Lisberger and Me

“For most of mankind’s existence, our subconscious mind has been hidden.  Now it’s on full display in the network.  Everything you can dream of is there and accessible instantly.  And the question is, what are we going to do with it?”

“People need a new way in.”

“If one aspect of work, access to information, has gotten infinitely easier, the laws of physics tell us that another aspect, one that maybe we don’t recognize yet, has gotten infinitely harder.  We expect things to always get easier, but that’s not necessarily true.”

“On one side of the equation you have the swarm, the hive mind, whatever you want to call it.  And on the other, you have all these tools, and this demand for productivity.  If you don’t know what you’re doing, it will get revealed quicker.  So you have to really know what you’re doing.  The swarm has to be grounded in capability.”

“The network and the tools are amazing.  If people learn how to use the network and the tools, they’ll be amazing, too.”

“One result of networks is the democratization of quality.  When all content is pumped out and made accessible, it creates a kind of middling format.  It leads to a common denominator effect.  This is why elitism matters.  Not just anyone can tell a good story, or create a good design.”

“Intellectual bullying perpetuates the wrong argument.”

“With improvisation, you can do a scene where one person plays the landlord and the other person plays the tenant who’s behind on the rent.  Then those two people reverse roles, and from that process, you learn how to go about resolving the problem.  In business, that never happens.  No one switches sides or changes roles.  If you play for the Blue Team, that’s the team you stay on.  If you’re on the Yellow Team, you stay on that team, and you argue for that side.  And you just keep on having the same argument, and it’s terrible, because nothing changes, and nothing ever gets resolved.”

“What you’re doing with GameChangers is fracturing and realigning the sides of the argument so that problems can get solved.”

“The subconscious mind doesn’t recognize time.  It exists in a permanent state of ‘now.’  In this sense the subconscious mind is like a child, who doesn’t know anything but ‘right now.’  When the subconscious mind makes itself visible and instantly accessible in the network, and everything exists in a state of now, it breeds immaturity.  We begin operating at the level of awareness of an 11 year old.  Maturity is something you can only get to over time.  It’s linear in that sense.  The ethics and perspective that come with time and maturity are what’s missing in this environment.”

“Maturity comes from mastery in the physical realm.”

Storytelling is in our DNA.  You can even say our DNA is, itself, a 40,000 year-old story, told in a language first translated in 1953 by scientist-storytellers Watson and Crick.  Before 1953, scientists knew the story existed, they just didn’t understand the language in which it was told.  Watson and Crick cracked the code and the story has been unfolding ever since.

Narratives are the most powerful way we have of organizing information.  They impose structure and meaning on the chaos of communication that flows like a thousand roaring rivers into, through, and out of networks.   They connect virtual experiences to the real world.  They inspire action.  Narratives make sense of it all, and of our relationship to it all.

As you may know, brand narratives designed for the networked world cannot be scripted, they must be improvised.  Much of the work we do at GameChangers involves helping our customers become better improvisers of their narratives, and not focus as much on telling good stories as they do on living good stories.  It is much easier and more cost effective to preach what you practice than it is to practice what you preach.

Here’s a huge distinction between scripted and improvised narratives:

Scripted narratives operate under the laws of Newtonian mechanics (also called classical mechanics).  Call them Newtonian Narratives.  Improvised narratives, by comparison, operate according to the laws of quantum mechanics.

Call them Quantum Narratives.

Here are some characteristics of a Newtonian Narrative:  It is finite, with a beginning, middle and end.  It unfolds in linear time.  It follows a formula or script.  It has a credited author.  It is inhabited by a well-defined and finite number of players.  It is rooted in physical geography.  It is platform specific (even when it is multi-platform).  It is solid, mechanical, repetitive and dependable.  It is immutable.  The book you read today will be the same book tomorrow.  It is causative, that is everything in a Newtonian Narrative happens because of something else.  Events are related to one another according to its formulas.  (”If Peyton Manning endorses it, people will buy it.”)

Another important distinction:  a Newtonian Narrative can only be conjecture before the fact and can only be true (or not) after the fact.  That is, until events have actually transpired, there is no truth to these narratives.  A book cannot be read until it has been written, , a news story cannot be reported until the ‘news’ has occurred, and all our scripts, game plans and predictions are, at best, a positive vision of what we’d like the future to hold.  None of it is our reality.  Newtonian Narratives predict the future and chronicle the past, but they are not ‘alive.’  Examples of Newtonian Narratives are: market research, feature films, sitcoms, print media, TV ad campaigns, style guides and the shopping list on your refrigerator door.

One more characteristic of the Newtonian Narrative:  It places a premium on knowledge, by defining knowledge as a have/have-not concept.  It rewards ‘knowing,’ and penalizes ‘not knowing.’   In the Newtonian Narrative, knowledge is something you earn, or pay to acquire, at which point you are said to ‘own it.’

None of this is to say that the Newtonian Narrative is necessarily bad, or undesirable.  Just like Newtonian mechanics in physics, it has its place, and that place is vital, as Toyota is learning today to its dismay, with all its recalls on defective car parts.  (Something in its process didn’t follow the script its engineers had authored.)

Networks call for a different approach to storytelling.  A quantum approach.  Understanding this difference and acting on it presents a huge opportunity for businesses and brands, and perhaps our best chance for economic growth that is both profitable and sustainable.

The Quantum Narrative redefines storytelling by ripping up and recomposing the stuff stories have been made of since the first cave dweller showed her companions how to build a fire (and got thrown out of the cave not long after by another cave dweller who claimed the secret of fire for himself).

Though it literally has existed forever, production of this kind of narrative is still in its infancy.  You can see glimmers of it in transmedia, massive multiplayer games, distributed production models, theme parks, social media, alternate reality games, activist brands, smart badges, business in China, remixes and mashups, augmented reality, micro-loans and the video of your dance in the musical, Hair.

Here are some of the characteristics of a Quantum Narrative:  It has no beginning, middle or end.  It has unlimited numbers of beginnings, middles and ends.  It is generative instead of repetitive.  It is participatory instead of authored.  There’s no traditional storyteller-audience relationship; in the Quantum Narrative, everyone is responsible for creating the story.  It does not foster consumption as much as it invites customization.  This is why participants in these brand narratives are not consumers; they are customers.  Or players.

A Quantum Narrative is not bound by time, space or geography.  As with human DNA, what happened 40,000 years ago is still present and active in the narrative today.  This kind of narrative can transpire in the blink of an eye or unfold over many millennnia.  Or both.  It happens here at the same time it’s happening across the room or the planet.  It resembles the playing of a game by an infinite number of players more than it does the telling of a story by one person to an audience in a room.

A Quantum Narrative is platform agnostic.  You cannot tie this kind of story to a technology or convention, because is designed to liberate itself from such conventions and transcend the media that deliver it.

A Quantum Narrative is present tense, which means that it does not get bogged down by history or saddled with expectations.  This is probably its most important characteristic, because it means that every single action in the narrative holds breakthrough potential.  Breakthroughs are not predicted by the narrative, they are, rather, made possible by it.  It is non-causative, that is, you cannot always know how or why things occur.  Serendipity plays an important role.

Quantum Narratives do not focus on who has knowledge and who doesn’t.  Instead, they begin with the premise that everyone (and everything!) has knowledge, and the fact that we don’t all know the same things is an advantage, not a drawback.  Quantum Narratives are designed to be shared, not owned.  They emphasize interpretation, context, and perspective over a so-called body of knowledge.

Quantum Narratives create the conditions for unexpected collaborations and syntheses of ideas.  They connect what has been scattered, make whole what would otherwise remain divided, and continually evolve.

They focus more on theme than on plot.  They assess performance in terms of consistency (thematic alignment) and inconsistency, not in terms of rightness (on message) and wrongness.  There’s only one way to be right, but there are unlimited ways to be consistent with a theme.  This, too, has huge implications.   It means that Quantum Narratives, in addition to being more adaptive, possess way more potential than Newtonian Narratives do.  It’s the difference between an atomic reaction and a stick of dynamite.

And then compare this.

Quite a difference.

The first is improvised.

The second is scripted.

Improvisation is active.  It is alive.  Members of Parliament are energetically engaged in the conversation about the matter at hand, supportive of, but not bogged down by, their various ideologies and positions.  Their actions and reactions are immediate, emotional and visceral.  This honors the problem.  American politicians dishonor a problem, and obfuscate it, when they use it as a foil for politicking, which is how almost every problem faced by the federal government is regarded now.  An excuse for campaigning.

This is the big point President Obama underlined yesterday in his meeting with the Republicans.  That 66-minute conversation may be the best thing that’s happened in American politics since the Watergate hearings.  Obama changed the game by calling out the current political game for what it is.   Let’s call the current game “Our Way or No Way.”  It is played by Democrats and Republicans alike, with equal vigor.  This game is toxic.  Limiting.  Stultifying.  Divisive.  And ultimately it’s unproductive.  This is not about blaming one party or the other.  The bad game is to blame.

Yesterday, Obama not only called out the current game for the quicksand pit it is, he suggested a better, more liberating, more productive game.  You might call the game he’s proposing, ‘Part of a Pie is Better Than None.’  In other words, the invitation to the Republicans (Dems, you’re next!) is to find an area of agreement and agree on it.  Do it knowing that some, but not all, and probably not not 80% of what you’ve got scripted, will come to pass.  Don’t be greedy.  Be generous instead.  Don’t place blame.  Accept responsibility.  Don’t point fingers.  Shake hands.  And then come out fighting.  Let’s relish the good fight, one where we fight together to solve the problem, not the bad fight, where we fight over who’s right and who’s wrong about how to solve it.  Let’s pick battles we can win instead of battles we can make the other guy lose.

Cheers to the GameChanger in Chief for changing the game once again.  Our political discourse needs more of the kind of energetic, intelligent, articulate, performances that the Brits demonstrate in their ‘Question Time With the Prime Minister” and Obama and the Republicans staged yesterday.  It will be a healthy transformation.  And it’ll make great TV.  Nothing we Yanks like better than that!

Do not get locked into your script for success.  Be prepared, instead, to improvise your way there.  Remember that other people have scripts, too.  As I can tell you from working in the entertainment business, when all we do is fight over whose script we’re going to follow, the show does not go on.

“Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.”

Howard Zinn, August 24, 1922 – January 27, 2010

One of these systems was called a Mix Mill.  It was a processing machine about the size of a small refrigerator that ground grains like corn and soybeans into livestock feed.  Using a series of black dials on the front of a cool-looking and very loud mint green machine connected to a set of augers, a farmer could dial in mixtures of grains and nutrients, and control the blend and texture of the feed.  This saved the farmer all the time and labor of loading grain into a truck, hauling it to a centralized grain mill, grinding and mixing the grain there in one big batch, then loading it  into 100 lb bags and hauling it back to the farm.

Another product, a Grain Bin, was a big silvery cylinder with drying fans installed around its perimeter that allowed the farmer to store and dry grain until the market presented the best selling opportunity.  No longer did a farmer necessarily have to sell his grain at harvest time, when the market was glutted.  The Grain Bin gave farmers more flexibility by giving them a much larger window through which to move their product.

After breakfast this morning with Scott Walker, the founder of BrainCandy LLC, whose Runes of Gallidon explores production using a networked  model, I can see more clearly than ever that we are in an analogous scenario today.  The ’small farmers’ of our time are Independent Media Producers (IMPs) such as app developers, gamers, bloggers, filmmakers and storytellers of all stripes.

The Mix Mills and Grain Bins of new media–some of them even sporting agri-names like FinalCut, Feedburner, FeedRoom, FeedCompany, Mailbeans and Sprouter–are abundant, and give an IMP almost unlimited ways to intersect with market vectors.  (In fact, anyone thinking of launching a media app would be well advised to take a look at this first.  All 67 pages of it.  It should be mandatory.)

Like Mix Mills and Grain Bins did for farmers, these apps  give the IMP much more say in the supply chain.  A say in when the feed gets ground.  How long it gets stored.  What goes into it.

The apps also hold down the IMP’s expenses.  Costs of fuel, labor and transportation are all lowered.  What was once produced at the centralized grain mill (e.g. a large post production facility with heavy-duty Avid machines and 24-track consoles) can now be produced using laptops in someone’s home studio.

With all these ‘Mix Mills and Grain Bins’ and the unlimited spectrum of mashups and market entry points they make possible, we IMPs– we tillers of the cybersoil, farmers of the fractal, growers of the game–are left with only two questions that have no off-the-shelf answer:  What are we planting? and Why?

Sports is also a recurring theme for the culture and politics of the times.  There is a lot of meta meaning bound up in sports.  For example…

Jackie Robinson’s is the story of de-segregation, and of breaking through any significant barrier in your chosen profession.

Rudy is the story of anyone who has to overcome long odds to achieve a dream.

Esther Williams‘ and Johnny Weismuller’s stories are about the marriage of sports and entertainment.

The recent film, Invictus, starring Matt Damon and Morgan Freeman, is about a visionary who sees a way to resolve a serious conflict via the playing of a game.

The Invictus theme is more or less mirrors what The Ball is all about:  Beginning this Sunday, January 24, three football (soccer for us Yanks) enthusiasts, Christian Wach, Phillip Wake and Andrew Aris, will kick a football from Battersea Park in London, the site where modern soc– er, football began in 1864, to Johannesburg, South Africa, site of this year’s World Cup, the first ever held on the African continent.  Their trip will take five months, and will run through 25 countries and 10,000 miles.

GameChangers: On The Ball

The Ball is sponsored by DHL-Africa, Special Olympics-Africa, the Freestyle Football Federation (think of them as the Harlem Globetrotters of football), and Alive and Kicking, which distributes footballs to kids in poor villages around the world.  Alive and Kicking is donating 1,000 balls for the guys to distribute on their trip.  DHL is handling logistics, including ground transpo, express mail, visa approvals, border crossings and internet and mobile phone connectivity.  Africa 10, a documentary produced by Julian Cautherly and Will.I.Am of the Blackeyed Peas, has donated an HD camera and flash memory cards, and is co-hosting The Ball content on its website for the duration of the trip.  GameChangers is a patron, too.  Our role is to support the The Ball narrative.

At the January 24 kickoff, ‘The Beautiful Game’ will be played with ‘no rules’ (pre-1864 version of mayhem in the streets with a ball); ‘old rules’ (c. 1864 genteel and casual, if it strikes your fancy, smoke a pipe while you play); and ‘modern rules’ (the athletic, free-flowing game of today).  Following the kickoff event, Dan Magess of the Freestyle Football Federation will attempt to set a world record for ‘keepy-uppy’, keeping a football in the air without touching it with your hands.  Current record is over 23 hours.  And with that, The Ball will begin its journey to Jo-burg for the World Cup.

This will be the third and most ambitious World Cup journey for the group, which operates under a non-profit organization, Spirit of Football.   Wach and Wake kicked The Ball from London to Seoul in 2002 and London to Munich in 2006.  This is Aris’ first year with the group.

The meta story of The Ball is how a simple idea can sweep aside our differences, and lead the way toward a shared sense of purpose, and the pitch on which all can play.

Kick away, lads, kick away!

One of the greatest gifts of my professional life has been the opportunity to hang out and work with people who draw Disney animation. They are exceptionally gifted observers, and experience the world from their own unique space-time perspective. (Once, I was walking through Descanso Gardens in L.A. with the legendary Disney artist Ken Anderson and he pointed up at the huge California Oaks overhead. “Most people see these trees as standing still,” he said. “If we could observe them over time we’d see that they’re really doing a beautiful dance.”) Disney animators inhale life’s experiences deeply like that, and breath it out through drawings that show movement in 1/24th of a second increments, every drawing a work of gallery-worthy art, fed back to us in waves through the twin lenses of character and narrative, as a movie.

“The Princess and the Frog” may not get my vote for the best movie title ever, but it is a positively heroic comeback for hand-drawn animation at Disney, which has, in true fairy tale fashion, awakened, dusted itself off and gotten back in business after being rendered dormant by the Dark Prince, Michael Eisner, and left for dead by many.  And…it features an African American girl as its main character, a first for a Disney animated feature.  We have come a long way since the days of Uncle Remus and Br’er Rabbit. We still have a long way to go.  But if we are like animators…patient, observant, and aware that there is opportunity in every 1/24 of a second…we might just get there someday.

We will give money via mobile phones. We will send medical help and heavy equipment and food and tents and fuel. Some of us will catch a plane or a boat there ourselves. We will take time off from helping in New Orleans to give Haiti a hand. We will triage this awful wound that anyone who is truly attuned cannot help but feel. It is nature of networks that when people anywhere are hurting, we hurt, too. And so in helping the people of Port-au-Prince, we are also helping ourselves.

Disasters bring out the best in us. Neighborliness. Empathy. Selflessness. Soul. We will be focused and energetic. We will be purposeful. We will honor our instincts. Our differences will vanish, our collaborative natures take over, our shared destiny will be made, for a time, more clear.

And after the rubble no longer echoes with the cries of those it has buried alive, after those who have been hurt have been treated and those who are hungry have been fed and those on the streets have been sheltered…after the aid and energy we’ve sent toward the stricken parts have exhausted themselves and the survivors have settled into a freshly impoverished routine…we must remember this:

Our brilliance is always with us, and does not require a disaster like this one to make its presence known.

Jim Stengel

Before there was a GameChangers LLC, before one word of the book had been written, I read in that Ad Age article how Stengel had made what we know today as a GameChanger move: He banned all storyboards from first meetings with ad agencies on new campaigns. What a gift!  Storyboards in a kickoff meeting, presume way too much. They hijack the process, and take it down a one-way, one-lane street. They imply a client/vendor relationship that prematurely assigns status and roles to the players and is therefore toxic to a truly organic process.

I give Jim Stengel a lot of credit for indicating that there is a need for improvisation in business. His storyboard ban created a vacuum that, by design I’m sure, required improvisation to fill.

In animation, where films are largely worked out on storyboards, presenting scenes that have been depicted on storyboards is called ‘getting the story on its feet.’ Stengel recognized that getting anything on its feet that was going to have legs needed to fall a time or two first.

Today, Stengel teaches at the Anderson School of Business at UCLA, and from his website it seems that he’s still got a unique perspective on the practices and processes of marketing brands.   I hope he’s telling the future captains of industry about his P & G storyboard rule.  It’s a good one.

Carroll with the Life Drum Core (and a copy of GameChangers) after a USC football practice

GameChangers do not confine themselves to one scene or one role.  Nobody knows this better than Pete Carroll. He probably could have stayed at USC until he was ready to retire. In a showbiz town, he is a star, adored by fans, and lavished with perks and money. He has done a ton of good here, too, in the form of community work through his A Better Life LA foundation. Here’s what the L.A. Times had to say about him in 2008:

Few know that about twice a month Carroll leaves his comfy digs at USC, hops in the back of a beaten Camry driven by a former gang member and heads to South L.A. neighborhoods where the snap of gunfire and the anguish of death occur with the steady regularity of a metronome.

These are not recruiting visits. He’s trying to save lives.

Most often, he arrives near midnight and walks shadowy streets with that familiar, electric strut, surrounded by little boys, grandparents, crack heads and gang toughs. He empathizes, listens, encourages, laughs. He talks about jobs and kids and marriage, about perspective and courage, about how difficult it must be to be caught in the madness of the streets.

He realizes that some might think he’s a fool, that some might say he should pay no mind to gang members. Naysayers do not stop him.

“I don’t go to judge . . . just to show that someone cares,” he said. “Just go to give people here a little hope. . . . Get folks to step back and think. Hopefully, get them to change.”

Five years ago, moved by news of murders near USC’s campus, Carroll formed a foundation called A Better LA, dedicated to ending inner-city violence. He hoped to use the self-improvement thinking he’s long leaned on in coaching to help people in poor and dangerous neighborhoods.

We play many roles in life, but always through the essential truth of who we are.   Seattle will be getting a new coach, and who knows how he’ll play the role, or how he’ll do there?  Carroll failed with the New York Jets when he coached before in the pros.  What the Seahawks can count on is getting a man who will compete hard on the field and contribute to the community in which he lives.

When things get too comfortable, a GameChanger consciously changes the game.  I don’t know Carroll’s mind, but it seems to me that a coach whose motto is “Always Compete,” needed a new challenge to keep his competitive edge.  He probably didn’t enjoy coaching against his protege, Steve Sarkisian, at Washington, to whom USC lost this year in an upset.  With his children grown, maybe the time is right for Carroll and his wife to move on.  As the writer and radio star Garrison Keillor once told me before deciding to leave Minneapolis to live in New York City for a few years, “If you do something for someone, they expect you to keep on doing it.  But a person has a right to do something else for a change.”

The Pete Carroll story will be analyzed to death, but on the meta level it’s simple.  In order to compete at the top of his game, a competitor like Pete Carroll needs a challenge.

A GameChanger does not seek success, but growth.  Success is a plateau we’ve reached.  Growth is a mountain we must climb.