Playing in the Moment
Play is a beautiful and critical aspect of improvisation. We rarely say that we are performing. When improvisers get together to rehearse or do a show, we tell people we are getting together to play. “We’re playing Friday at 10 p.m.—want to come?” is a common refrain because it’s not only the improvisers who play, the audience plays too. We use their suggestions, energy, and comments, and even have them come onstage to shape what we do—we’re all in it together.
There’s fascinating research about the importance of play to the human and even animal condition. Stuart Brown, in his 2009 book, Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul, tracks the evolutionary process of play. He finds that mammals and advanced species need play; it underpins our evolutionary state, survival, brain size, and social structure. Throughout his decades of research, Brown found that murderers often had childhoods devoid of play and fun, while extremely happy professionals never stopped playing. Play is a need for both humans and animals—the anticipation, interaction, competition, pleasure, surprise, and engagement of play is vital because it shows us at our absolute best.
And most telling, Brown contends that the improvisational nature of play allows us to synthesize ideas in unexpected ways. We jump into new ways of thinking and behaving during the act of play, so that suddenly our brain makes connections that wouldn’t otherwise be found. He gives the example of an engineer building sandcastles at the beach. While playing with her children in the sand, the engineer may stumble upon an insight for her work.
To understand how play can inform and affect our lives, let’s look at some of the elements of play and improvisation. Rather than looking at the obvious elements, such as competition, that are so richly explored by Brown and his colleagues, I want to explore aspects of play that are more intuitive and improvisational: focus, team, commitment, and doing stuff. These are all behaviors of both improvisation and innovation.
“This is the real secret of life—to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.”
—Alan W. Watts
One of the most enjoyable aspects of play is the focus that takes over during acts of play. We become absorbed, lose track of time, and are utterly focused on what is happening right here in the moment. In improv, focus is critical to creating a great show. When people who have never improvised play improv games, they often talk about their heightened state of attention and listening. They are in the midst of something they’ve never done before, they want to do well, and they have no idea what’s going to happen next. Even when the control freaks try to direct a game, they soon learn it’s impossible, drop their preconceived notions, and simply play the game. It’s critical to be in the moment.
Unfortunately, we are rarely in the moment in our day-to-day lives. As adults, we spend most of our time elsewhere—we’re always thinking about things like what we had for breakfast or what we should do tomorrow or the next day. Even when we’re having an intense debate, we stop listening to the other person and start thinking about our rebuttal, or how smart we’ll sound when we give a snappy comeback, or we’ll become so distracted thinking about our next meeting that we zone out. It is very difficult to be in the moment. But one of the most important behaviors of innovative people is the ability to focus, be in the now, and watch without preconceived notions.
On the improv stage, we call it scriptwriting when someone stops being in the moment. It’s a serious no-no. Everybody else onstage can tell when someone is thinking ahead and trying to control where the show is going. It’s usually because that person has had a “brilliant” idea and wants to make sure the story goes in the direction he imagines. It’s a disaster! He cuts off scenes, tells other people onstage who they are, and basically bullies the work. The sense of play dies, and even the audience can sense that something is wrong.
Improv is great because it is in the moment. You have to roll with whatever the ensemble throws out, and when you can connect and add a great character, joke, or song to the moment on stage, they’ll roll with it, too. It’s an amazing, symbiotic experience that I’ve rarely experienced elsewhere.
The all-consuming act of improvisation (creation in the moment without preconceived plans) shuts down the critics in our brain. It’s beautiful, really. I love the image of the wizened pundit, the one that seethes doubt and self-consciousness, bound and gagged in a corner while the creative artist/scientist part of the brain is off spinning with abandon. So often the critic introduces self-doubt and fear so that the artist/scientist is unable to experiment. Focus shuts out the mean-spirited voice in our heads.
So how do we enter this state of improvisation? True improvisation occurs when years of experience allow a performer, athlete, musician, scientist—or you—to enter a mixed state of conscious and subconscious. When a person knows so much about a subject or has done something for so long that it’s no longer entirely conscious, they can go “off script.” They begin creating, dancing, or speaking a foreign language without the need to plan. The idea is to take the reins off your brain, and allow it to focus and run. When you can go deeply into a subject, you can begin to improvise with what you know, creating new pathways, new processes, new innovations. Improvisation is a beautifully deep and absorbing process, and one that your brain already knows how to accomplish.
Being in the moment is light. You’ve probably felt it when you’ve looked up and suddenly realized that you were absorbed, you had left the world of care or preoccupation, and it’s much later than you imagined. Something had taken over and you had created or done a task or watched something beautiful.
Those experiences feel all too rare thanks to distraction and multitasking. Those pernicious problems are the inverse, the enemy of being in the moment.
There are many stories about interruption and distractions ruining the playful, creative process. One of the most famous is Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s unexpected caller. Once the poet awoke from an opium-induced sleep with exotic images in his head and immediately set about writing “Kubla Khan,” a poem of fantasy and sensuality. Unexpectedly, a man he forevermore called a “person from Porlock” interrupted his work by happening along. When Coleridge returned to the page, he couldn’t write any more. He reported having the feeling for the rest of his life that the poem was in his head, but he was never able to access it again to finish it (Poetry Foundation 2016).
Multitasking is another terrible enemy to focus. The past decade has produced study after study proving the cognitive detriment of multitasking. Even the youngest generation—those born into the electronic, multitasking world—are suffering. As Devora Zack (2015) outlined in her lighthearted yet science-packed book, Singletasking, “College and high school students have the same memory limitations as adults…. We understand and recall less when task-shifting…. Learning to concentrate is a life skill.” She goes further to quote a Harvard study (Junco and Cotten 2012) that revealed divided attention and multitasking behavior “leads to a lower capacity for cognitive processing and precludes deeper learning.”
Neuroscientists have proven that multitasking is indeed impossible. The belief that a person can accomplish several things at a time is a myth. Not to mention that every time the brain switches between tasks, the quality of the work and focus degrades (Ophir et al. 2009). Even more alarming is the documented reality that by overloading our brains with stress, we are actually shrinking our brains! When we multitask, the amygdala, the ancient little piece of our brain at the base of the neck that is responsible for fight, flight, and freeze, floods the prefrontal cortex with cortisol, the stress hormone. The prefrontal cortex, where we do our high-level thinking and cognition, becomes impaired by this constant overdose, and the brain begins to shrink, lose capacity to function, and be effective (Laubach 2011).
So, if we’re turning our brains to mush, what does that mean for the future of our inventions, our great novels, our disease-killing drugs?
Your brain wants to focus. It’s dying for a little fun time to go deeply into a single issue and play around without restriction. And improvisation is the answer. Fortunately, the brain already knows how to take care of itself; it simply requires us to enter a state of focus and improvisation. In 2010, Aaron Berkowitz and Daniel Ansari studied the brain activity of musicians and nonmusicians, and found that when improvising, highly trained musicians entered a different chemical state. Using MRI scans, the researchers found that the musicians’ brains shut down the temporo-parietal junction, which allows your attention to be distracted by peripheral stimulus like a shiny object, movement, sound, or color. In addition, there was a surge of medial prefrontal activity, where expressiveness occurs in the brain, and the lateral prefrontal regions—the areas that control inhibition and self-consciousness—were shut down.
“In other words,” wrote Amanda Rose Martinez (2010) in Seed magazine about the researchers, “[in] the improviser’s brain, the area that imposes self-restraint powers down, allowing the region that drives self-expression, which ramps up, to proceed virtually unchecked.” The amazing thing is that improvisation actually orders the brain to shut down regions of itself that would interfere with the free-flowing process of creation: Distractions are eliminated and self-consciousness is unplugged.
“Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
I once worked with a man at an energy provider. He was a safety inspector and had been in the trenches laying lines for years. He was gruff and quiet except when he talked about his favorite hobby, rebuilding vehicles. He specialized in three- and four-wheelers, laughing as he recounted many nights where he “looked up and it was midnight!” He talked about that time in the garage, covered with oil and trying to fix broken vehicle components, as “playtime.”
“Even though I’ve been concentrating on fixing the dune buggies, sometimes I’ll walk out and realize I’ve solved another problem. Something at work—an interpersonal issue or a project I just couldn’t get figured out. I think that focused time, without distractions or phone calls, allows my brain to do other work.”
Indeed it does. Just as in sleep and in the lull we discussed around brainstorming, allowing the brain to focus on a task and stop multitasking frees up your subconscious capability to think on a higher level.
One of the misconceptions about innovation is our popular notion that genius is individual. Someone blessed with ability and talent becomes an overnight success through raw talent. You either have it or you don’t, and when you do, you’re a lone wolf. But the reality is that great innovation, just like great improvisation, happens in groups.
It’s funny, but when I tell people I did improv, they assume I mean stand-up comedy. The little stand-up I did wasn’t very good, and it filled me with terror. I’m in awe of stand-up, because good or bad, you are out there all alone. In contrast, I couldn’t wait to get to my next improv gig because I knew I’d have a team—I’d never be alone onstage, left out to dry, and manage an unhappy crowd by myself. By the same token, if we rocked, I’d have a whole ensemble with whom to celebrate! Every moment of creation felt richer and more alive to me because it was an in-the-moment collaboration. Because we were working together, we could play off the many surprising, creative, and wonderful things that came out of the weird brains of my improv friends. Truth be told, even stand-up performers rarely do all their work alone. They have friends and collaborators, people who watch and give them feedback, and writers who create content for them to deliver. The amazing comedy and creativity that audiences see onstage is the product of intense group collaboration.
Therefore, we need to realign our misconceptions about innovation. It’s a group sport, and the greatest innovators act like an improv troupe. Although innovators often drive their ideas with tenacity through hardship, they rarely do it alone. Many people picture famous innovators alone, in their lab coats, being struck by a great idea. However, many of the most famous “loners” were actually surrounded by collaborators.
The very symbol for the big idea, a lightbulb, was invented by Thomas Edison. But he didn’t create it by himself. Edison usually worked in a laboratory funded by a corporate sponsor, surrounded by countless scientists, and was said to have more than 30 assistants! The lightbulb only came about through a series of inventions that led to a great breakthrough (Israel 1998).
Steve Jobs was widely described as he was seen during Apple’s product launches—alone on a stage, in his iconic black turtleneck, being a genius. He displayed all the same behaviors of play, thinking upside down, and front-end considerations that improvisers do; he also had a team. In addition to Steve Wozniak, he also worked for years with Joanna Hoffman, Bud Tribble, George Crow, Rich Page, and Susan Barnes. Not to mention his huge company of coders, computer scientists, assistants, and designers. The entire ecosystem of Apple was not just about Steve Jobs—it was about creativity and innovation—and it was peopled with hundreds.
Innovation:
• Something new or different introduced.
• The act of innovating; introduction of new things or methods.
Great ideas grow stronger in the right types of groups. If teams engage in improvisational behaviors, their play can enrich the idea and take it places. That sort of ecosystem was explored by Keith Sawyer in his 2007 book Group Genius. He examines the percolation of ideas, verbal cues, body language, and incremental changes of groups. The sudden spark of an idea is usually the result of long-term social interaction coming together in a realization. Writes Sawyer: “Innovation today isn’t a sudden break with the past, a brilliant insight that one lone outsider pushes through…. Just the opposite: innovation today is a continuous process of small and constant change, and it’s built into the culture of successful companies.”
There’s another key aspect of teams, play, and innovation. It’s about leveraging all sorts of people and ideas, not just experts. All those teams of innovators weren’t experts right away; they often took inspiration from nonexperts. Steve Jobs resisted overengineered computers because he saw that normal people wanted something simple, not something intimidating and complicated. His customers, not experts, were his litmus test.
One of the reasons improv can be so funny is that we take on characters and situations for which we know nothing! Improv teams usually aren’t experts in astronomy, economics, DNA, or pastry baking. Yet we can create funny, touching, and impressive scenes by pulling together the pieces of our knowledge and making a great scene.
I was once in a scene about collecting antique guns. None of us knew much about antique guns; however, Eric had done Civil War reenactments and knew the look and feel of an antique gun, Frances avidly watched Antiques Roadshow and had seen an episode on guns once, and I had cleaned my dad’s hunting shotguns as a kid. We committed and somehow pulled out a really funny and intricate scene. It was so good, the man who had shouted the suggestion came up after the show, assuming we were also collectors like him. When we told him it was an amalgam of small pieces of information, he was flabbergasted.
“I am looking for a lot of people who have an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done.”
—Henry Ford
Anybody can play! And when everybody gets to play, surprising things happen. Another issue in innovation? Leaving all the thinking, ideation, and play to “the best heads in the department.” Surrounding yourself with a bunch of experts—or leaving innovation to only a single or small group of experts—is idiocy. The deeper an expert goes into an area of expertise, the less open he is to divergence and possibility. Ironically, in addition to having deep knowledge of their work, subject matter experts may also hold themselves back.
James Surowiecki, in his book The Wisdom of Crowds (2004), traces the efficacy of group thinking. He contends that a large group of everyday people often have enough collective wisdom to out-think a guru. The beauty of nonexperts is that they are not hampered by the curse of knowledge, which tends to show up in several ways. First, your knowledge of an area is so deep that you unconsciously skip over steps or details, simply because they are “obvious.” That leaves nonexperts bewildered as they try to figure out what you are talking about.
I encountered it the first time I sent a draft of my first book to my editor. She called to let me know there were many passages on improvisation where she had no earthly idea what I was talking about. Improv had become so innate, so obvious and ingrained to me, that I took the small processes completely for granted, to the point where I no longer explained them.
The curse of knowledge also gets in the way by creating boundaries around your knowledge. You’ll experience multiple issues, disappointments, and surprising outcomes, which teaches you to be cagey. The more expertise you have, the more issues and boundaries it creates. Sometimes the more you know, the more obstacles you see. Conversely, nonexperts don’t know they can’t or shouldn’t do something. And here’s the weird part—those nonexperts, those who are free to believe that something is still possible, might just make it happen.
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.”
—Shunryu Suzuki
Rice University challenges its students to create inventions that solve third-world problems. One group created a very cheap bubble CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machine to use with premature infants born in Malawi, a country with little to no funding for equipment in hospitals and unstable electrical systems. So, the students used a shoebox and two aquarium pumps. Why not? They were not hamstrung by the belief that medical equipment had to be professionally made with expensive materials, as some manufacturers might. The device worked and has started saving infant lives already. These students improvised—they chose to see boundaries as possibilities, and worked together for a goal they believed was achievable (Nye 2014; Palca 2014).
Let everybody play. Innovation is a team sport, just like improvisation. Experts and laypeople both have something to contribute, and their interaction will probably lead to more diverse outcomes. Despite the unwieldy messiness, diverse playmates make for unexpected and often innovative outcomes.
“None of us is as smart as all of us.”
—Japanese Proverb
For years, I’ve been attending my children’s basketball, soccer, football, cross-country, and baseball events. I can’t even count the number of times a coach yelled out, “I need to see some commitment out there!” or “You’ve got to commit to [choose one] winning/your team/the basket/the goal/the last 100 yards!” In these instances, commitment is about giving it your all, playing like there is no other option in life, and not holding anything back.
It’s the same in improv. There are two key sides to commitment in improvisation: the commitment itself and commitment’s ability to allow the audience to suspend their disbelief. When an improviser is so good, so into a character that she looks and sounds like the real thing, the audience will utterly enjoy the show. We all know that she’s not an astronaut, a WNBA player, or a spy, but when she commits fully and plays every moment as if it’s true, the audience allows their brains to believe. It’s a wonderful part of theater, improv, movies, and art. We think, “OK, for the fun of it, I’m going to suspend my skepticism and my logical understanding that this would never happen. It will allow me to believe a tiny woman is playing in the WNBA and enjoy this crazy show!”
Consider action films. There’s just no way real human beings could come out of landslides, explosions, and overcome 20 armed enemies. But we choose to believe it, because it’s part of the fun, the hope, the beauty of art. You’ve probably seen movies where they went too far—made it too difficult to suspend your disbelief—and you walked out feeling skeptical, as though the movie makers had insulted your intelligence. But when done right—when they commit to creating a world where we can easily suspend our disbelief—it’s magic. And those behaviors allow us to engage in creative and innovative behavior as well.
The concept of commitment in improv is about never pulling back: going with an idea to its fullest extent, even if it feels as though it’s not working. Commitment is key to success, because the minute an improviser stops committing, everyone knows: The actor is only sort of playing someone in love or someone obsessed by numbers or a farmer or a garbage collector, so even if he hits funny moments, it’s just not as funny. That’s because the audience can’t suspend its disbelief.
I once saw an improv show on New York’s West Side, and the second half was sketch comedy. Sketch is born out of improv. Actors, writers, and directors love to mess around with concepts and stories. So, when they’ve improvised a few characters or an idea that seems to work, they’ll script it and put it into sketch comedy. We call it “sketch” and not “scripted” because although the actors are held to the outcomes and goals of the story, they’re free to improvise the lines.
Well, not every night of improv is good. The concept was a family sitcom, but the couple breaks up and decides to do their own shows, each using their son as the foil. It loosely held together character sketches of goofy and weird situations. And it was really bad. While there were funny moments, and I laughed out loud several times, the troupe decided to go with really “wrong” ideas to see if they could pull the comedy out. (“Wrong” is when comedians decide to take on a politically incorrect subject, knowingly play the heck out of the stereotype, and allow the audience to laugh at the fact that they’ll do and say what no one else will.) They had a scene about senior citizens addicted to crack, a scene about pedophilia, and another about planning a party for the day after 9/11. Remember, we’re in New York City. It bombed. (Pun intended.) It was so bad that I saw one of the actors sneak over to the bar during a break and grab a shot.
I know how it feels to be having a horrible night on stage. Your insides curl up and every time the punchline meets silence your blood gets another degree colder. There have been many times in my career that I wanted a shot of tequila halfway through, too. But guess what? Even though the show was terrible, I was still delighted to watch them. They were the definition of pros. Not once did they falter, not once did they give the scenes less than 100 percent; they even took their bows to tepid applause with huge smiles on their faces. We never saw them sweat. And because of their commitment, I was willing to try again with every scene. Even though they kept hitting rock bottom, when they came out onstage with a new character, utterly engaged and playing it full tilt, I was willing to suspend my disbelief just one more time. They kept me engaged.
You might be thinking, “Well that was a completely wasted night, and who knows how many weeks of rehearsal.” But it wasn’t. Because they didn’t stop committing, they found several great moments in their sketches. They were able to learn what works and what doesn’t, and they’ll never have to wonder, “Gee, if I’d given it my all, that third joke might have worked.” And here’s another thing improvisers know—they must have the courage to go back and commit every single time. They probably did that same show again, just to see if it would play better for another audience on another night of the week.
This is directly linked to the people who are creative and innovative every day. Joy Mangano was a single mom who was highly inventive and displayed many of the behaviors of creative and innovative people. Her first idea, a reflective pet flea collar, was a great and new idea for the early 1990s. Unfortunately, she didn’t patent the idea and the Hartz Mountain company bought a similar idea and took over the market. Instead of thinking, “I’m not an inventor, I don’t even understand patents,” Mangano doubled-down on her commitment to be an inventor of things that make life easier. Although she went through a divorce and had to work as a waitress and airline customer service representative to fill the gaps, she kept looking for ideas. Her next big idea, the Miracle Mop, garnered early interest from QVC. She put her entire life savings into manufacturing the new product and made the first 100 in her dad’s auto body shop. The movie Joy, starring Jennifer Lawrence, chronicles the heart-wrenching moment when a celebrity botched the sale of her mop on TV. QVC calls Mangano to tell her it’s too bad, but the mop is a flop, good-bye.
She could have said, “A big, important celebrity couldn’t sell my mop, and QVC says it’s not a good product. I’d better bow out, because they know more than I do, and I’ve already lost most of my assets!” But instead of folding or pulling back, Mangano committed. She insisted that QVC allow her to show the mop on TV herself. And it’s true, when Mangano, an ordinary mom, appeared on TV to sell the mop, she committed to the product and the moment because it was everything she had, and she knew it would work. Her total believability allowed thousands of people to suspend their disbelief that this new product might be a scam or might not work. On that first appearance, Mangano sold 18,000 units in less than half an hour. She now holds the patents to more than 100 inventions, and eventually sold her company, Ingenious Designs, to the Home Shopping Network. HSN continued to cash in; Mangano’s Huggable Hanger, which was endorsed by Oprah Winfrey to create more organized, space-conserving closets, sold 300 million units and was HSN’s top selling product of 2010 (Henry 2016).
Commitment to an idea, often through adversity, may look like the behavior of an idiot to many. But to innovators, it’s natural. They have to commit because they can already see it working. They know there’s something more, and they follow down that path.
Play is about doing. You jump in and try something and make a mess. You do stuff because it’s fun, and it’s all OK, because we’re just playing around! And by that token, improv is about doing. You don’t sit around, think through everything, and write a paper on an improv show. You get up on stage and do it. And you mess up, you start again, you’re brilliant, you’re awful, you fix stuff, you make things, and you learn things.
“Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.”
—Mark Zuckerberg
Researchers say that the most creative place in the world is in the shower. Our bodies and brains relax, the noise of the shower drowns out the outside world, and we breathe deeply. Great ideas come during that time. The second most creative place on earth is on vacation (Jacques 2014). No matter where it is, when we’re on vacation, we’re out of the normal curve of our lives—we’re seeing and thinking about new things.
The behavior that sets creative thinkers and innovators apart is the propensity to do something about it. Most people have a great idea in the shower, get out, get dressed, go to work, and tell the story of their great idea a year later over cocktails. Innovators get out of the shower, dry off, and go do something about their idea.
After all, how did software engineer Lisa Seacat DeLuca come to have more than 100 patents? “The idea generation isn’t the slow part,” said DeLuca. “Anyone can come up with ideas very quickly. It’s taking the time to write them down and do research to figure out if it’s a great idea or how to make it an even better idea—that’s really the bottleneck in innovation.”
Creative innovators do stuff and they often don’t see it as creative. It’s mostly problem solving in the moment. They run into roadblocks or frustrating issues that others simply accept, get annoyed because they can visualize a better way to do it, and make it happen to make their own lives easier.
Lightwell is a client of my company, ImprovEdge, and a woman-owned business in Dublin, Ohio; the United Kingdom; and Northern Ireland serving the tech industry. We worked with its leadership team to help them stay flexible, improvisational, and able to manage an extremely diverse employee base.
They have to manage well because they are driving a hotbed of innovation. “These are accidental innovations! I’m lucky enough to work with brilliant engineers who fix stuff just because they don’t want to be bored,” says Lightwell president Michelle Kerr, of the innovations the company keeps pumping out. “Although that sounds self-serving, it’s how many of our breakthroughs occur. They’re doing something they don’t enjoy, so they find a way to change it, fix it, innovate it. It’s such a part of their DNA; they usually forget to mention they’ve even done anything!”
Once Kerr was visiting the Belfast office and started chatting with an Italian engineer, Paul, who had transferred there. She asked him what he’d been up to, and after a shrug and “not much,” he showed her a little process he had created for a new order management solution.
One of the worst parts of IT and development is testing. It’s mundane, time-consuming, often faulty, and creates a bottleneck in getting new products to market. A lot of testing is outsourced to overseas companies. Paul was irritated with the whole process—he didn’t want to spend the hundreds of hours it could take to do the test, and he didn’t want to give up control and wait on an overseas firm to do the work. So, he created a sort of harness—a testing tool that pulled the work together and eliminated a huge amount of time and issues.
As Kerr took a closer look, she was astonished at the elegance and efficacy of his idea, and she realized this could be a product in and of itself. That led to bringing in the whole Belfast team, which dove in, assessing, brainstorming, testing, failing, and playing. They collaborated on a radical level to create a brand-new product for their clients using Paul’s original idea as the springboard.
This “simple fix,” as Paul first called it, takes the testing that used to require 2,000 hours and gets the same work done in 200 hours. Right now, a global retailer is considering using this product for order management across multiple continents.
I asked Kerr about her team and culture, because this is not the first time they’ve innovated on such an impressive scale. She responded that the propensity to find systemic solutions, rather than band-aids, seems to run through the team. They have an ingrained mantra—“Why not?”—which drives them to ask questions, talk to one another, and seek less-obvious opinions and outcomes. Ever since Lightwell’s inception, Kerr and her team have created an environment of collaboration, questioning, and innovation. The awards crowded onto the shelves speak to the efficacy of this open, creative environment.
She also refuses to take any credit: “I’m an under-the-radar person. I may have identified the opportunity that Paul had uncovered, but it took the diversity of the team, and a lot of time and work and passion to bring this product to market.”
Do you remember playing the telephone game as a kid? Someone started a short narrative, which was then sent around a circle, whispered from one ear to the next. The fun was in waiting to hear how the story changed by the time it reached the last ear. In this adult version, your group will have a chance to reconsider how they listen or don’t listen, and how they adhere to a version or prefer to add their own details. It’s best played with a group of 10 or more, and entertains your group while they sharpen their listening skills.
1. Each participant prepares a 30-second true story about themselves. It can be from today or years ago. It must be simple: “When I was 10, I played tag in the dark at summer camp. I tripped on a tent rope and broke my arm and the ambulance took an hour to arrive way out there!”
2. Ask everyone to pair up and share the story with a partner. Don’t let on that there’s more to come.
3. Now the listeners must retell the story they just heard—in first person, as if it was their own—to a new partner. They must tell the story exactly as they remember it, without even changing pronouns. (Which can be very funny when men have to retell stories of childbirth, for example.)
4. Repeat for one to two more rounds, each time retelling the story they just heard to a new partner. In this pattern, a participant will tell her own story, Tom’s story, Jorge’s story (which Jorge just heard from LaChandra), and Melissa’s story (which has already gone through three other people).
5. After at least three rounds, ask several volunteers to tell the story they just heard. Then ask the real authors to identify themselves and tell the original version of their story. It may vary widely, with different names and details. Or it may not. It may be astonishingly close, even down to similar hand gestures.
6. Discuss as a group. What keeps us from really hearing a person’s story? Why was a certain story easy to remember? How did it feel to have your story change so much? It may not be a big deal for a game, but what about information flowing at work? When the details really matter, we better be paying close attention!
We next meet our two heroes on the playing field. Innovation arrives first. She’s riding a solar-powered scooter, and wearing a non-Newtonian smart material vest (to protect against impact in the game) and auto-lacing, custom 3-D printed athletic shoes. When she jumps down, she places her purse on a waterproof, collapsible chair she pulls out of her pocket.
Improvisation arrives just after, tumbling out of a pickup truck that’s blaring music and filled with the most unusual assortment of people: musicians with their instruments, football players in full gear, a member of the U.S. Women’s National Soccer team, a quadriplegic, four children at various stages of life, a large black Labrador, a cowboy, and a pregnant woman.
