The extraordinary improviser, Paul Vaillancourt, gave me a list of sayings that have been compiled and passed around the improv theater community over the years. The great teachers Mick Napier and Del Close get some of the credit, as do Viola “The Godmother” Spolin and ImprovWorks’ Sue “Pond” Walden, though the exact origins of most of these sayings would be pretty hard to trace. What’s clear to anyone who explores improvisation is that the the meaning behind the sayings originates from the same place that accounts for such profound ideas as jazz, the Dao De Jing, Johnny Appleseed and Pixar Animation.  Here is the fifth in a series

Play against cliches. First, play with the cliches of your business.  You all know what they are.  Name them.  Call them out.  Have some fun with them.   And then go against them.  There is a lot of movement in playing against cliches.  Just doing this one thing can transform your scene into something delightful.

Think of the environment as a six-sided sphere, of which the audience is a part. What a brilliant way to determine your marcomm budget!  It’s 1/6 of your total operating budget.  Done.  Next.

The environment also has an outside and an inside. This is a good way of thinking about how your brand’s environment travels with the communication that represents it in the networked world.  Think of your network as a place.  What is that place like?  Who is walking the halls?  How is it lit?  What kind of art hangs in its offices?  What does it sound like?  All these concepts should be consistent and play off one another in virtual space and in reality. A friendly atmosphere in the office extends to the social graph.  Artfulness will be apparent in reality and in virtual space.  Clutter is as clutter does.  Etc. etc.

You don’t have to try to be funny, laughter will happen just by being human.  Being human is funny enough. A common misconception we battle all the time at GameChangers is that improvisation is all about being funny.  So not true!  Improvisation is about communication, learning, and transformation.  It is only by a quirk of genetic fate—Viola Spolin’s son, Paul Sills, brought all the games Viola had conceived with him when he and Bernie Sahlins co-founded Second City—that we in the U.S. associate improvisation so strongly with comedy.  Comedy is just a sliver of the output improvisation is capabl of generating.   It’s like saying all ice cream Praline Pecan.  Taint so.

Playful, direct, co-developed ideas, informations, and dreams will always be far hipper than one person’s alone. This is just a basic human algorithm.  The best ideas of eight people will always be better than the best ideas of one person.  Spare us your genius, and bring us something else.  Your work ethic.  Your brain.  Your smile.  Your song.  Your sense of smell.  Your experience.  But spare us your genius.  Because, you know…our stuff will always be far hipper than yours alone ; )

Painting by Bill Schenck www.schencksouthwest.com

“You have been telling the people that this is the Eleventh Hour. Now you must go back and tell the people that this IS the Hour.  And there are things to be considered:  Where are you living?  What are you doing?  What are your relationships?  Are you in right relation?

“Where is your water?  Know your garden. It is time to speak your Truth.  Create your community.  Be good to each other. And do not look outside yourself for the leader.

“There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid.  They will try to hold on to the shore.  They will feel they are being torn apart and will suffer greatly. Know the river has its destination.  The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open and our heads above the water.

“And I say, see who is in there with you and celebrate. At this time in history we are to take nothing personally, least of all, ourselves.  For the moment we do, our spiritual growth and journey comes to a halt.

“The time of the lone wolf is over.  Gather yourselves!!  Banish the word struggle from your attitude and your vocabulary.  All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.

“We are the ones we have been  waiting for.”

Then he clasped his hands together, smiled, and said,  “This could be a good time!”

If the whole is going to be art, the parts must strive not to be.  If we strive to make everything we do precious and perfect and just-so.  If we deliberate and debate the appropriateness of our actions.  If we measure every move.  Craft and eddit every response.  The sum of the parts of what we CrEaTeToGeThEr.  Is.  Surely.  Going.  To be.  Yes.  Oh yes most indubitably and beyond repudiating to the level of a statistical certainty will most definitely be…(Say it!)  A pompous load of crap.

Always bring a brick, not a cathedral into a scene.   We know a businessperson who had built a well-deserved reputation for dropping big ideas on meetings.  That was his thing.  People were in awe of how inspired and forward-thinking his ideas were, by the compelling scenarios he painted for them with his words and emotions.  He liked this role, and didn’t do anything about changing it.  Why would he?  People called him a genius.  A visionary.  What usually happened, though, is that his big ideas died on the vine, or failed to live up to their promise.   His ideas were so big, so singular, that people had trouble adding their own bricks to his architecture.  In our friend’s mind, the cathedral had already been built, all there was for his admirers to do was worship at his altar.  We gave the genius an ‘adjustment’.  All we said was, ‘Don’t be the guy with the big idea.  Be the guy who makes other people’s ideas big.’  This has made all the difference in the world.  He has learned that it’s more satisfying and a lot less stressful to make his scene partners look good, and to not worry so much about proving his own genius  It turns out he’s just as talented at sharing his talent as he is at showing it off, and sharing has proved to be a much more productive way for him to behave.  Today, his reputation is for getting big things done.

Make the strange familiar, the familiar strange.  This is a great philosophy for keeping your brand’s culture lively.  Every business culture benefits from a flow of ’strange’ (i.e. alien to that culture) situations, environments and characters.  Likewise, if we get too familiar with our environment, our process and our fellow players–and most tragically if we quit surprising ourselves–our performance is going to get stale.  When every day is the same we lose our sense of anticipation.  If we dont’ think we’re going find anything, we quit looking, and the flow of new ideas drys up.  It is good to introduce some outside strangness into the workaday mix; it is even more potent to rediscover the strangeness within ourselves.

Don’t prolong the agony of a scene that is slowly dying.  Infuse it with the momentum it needs to end on a positive note.  There are a lot of business scenes ’slowly dying’ these days.  Meetings with HR end in pink slips.  Start-ups lose their funding.  Towns lose their biggest employer.   Often in these situations, the only feasible move is to end the scene quickly and move on.  It makes a huge difference to the rest of your performance if the bad scene ends on a postive note instead of a downbeat one.  A town that greets the news of losing its biggest employer with some kind of community celebration is already on the road to recovery while a town that gets busy telling lots of sad stories to the news about how they got screwed is going to be staying in the doldrums for awhile.

All masks are empty until they are put on and inhabited by the actor.  The same is true with job titles.

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.

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.