Here’s what GameChangers says about Bcc’ing:

Business is a stage on which you perform. Why wouldn’t you want an audience? When the spotlight is on you, you cannot see all the faces in the audience. If you can see all their faces you do not have a big enough audience.

So to the person receiving an email, assume Bcc’s. Because you have, and want, an audience.

To the person sending or forwarding an email, use Bcc’s judiciously, and only if the people you are Bcc’ing are meant to be in the audience, and are not part of the scene. Here’s the difference:

Let’s say you’re in HR and you’re emailing a candidate to set up an interview with a Manager who will determine his or her fate at your company. That Manager is in the scene, and if the HR person is going to copy the email it should be a Cc, not a Bcc. If, by comparison, the HR person were emailing to set up an initial interview, with the Manager to be introduced to the scene by the HR person if the initial interview goes well…that would be a case for a Bcc, as a Cc would require an introduction, unnecessary at that point in time, to the Manager. That’s inefficient communication.

Play it any other way, and you’re just stirring up useless communication, backchanneling that will require explanations and induce more backchanneling, etc.

So use Bcc  sparingly, and Cc and Bcc according to the role of the person you’re copying. Oh, and send fewer emails in the first place.  I thank you. The world thanks you.

For all I knew, the Food4Less supermarket in the shopping center where the Starbucks sat had been the same one where four young black men from Inglewood had shot part of the underground L.A. Riots video we’d watched together a couple of years after the whole mess had gone down. I remember us laughing at the looters who were too slow getting out of the supermarket because they were trying to steal too many frozen turkeys or whatever, and had been the ones to get busted when the cops arrived. Stupid looters. All over the soundtrack of their video, you could hear the  guys who shot it expressing a kind of awe at the fire and mayhem that was everywhere they pointed their camera. They sounded half-scared, half giddy, like they were experiencing their first sex, or something. They drove the streets and shot the video  undercover, three of them ducking down so the cops would think it was just one kid in the car trying to get home and not four of them time-skipping into the future, to the day we’d all be laughing at their pre-YouTube clips of Looter Fails and L.A.’s Dumbest Criminals.

On Saturday at the Starbucks, at about one in the afternoon, an African American man, maybe a dozen years older than me, was putting cream and sugar in his coffee at the same time I was.

“Coffee tastes different in the middle of the day,” he said, emptying three packs of raw sugar into his drink. “I wonder why that is,” he said.

“Coffee tastes best in the morning when it’s doing its job and waking us up,” I said.

“That’s the truth. When I was little, the grown ups would be having their coffee in the morning, at four AM! and you’d wake up to that smell. Four AM they’d be sittin’ in the kitchen having their coffee, and the smell of it would be the thing that woke you up.”

“And then a little later, you’d smell the bacon,” I added.

“You would. We had good bacon back where I grew up.”

“Where was this?”

“Down in Louisiana, near Shreveport”

“Good bacon in Shreveport.”

“Oh yeah we had good bacon.”

“You had chicory in your coffee.”

The man ignored what I said about the chicory. He was still smelling the bacon. “Four AM, you’d smell the coffee, and then you’d smell the bacon fryin’. Folks got up early back then.”

“I grew up on a farm,” I said. “You’d go to work when the sun came up, and quit when it went down.”

“They didn’t have TV to watch at night. So they would sit and talk for a little while after supper, or listen to the radio, and then they’d go to bed. Where was your farm?” he asked.

“Indiana.”

“They got good bacon back there.”

“Oh yeah.”

We finished mixing the cream and sugar in our coffees. Wished each other a good day. Went our separate ways.

It was no big scene.  The conversation could have happened to anybody, anywhere in L.A., or just about any other city in the U.S., for that matter, on Saturday. And I think that’s the point. Our ability to make connections that put something good into play is everywhere, all around us, with everyone we meet, and every part of the environment with which we interact.

That man initiated a scene by making a declarative statement that indicated who he was: A Discriminating Drinker of Coffee. We yes-anded one another with the smells of coffee and bacon in the morning, and painted the scene with adults huddled in kitchens in the dark of the morning, and children asleep in their beds. We established the who/what/where. We edited cleanly. It was a nice, tight, 90-second scene.

20 years ago, that man and I could not have had that conversation. And maybe that’s the point, too. We have come a long way from the Rodney King verdict, and Shreveport and Indiana. We are all in the business of waking up and creating the days, the weeks, the lifetimes that lie ahead. We still have a long way to go.  We can only do it one scene at a time. By sharing stories. Smelling  the coffee. Appreciating the bacon.

Enjoy your week!

Now more interested than ever in contacting someone who sat at this table, to learn how they out-played every other table in the game we conducted at the 2012 Innovation Summit.

We used our ERGO (Environment, Roles, Guidelines, Objectives) game structure to design the session. The game involved 100 people seated at 12 tables. In 90 minutes, the group came up with 800 ideas grouped into four different themes and ranked from 13 to 1 in order of ‘impact in the next five years.’

The objective of the game was to generate and rank as many ideas as possible in the time we had, and then look at innovation as a process of identifying patterns and connections in large datasets.

Objective

As communicators, our 800+ ideas are our material the way a rock is a sculptor’s material. What we do with the material is what a sculptor does to a rock–chip away at it to reveal patterns and narrative elements concealed within the rock that are made visible through our process.

THE MYSTERY TABLE:

We noticed a really interesting outcome to  Friday’s game. (Remember: Outcomes are different from Objectives, and are where most of the value of a game resides.) Of the 12 tables, one table performed better than the others. It was a table of seven women and one man.  Their ages varied. And because we asked everyone to sit with people they did not know, we can assume at least some of them were new to one another. Yet their focus was better, their tempo faster, their agreements quicker, than any other table in the room, as far as we could tell.

Why? How? It is a mystery begging to be solved.

The people at that table understood our game well enough that they were able to adjust one of its guidelines without affecting the game in any way except to make it go faster.  That choice probably gave them an extra 5 minutes over the duration of the game that could be spent on idea generation instead of game mechanics.Many of the other tables got bogged down in game mechanics for 10 of the 90 allotted minutes. That gave the Mystery Table a 15-minute advantage over the less agile tables. That’s 17% more productivity over the 90-minute period.

I never saw them ask for help, but I saw one of them listening whenever a nearby table asked for help. That’s one way they communicated and shared efficiently. The work at other tables would come to a complete standstill as they got an explanation from Jenkins or Balsamo. The work at the high-performing table never stopped. I want to know more more about the Mystery Table, about what made their process so efficient.

If we’d have had another half hour in our session, we could have dug into the Mystery Table’s process. What was the game like for them? What choices did they make that kept things clear and focused? How did they listen to one another? How did they yes-and? How did they sort out any confusion they might have had? How was the decision made to change one of the game’ guidelines to make their ranking process more efficient? What secrets would this Mystery Table have revealed to the rest of the participants?

I am going to follow up with at least one of the people at the Mystery Table and let you know what he or she says about their process. Stand by.

Outcome

Drew Coolidge

Most of the credit for this post goes to Drew Coolidge, an exquisitely gifted improviser I’ve had the fun of watching many times in action with his group Cartel, and before that in a group called Spank Drew (draw your own conclusions about what that team thought of him). On USSRocknRoll.com he writes about his three favorite improv teachers, and the gifts each of them gave him.

Here’s a summary of Drew’s post and my take on its applications to business:

From Eric Hunnicutt, he learned how to deal with fear. “Just be present. It’s not about getting rid of fear, if you’re present, fear has no room to exist.” Hunnicutt taught him.

When it comes to business, or life in general for that matter, who among us doesn’t have fears? A speech. A parent. A spider. A client. Hunnicutt’s advice to Drew about performing onstage is just as legit in any other context: don’t work at being fearless. That’s like treating fear as some kind of virus and yourself a victim in need of medication. Don’t go there with your energy. Instead, practice being present. If you’re completely absent, begin by focusing on your breathing. Your senses, all of them, and the space around you, all of it. Go from there. By giving 100% of your attention to everyone and everything around you, fear ceases to become a factor in your performance.

(The basketball legend, Larry Bird, once said about playing in an NBA championship game against the Houston Rockets that, while running a fast break, was he aware not only of where all ten players were on the court, he was aware of every fan in the first 20 rows of the arena. If someone was sitting down with a box of popcorn, or leaving their seat, Bird saw it while sprinting down the floor. We normally think of players confining their awareness to the court, but when our senses are 100% engaged, a line painted on a floor is just one more thing we notice. It does not define the limits of our awareness.)

From Dave Hill, Coolidge got insight into what improvisers call the group mind. The group mind is when all the players on a team tap into and share the flow of a performance. They are all on the same page, they are one organism, evolving in realtime right before our eyes. “It’s the product of individuals making strong choices and completely supporting the moves of the other players,” is how Drew boils down Hill’s gift. It naturally follows Hunnicut’s note. If you’re present, you can do this.

In business, everyone talks about teamwork, but dishearteningly few understand what Dave Hill taught Drew: Every player on a team can make the strongest, boldest, ballsiest individual move she or he is capable of making, and support those moves by their fellow players, and have all of it be consistent with good teamwork. (Oh, and group mind is not the same thing as groupthink. The two concepts are completely at odds with one another.) Agree on the game your team is playing and you’re on the way toward discovering the group mind.

From David Pasquesi, Drew received this gem: “The scene is already occurring, it’s our job to allow the scene to reveal itself to us. The tools for doing that are: 1. Listening (or Paying Attention) 2. There is no two.”

We call Lstening (or Paying Attention) ‘Heeding.’ In business, we can get so focused on the desired resolution to our ‘scene,’ that we forget to heed what’s happening in the moment, which is the only chance we have to improve our odds of success. Heeding results in opportunity recognition. Forget to heed, fail to recognize opportunity.

I’ve evolved the headline from Drew’s post a bit. He made it go, I heeded, and that’s how we up along. Spanks, Drew!

There is a different approach, one used by improvisers. It’s also an approach that will be familiar to agile developers. In improvisation, every ‘mistake’ is received, instead, as an opportunity. An opportunity for what? Depends on the ‘mistake.’ It could be an opportunity to learn. To upgrade a system. Improve a relationship. Refine a process. Eliminate a defect. Correct a mis-perception. Could be anything.

Here’s the flip: Don’t focus on eliminating the bad. Focus on creating the good.

The key to the flip is using the Activity Formerly Known as a Mistake as a kind of fulcrum for fast action. Don’t waste time dwelling on it or assigning blame. And especially don’t let your fear of making another so-called mistake limit your range of options in the future. If this is your M.O., it won’t be long before you are giving yourself no range of options whatsoever, and will only  engage in activities that are perceived as ‘risk free.’ That’s when you stop learning. When you stop learning you stop evolving. And when you stop evolving, you lose touch with the marketplace, which is evolving, with you or without you.

A mentor of mine, Art Swerdloff, used to have a saying that had been handed down to him by his mentor, the legendary film editor and former Dean of the USC Cinema School, Slavko Vorkapich: “There are no mistakes, only effects.” Vorkapich and Art were talking about film editing, but they could have been talking about any kind of communication process. According to their approach, it was impossible to make a film edit that was ‘wrong.’ Looking at their process like this let Vorkapich and Swerdloff perceive their work as a direct interaction with their audience. No edit is a mistake. Every edit produces an effect on the audience. Does it confuse them or underscore an emotion? Reinforce or change the flow of the story? Is the edit a jarring experience for the viewer? Does it surprise? Build or resolve tension? Add or shift perspective?

This approach transcended craft, and let them build a dialogue with their many collaborators—directors, cinematographers, composers, sound editors, et al—built on a vocabulary of effectiveness. If their discussion with their collaborators had focused, instead, on mistakes, it would not have been long before they’d get getting into one another’s business, and critiquing another person’s area of expertise. By focusing, not on the edit itself, but on the effect produced by the edit, they were able to their share their objective with their collaborators, and pursue it with a shared sense of purpose, with each collaborator working at the height of his or her craft.

Say it once more, maybe even say it out loud. There are no mistakes, only effects!

Then don’t let anything get between you and your effectiveness.

The Musicians Institute, or, as we like to call it, ‘Rock ‘n Roll U.,’ in Hollywood, is a trade school with 1,500 aspiring professional musicians from around the world as its students, and super-skilled music pros on its faculty. It is owned by Mr. Shibuya from Japan. Mr. Shibuya’s daughter, Coko, is president of the school. It is a very cool space. One of my favorite places to hang out when I’m in Hollywood. Musicians on every corner, in and every hallway, talking shop. Classes where the teacher sits at a drum kit on a riser, and the students all have drumsticks and pads at their desks. Guitarists jamming under stairwells between classes. People sharing beats over lunch. Interact with this environment and you cannot help but feel better for having done so.

Because the Musicians Institute has its roots in Japan, last year’s earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster shook the school, especially Coko and Mr. Shibuya, like the hand of God. Ever since the day of the disaster, March 11, 2011, it has been MI’s clear intention to raise money for the relief effort.

But how?

There had been a lot of talk about what shape a fundraiser might take. A concert?—the obvious idea. But still a lot of questions and vagueness. And then we came up with a game. We called the game Jam For Japan. The objective: Raise money to buy music instruments for children who ‘lost their music’ the Great Disaster. Give relief in the form of music. Donate happiness, in the form of a guitar, a saxophone, band uniforms, teaching, to the children who had been visited by so much sadness in the past year. 18,000 people died in a single day, remember. The tornadoes back near my hometown in Indiana killed 39 people last week. Imagine 460 such tornadoes hitting the same area in the same day, you get an idea of just how much sadness there has been, and how the region was devastated.

With the game defined, the project took off. Relief International soon joined Jam For Japan as our charity partner. We invited lots of talented people to play along.
We set a date: March 10, 2012.

The Jam For Japan concert is today! 4 to 8:30 PM at the Musicians Institute in Hollywood. We have already raised over $50K, which is double the $25K goal we’d set, so we have made the concert free, though you really should reserve a seat via EventBrite iif you plan to come.

We’re kicking it off at at 4 PM with a taiko drum core, Kishin Daiko, performing on Hollywood Blvd. Later, Elan Atias is going to play on the main stage. In between, there will be lots of cool stuff, including a work of 3D pavement art by Tracy Lee Stum and a children’s music workshop conducted by the Lil Big Ups Rubba Band Band Man, Lonnie Marshall.

#sxsw peeps, buzz it up, please!!!!! Clint! Jay! Scott! Leora! Taylor! Sloane! Shira! Do your things.. Domo arigato!

First, it’s important to point out (again) that people—not events, products, strategies or tactics—are gamechangers. Only people have the power to change the game in each and every moment. Everything else is either fantasy or history.

Here are five ways Jeremy Lin changes the game…not has changed…not will change. Changes. Now. A gamechanger is always in the now.

Emphasize preparation over planning. It’s good to have a plan, but plans are subject to a lot of forces beyond our control. Our preparation, however, is something we can control. When Lin’s chance came, because his team’s plan to have other guards playing ahead of him did not pan out—a situation entirely out of his control—he was prepared. He was in shape to play a full game, even though he’d only played a few minutes at a time prior to that. Because he had studied and practiced his coach’s offense, he was able to execute it in game conditions. Lin understood that in the NBA, the planning is the area of concern for coaches, owners, trainers, schedulers, the Commissioner, and that what a player needs to do is prepare. As the great John Wooden once counseled my son about his own basketball playing, have faith that your chance will come. In the meantime, work at being ready for when it does.

Be willing to change your role and your status from scene to scene. Lin has changed his role to fit the needs of his team, both situationally within a game, and from game to game. In Lin’s first games as a starter, the Knicks needed scoring, so he played the role of a scorer. When they needed a change in momentum or tempo, he created it. When the team got too passive, he got aggressive. Now that the team’s acknowledged stars, Amare Stoudemire and Carmelo Anthony, have returned to the lineup, we see Lin changing his game to accommodate and include them. He understands that changing one’s role or status within the game does not change the essential nature of one’s character. He is same person today, in the glare of the global spotlight, as he was when he was sleeping on his brother’s couch, before the spotlight hit. He will be the same player whether he’s scoring 31 points in a game, or scoring three points, with 14 assists.

Embrace your mistakes. That doesn’t mean making more of them, it means seeing them as an opportunity to improve your game.  Accept mistakes as pointing the way toward an improved standard of performance. Lin made too many turnovers in several of his early games as a starter. He made it a point of focus and his performance has since improved in this area.

Add vocabulary. Before I’d ever seen him bounce a basketball, I saw this clip of Lin and Knicks teammate Landry Fields doing an elaborate pre-game handshake. I call it the You’ve Got the Yin I’ve Got the Yang Dust Off Confucius 3-Point Binocular Pocket Shake. In the history of sports handshaking, this was a new one. It was the first indication that we were looking at a gamechanger. This isn’t the kind of handshake a person makes up on the spot. This is a move Lin and Fields had to have worked up before Lin got any playing time. It wasn’t a response to celebrity, a personal signature, or a religious statement. It was a couple of smart people (Lin a Harvard grad and Fields a Stanford grad) adding vocabulary to the lexicon of their profession.

Make your teammates look good. Giving support is the highest form of gamechanging. At first, I thought Stoudemire and Anthony, who have been in the spotlight for most of their careers, would resent the attention Lin was getting. Now I’m thinking this won’t be an issue, because they see that Lin is going to help the stars of the team shine brighter, not dim them. No matter what game you’re playing, making your teammates look good is always a winning way. And a recipe for happiness.

So obvious, it’s funny–no one gets to Carnegie Hall without a ton of practice. It is usually the most ‘talented’ performers who practice most diligently. The talent onstage in Carnegie Hall is, as much as anything, a talent for practicing. A love of the hard work and focus that it takes to master one’s craft.

Rob McNamara writes in Integral Life about ‘The Necessity of Practice.’ Practice, notes McNamara, is preparation. What we are seeing and hearing onstage at Carnegie Hall is a performance informed by preparation. It is the preparation that elevates and defines the quality of the performance.

Everyone has a Carnegie Hall, a place or ideal they’re trying to get to. A vision for the future. And then, quite often, something happens. We get sidetracked. Distracted. Too busy to practice. We stop off at the Carnegie DELI and call it Carnegie HALL. Our ego tells us we have arrived. That’s when the unproductive patterns–sameness, repetition, redundancy, stagnation, smugness—set in. That’s the point where our performances become cyclical, begin to repeat themselves, and our audiences get bored, and begin wondering why they paid their money.

McNamara defines the act of practicing as ‘Engagement.’ The GameChangers Orchestral Model™ identifies six practices that generate productive outcomes in the world. Engagement is one of the six. The other five are:

Heeding (listening, paying attention, observing actively). In the Orchestral Model™, this practice precedes Engagement. As the social media doyenne, Sally Falkow, (@sallyfalkow) says, “You don’t go right up to people having a conversation at a party or social event and just start talking. First you have to hear what conversation is about, and then can you be part of it, and engage with people in a meaningful way.”

Learning. What is revealed to you as a result of your interactions with others, and with your environment? How does your network inform you? How do you turn learning into solutions? All this takes practice.

Creating. How does what you do make a difference? How does it make you unique? How do channel creativity toward innovation?

Performing. What are your criteria? What is your Carnegie Hall? Is it a seven or eight digit number? A place? A whale of a client? A standard you have set for yourself, or that others have set for you? How does your performance differentiate you?

Deciding. How consistent are you? What values do you represent? How clear and shareable are your decisions? What themes are important to you? Who and what influences your behaviors? If your deciding practices are weak, Big Trouble soon come.

Performing and Deciding are what we call the core practices. If you are not good at these–if you don’t have a clear vision of where you’re going, or if you are indecisive and wishy-washy along the way—the rest of the practices will not matter, because you’ll be too busy zig-zagging toward a mirage, rendering meaningless decisions in service of illusory goals.

So call the whole thing Engagement, yes, definitely! Practice it! Be engaged! Be present! Pay attention! Notice! That’s a good first step. Then refine your practices into the six different areas of the Orchestral Model™, like an athlete working on muscle groups or a musician working through different progressions.

And when call comes from Carnegie Hall, you’ll be ready.

I was struggling with my scenes in this week’s class, then had a little breakthrough in the last scene I did (we do dozens of scenes per class). The difference came about when I began by listening instead of thinking.

“Listen, then think,” says Miles. “Don’t try to make sense of the situation. Interact with it by listening.”

Here’s what happens when you think first instead of listening first:

You begin having a conversation about what’s in your head instead of about what’s in the scene. And because neither your scene partner(s) nor your audience can hear what’s in your head, you’re having a conversation with yourself, which distances you from the scene instead of engaging in it. You’re having a conversation with yourself.

Here’s what happens when you listen before thinking:

You can use your intellect to serve the scene (by doing something smart that propels the scene and makes your partner look good) instead of letting your intellect use you (“I am the smartest person in the room and here’s proof”). You’re having a conversation with reality.

Thinking is the ego talking; Listening is the world talking.

Listen. Then Think. That is the order of the opportunity in any scene you’re in.