Positivity and the First Rule of Improv

In recent articles I described what I call taking a widescreen view of life, that is, looking at the events of one’s life as broadly as possible and using a positive filter to interpret those events. I contrasted this widescreen concept with the notion of learned helplessness, in which a person’s interpretations of events as permanent, personal, and pervasive lead to negativity and lack of resilience.

This past week I was excited to rediscover another body of work that echoes the widescreen concept – and backs it up with solid research.

I’m referring to the work of Barbara Fredrickson, a psychology professor at the University of North Carolina who is a pioneer in the field of positive psychology and the author of the book Positivity. Fredrickson has developed what she calls the Broaden-and-Build theory to describe how positive emotions (such as joy, interest, contentment, and love) produce their benefits in our lives.

First, says Fredrickson, positive emotions “broaden an individual's momentary thought-action repertoire: joy sparks the urge to play, interest sparks the urge to explore, contentment sparks the urge to savor and integrate, and love sparks a recurring cycle of each of these urges within safe, close relationships.” By contrast, she says, negative emotions are marked by a narrowing of our mindsets and a limiting of our action repertoire to such options as attacking or fleeing.

Second, Fredrickson notes that this broadening of our awareness of possible responses “promotes discovery of novel and creative actions, ideas and social bonds, which in turn build that individual's personal resources; ranging from physical and intellectual resources, to social and psychological resources.”

Like me, you may have always intuitively sensed the link between positive feelings and the Broaden-and-Build effect that Fredrickson describes. If I think back to the times in my life when I’ve felt most creative and productive, most in tune with my environment, most alive, I would describe my feelings in such terms as expansiveness, openness, wholeness, and receptivity to new possibilities. By contrast, when negativity takes hold of my outlook, I feel constrained, limited, stuck in “this or that” thinking,

The Broaden-and-Build concept is also perfectly reflected in the primary rule of the improv stage: Total agreement at all times. Only by saying “Yes And” to the offers of her onstage partners can an improv performer open up the possibilities in a scene. As Charna Halpern writes in Truth in Comedy: The Manual of Improvisation:

“[By saying ‘Yes And’], one step at a time, each player provides a building block, until they have easily, painlessly constructed a scene. Answering ‘Yes , but …’ stops any continued growth, while a flat ‘No’ erases the block that has just been established.”

As a Daily Improviser, do you Broaden and Build by saying “Yes And” to whatever comes your way? Do you Accept the Possibilities in life’s offers and Advance with Positive Purpose, weaving supposed “mistakes” into the larger pattern by taking a widescreen view of life? Or do you stop continued growth – your own and that of others – by saying “Yes But” and “No”?

The Third Skill - Beyond Connecting and Creating

In the first two articles in this series, I described the way in which scientific research involves both “connecting” skills – seeing the relationships among disparate phenomema – and “creating” skills – pursuing and developing those insights so as to achieve scientific breakthroughs. I also observed that “connecting and creating” in tandem serve as the basis of any human accomplishment. Finally, I noted that a performance improviser must master both skills in order to be considered a success on the improv stage.

I left off last time (after a brief messy interlude) with the question: Does a Daily Improviser need to be similarly accomplished at both skills?

In a word: No. As I’ve pointed out, the Daily Improviser does not need to directly use the skills of the performance improviser in order to benefit from the improv “body of knowledge.” She can also adopt the improv attitudes as a means to create an atmosphere that supports those who do possess strengths in the improv skills.

To illustrate this point, we can look to the career of man named William Henry Welch, who lacked a critical scientific skill yet became perhaps the single most influential scientist in the world.

As John M. Barry recounts in his book The Great Influenza, Welch was probably more responsible than any other person for the development of medicine as a professional discipline grounded in the scientific method. Primarily in his role as first dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Welch spearheaded the move to reform medical practice in the United States – a practice that was overrun with fakes and quacks whose “remedies” frequently did more harm than good.

Yet, as Barry notes:

“Welch had been no great pioneer even in his own field of medical research…. He had generated no brilliant insights, made no magnificent discoveries, asked no deep or original questions, and left no significant legacy in the laboratory or in scientific papers.”

Welch’s mind was clearly more drawn to “connecting” than “creating”:

“No question ever aroused a great passion in him, no question ever became a compulsion, no question ever forced him to pursue it until it was either exhausted or led him to new questions. Instead, he examined a problem, then moved on.”

Sounds like the classic surface-skipper – someone we might even today label “A.D.D.” I get the sense that Welch would have been an ace Da Doo Ron Ron player but would have been thoroughly outclassed by Einstein – the exemplary “connector-and-creator” – on the Harold stage.

So, if Welch’s skills lay primarily in connecting but not creating, how did he ever gain such influence? Barry provides an answer that points to a third skill required for any successful endeavor:

“Welch’s real genius lay in two areas. First, he had not only knowledge but judgment. He had an extraordinary ability to hear someone describe his or her experiments, or read a paper, and immediately define the crucial points still obscure, the crucial series of experiments needed to clarify them. It was as if, although he could not himself conjure [i.e., create], he knew the techniques of conjuring and could teach others conjury. He had an equally extraordinary ability to judge people, to identify those with the promise to do what he had not done.



“Second, Welch inspired. He inspired unconsciously, simply by being himself…. He seemed so centered and comfortable with himself that he gave comfort to those around him.


“Everything about him was positive. His intelligence and the depth and breadth of his knowledge stimulated his teaching as well. He walked into the classroom without notes or preparation, often not knowing what subject he was to lecture on, and in an instant began discoursing lucidly and logically in ways that provoked thought and excitement… Welch’s conversation [had the] ability to make students feel the richness of the world – the world of art and literature as well as science.


“The total effect … made for an atmosphere of achievement … The desire to be like Welch, the desire to win his approval.”

I can’t think of a better description of this third skill – catalyzing. The leadership development group Development Dimensions International defines a catalyst leader as one who “inspires others to act” – and in this area Welch was clearly a master. Welch himself did not possess all the skills needed to achieve world-changing scientific breakthroughs. Yet, through his ability to create an atmosphere where others with those skills could flourish, he played a critical role in the achievement of those breakthroughs.

In sum, connecting and creating are two key skills needed for any human achievement. Yet the catalyzing skill is also required in order to focus priorities, secure resources, navigate efforts through social and political minefields, and inspire the talents and energies of all participants in the enterprise.

Finally, back to William Henry Welch. How might we relate his “catalyzing” skills to the world of the stage performer? Barry makes this observation:

“He was personality and theater; he was impresario.”

In short, he was visionary, organizer, producer, fund-raiser, spokesman, tout – a Ziegfeld of the scientific world.

Interlude: The Benefits of Messiness

In the name of avoiding the perils of overorganization, I’m taking a brief detour from my series on “Connecting and Creating” to address an interesting connection I encountered today while browsing through the book A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder, by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman

To set the context: In one of my first articles in The Daily Improviser, I wrote the following:

“If anyone were to ask me ‘How can I be a Daily Improviser in my organization?’ I would say, ‘Read Frederick Winslow Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management – and whatever he says, do the opposite.’”

Abrahamson and Freedman make a similar observation:

“[W]hile the wild enthusiasm for strict Taylorism faded, what never quite disappeared was a now-ingrained inclination to organize, schedule, arrange, and standardize at work, home, and everywhere else, as a means of squelching variation, improvisation, unpredictability, and anything that smacked of extraneousness.”

(Note, by the way, that by “messiness” they're referring to more than just strewing around stacks of paper and flinging clothes over the handlebars of the Exercycle. Reflecting perhaps some latent tendencies toward organization, the authors create a neat taxonomy of messiness that includes such entries as clutter, noise, inconsistency, distortion, time sprawl – and, yes, improvisation.)

The authors then elaborate on some of the major drawbacks of overorganized people and systems – inability to respond flexibly to change, an unhealthy insulation from one’s environment (shades of Hans Monderman, “the guy who hated signs”), rigid plans and processes that shatter when their underlying assumptions meet reality (shades of Commander’s Intent).

Abrahamson and Freedman hasten to point out that there is such a thing as dysfunctional mess. “We’re not saying that messier is always better,” they write. “Rather, we argue that there is an optimal level of mess for every aspect of every system…. [P]eople and organizations frequently err on the side of overorganization.”

An optimal level of mess? Could there actually be benefits in messiness? Yes indeed, say the authors - flexibility, diversity, resonance with the environment, serendipity, robustness ... and, um, even fun!

Well, sorry for the “mess” I created by breaking into the “Connecting and Creating” series – but I just wanted to get this out while it was fresh in mind (hmm, another benefit of messiness).

Da Doo Ron Ron and Albert Einstein: Part Two

In my previous article, I described the role of the skills of connecting and creating in successfully carrying out any kind of endeavor – whether on the improv stage or on life’s stage. To sum up, “connecting” identifies the range of promising possibilities to pursue, while “creating” determines which of those possibilities are the most promising – and pursues them.

I was inspired to make this “connection” by a passage in John M. Barry’s superb book, The Great Influenza, a panoramic account of the men and women of medicine who grappled with the 1918-19 influenza pandemic. Barry challenges one of our most-cherished dichotomies – art vs. science – by observing:

“The greatest challenge of science, its art, lies in asking an important question and framing it in a way that allows it to be broken into manageable pieces, into experiments that can be conducted that ultimately lead to answers. To do this requires a certain kind of genius, one that probes vertically and sees horizontally.

“Horizontal vision allows someone to assimilate and weave together seemingly unconnected bits of information. It allows an investigator to see what others do not see, and to make leaps of connectivity and creativity. Probing vertically, going deeper and deeper into something, creates new information….”

Seeing horizontally and probing vertically … shades of the contrast between Da Doo Ron Ron and The Harold!

Barry goes on to note that many researchers were (and are) skilled at finding connections, a la the Da Doo Ron Ron player who can quickly flip through the Rolodex of the mind to find a rhyme, any rhyme. However, Barry says, the greatest researchers were (and are) able to do more than just stand back and regard such connections as “interesting.” Like the best Harold players, they can probe and develop those connections and mold them into a work of art – whether a new vaccine or a complex improvised story.

In fact, Barry relates his horizontal-vertical observation to perhaps the greatest artist in all of science, Albert Einstein:

“Einstein reportedly once said that his own major scientific talent was his ability to look at an enormous number of experiments and journal articles, select the very few that were both correct and important, ignore the rest, and build a theory on the right ones….. [P]art of his genius was an instinct for what mattered and the ability to pursue it vertically and connect it horizontally.”

Scanning the enormous possibilities … selecting a few, ignoring the rest ... connecting and pursuing … somehow I think Albert would have made a heck of a Harold player.

But wait! Yes, a performance improviser needs to both connect and create – but what of the Daily Improviser? If we’re expecting her to be similarly well rounded, and if we regard her as somewhat deficient if she displays the rough edges of weakness, aren’t we contradicting the observations elsewhere in this blog about focusing your development on your strengths?

Well, to resolve this, we can look at the life and career of a man of science who was lacking in a critical skillset - yet who became (in Barry’s words) “the single most powerful individual in the history of American medicine.”

[To be continued ...]

Da Doo Ron Ron and Albert Einstein: Connecting and Creating

Da Doo Ron Ron is a well-known improv game that, I believe, illustrates some essential truths about the skills required for success in any human endeavor.

The Da Doo Ron Ron game is based on the song of the same name. You all know it – sing along with me:

Met him on a Monday and my heart stood still

Da Doo Ron Ron Ron Da Doo Ron Ron
Somebody told me that his name was Bill
Da Doo Ron Ron Ron Da Doo Ron Ron
Yeah, my heart stood still
Yeah, his name was Bill
And when he walked me home
Da Doo Ron Ron Ron Da Doo Ron Ron

The Da Doo Ron Ron game starts with the performers standing side-by-side across the stage. An audience member calls out a name (say, “Jill” – probably from a Shaun Cassidy fan), which prompts the performer at one end of the line to sing:

Met her on a Monday and her name was Jill
[All performers sing] Da Doo Ron Ron Ron Da Doo Ron Ron

The next performer then must come up with the next line of the song, which must end in a word that rhymes with “Jill”:

She fed me chicken soup and it tasted like swill
Da Doo Ron Ron Ron Da Doo Ron Ron

The next performers in sequence continue singing a rhyming line each, for example:

Yeah, it made me ill
Yeah, I took a pill
Yeah, I climbed a really big hill
Do Doo Ron Ron Ron Da Doo Ron Ron

A performer is eliminated from the game if he fails to come up with a rhyme, uses a rhyming word which has already been used, or hesitates and breaks the rhythm.

In the example above, notice that the last line about the “really big hill” doesn’t necessarily make sense in the context of the other lines. This is ok under the game rules – all that’s needed is a rhyme, any rhyme. The key, then, to playing Da Doo Ron Ron is to run rapidly through what my improv colleague Joey Greene calls the Rolodex of the mind – mentally flipping through all the possible rhymes you can use when it becomes your turn.

While Da Doo Ron Ron serves as a high-energy warmup game, it draws on only part of the performance improviser’s toolkit – the ability to make quick mental connections. For more complex structures such as The Harold, however, the performance improviser must also turn those quick connections into a narrative that drives toward an ultimate resolution – what Keith Johnstone refers to simply as storytelling. In other words, to play actual improvised scenes, the performance improviser must both connect and create.

I believe that these two skillsets – connecting and creating – lie at the heart of any individual or joint effort. Connecting – recognizing relationships among seemingly unrelated objects or concepts, seeing the possibilities lurking in the shadows. Creating – recognizing the most promising relationships and possibilities to pursue and forging them into a fully realized outcome.

The performance improviser must utilize both skillsets - in real time - in order to transcend relatively simple games like Da Doo Ron Ron and become the compleat storyteller. For the Daily Improviser, though, the imperative is a bit different, as illustrated by one of history’s greatest artists – Albert Einstein.

[To be continued …]

Learned Helplessness vs. the Widescreen Life

In previous articles, I've described some of the real-world applications of the improv tenet "Weave mistakes into the larger pattern." In particular, I talked about living a widescreen life - not just focusing on a few missteps in the here and now and interpreting them as "failures" but stepping back, suspending judgment, and seeing how those supposed missteps might be part of a larger, more comprehensive, more positive story.

Let's take an example of such a supposed misstep – not being selected for a much-desired job - and consider the different ways in which you might explain the event to yourself. You could say things like:

"That was my golden opportunity - I'll never get another chance like that!"


"I really messed up my answer to one question - that's why they rejected me!"


"I'm really not that impressive a person - I guess they saw that!"

Or you might say:

“Other opportunities will come along – maybe even better ones!”


“For some reason, they just didn’t see me as the best match for this position!”


“I’ve got a strong track record in my field, and I’m sure my strengths will be recognized!”

Each of these statements is a reflection of an explanatory style, a concept described by Martin Seligman, Steven Maier, and Christopher Peterson in their book Learned Helplessness. The first group of explanations illustrates the pessimistic style, in which events are framed as permanent (“It will never change”), personal (“It’s my fault”), and pervasive (“I can’t do anything right”).

By contrast, the second set of explanations reflects the optimistic style, which identifies the possible negative interpretations of the event, evaluates their validity, and generates a more balanced and accurate characterization.

Seligman believes that cognitive therapy techniques can help people create better stories from their life events and thereby develop learned optimism, avoiding the negative outcomes (such as low self-esteem and depression) that chronic learned helplessness can produce.

For the Daily Improviser, then, living a widescreen life involves more than just taking the broad and long view. It’s also about developing a compelling positive narrative – in real-time – based on that view, one that incorporates another important improviser’s goal: "Seeing things as they really are."

Conversation, Ambiguity, and the Daily Improviser - Part Two

In my previous article, I dealt with the topic of coarticulation, the human tendency to overlap vocal sounds while speaking. As Steven Pinker notes in his book The Language Instinct, we do this because the tongue is “a heavy slab of meat that takes time to heft into place…. We place the tongue in the [position] that offers the shortest path to the target for the next [sound].“ Thus, we pronounce “NPR” as “EM-pee-arr” and “horseshoe” as “HOR-shoe,” with the first “s” unarticulated.

So how do we accurately comprehend what a coarticulated voicing really means? Pinker first deals with a theory – the top-down view – that says we’re constantly anticipating and filling in the details of the fragmented and slurred sounds that emit from others’ mouths. As I observed last time, if the top-down view is correct, then we have a significant barrier at the physiological level to truly perceiving things “as they are.”

However, Pinker then proceeds to cast doubt on the top-down view, citing research that questions whether we actually do resolve ambiguity by overlaying what we expect to hear on top of what we actually hear. To demonstrate this, he draws on an unlikely source: Mis-heard rock and roll lyrics, aka mondegreens, so called because of an oft-cited misinterpretation of the folk ballad “The Bonnie Earl O’ Moray”:

“They have slain the Earl of Moray / And Lady Mondegreen.” (Actual lyric: And laid him on the green)

Other common mis-hearings of rock and roll lyrics include (actual lyrics in parens):

"'Scuse me while I kiss this guy” ('Scuse me while I kiss the sky) – Jimi Hendrix

“You and me and Leslie, groovin’” (You and me endlessly groovin’) – The Young Rascals


“Wrapped up like a deuce, another runner in the night” (Revved up like a deuce [i.e., a coupe], another runner in the night) – Bruce Springsteen

And of course the ever-popular:

“There’s a bathroom on the right” (There’s a bad moon on the rise) – Creedence Clearwater Revival

So how do mondegreens refute the top-down theory? Says Pinker:

“The interesting thing about mondegreens is that the mis-hearings are generally less plausible than the intended lyrics. In no way do they bear out any sane listener’s general expectations of what a speaker is likely to say or mean…. Apparently, listeners lock in to some set of words that fit the sound and that hang together more or less as English words and phrases, but plausibility and general expectations are not running the show.”

Pinker cites additional evidence beyond the mondegreen example to show that our attempts to resolve vocal ambiguity are more about acoustics and comprehension than about “hearing what we expect to hear.” The clear implication, then, is that we can’t ‘scuse ourselves from attempting to perceive things “as they are” because of some supposedly innate human compulsion to read our own meaning into others’ speech.

Well, that’s it for today! To quote the Bachman Turner Overdrive, I think it’s time now to be bakin’ carrot biscuits – er, takin’ care of business.

Conversation, Ambiguity, and the Daily Improviser

Quick – say the following sentence out loud: “I heard it on NPR.”

Now say it again – and this time take note of whether you’re pronouncing it “EN-pee-arr” or “EM-pee-arr.”

If you’re like most people, you’re probably saying the latter. Chances are you never noticed how your lips close into the “P” position before your tongue completes the articulation of the “N” that precedes it, resulting in an unintended “M” sound. Yet anyone familiar with National Public Radio would still probably easily interpret what you’re saying.

This overlapping of vocalized sounds is called coarticulation. As Steven Pinker points out in his book The Language Instinct, the ability to make sense of coarticulated sounds is one of the things that keeps humans from playing John Henry to any voice-recognition machine yet devised.

But it strikes me that this human facility to parse the elements of coarticulated sounds throws another wrench in the works when it comes to achieving an elusive goal I described in an earlier article – that of seeing and hearing things “as they really are.” As Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan say in their book The Three Laws of Performance, mastery is a state in which there is “nothing between you and the thing you’re dealing with.” In Zaffron and Logan’s view, “if you have beliefs, expectations, hopes, fears about [a] situation, mastery means putting these on the shelf so you are not looking through them at what is in front of you.”

But Pinker’s speculation about how we deal with coarticulation reveals an immediate challenge we face in trying to perceive things “as they really are” – a challenge that lies at the level of basic human physiology. In describing one school of thought as to how we properly interpret coarticulated sounds, Pinker says:

“Maybe we are constantly guessing what a speaker will say next, using every scrap of conscious and unconscious knowledge at our disposal, from how coarticulation distorts sounds, to the rules of English phonology, to the rules of English syntax, to stereotypes about who tends to do what to whom in the world, to hunches about what our conversational partner has in mind at that very moment.”

If this is how we resolve the ambiguity in coarticulated sounds, it would imply that communication couldn’t take place at all unless we did continually “hear what we expect to hear.” This would be a formidable physiological barrier to overcome in our attempts to perceive things “as they really are.”

But maybe this mountain ain’t high enough to prevent the attainment of mastery after all, as Pinker proceeds to demonstrate by citing an unlikely source: Rock and roll lyrics. As Bruce Springsteen might or might not have said, we’ll wrap it up like a deuce next time.

"Weaving Mistakes into the Larger Pattern" on the Mississippi Gulf Coast

Hurricane Katrina was a horrific tragedy, but a friend of mine who's visiting the Gulf Coast this weekend reminded me of some of the ways in which the improvisational spirit has taken this Great Mistake of nature and woven it into the ongoing thread of human creativity and reaffirmation. 

Rather than raze the remains of the venerable live oaks along U.S. 90 on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, civic leaders and regional artists converted many of the trunks into spectacular sculptures of eagles, seahorses, marlins, and other aquatic life. 

Instead of wiping out all traces of the giant oaks, the planners of this artistic enterprise have created a new attraction for visitors and a tribute to the improvisational quest to "weave mistakes into the larger pattern."

"Do Your Best, That Is Success" - The Legacy of John Wooden

In my previous post, I discussed the basketball career of Wilt Chamberlain and noted how Wilt’s approach to developing and utilizing his talents prefigured the Strengths-Based Development movement. Several years before Wilt’s emergence, however, another basketball legend – usually associated with California but born and bred in my home state of Indiana – created a simple yet profound model of success that also was anchored in defining and maximizing one’s unique capabilities.

I’m speaking, of course, about John Wooden, the longtime coach of the most successful team in college basketball history, the UCLA Bruins. Yet, to Coach Wooden, the “success” of his teams was determined, not by the won-lost ledgers, but by his players’ alignment with a maxim that grew out of his Hoosier upbringing:

"Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming."

Or, more simply, as Coach Wooden writes in his book Coach Wooden's Leadership Game Plan for Success:

“Do your best, that is success.”

As I read this definition, I thought back to the “Famous Daily Improvisers” I’ve been citing throughout this blog – Robert Benchley, Burr Tillstrom, Ernie Anderson … and Wilt Chamberlain. I used each of their careers to illustrate the power of focusing on your strengths and becoming “the best you can be.” As I mentioned in the Benchley article, your challenge lies in identifying your own unique set of talents, working hard (though it won’t seem like hard work) to hone them into your own special cluster of skills, and most importantly not comparing yourself to others!

Who is your benchmark – your own “best self” or an idealized picture of somebody else? Do you get frustrated because you can’t live up to that picture? Or do you ignore those judgmental voices of what you “should be” and “can’t be” and instead set your own goal, based on your own assessment of your capabilities?

Do you define success for yourself – or do you let others do it for you?

As Coach Wooden approaches his 99th birthday on October 14, I’m sure he must be gratified with his own success – not only on the basketball court, but also in the wider world of organizational and human development as the Hoosier values embedded in his success model continue to expand in influence.