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.

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.

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.

One of the things that enthralls me about the art of improvisation is how deeply spiritual it is. I know, right? — the same form that yields the antics of Whose Line Is It, Anyway and Kenneth the NBC Page on 30 Rock is somehow connected to, like, your ch’i, your soul, your dharma?

The threads of my contention lead back to Viola Spolin’s work in the 1930s and ’40s, before her son Paul Sills and his cronies at the U. of Chicago hijacked her techniques for their own forays into comedic improv with Compass Players and Second City. It was Spolin who put the soul in improv. She saw that the act of improvising was much more than mere frolic. She observed the learning, communication and creative breakthroughs that came about because of it. With insight every bit as penetrating as Einstein’s physics, she surmised that improvisational play helps us overcome our fears and unlocks pathways to our hidden potential, to new uses for our knowledge, to the full range of our ability to connect with one another in meaningful, productive ways. And I believe she saw that in its deepest and what she called its most ‘objective’ state, improvisation could be an expression of love.

This hit home with me today when I got a message from my friend, Deepam Chatterjee, a teacher and storyteller from India, who posts some very interesting, often profound, dialogues with his audience on Facebook. Deepam’s thoughts resonate like the sound of a giant gong with the principles of improvisation.

According to Wikipedia, one myth has it that Ganesha the elephant-headed Hindu god, came into being because another god (Shiva) laughed. And while I draw the line at worshipping Drew Carey — funny though he may be hosting The Price is Right – as any kind of deity, I still see parallels aplenty between spirituality and improvisation.

Some excerpts from Deepam’s message (with my notes in italics):

“I see it (his Facebook posts) as Satsang — where a large group benefits from an interaction between a teacher and a questioner…” In the same way, the audience benefits from on-stage dialogue by improv performers. Plus, improvisation often has the added dimension of beginning with a suggestion from the audience — in effect posing the ‘question’ that gets explored in the dialogue.

“Service is about the one being served — not those who serve…” In improvisation, making a strong supporting move, ‘giving a gift’, is the very best contribution one can make to a scene. Making fellow players look good is a rewarding experience for an improviser. Strong support always results in a strong performance by the group. And when everyone in the group kills during a performance, the post-show parties are much more fun.

“I believe that we must use all the abilities in doing what inspires us…” An improviser understands that knowledge will be there when her or she needs it. It is inspiration that frees us to put that knowledge into play. Don’t seek knowledge, seek inspiration, and the knowledge will come. The hustle begets the flow.

“Learn to accept people and situations as they are…” An improviser deals in the reality of the scene, not in what they want the scene to be or become.

When God throws the ball at you, throw it right back!!!! Give and take strongly. Use what the scene gives you. Keep the ball moving.

As you choose the moment, you are free of the past… It is by staying in the moment that improvisers make the most of their scenes. In this way, every instant gets charged with incredible potential. You weren’t needed earlier and you won’t be needed later. You are needed now.

There are no preconditions… There are no preconditions.

Thank you, Deepam!