The Daily Improviser Finds the Game!

Last time I described the loose improv framework called Finding the Game, a guideline that performance improvisers use to create useful boundaries around their creative efforts. Today I’ll begin addressing the question: How does “Finding the Game” apply to the Daily Improviser?

If you think about it, the performance improviser’s onstage challenge is no different from the Daily Improviser’s challenge in his everyday dealings: How, from the infinite universe of choices available to me at any moment, can I move forward in a productive and satisfying way?

Granted, you don’t always have to be “moving forward productively.” If you think you do, then you’re likely to lose the benefit of just sitting in quiet contemplation or deep meditation. And even then your thoughts don’t have to be directed toward any particular end. As a popular poster from my college days put it, “Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits!”

But I think most of us would also own up to the saying, “Other times I stands and acts!” We need to periodically gather those kaleidoscopic mental sensations and begin sorting through them, putting them into categories, sequencing them into a blueprint for action, and slapping them on a calendar.

Very simply, we periodically need to focus. The performance improviser needs to - in rapid fashion - both run through the Rolodex of the mind and make selections from the spinning cards in order to create a coherent scene. Similarly, the Daily Improviser must continually (though not so rapidly – in most cases) alternate analysis and action.

I’ve been thinking about this mental balancing act as I’ve been reading Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, the long-awaited sequel to Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. One of the Heaths’ first observations about influencing people to change is:

If you want people to change, you must provide crystal-clear direction.

The Heaths describe the case of two West Virginia University researchers who were trying to conduct a campaign to promote healthier eating. “Eat Healthier!” of course provides no direction for people, since the ways in which people can interpret such advice is almost limitless.

So where to start? What should people be encouraged to do? As the Heaths say, this is exactly the kind of situation that lends itself to spinning of the mental wheels, resulting in “analyzing and agonizing and never moving forward.”

The researchers could easily have gotten bogged down in the complexities of the issue and never launched the campaign at all. Or, they might have moved ahead with a campaign that tried to address all of the complexities but which would have overwhelmed the target audience. (As the Heaths said in a similar context in Made to Stick, “If you say three things, you don’t say anything!”)

Instead, the researchers decided to zero in on one specific dietary habit – milk-drinking – and conduct a campaign to encourage people to buy 1% or skim milk rather than whole milk, a change that by itself would cause the average diet to attain the USDA recommended levels of saturated fat. The general ho-hum message “Eat healthier” was replaced by the message “Next time you’re in the dairy aisle of the grocery store, reach for a jug of 1% instead of whole milk!”

Simple. Crystal clear. Focused.

You could say that the WVU researchers were successful at Finding the Game in their campaign – stating a simple, concise message that would focus people's attention and mobilize them to act in a desired way.

How do you go about your own “campaigns” to encourage change – in your organizations and in your personal lives? Do you try to address the full scope of the issues in all their complexities – and get bogged down as a result? Or, instead, do you Find the Game by focusing on those few key actions that afford the most leverage and lend themselves to crystal-clear, focused calls to action?

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.

Are You Experienced?

In recent Daily Improviser articles, I’ve been exploring the concept of mastery, defined by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan (in their book The Three Laws of Performance) as “nothing between you and the thing you’re dealing with.” Zaffron and Logan say that mastery is the key to attaining our highest levels of performance.

The achievement of mastery would seem to require cutting through our biases, assumptions, conditioned responses, and received cultural wisdom in order to directly experience the reality before us. As I’ve noted, though, I’ve been wrestling with the question: Is such a state possible?

Not at all, says Steven Pinker. In his book The Blank Slate, Pinker describes the efforts of the 20th Century modernist and postmodernist movements to achieve the goal of exposing people to “fresh, raw experience.” Through their use of dissonant, incongruous, and unsettling forms and their derisive attitude toward “beauty,” modernism and postmodernism were intended to “strip away the false sense of routine experience and interpretive framing, and to make us experience nakedly and anew the immediacy of reality through our peeled and rejuvenated senses.”

However, by citing recent research in evolutionary psychology, Pinker casts doubt on our ability to tap into direct experience.

“Modernism and postmodernism cling to a theory of perception that was rejected long ago: that the sense organs present the brain with a tableau of raw colors and sounds and that everything else in perceptual experience is a learned social construction…. We can no more turn [our innate organizational systems] off and get immediate access to our sensory experience than we can override our stomachs and tell them when to release their digestive enzymes.”

In addition, Pinker notes, our innate organizational sense does not stop at helping us apprehend the physical structure of the world.

“It also colors our visual experience with universal emotions and aesthetic pleasures. Young children prefer calendar landscapes to pictures of deserts and forests…. Babies prefer consonant musical intervals over dissonant ones, and two-year-olds embark on a lifetime of composing and appreciating narrative fiction when they engage in pretend play.”

Pinker would seem to question whether we really can attain the “nothing between” state of mastery when we interact with others:

“When we perceive the products of other people’s behavior, we evaluate them through our intuitive psychology, our theory of mind. We do not take a stretch of language … at face value, but try to guess why the producers came out with [it] and what effect they hope to have on us.”

In my previous article, I noted how performance improvisers – people who supposedly do tap into direct, in-the-moment experience – themselves use forms such as catchphrases and archetypal scenes to “come between” them and their performances. Pinker’s observations about the findings of evolutionary psychology would appear to provide even further doubts about our ability to strip away everything between us and reality in our pursuit of mastery.
 
But I wonder if Pinker doesn’t go a bit too far in criticizing the creators of “upsetting” art for attempting to shake people out of their complacency. For example, I believe that atonal works such as John Coltrane’s Ascension do challenge the listener to reexamine his entire concept of music – and to question long-held assumptions about the nature of art and creativity in general. Certainly in my own case, such musical encounters helped me to hear with new ears and revealed virgin territory for my curiosity to explore – exactly the type of “stripping away” of assumptions that I believe the mastery concept contemplates.

Improv: Cutting Through the Fog?

I left off last time by citing Keith Sawyer’s contention that improvisation provides a better model for describing everyday interactions than does Erving Goffman’s script model. On the face of it, improv would seem to be the Daily Improviser’s ideal entrée to the “nothing between” state of mastery which I’ve described at length in this blog.

After all, isn’t that what improv is? Creating something out of whole cloth - something that had never previously existed - based on being fully in the now and tapping a mainline to direct experiencing of the current reality?

Actually, Sawyer’s observations cast a different light on the role that improv plays in our communications. In the process, I think, he further brings into question the feasibility – and even the necessity - of attaining mastery as Zaffron and Logan define it.

Sawyer notes that we don’t literally perform word-for-word scripts in our daily interactions, as Goffman’s theories would seem to imply. Yet, he says, neither do we completely make up our communications anew every time. Based on his observations of a wide variety of situations, Sawyer says:

“Although our conversations are not fully scripted, there are two kinds of structures that we use in conversation. First of all, we often weave in catchphrases – little pieces of script that are building blocks in our improvisations. Second, some of our conversations are created within an overall framework – a common situation like the restaurant or the post office – where the flow of the conversation is predetermined.”

To illustrate his point, Sawyer describes his observations of some natural improvisers, i.e., children at play. Sawyer notes one instance in which some children began performing a Christmas scene that began with one child calling out the catchphrase, “Santa Claus is coming!” Rather than immediately enacting a standard “Christmas script,” though, the other children spontaneously overlaid a “horror movie” script on the proceedings by screaming and running to their (pretend) beds. The scene then continued with a procession of other holiday icons (the Easter Bunny, Halloween figures) who provoked mock terror rather than glee with their arrival.

So, even in improv, there is “stuff” between us and our environment – and much of it seems like good stuff, which we bring in from our past to convey meaning and to help make sense of the world in front of us right now. Rather than playing make-it-all-up as she encounters her world, the Daily improviser may well legitimately use “shorthand” phrases and words and concepts that help her communicate with others. And as with the children in Sawyer’s example who amalgamated multiple “scripts,” she can also combine elements from her experience – knowledge, conclusions, observations, theories – in new ways to deal with new situations.

In upcoming articles, I’ll continue to explore the topic of “direct experiencing of reality” and the stuff that can – and perhaps should – intervene between us and the things we’re dealing with. I’ll also explore what I perceive to be the limits of our reliance on existing structures such as catchphrases and loosely scripted frameworks.

The Daily Improviser Meets the Daily Script

"You can observe a lot by watching!" - Yogi Berra

Last time, I revealed my concerns about whether we can really attain a state of mastery, in the sense of being able to purge everything between us and the thing we’re dealing with. Can we attain this state – and must we in order to perform at our best?

An article I recently encountered – “The Improvisational Performance of Everyday Life,” by Dr. R. Keith Sawyer – may shed some light on these questions. Sawyer cites the work of the sociologist Erving Goffman, the author of the seminal book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. In that book, Goffman contended that our daily interactions (or “performances”), far from being spontaneous and unstructured, are in fact highly constrained by the “scripts” we learn from our culture. Examples include the “Telephone Script” (the words we use to conduct a telephone conversation) and the “Restaurant Script” (the words we use to interact with a server).

Clearly, Goffman would say, we are not blank slates upon which meaning is newly composed with each interaction.

In addition, Sawyer cites other authorities who note that most of our daily interactions are highly indexical, that is, our communications indicate something that isn’t contained in the literal meaning of the words we use. Our conversation is loaded with catchphrases, clichés, inflections, and accents that convey something about our attitudes and expectations (shades of the subtexts I described in an earlier article). In a comment that calls to mind the above-cited Yogiism, Sawyer says:

“Some linguists estimate that as much as 90% of all of our spoken language is at least partially indexical – in other words, very little of what we say is context-free.”

So, according to Goffman and the other researchers, not only do we continually apply pre-set scripts in our interactions, but we convey meaning in other ways that prevent others from interpreting those scripts literally.

So much for mastery, then. All of these recycled scripts with subtextual meanings would seem to constitute heaps of stuff that interfere with our attaining that elusive “nothing between” state.

But Sawyer then proposes that a new paradigm, based on improv theory and practice, be overlaid on Goffman’s script theory. Does that mean that the Daily Improviser should literally become a performance improviser in everyday life, making up everything new on the spot based on exactly what’s in front of him at the moment?

[This is the point in the Blog Script where the author says: Stay tuned!]

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!