Exhibit A: In 1920, Father Julius Nieuwland creates the polymers that make synthetic rubber possible when he accidentally leaves a pot boiling on a stove.

Exhibit B: In 1928, Walt Disney creates Mickey Mouse when his partner in the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoon series double-crosses him. Mickey gets his name because Walt’s wife, Lily, hates the name ‘Mortimer’ that Walt had given him.

Exhibit C: In 1975, Post-It Notes originate when one of its inventors, Art Fry, needs a bookmark for a church hymnal.

Exhibit D: In 1998, Dr. Taryn Rose begins designing shoes because her feet hurt when she wears other designers’ shoes.

The point here is that none of these 20th-century success stories, nor tens of thousands of others just like them, had a script, they were spontaneous, productive responses to the situations that life presented. Father Nieuwland made an apparent mistake and recognized that it moved the scene forward. To an improviser, mistakes are pure opportunity. As the flamenco guitarist Kai Narezo (who’s married to one of my teachers at I. O. West, Shulie Cowen,) says, “The good news about bad notes is that there’s always a good one right next to them.”

Walt Disney wasn’t aiming to create an iconic character that would launch an entertainment empire. He was a resilient businessman who’d gotten his franchise brand yanked by an unscrupulous distributor. His company needed a new product in the pipeline just to keep the doors open. He did what was needed in that particular situation. An improviser plays the scene, not the story.

To an improviser, turning the little things into big ones (and big ones into little ones) is part of the art. The Post-It dude simply wanted a better bookmark for his hymnal. Dude remembered a strange kind of adhesive that a buddy of his at 3M had invented. Dude stuck a bit of it on the back of some slips of paper. Yahtzee!

Taryn Rose’s family was aghast when she told them she was leaving medicine to go into fashion design. It was not a rational move, but it was a good one. An improviser doesn’t judge a scene while it’s in progress. She acts on instinct informed by knowledge, not governed by it. Knowledge (what Dr. Rose knew about the practice of medicine) will always be there, but the moment of opportunity (what Dr. Rose felt was possible) is fleeting and must be promptly and spontaneously acted upon. If you overthink it, the moment is gone.

When their scenes took an unexpected, unscripted turn, these players were prepared, and turned the ‘bad notes’ of: a) accident, b) setback, c) triviality and d) discomfort into the sweet music of success. This is the alchemy that’s possible with improvisation.

Today — with the vast opportunities and the commensurate challenges presented by the Networked World — the ability to improvise will be even more important to business success than it has been in the past. Moments of opportunity will come and go in much greater abundance, but they’ll be way more fleeting, too, and it’ll take more openness, trust and spontaneity on the part of players and especially organizations to take advantage of them.

What do Jif Peanut Butter and the commedia dell’artes of the Renaissance have in common? Both are improvised performances that are informed by suggestions from the audience.

A suggestion is the word(s) or idea(s) given by the audience to an improv group from which the group develops themes for a performance. Suggestions are important to improvisation because they make the audience an active collaborator in the show. Watching a group springboard from a suggestion into an exploration of themes inspired by that suggestion is one of the most engaging aspects of an improv performance. It engenders a natural rapport between audience and performers, and gives the crowd a rooting interest in the outcome of the show. After all, if something is our idea, we want it to be good.

The business improviser also acts on suggestions from the audience. The purpose is the same: to bring the audience into active collaboration on your performance and give it a rooting interest in your success.

In the commedia dell’artes, an early form of improvised theater, small troupes of performers traveled from town to town in Italy and central Europe, giving spontaneous shows on street corners. These troupes used satire as a way of appealing to the locals’ sense of humor. Before the show began the performers would gather as much information as they could about the town and its people. Who the bigshots were. The name of the constable. The concerns of the citizens. The performance would then arise organically from this ‘conversation with the audience’. Because the troupe had been given useful information and invariably had a repertoire of stock (usually masked) characters that figured into the life of every small town, they could perform scenes that hit home with the audience.

Entrepreneurs and business executives like Jim Stengel, the Chief Marketing Officer for Procter & Gamble, maker of Jif peanut butter and a hundred other familiar consumer brands, understand that brands in the Networked World are, in effect, improvisational performances for the marketplace, and spend much of their strategic focus ‘listening to the community describe itself’. These days marketers like Stengel call on their brands to reflect to an unprecedented degree what the community is saying. A multi-billion-dollar company like Procter & Gamble and a centuries-gone commedia dell’artes company from Italy have this same vital fact of life in common: The success of each depends on how adept they are at acting on suggestions from their audiences. In business, the community describing itself instigates what I call an Umbilical Loop of interactions between audience and performer by which brands are built and sustained in the marketplace.

Business-related suggestions are usually complex and come in a multitude of forms via many channels and, if the organization is wired at all, in massive volume. On the other hand, sometimes suggestions can be slap-you-in-the-face simple.

In 1998 Dr. Taryn Rose was an orthopedic surgeon practicing in San Francisco. Her patients included quite a few stylish, shoe-loving women who frequently complained to Dr. Rose about and needed treatment for foot pain – pain caused by those stylish shoes. Dr. Rose, too, wore fashionable shoes, and her feet would suffer during the long hours she spent building her practice. The complaint was so chronic that Rose took it as a suggestion from the audience. From the suggestion of ‘hurting feet’, the entrepreneurial physician arrived at a theme of ‘comfortable fashion’ and began designing shoes that appealed to her audience’s sense of style and her doctor’s sense of good health. Suffice it to say that Rose no longer practices medicine. Today, she is a well-documented business success story, the founder and CEO of Taryn Rose, Inc., which in 2007 will enjoy retail sales worldwide in excess of $20 million.