In the Business section of its September 22 edition, the New York Times featured an article by Steve Lohr about a Netflix-sponsored contest with a $1 million prize for the best solution for helping the movie rental service improve its recommendation system (”If you like Movie X, we recommend Movies Y and Z…”)  The article included a number of insights into what we call a Winning Game:

1.  A winning game attracts winning players. By giving participants access to a very sophisticated data set, NetFlix’ contest was designed in a way that attracted highly-skilled programmers from around the worl.   The game itself serves as an organizing mechanism and a magnet for talent.

2.  A winning game invites collaboration.  The winning team, which called itself BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos (pragmatic chaos–a great description of improvisation!) was composed of scientists, statisticians and coders from half a dozen countries who joined forces in the course of the contest.   By collaborating, they all increased their chances of getting to the prize.  Collaboration begins with communication.  It leads to learning.  It results in transformation.

3.  The performance of the team is more important than the performance of any one player. See #2.

4.  Successful outcomes cannot be scripted ahead of time, they must be improvised.  No one member of the Pragmatic Chaos team had the roadmap to victory before the game began.  It was the collaboration, and their ability to improvise, that guided them to the winning solution.

5.  In a winning game, there are no losers. Only one team got the $1 million prize awarded by Netflix, but there were many winners.  If you improve your performance through participation, you win.  If you make a connection, add to your knowledge, or get a fresh perspective on a problem by virtue of playing the game, you win.  The second place team in the Netflix contest, Opera Solutions, a NY-based data analytics company, not only got a lot of coverage for its brand in the Times article, its CEO, Arnad Gupta, described the $1 million prize as “trivial.”  “We’ve already had a $10 million payoff internally from what we’ve learned,” he said.

6.  A winning game is designed to improve everyone’s performance. Viola Spolin, the godmother of modern improv, distinguished between competition and contest.  A competition, by her definition, is designed to separate winners and losers, and inevitably results in an ego-fueled quest for status, dominance, and control of the narrative.  Because walls go up and knowledge gets hoarded, not shared, competition limits opportunities to collaborate and learn.  A contest, Spolin explained by way of differentiating, is a way of competing with oneself, and of improving the performance of one’s team.  It results in what she called extension.  Participating in a winning game makes you and your team better players than you were before.

The Times article mentions several other games that, like the Netflix contest, are designed to yield productive outcomes for all their players, among them the X-Prize Foundation, and InnoCentive, an online forum for collaborative problem-solving and innovation that launched in 2001 and has attracted the attention and participation of big brands like Eli Lilly Co., Avery, and Procter & Gamble.

Footnote:  The article quotes Michael Schrage, a research fellow at MIT’s Sloan School of Business and one of the most brilliant analysts of business innovation I know.  Schrage and I have corresponded about GameChangers and improvisation in business.  He told me in one email that he was an “improv kid,” from the South Side of Chicago, the same neighborhood where Viola Spolin lived and worked.  When he was in high school he built props for Second City shows.  “I cried when Del died,” he wrote.  And if you truly know improvisation, you know what Schrage means by that.

For sure, the game is changing.  And improvisers, in all walks of work and life, are the ones who are changing it.