey requires allies along the way.

3.   Embrace your Cablinasianism.

Tiger has made a big deal about being what the brand calls ‘Cablinasian.’  Caucasian-Black-Indian-Asian.  Okay cool.  But the scripted Tiger only explores a very narrow strand of that, the strand that is privileged, plays a lot of golf, owns a yacht and apparently hits on anyone carrying a cocktail tray.   All brands can tap creative energy by exploring their multiculturalism.   Tiger’s ethnic makeup is one thing besides being a great golfer that can differentiate the brand, but he has to show the audience what Cablinasian means beyond the clever cosmetic of a made-up word.

4.   Be a supporting player for a change.

From the time he was born, Tiger Woods has seldom been in a scene in which he was not the star.  His father basically abandoned his other children to focus on young Eldrick.  By age two, Tiger was on national television hitting golf balls.  When he was a junior, he played with the grown-ups, when he was in college, he played with the pros, as a pro, he plays against the history of the game itself.   That is a pretty lonely path.  He needs to focus on sharing the narrative with others for awhile.  This does not mean going into hiding.  It means consciously taking a backseat in someone else’s scene.  Raise your children.  Work with your charities.  Find a protégé to coach.  In the Networked World, we are measured every bit as much by what we contribute to others as by what we amass for ourselves.  No brand is an island.

5.   Get better at something you’re bad at.

We all develop go-to moves.  If you are good at something, and receive a ton of approval and money for doing it, what is your motivation for doing anything else?   Here is your motivation:  In the Networked World, the narrative is not only multi-channel, it is multi-dimensional.  Relying on your go-to move has the effect of limiting your brand’s value, because it limits the dimensions of the brand that have the potential to improve and grow.  When you have won the Masters by 12 strokes and the U.S. Open by 15 and are probably The Greatest Golfer Who Ever Lived, golf is not an area of growth.  It is a flat line at best.  The growth areas are the dimensions of the brand that have not yet been explored.   For Tiger Woods, this could probably mean just about anything other than playing golf and getting girls’ numbers.  What does it mean to you?

It was taken on the beach in Tulum, Mexico, while he and his wife, Shannon, were on their honeymoon. (Talk about a COMPLIMENT!)

Thanks, Ethan (& Shannon), and Congrats!

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.