The Improvisational Life and the Blank Slate

Awhile back, I dealt at length with Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan’s book The Three Laws of Performance. In describing the Second Law – “How a situation occurs arises in language” – I cited Zaffron and Logan’s observation that “whenever you say something, other communication is carried along with it.” This phenomenon, which they call “the unsaid but communicated,” can easily be ignored by individuals and organizations, who often are content to deal with only the surface level of issues. As a result, the real issues fester unacknowledged until they can no longer be overlooked – or effectively handled.

These “unsaid but communicated” messages are just one example of the barriers that prevent us from achieving mastery in our performance, a level which Zaffron and Logan define as “nothing between you and the thing you’re dealing with.” In order to attain mastery, Zaffron and Logan appear to say, you must root out any unspoken meaning, biases, assumptions, hidden agendas – anything – that would mediate between you and a direct, in-the-moment experiencing of the reality before you.

I hope I’m not reading too much - or too little - into Zaffron and Logan’s definition of mastery, a la Justice Hugo Black’s famous strict constructionist view of the Constitutional guarantee of free speech: “’No law’ means no law.” Yet, still … “nothing” means nothing! And I must admit that this plain meaning of their “mastery” definition has been gnawing at me. Can we truly achieve such a state – the direct apprehending of what’s in front of us, seeing things "as they are," uninfluenced by our prior received wisdom and conditioned ways of seeing the world? And is such a state even necessary in order to attain our highest levels of performance?

Must we treat every interaction as a blank slate, to be written upon anew each time? Is this what an improvisational approach to life would have us do?

I’ve already touched on this concern to some extent, and I plan to revisit it in upcoming articles. Stay tuned!