Finding the Game

Let’s say you’re plucked out of an audience at an improv show and thrust onstage into the glare of the spotlight. You’re told that you’re a Viking warrior being introduced to your daughter’s new boyfriend.

The scene starts – GO!

About now you may be thinking: When do I wake up from this nightmare? You may feel like the angst-ridden second-round participants in the What’s In a Name activity, except that now all the other participants are watching you and expecting you to be hilariously funny so they can get their money’s worth.

Then – seeing escape to be impossible – you futilely grope for words to string together from the infinite choices available to you. You may think: What do I say? How can I fill this blank slate?

I think this reaction lies at the root of many people’s resistance to the idea of improv. The very thought of having to fill the airspace with impromptu dialog forged from the best of all possible words provokes anxiety at best, panic at worst. Performance improvisers who can deftly create on-the-spot scenes are often seen as naturally gifted, with spontaneity imprinted in their DNA - somehow able to stare into the void and magically conjure fully formed scenes out of thin air.

But as I’ve mentioned before, performance improvisers don’t generally paint on an utterly blank slate. Instead, they use many constructs – what I would call heuristics – to loosely frame their scenes and provide in-the-moment guidance for their actions.

Yes And is itself one of these loose frameworks – i.e., “always agree with your stage partner.” This simple guideline restricts the improviser (“Don’t say no”) and yet paradoxically frees him by removing the paralyzing effects of unlimited choice. Whatever he says, he knows he needs to affirm and build on what his partner has just said. Other loose frameworks include chiches, catchphrases, and accents.

Another framework is called Finding the Game. “The Game” is simply an interesting insight or interaction that emerges from the scene in the first few seconds, one that could be stated in a few words. Here is an example of Finding the Game, derived from my own workshopping experience.

In this scene, a male player and a female player were kids playing in their adjoining backyards. The female jumped up on the fence between the two of them and began walking tightrope-like along the top, leading her partner to observe, “Wow, you’ve got great balance!” Immediately they both intuitively recognized the Game they would play: Boy watches girl’s balancing ability as they go through life. (Since this was a long-form exercise, they knew they’d be coming back with later scenes that traced their lives together.)

Rather than just fumble around with disjointed kid-like dialogue, the two players were able to focus on this Game as a loose framework within which to spontaneously develop a whole series of scenes – as teenagers, boy admires girl’s balancing of academics, sports, and social clubs; after they get married, boy marvels at girl’s Supermom overachievements as wife, mother, and corporate CEO; after 20 years, the girl starts to crumble under the weight of her life’s balancing act …

“The Game” thus provided focus and direction for the scene and effectively guided the players’ in-the-moment decisions about what to say and do next. In this way, “The Game” represented a useful boundary that freed them to do their best, most creative work.

So back to our Viking - i.e., you – and his beautiful daughter’s boyfriend. What is The Game that you could identify to help you with your onstage decisions? Maybe: Viking tries to determine boyfriend’s marauding skills to see if he’s a suitable match. Or: Boyfriend wants to marry the daughter and relocate to a warmer climate. Any of these choices can provide the loose framework within which you and your partners can creatively improvise.

But then you might say: So what? How does this inside knowledge help me? How can I apply “Finding the Game” to my Daily Improvising life?

I’ll answer this next time by circling back to a concept I covered in one of my first articles – a concept that the Daily Improviser can use to provide useful boundaries to guide his and others’ day-to-day choices.

For now, however, I think I hear Brunnhilde singing!

Useful Boundaries - Continued

OK, Pop Quiz:

In 15 seconds, write down as many things that are white in color as you can think of.

Finished? All right, now for Round Two:

In 15 seconds, write down as many white things in your refrigerator as you can think of.

How many items did you generate in each round? And which round seemed easier?

As Chip Heath and Dan Heath point out in their book Made to Stick, having the whole universe of white things at your mental disposal probably didn’t present any advantage – and in fact may have proved a disadvantage. As the Heaths say:

Most people, remarkably, can list about as many white things from their refrigerator as white anythings…. Even people who list more white anythings often feel that the refrigerator test is “easier.”

Why does this happen? Because, as the Heaths point out, placing a mental boundary such as a refrigerator around the universe of possible white things “is a way of mobilizing and focusing your brain.”

Just a neat brain trick? No, say the Heaths – a valuable concept for honing and communicating ideas, as they illustrate with the example of Jerry Kaplan.

In 1987, Kaplan was a young entrepreneur who was trying to interest the Kleiner Perkins venture capital firm – the most prestigious in Silicon Valley – in his idea for a smaller, more portable personal computer. As he began his “audition” before the firm’s partners, the tieless Kaplan realized that what he thought would be an informal conversation was really expected to be a slick, buttoned-down presentation.

Armed only with his small maroon leather portfolio, and fearing that he was losing his skeptical audience, Kaplan decided on the spur of the moment (as the Heaths recount) “to risk some theatrics” by tossing the leather portfolio onto the table and announcing with a flourish, “Gentlemen, here is a model of the next step in the computer revolution!”

Suddenly, the tone of the meeting changed from a slow grilling to an impromptu brainstorming session. The Kleiner Perkins people began focusing on the portfolio and speculating about the possibilities and opportunities represented by the prospect of condensing computer power inside such small confines. As the Heaths put it:

The presence of the portfolio made it easier for the venture capitalists to brainstorm, in the same way that focusing on “white things in our refrigerator” made it easier for us to brainstorm.

The result: The partners decided to back Kaplan’s idea, valuing his company to the tune of $4.5 million.

The What’s in a Name activity (described in my earlier article) … the Refrigerator Quiz … Kaplan’s Improv Moment … all of these are examples of useful boundaries that provide focus and concreteness for our thinking and communicating.

In Made to Stick, the Heaths provide many other real-world examples of useful boundaries that have the paradoxical effect of liberating rather than stifling one’s creativity and communicative power. In my next article, I’ll provide other examples of useful boundaries from a world that might seem the most boundless – the improv stage.

In Honor of Presidents Day

As a fitting coda to my article of yesterday, I offer the following:

"Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new at all." 

Abraham Lincoln

Don't Be Original!

In my previous article, I described the angst experienced by participants in the What’s In a Name activity as they tried to come up with “original” names for items when faced with no restrictions on their choices.

The ego-driven desire for originality also afflicts many people in business meetings, who seem to care more about impressing others with their brilliance rather than collaborating with their team members to work toward a joint result. This “look-at-me” focus can also lead to silo-based behavior, with each person primarily concerning himself with his own perspectives and those of the group with which he identifies.

Clearly, the urge to impress others with our wonderfully original thoughts is one of those negative “things between” that get in the way of attaining a state of mastery. And, as Keith Johnstone makes clear in his book Impro for Storytellers, even performance improvisers can run afoul of this urge. As Johnstone observes:

"When [improvisers] are trying to think of clever things to say, they’ll pay scant attention to anyone else."

The compulsion to be original tends to keep people (whether performance improvisers or Daily Improvisers) turned inward toward their own thoughts rather than outward toward their environment. Instead of listening to and integrating the ideas and viewpoints of others, the self-referential improviser might plow ahead into an area that only the little playwright in her head finds interesting.

So what’s the remedy for the urge to always be original? Simply this, in the words of Patricia Ryan Madson: Be average! For more on this, refer to my earlier article on Robert Benchley: The “Average” Man.

Granted, there are times when truly original thinking is required – but, even then, such thinking doesn’t have to come from a single inspired individual but can emerge from a team’s collaborative effort. And even when true originality is called for – whether from an individual or from a team – the answer isn’t necessarily to wipe the mental slate clean and devise a wholly new play. As I’ll show next time, the placement of useful boundaries on our thinking can (paradoxically) help us think outside the box.

Putting Useful Boundaries on Our Thinking

In my organization-development practice, I often conduct an improv-based activity I call What’s In a Name?

In Round One, I have participants walk around the room, point to objects, and call out each object’s name as they point (“table,” “white board,” “light switch,” etc.). Most participants, of course, can do this with no problem.

In Round Two, participants are again told to walk around and point to objects, but this time they must call out a name other than the actual name of the object to which they’re pointing.

Invariably in Round Two, you can almost hear the mental gears grinding as participants strain to think of a name from the whole universe of possibilities available to them. During the debrief, many participants attribute their hesitation to the pressure they feel to think of something “creative” or “clever.”

However, occasionally in Round Two, a participant will rattle off object names just as easily as he did in Round One. When asked to share his strategy, the participant will often let the others in on the “secret”: Think of another category – like “barnyard animals” – and assign names from that category (“chicken,” “horse,” “pig,” etc.) to each of the pointed-to objects.

I use this activity to illustrate the value of placing useful boundaries around our thinking, in order to avoid becoming – like most of the Round Two participants described above - paralyzed by the tyranny of unlimited choice whenever we’re contemplating a course of action. Useful boundaries help us frame our thinking so that we can focus our mental energies on the most promising possibilities and options, eliminating red herrings and irrelevant considerations right upfront.

For the Daily Improviser, useful boundaries can take many forms:

• Her own experience, and the experience of others (aka “advice” and “mentoring”);
• Checklists to help her prioritize actions and avoid having things fall through the cracks;
• Templates to help her compose documents (and thereby avoid the dreaded “blank page”);
• Structured processes for carrying out certain procedures, most notably the processes associated with Project Management practice.

But wait! If “Daily Improvising” is all about applying the skills and attitudes of performance improvisers to everyday life, why am I suggesting that the Daily Improviser put boundaries on her thinking? Don’t performance improvisers keep themselves open to the universe of possibilities and make up everything anew on the spot?

Well, if you’re a regular reader of this blog, then you’re probably way ahead of me. As I mentioned in an earlier article, performance improvisers themselves commonly place useful boundaries on their thinking to facilitate their actions. By using catchphrases, clichés, accents, and pre-set scene structures, they are able to put a loose framework around their scenes and provide focus for their in-the-moment choices.

I’ll continue next time with some further examples of useful boundaries as described by the improv guru Keith Johnstone in his book Impro for Storytellers.