Don't Agree with Me - Support Me!

Several times in the Daily Improviser blog, I’ve referred to the ExploreFlexSupport model as the foundation for effective action by both the performance improviser and the Daily Improviser. Today I’d like to focus on the third part of the model: Support.

On the improv stage, Support means: Say “Yes And” to your fellow players by building positively upon their lines and actions (i.e., their “offers”). If both partners provide this kind of mutual support, they can collaboratively create a rewarding scene.

By contrast, an obvious action that undermines support is saying “No” to a scene offer. In his book Truth in Comedy, Kim “Howard” Johnson cites a scene in which a female player tells her onstage partner that she wants a divorce. The partner replies, “But what about the children?” to which the first player responds, “But we don’t have any children!” As Johnson says: “Naturally, she got a huge laugh. Naturally, she had completely destroyed the scene” – because the laugh was at the expense of the scene and her partner’s offer.

This Support model sounds a lot like the positivity-based And Stance I’ve described as a guide for the Daily Improviser as he engages with others in a joint search for truth. But as I’ve been saying in my past few articles, I’m starting to wonder about the possible limits of the And Stance, with its emphasis on finding points of agreement and common ground. By focusing so much on agreement (and being agreeable), are we perhaps discounting the energy and complacency-busting power that can accompany throwing a bit of creative abrasion into the mix? In the name of smoothing over our interactions, do we run the risk of holding back how we really feel?

In fact, Mick Napier has raised the same type of questions about the Support model even as it applies to the improv stage. Napier has confronted head-on the Conventional Wisdom of the “Support Your Partner” model with the Uncommon Sense notion “Take Care of Yourself First.” As Napier writes in his book Improvise: Scene from the Inside Out:

"If you want to support your partner in an improv scene, give them the gift of your choice. I only feel supported by my partners if they make a move, if they do something. If they just stand there and look at me thinking about supporting me, I am absolutely unsupported. The more powerful a choice they make, the more I am supported." [Emphasis added}

Napier thus recognizes another aspect of the Support model that often gets lost: Support doesn’t just mean accepting and building on your partner’s offer. It also means giving your partner something solid to work with in return. 

To illustrate: Partner #1 says “Look at those giant blue manhole covers raining down from the sky!” Partner #2 responds, “Yes! I wonder what they’re coming from?” In this situation, Partner #2 would be totally in agreement with the reality established by Partner #1. Partner #2 would also be totally non-supportive of Partner #1. Why? Because rather than making a strong choice of his own that can carry the scene to the next level, Partner #2 has essentially punted the verbal ball back to Partner #1 and said, “Here, you figure out how to run with your reality.”

Napier’s observation nicely (if I can use that term) resolves the apparent contradiction between the Conventional Wisdom and Uncommon Sense I described above by basically saying: I can best support my partners by giving them the best of myself and my thinking! Or, to state it as a formula: Agreement does not equal Support!

I think this formula can also apply to the Daily Improviser as she encounters others on the journey to truth.  If we equate “support” with “being agreeable,” then we run the risk of holding back our best ideas and discounting the validity of our own perspectives. If a group of us do this, then we run the risk of generating Groupthink, that implicit (and sometimes explicit) peer pressure we apply to team members to stay within the bounds of “approved” thinking, even if it leads us to march collectively over a figurative cliff. Again, as Wilbur Wright said, we don’t want to be too quick to give up our own hold on the truth in the rush to accept our partner’s sense of truth.

And yet … I wouldn’t want to go too far down the path of saying that, for the Daily Improviser, truth is best served by a knock-down-drag-out encounter between two different views and perspectives, with each contender going to the mat to try to prevail over the other’s position. First, as I’ve also observed elsewhere, adopting this attitude often means that the “victory” goes to the best arguer, not to the most valid argument. Second, humans are not purely rational, argument-processing, truth-sifting machines that can put aside their emotions during a struggle for the truth. We can win the rhetorical battle but lose the relationship war, at a cost of bad feeling and lingering resentment. As was the case with the Wright Brothers, at some point we need to quit contending and start looking for common ground.

I'll continue this topic next time by further exploring the meaning of "Support" for Daily Improvising leaders.

The "Clash of Ideas": A Negative Approach to the Search for the Truth?

My previous article about the Wright Brothers and their contentious verbal altercations reminded me of a term I encountered a few years ago – “creative abrasion” – which reflects the notion that innovation can only be realized by the clash of conflicting ideas – especially by rubbing the status quo against new, provocative ways of looking at things.

In their book Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath refer to a similar concept in the context of influence and persuasion. If we want to influence somebody, say the Heaths, we need to confront that person’s Conventional Wisdom on the topic (which keeps him grounded in the status quo) with the Uncommon Sense of our message. And rather than just telling him why our message makes counterintuitive sense, we need to first shake his hold on his Conventional thinking by such concrete devices as demonstrations, illustrations, and stories. These communication vehicles themselves represent examples of “creative abrasion.” Once the listener has “unlearned” at least parts of his previously received wisdom (so the idea goes), he can then be more open to our contrasting message.

These examples represent everyday applications of one of the foundations of performance improv: The presenting of the players with incongruous situations (e.g., “a Sumo wrestler performing Swan Lake”) that they then must spontaneously and collaboratively resolve in their scene. Many improv workshop games focus on the deliberate creation (and resolution) of improbably coexisting situations and characters. In the Train Wreck game, for example, one character improvises a lengthy line of dialogue on any topic of his choosing (e.g., the proper care and feeding of sunflowers), which his partner interrupts with a wildly inapt response (e.g., “I’m not your real father.”). The players must then make the intrusive line work within the context of the opening speech.

Shake-ups … collisions … the shifting and rubbing of conceptual (rather than tectonic) plates … each of these represents the types of “creative abrasion” necessary for innovation. Yet I somehow feel the concept of creative abrasion itself scraping against a body of thought I’ve been developing in The Daily Improviser: The idea of using a positive, “Yes And” approach to collaborating with others in a joint search for truth.

It seems to me that each of the examples I cited above (as well as the Wright Brothers examples in my previous article) represents a blatant NO response to an existing concept or direction of thought. But haven’t I been advocating the improv-derived Positivity approach as an alternative to the usual lying-on-the-tracks mindset that typifies so much verbal wrangling? How can the throwing down of such conceptual gauntlets square with the idea of conducting a cooperative approach for an agreed-upon truth?

These questions pave the way for an inquiry into an even larger question. As I previously noted in my article on Barbara Fredrickson’s research into what makes people happy, for the most part Negativity is stronger than Positivity. As Fredrickson says, it takes three positive thoughts to counteract a single negative thought. If Positivity is the better way to interact with others, why should this No-to-Yes ratio be so skewed in No’s favor?

Naturally, I have some thoughts on all of the questions I’ve raised above. For once, though - having just created my own version of a Train Wreck - I’m going to leave an article with some loose ends dangling. I’ll revisit these questions later – and in the meantime, I invite readers to offer their own creative ideas (abrasive or otherwise).

Speaking of Winging It ...

"They argued for sport, their voices rising, relishing the debate as they might have relished a tennis match, whacking assertions and evidence back and forth."

Two aggressive disputants crossing swords in a typical business meeting? A dysfunctional couple on the road to a messy split?

Well, no. Actually, the two verbal combatants described above were none other than Wilbur and Orville Wright.

As James Tobin describes them in his book To Conquer the Air, the Wright Brothers did not always (or even typically) engage in calm, collegial discussions in their collaborative efforts that led to the first manned flying machine. “To outsiders,” writes Tobin, “the brothers’ way of thinking looked less like cooperation than combustion.” Tobin goes on to observe:

“From the fracas, ideas emerged. They enjoyed the fight. But the fight was also a method, and the tougher the fight, the better the results. Will [Wilbur] once analyzed it for a friend:

“’No truth is without some mixture of error, and no error is so false but that it possesses some element of truth. If a man is in too big a hurry to give up an error he is liable to give up some truth with it, and in accepting the arguments of the other man he is sure to get some error with it. Honest argument is merely a process of mutually picking the beams and motes out of each others eyes so both can see clearly. Men become wise just as they become rich, more by what they save than by what they receive. After I get hold of a truth, I hate to lose it again, and I like to sift all the truth out before I give up an error.”

As I read that, I immediately was struck by an apparently contradictory “truth’ of my own that I had asserted in an earlier blog article. The proposition I put forth can be summed up in the article's title: Want to Defeat the Truth? Then Start Arguing!

Well, like Wilbur, I also prefer to sift all the truth out of an assertion before I give up any erroneous elements it contains. And I would immediately observe that Wilbur’s statement actually echoes a concept I’ve also described: The And Stance.

The And Stance is an attitude between conflicting parties that, instead of saying “I’m right and you’re wrong,” puts forth the proposition that “I’m right AND you’re right” – that is, each of us has a piece of the truth in our possession. The process of searching for truth then involves “sifting” through the contents of our respective positions and agreeing on the truths we can jointly adopt.

Clearly, Wilbur’s statement recognizes that the process of argument doesn’t consist of beating the other party into submission with the brilliance of our points. Instead, argument – honest argument, as he called it – is a mutual process of testing each party’s ideas and having each party be willing to modify (or even give up) those that don’t hold water. In this way, the “honest arguer” is like the champion athlete who simultaneously convinces himself of his strength to prepare him for competition while also being open to the gaps in his game so he can improve. As I wrote in my Want to Defeat the Truth? article:

The typical arguer commonly fails to [recognize] that he could actually be wrong. By ignoring the holes in his own position, an arguer becomes like the athlete who convinces himself of his indomitability but overlooks the often glaring evidence that tells him where he's falling short. When both verbal combatants fail to acknowledge their own fallibility, the typical argument becomes … "less about seeking the truth than about overcoming opposing views" - or, to use another combat analogy, an attempt to batter the other with one's position until he submits. Whichever party "wins" such a battle, the truth is usually the real loser.

Obviously, the Wright Brothers’ methods for seeking the truth were successful – because they didn’t get married to positions that they held onto until the bitter end. As proof, Tobin cites this anecdote related by the Wrights’ niece:

One of them would make a statement about something very important, and then there would be a long pause. Then the other would say, ‘That’s not so.’ ‘Tis too.’ ‘T’isn’t either.’” And “at the end … Wilbur would say, ‘Well, I think you were right. You certainly were right about that.’ And [Orville] would say, ‘No, I think you were right.’”

When’s the last time you participated in a business meeting where the “combatants” ended up saying something like that?

Leadership: You Don't Have to Just Wing It!

In my previous articles, I’ve been discussing how leaders can take the “book smarts” they acquire in the classroom and turn them into “street smarts” – that is, convert learned skills into applied skills. By such strategies as stealth learning (learning while doing other things), unlearning of old habits, targeted practice, and visualization, they can integrate new ways of leading and interacting into their daily behavior.  And – returning now to “Route 66” (see my previous article) – they can also use another mechanism, one that we can derive by analogy from the world of flight instruction.

First, a pop quiz: How do pilots best learn to fly?  Is it better for them to (A) Take classes in flying, or (B) Jump into a plane and learn from their mistakes?

Few people, I think, would select Option B – because the (literal) impact of making mistakes far outweighs the hands-on experience they would acquire.

But other people might also point out the downside of Option A, observing that you wouldn’t want to get into a plane with a pilot fresh out of the classroom with no hands-on experience at all.

But, aha, you would then say – I’m setting up a false dichotomy. The real answer (you would continue) is (A) and (B), since a pilot requires both book learning and practical experience to pilot a plane successfully.

Well, you’re way ahead of me – except for the fact that we’re all leaving out a third option that fits between A and B (call it Option A.5): A flight simulator.

A simulator is a necessary transitional step between the ground and the air. In a simulator, a student pilot can take his book learning and practice applying it to real-life situations in a safe environment. To mix metaphors, we can say that a simulator provides an alternative to the “sink or swim” approach, as a way to bridge the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it.

Yet let’s consider now the way we commonly train leaders. Don’t we often just:

Use only Option B – i.e., don’t provide them any training and leave them to try to learn leadership through (often painful) experience?

OR:

Use both Option A and Option B – i.e., send them to class and then throw them into the leadership arena, expecting them to immediately apply their classroom learning to in-the-moment situations?

But if we don't just rely on Option A and B for pilots, why do we rely on only those two options when we're training leaders?  Why can’t we also use an Option A.5 to help leaders apply their newly learned skills to unexpected situations in a safe environment?

Well, in fact there is an Option A.5 for leaders: Improvisation workshops.

You can think of improvisation workshops as a “flight simulator” for new leaders. Through learning and practicing the basic skills of improv – collaborating with others, listening, being flexible, acting supportively, maintaining a positive attitude, and (yes) having fun – leaders can discover how to translate their classroom learnings about leadership to actual concrete behaviors. (And I would note that these “translations” between improv concepts and leadership behaviors comprise the major focus of The Daily Improviser blog.)

After teaching the improv behaviors, improv workshops can (like flight simulators) be structured to confront participants with “curveball situations” that they’re likely to face in their daily environment. As in a flight simulator, participants can then test out their new behaviors on these lifelike situations in a safe environment, where the potential damage resulting from using less-than-optimal behaviors is held to a minimum. And while they’re trying on new ways of acting, they can make note of their reflexive responses that serve to block the behavioral changes they’re trying to implement – another good opportunity to bring their natural style into awareness so they can see what kinds of behaviors they need to “unlearn.”

Improv workshops can thus play a role along with other transitional methods (such as mentors, coaches, and action learning projects) to keep new leaders from having to merely wing it when they emerge into the glare of the organizational spotlight after they leave their formal training.