When the original idea starts repeating itself, the scene is over. The mandate of the improviser is to help the scene evolve. The great basketball player Bill Russell said he knew it was time to quit playing the game when every play gave him a sense of deja vu. He was talking about changing his career, but this bromide holds true for smaller scenes as well. When you begin your Monday morning meeting with a review of the previous week’s business, the meeting is over when the previous week’s business comes up for a second time.

Start in the middle. It is perfectly okay to begin your Monday meeting with a screening of your brand’s freshest online media.

The rule of threes is inflexible. If something is done twice, it must be done a third time. If you hold two Monday morning meetings, you must hold a third.

Remember give and take. In improvisation, ‘giving’ is the art of offering something (known in the parlance as a ‘gift’) to your scene partners that they can build upon. Initiating a scene with the line, ‘Dude, thanks for coming’ is not much of a gift. Initiating a scene with the line, “Dude, welcome to the Big Lebowski Fan Club.” is good giving. In business, initiating a scene with the line, ‘Thank you all for being here today.” is a worn cliche that does not give your scene partners or your audience anything to hang their hats on. Initiating that same scene with the line, “Lebowski Limited exists to make people happy.” is better. Good improvisers ‘take’ just as skillfully as they give. This means doing something with what one has been given so that the scene continues moving in a productive direction. It means ‘yes-anding’ your scene partners. “That’s good.” is an example of a response that does not take from the line before it. “Well alrighty then, show me the happy.” is an example of how an improviser might take, or yes-and, the ‘Lebowski Limited’ line. The most basic, most foundational, improvisation exercises are grounded in the concept of giving and taking.

Recognize the space, own it, use it, and make it yours. How many times do we ignore the space we’re in? So much of business is conducted in familiar environments — the conference room, the office, the restaurant, the convention floor — that if we do not ‘make the space ours’ we (and our brands) will get lost in the neverending sameness of it all. This is true of PowerPoint presentations, when we let the presentation shine its light on us, instead of the other way around. Maintain your vital human presence in the room. It is also true of digital space, which is a big blank canvas until we put our brands, our networks, into play. It is true of every scene we are in. Understand the space you’re in. Define it. Work it.

Adopt, adapt, improve. If there is a better way to describe what improvisation has in common with business in the Networked World, I have not heard it. This is a beautiful mantra. Scratch these words your desk with an Exacto knife. Write them on random white boards. Take down that ‘Hang In There, Baby’ poster, and have an artist friend paint this phrase in its space.

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.