Marc was, to my knowledge, the best auto mechanic on campus.  He’d wheel his Low Boy under a car chassis, listen to an engine, or spider around under the hood and demonstrate that while you might have had the supposedly functional eyes, you couldn’t look at a car with the skill that he could.

He was one of the best students at Notre Dame.  And a party animal.  And a ladies man.  He had a great sense of humor.  In Sorin Hall, where Marc and I lived, nobody thought of him as handicapped.  Quite the contrary.  He was gifted.  By comparison, most of us were lazy, ignorant slugs.

I have not stayed in touch with Marc over the years, but I have kept tabs on him.

A few years ago, for example, Disney planned to release a feature film based on the sight-impaired Mr. Magoo cartoon character.  At first I heard the rumors coming out of Disney’s film marketing department.  “Someone in Washington representing blind people is causing trouble.”  And then I heard the name Marc Maurer, and I had to smile, because I knew it was game over, a mismatch from the get-go.  Dr. Maurer, who today is President of the National Federation of the Blind, chewed up the Mouse and spit it out.  Making fun at the expense of the sight-impaired is a mistake Disney will never make again.

Later this week, I will be conducting a GameChangers workshop for Executive MBA students at Notre Dame, and I intend to mention Dr. Maurer.  In researching him, I came across one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard.  In keeping with the character of the Marc Mauer I knew at Notre Dame, the speech is by turns intelligent, inspiring, and hilarious.  Take the time to listen to it.

Some of the beautiful ideas Dr. Maurer expresses in this speech:

If we let a single characteristic become the identifier of a person, it ensures that our estimate of them will be wrong.  Value is measured not by a single characteristic, but by the aggregate of those possessed by each individual.  Each characteristic contributes to the whole, and each may strengthen or hinder the person possessing it.

We live in a society in which blindness is thought to be a condition to be repaired.  Eyes that cannot see are broken.  However, it is false to say that the person who owns them is broken.

We, the blind, do not need to be fixed.  We are fine the way we are.  We can find our meaning and our purpose without modification or alteration.

I do not believe that blindness and helplessness are synonymous.  I carry the cane because it is a tool that helps me travel.  It is a tool of my independence, not a badge of my helplessness.

Learning should not be limited to what trains the mind, it should also train the spirit.

Your life belongs to you!

Note that it’s Federation OF the Blind.  Not FOR the Blind.  It’s not about what we can do for blind people.  It’s about what blind people can do for themselves, and if we’re lucky, for us.  Yeah, Dr. Marc Maurer is blind.  And his vision is just fine.

The challenge with people feeling powerless is this: we don’t see how we can contribute to solve problems. We believe it is “someone else’s” to own rather than something any of us can contribute to. Powerlessness leads to apathy on global issues and disdain on local issues.

Now check out this from Mick Napier’s classic book, Improvise:  Scene from the Inside Out:

Two people…staring at each other and wondering who’s going to make the first move.  Two people being nice to each other and allowing the other to start doing something.  In that short amount of time, two humans have created themselves as powerless…Who has time?  The audience is waiting.  They don’t care about your support.  They care about what you do.  What you do now.

These two statements, made miles and years apart, reflect the timelessness of the concept:  Do something!  Participate!  Add to the conversation!  When you’re just getting started don’t worry about what the solution will be, or where the scene will take you.  No one knows, and your audience doesn’t care.  The most important thing is to bring to the scene whatever you’ve got.

The saying in improvisation is ‘take care of yourself first.’  This is not the same as being selfish.  It is, rather, the recognition that making the first move, even if we are not always the one to make it, is always our responsibility.

Michael Margolis

Not long ago, thanks to a series of events set in motion by our mutual friend, Michelle James, I had the good fortune to connect with Michael Margolis, the founder of GetStoried.com and the author of Believe Me — “a storytelling manifesto for change-makers and innovators.”

There’s a natural affinity whenever professional storytellers get together.  Everything reminds us of a story, and so the conversation tends to leapfrog from anecdote to observation to insight, and back again.  Michael and I not only leapfrogged.  We hopscotched.  We see-sawed.  We tagged, hide-and-go-seeked and monkey-barred.  We were a couple of kids at recess, playing with our favorite toy.

What I like best about Michael’s approach to storytelling is that it’s active.  Story, seen through his lens, isn’t passive.  It’s not static.  Not fixed in time or immutable.

Story is alive.  It’s dynamic.  In constant motion.  In fact, telling good stories, while it has its place, is not nearly as productive as the living of them.  This is what Michael gets at in Believe Me.  It describes stories as our most powerful way of defining and shaping the world we live in.  Seeing stories in this light gives us the ability to transform them from past-tense or scripted, into a form that is revealed to us in each and every breath, and transmitted to our ‘audience’ in each and every action we take.

This is the learning that emerged for me from Believe Me.  Story is more powerful as a verb than as a noun.

Don’t think of story as a Thing.  Treat it as an Action. The act of Changing.  Innovating.  Revealing.  Inviting.  Reflecting.  Making.  Learning.  Leading.  Contextualizing. Connecting. Understanding.  Liberating. And yes…Playing!

Someday, after the fact, a Story may describe What Happened.  Right now, the only time that matters, Story is What’s Happening.  Knowing this difference will make you more observant and appreciative in the moment, and when it’s time for you to tell your story, it will rock, and your audience will Believe.

In our crazy race to escape these kinds of vortexes, we can turn direction-blind.  We pick a course of action, or someone picks a course for us, and in our all-out effort to escape a certain fate, we go heads down as hard as we can for as long as we can in that direction, like barn-sour horses galloping toward a distant barn.  A strategy, as Umair Haque points out in his latest HBR post, can be just as bad as a locked-in direction, because it can confine or limit one’s options instead of liberating them.

What Haque advocates, and what we could not agree with more, is adopting a set of behaviors (he calls these behaviors ‘Wisdom’) that foster liberation of the ideas and the ethical actions that can deliver us from the Goldman-Sachs Singularity, and whatever else sucks.  These behaviors have no time frame, because they are timeless.  They cannot be quantified, because they are potentially limitless in number.

One of these behaviors (me, adding to Haque’s list) is to Envision.   And by that I don’t mean Ayn Rand’s old Burt Lancaster-as-One-Of-A-Kind-Genius concept of vision but what I call ‘Viola Vision’, which consists of ’seeing and sharing what we see.’  This kind of envisioning expands our horizons, and gives us infinitely more options for escaping what sucks.  So in your quest for solutions, don’t forget to:

Look over. It’s how you get perspective on a problem.

Look under. Play with the dynamic of concealment and revelation.  Respect roots.  Dig deep.

Look sideways. My friend, the animation director John Musker, talks about stories as ‘taking an unexpected left turn.’  A sideways move can shake up your narrative in a way that keeps you on your toes and your audience engaged.

Look down. Who needs help?  Some days, this the only question worth answering.

Vineet Nayar Leads With Modesty

Nayar’s ‘employees first, customer second’ philosophy aligns with a basic concept of improvisation:  Take care of yourself first.  Mick Napier hits this hard in his book, Improvise:  Scene from the Inside Out.  If you wait for the other people in your scenes to have an idea, to initiate, you’re making yourself powerless, and you leave your scene partners and the audience hanging.  And if the other person in your scene waits on you, you’re lost, and so is the audience.  Nayar’s point is the same:  HCL can only be as good to their customer/audience as its employees are to one another.  These behaviors cannot be separated.  You cannot be one way to your scene partners and another to the audience.  It is all part of the same space-time continuum.  And productive action can only begin with you.

Other quotes by Nayar that are consistent with improvisation, and my notes in italics:

“I did not know where I had to go, and I was projecting as if I knew. I assume that you expect me to know where I am going, and you will respect me for that, and the day I tell you both of us are in the same boat, we would fail. That was a very big learning for me.”  Pretending is not illusion  if it is a step on the path to being.

“If you see your job not as chief strategy officer and the guy who has all the ideas, but rather the guy who is obsessed with enabling employees to create value, I think you will succeed.”  Support, the giving of gifts, is the most powerful tool in the improviser’s repertoire.

“How do I communicate to employees to not look up to me, but to look within, to communicate that I’m one of you, to destroy that hierarchy? So I decided I’m going to go into this big gathering of employees dancing to a very famous Bollywood song. And I can’t dance for nuts, right? I was dancing in the aisles with these employees and making lots of noises. What happened? It completely destroyed the gap.”  When you want to communicate something important, use more than information to do it.

“The failures are far in excess of successes.”  Failure is not defeat if it is a step on the path to understanding.

“I don’t want people who are coming here and teaching me something or teaching the organization something. I don’t want teachers. I want people who are not only charged up because they like it, but because they will learn from this experience. I’m looking for people who see experience as a continuum and not as an end in and of itself.”  Improvisers are not teachers.  We are builders of  environments in which communication, learning and transformation can happen.

IMPORTANT FOOTNOTE!

When we tried linking to the HCL URL with Mozilla Firefox 5.0, we got this message:

We noted this ‘FAIL’ in the post.  Within minutes of publishing the post, an HCL employee, Aruj Kapoor, wrote to say he was sorry they’d been down, that they’d fixed the bug and the site was restored.  And not only that, he ‘yes-anded’ by asking what specific information we were seeking when the site went down.  Aruj’s awareness of what my experience must’ve been when I hit the dead link–frustration, confusion, puzzlement–led him to offer his support to the scene I’d initiated with HCL. Be sensitive to your environment and it will tell you what you need to know. By yes-anding, Aruj converted a mistake into an opportunity to extend the dialogue between the HCL brand and me.  Nice move.  Every mistake is an opportunity to do something useful.

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 story as old as life on the planet, 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.