“You ain’t got much time to think, ’cause you in the chair from now on.”
In 1963, defying the wet-velvet heat of a Washington, D.C., summer, thousands upon thousands of people gathered to march in America’s capital. They were there for “jobs and freedom,” to show the Kennedy administration that civil rights legislation must be pushed through Congress—and to hear Martin Luther King, Jr., speak.
The official program had been long, packed with speech after speech. The damp heat was oppressive. A few people began to drift away in search of shade. But a quarter of a million remained. They stretched back from the Lincoln Memorial, packing the sides of the famous reflecting pool, swirling around the base of the Washington Monument and extending toward the intransigent Capitol itself. The Mall usually dwarfs anything on a human scale; not that afternoon.
The gospel singer Mahalia Jackson sang “I’ve Been ’Buked and I’ve Been Scorned.” Anticipation built in the crowd. All three television networks switched to live coverage of the event. Dr. King stepped forward to speak, to address not only the sweltering crowd but also a national audience he had never had before and might never have again. It was his moment, and he knew it had to be perfect.
Dr. King had spent the night laboring on his speech with a few trusted aides, weighing every word of what he would say. He knew that he would be speaking with the monumental statue of Abraham Lincoln behind him, and a hundred years after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had declared that the slaves of the U.S. South were free. So King decided to open with an artful echo of Lincoln’s great Gettysburg Address. King’s text began, “Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice.”
Martin Luther King could draw on long experience of carefully crafting his speeches. His memory had always been prodigious; at the age of five he was learning Bible passages by heart. He told his parents that when he grew up, he was going to get some “big words.”1
So he did. Martin’s father was a preacher and the boy took to the craft of speechmaking early. At the age of fourteen, Martin traveled across Georgia on a bus to compete in a public-speaking contest. On the way home to Atlanta, the white driver ordered Martin, a “black son-of-a-bitch,” and his teacher Sarah Bradley to give up their seats when whites got on the bus. Bradley eventually persuaded Martin to comply. The night stayed with King, who later recalled that he had never in his life been more angry.2
But while the journey home was an unforgettable insult, the day had been a triumph. King had won a prize at the contest, delivering his speech, “The Negro and the Constitution,” entirely from memory. That was the teenage King’s approach: rigorous research, careful drafting and redrafting, memorizing the beautiful script, and then delivering it with passion.
King used the same principles three years later, preaching for the first time in a small meeting room at his father’s church. He was spectacular. “The crowds kept coming,” his father recalled. “We had to move to the larger auditorium.”3 He won an oratory prize in college, where with thoughts of becoming a lawyer he practiced court testimony in front of a mirror. And when King applied for his first job as a minister, at a Baptist church in Montgomery, Alabama, he used a sermon he’d preached several times before.4 Once he secured that job, he lavished enormous effort on his sermons, despite weighty obligations elsewhere. King was still finishing his doctorate in theology, rising at half past five each morning, making coffee, shaving his stubborn bristles into a neat mustache, and then working for three hours before his pregnant wife, Coretta, woke to join him for breakfast.5
His Sunday sermons mattered enormously to King. He began drafting on Tuesday, and continued to research and draft throughout the week, drawing ideas from Plato, Aquinas, Freud, Gandhi. As Sunday approached, he would write it all out on yellow lined paper and commit it to memory. He would bring the script to church with him, but as he ascended to the pulpit he would leave it in his chair and speak without notes for half an hour or more. The congregation adored him, and the way he spoke stylishly about matters of substance. “He was fantastic,” recalled one of his staff. And to achieve this mastery, the young Reverend King spent fifteen hours crafting each sermon.6
• • •
Martin Luther King, Jr., was one of the greatest speechmakers to grace the English language, and at first it might seem obvious why. As well as being educated and prodigiously talented, the young reverend left nothing to chance. Every syllable of his oratory was meticulously prepared.
By contrast, consider the fate of those who do not seem to have prepared. Rick Perry, then the governor of Texas, was once the favorite to be the Republican presidential nominee for the 2012 election. His chances ebbed because his performance in debates was excruciating. During one debate, a journalist tweeted, “I think Rick Perry just had a stroke.”7 In another, Perry confidently began to list the three government departments he’d abolish if he were president—but couldn’t remember the third item on the list. The moment fifteen minutes later when he piped up to add that he’d remembered the third one is so embarrassing it makes you want to disappear.8
In 2014, Ed Miliband, leader of the UK’s Labour Party, gave a speech to make the case that he should be the next prime minister. Not for Mr. Miliband the countless hours committing the speech to memory, nor the more obvious routes of the teleprompter or script.
“What I try and do is I try and write a speech and then I use it as the basis for what I want to say to the country,” he explained in a TV interview the morning after. “I like it as a way of engaging with people. And, of course, it’s one of the perils of it that there are bits that get left out, bits that get added in. It sort of comes with the territory.”9
It sort of does. Mr. Miliband duly forgot to deliver the section of his speech that discussed a key electoral battleground, the budget deficit. Mr. Miliband’s opponents had been trying to focus on the deficit and to paint him as someone who simply didn’t take it seriously. His carelessness seemed to confirm that the critics were right. After a bruising election defeat a few months later, Ed Miliband’s career as Labour leader was over.
Entrepreneur Gerald Ratner managed to self-destruct more quickly. Ratner had spent the 1980s building the largest jewelry chain on the planet. He destroyed it with a couple of jokes.10 Speaking to a prestigious audience of business leaders in 1991, Ratner joked that one of his products—a crystal decanter—was “total crap,” and that a set of earrings he sold were cheaper than a shrimp sandwich, “but probably wouldn’t last as long.” The comments hit the front pages of the newspapers and sales at Ratners collapsed. Ratner was defenestrated; the company even jettisoned his now toxic name. The cost of his slip was estimated at half a billion pounds—three-quarters of a billion dollars. Gerald Ratner himself lost everything.
Who would want to risk the fate of a Gerald Ratner when they could follow the meticulous example of the young Martin Luther King? It seems obvious that when speaking in public we should prepare as diligently as Martin Luther King did when he drafted and memorized his sermons.
But what if that’s wrong? What if we should improvise more, taking risks and saying what comes to us on the spur of the moment? Because while the stories of Dr. King, of Ratner and Miliband and Perry, appear to suggest that careful preparation is essential, there are also times when it makes sense to embrace the messy process of improvisation. And there’s an obvious place to start.
• • •
On March 2, 1959, a group of jazz musicians assembled at East Thirtieth Street in Manhattan, in a church that had been converted into a recording studio.*11 Miles Davis, the group’s leader, had brought with him the vaguest sketches of melody lines. And the session started awkwardly, since Davis had drafted in a new pianist, Bill Evans, without troubling himself to warn the incumbent, Wynton Kelly.
Although jazz is famous for its spirit of improvisation, usual practice was to record each song several times, and it was common to splice together tape from the different takes. But as Bill Evans explained to the jazz writer Ashley Kahn, Miles had a different approach: “The first complete performance of each thing is what you’re hearing . . . I think that is what accounts for some of the real freshness. First-take feelings, if they’re anywhere near right, they’re generally the best. If you don’t take that one, generally, you take a dip emotionally.”12
One of the pieces was “So What.” The recording began with a few takes aborted almost immediately: there was paper rustling in the studio in a couple of them. But when the producer worried that the microphones were picking up Jimmy Cobb’s snare drum vibrating in sympathy with the bass and piano, that didn’t worry Miles: “All that goes with it,” he said. It was part of the music.
Then a new attempt on the piece begins with a soft, suspenseful duet between Bill Evans on piano and Paul Chambers on bass. It’s rubato, played in a loose, flexible tempo different from the rest of the piece, and with the bass carrying the tune, it sounds like very little that has ever been done before. Davis, John Coltrane, and Cannonball Adderley join in on brass with a more traditional call-and-response and the take builds toward the solos.
After ninety seconds comes a critical moment. Jimmy Cobb, hastily switching his brushes for sticks, gives his cymbal a whack that’s just a little too hard. Cobb expects Miles Davis to call a halt—but instead the trumpeter launches into what is to become one of the most famous solos in jazz, with Cobb’s cymbal resounding and fading in the background. It’s an electrifying combination; but at the instant the cymbal splash happened it must have seemed like a mistake.
After two recording sessions, Miles Davis had a record that would change the course of twentieth-century music—Kind of Blue.13 Quincy Jones, the revered producer of Frank Sinatra and Michael Jackson, said, “I play Kind of Blue every day—it’s my orange juice. It still sounds like it was made yesterday.” Another legend, jazz fusion pioneer Chick Corea, said that while it’s one thing to play a new tune, “it’s another thing to practically create a new language of music, which is what Kind of Blue did.”14
And yet Miles Davis and his band improvised this musical revolution from moment to moment.* That seems little short of a miracle.15
And the most striking fact about Kind of Blue is this: It wasn’t the record that Miles had been hoping to produce.
“When I tell people that I missed what I was trying to do on Kind of Blue, that I missed getting the exact sound of the African finger piano up in that sound, they just look at me like I’m crazy,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Everyone said that record was a masterpiece—and I loved it, too—and so they just feel I’m trying to put them on. But that’s what I was trying to do on most of that album, particularly on ‘All Blues’ and ‘So What.’ I just missed.”16
He just missed. Not to worry, though—there will be other days, and other studio sessions. Sometimes the mess produces something worth having—even, or especially, if it wasn’t what you were aiming for.
• • •
Like pianist Keith Jarrett and guitarist Adrian Belew, Miles Davis and his group were touched by musical genius. Their exploits can seem remote from our everyday achievements. Yet we can learn from asking why Miles preferred improvising to careful composition. To improvise is to lose control—with the consequence that the improviser may later shrug and write, “I just missed.” So what do we gain in exchange for that loss of control, and when is the bargain worth accepting?
Some gains are obvious. Improvising a single performance is much faster and cheaper than scripting or composing one. Kind of Blue took less than nine hours to record.* In contrast, the Beatles’ masterpiece Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band took seven hundred.17 Being quick and cheap isn’t everything, but it isn’t nothing, either.
Another clear gain is flexibility. When I wrote that “to improvise is to lose control” that wasn’t quite right. We rarely have complete control, just a comforting illusion of control instead. The speaker without a script may bungle his lines—just ask Rick Perry or Ed Miliband—but he is also free to change course in response to a question, or to cut things short if the event is running late. Having a script makes that harder. The improviser has given up full control on her own terms; the person who relies on the script risks having control wrenched away on someone else’s terms.
Speed, economy, and flexibility: these three advantages should already be enough to convince us that the messy process of improvising has its advantages over tidy, scripted alternatives. But there’s something else that seems to happen during the process of improvisation, an almost magical creative spark that until recently has been elusive.
“It’s magical, but it’s not magic,” says Charles Limb. “It’s a product of the brain.”18
Charles Limb is a neuroscientist and surgeon at the University of California, San Francisco. He is also a fanatical jazz saxophonist, and is convinced that jazz improvisation is one of the few creative acts that is currently feasible for neuroscientists to study. Unlike writing a novel, jazz improv is a fleeting process in which original material can be whipped up in a few seconds. The conditions under which the improvisation was produced can be repeated again and again, and the improvisation can also be compared to a control—for example, performing a memorized piece.
All this can be observed inside a brain scanner—a functional magnetic resonance imager, or fMRI. The scanner generates powerful magnetic fields that illuminate the contrast between oxygen-rich blood flowing to the brain and the oxygen-depleted blood flowing away again. An fMRI scanner is a challenging place to express your creativity, though. Imagine lying flat on your back as you’re slid into a giant white plastic donut with the look of a vintage iPod. Your head is immobilized to allow the imaging to take place. You have a small plastic keyboard that sits across your knees. (Steel components would be unwise: the magnetic field would rip the keyboard apart and pull the shrapnel into the scanner with your head.) You can see your hands only through an array of mirrors, the keyboard speakers are in another room, and the sound has to be piped back so you can hear yourself play. Sound good? Now let yourself go and jam.
Despite the obvious limitations of this approach, Limb and other neuroscientists19 have been discovering some intriguing hints about what goes on in an improvising brain. When they recruited six professional jazz pianists to improvise short passages of music, comparing them with scales and memorized tunes, Limb and Allen Braun consistently found an intriguing pattern in the prefrontal cortex.20 This is the part of the brain that is most distinctively human when comparing our brains with those of animals. “It’s where the apparent seat of consciousness resides,” says Limb. “Complex memory, sense of self, sense of morality, sense of humor. Higher-order cognitive processing is all implicated in the prefrontal cortex.”21
No surprise, then, that the prefrontal cortex behaves unusually during musical improvisation. But the striking pattern is that rather than being fired up during improvisation, some fairly broad areas of the prefrontal cortex are being shut down. (These are the dorsolateral areas, on either side of the top of your forehead, and the lateral orbital areas, behind your eyes.) At the same time, the medial frontal area, behind the bridge of your nose, becomes more active. Not only was this pattern robust in the work on jazz improv, it also emerges from a separate study of freestyle rappers by Braun and others.22
What does this all mean? It suggests that improvisers are suppressing their conscious control and letting go. Most of us go through our days censoring our own brains. We respect standards and norms. We try to be polite. We don’t usually swear at people, or punch them. All this requires a degree of self-control—after all, sometimes we really want to punch people. So that filtering is a good thing. But you can have too much of a good thing, says Charles Limb; too much filtering. “Taken to the extreme maybe it squashes creativity. So rather than suppressing all these ideas the improvising brain lets them go.”23
Improvising musicians shut down their inner critics. Improvisers stop filtering their ideas quite so assiduously, and allow the mess of new ideas to flow out. The improvising brain is a little like the tipsy brain, although alcohol is much cruder, making us clumsy as well as disinhibited. It is no wonder that at its best, improvisation can produce flashes of pure brilliance. No wonder, either, that with the internal censor asleep, it sometimes feels like a messy, reckless thing to risk. And that is where we will leave the likes of Miles Davis, and turn to what happens when ordinary people improvise.
• • •
On July 11, 2012, one of the UK’s largest phone companies, O2, suffered a dramatic outage. The trouble began in London and rolled out from there, for more than twenty-four hours. Hundreds of thousands of people were affected, with cell phones, landlines, and broadband Internet all at risk from the glitch. Many customers, naturally enough, took to Twitter to vent their frustration, posting pithy complaints—or sometimes foul abuse—in a way that both O2 and anyone else could see.
The flow of incoming tweets and Facebook complaints was overwhelming. “We were faced with twenty times our weekly volume in one day,” says Nicola Green, O2’s head of communication at the time. “We were having thousands and thousands of tweets coming in.”24
O2’s social media team began by following the standard practice: apologizing and linking to a website with the latest information about the network problem. The safe, tidy option would be a quick cut-and-paste to each complaint: “We’re sorry about the interruption to your service. For the latest service status update visit: http://status.o2.co.uk/.” As for abusive complaints, the standard advice is to ignore them.
But one of the O2 team—an introvert by the name of Chris—decided he’d try something different. Here are a few of the exchanges that resulted:
CUSTOMER: not gonna lie cannot wait to leave @o2—
O2: but we still love you!
CUSTOMER: F*** YOU! SUCK D*** IN HELL.
O2: Maybe later, got tweets to send right now.
CUSTOMER: Oh @O2 have said sorry. Nice. So when I don’t pay my bill for another month will a sorry do? How about a***-f***ng your mothers you t***s?
O2: She says no thanks.
These responses are risky. Imagine Chris’s situation: he and a dozen colleagues were watching a waterfall of angry tweets scroll across their screens. Their boss, Nicola Green, was running a press office swamped with media inquiries, and talking to the chief executive himself to figure out a collective O2 response. It would have been a lot safer for Chris and his colleagues to wait quietly for a tidy corporate line to be agreed upon by the higher-ups, and then push it out like a production line of human autoresponders. By responding to customer complaints with cheeky affection or the equivalent of a jokey wink, Chris was potentially giving himself a lot of explaining to do. Any one of the responses might have backfired. But Chris realized instinctively that the alternative, a hastily cloned response to thousands of dissatisfied customers, simply wasn’t good enough.
Chris’s tweets quickly attracted an audience, and his colleagues rallied around and copied his example. Tens of thousands of people started following O2 to watch the show, and tweeting in their own suggestions and faux complaints. One alleged that his O2 phone had grown arms and legs, and hurled his mother down the stairs, demanding that O2 “get it sorted, please!” O2 sympathized, then asked, “Was the phone running Angry Birds at the time?”
One wag tweeted a photograph of a pigeon, with the slogan “Carrier Pigeon Can Carry.” O2’s deadpan response: “How much for the bird?”
When one customer helpfully chipped in, “I haven’t had any problems,” O2 shot back, “I’ve had 99.” Another opined, “Whoever is running the O2 twitter feed today is handling the abuse well. Go you! :-)”; O2 replied, “I need a hug.”
What all the responses had in common was that they were undeniably human. Suddenly O2 wasn’t just a faceless brand letting down its customers. It was a collection of human beings trying to deal with difficult circumstances. The angriest customers didn’t seem like O2’s victims anymore. They seemed more like bullies. Chris and his colleagues were standing up to those bullies with a sense of humor. Here was a large multinational company failing to meet its obligations to paying customers—and yet it was hard not to sympathize with it.
O2’s improvised defense was reported across the world and almost universally admired. But because a single misfiring joke might have undone all the good work, Nicola Green—who was far too busy at the time to police the tweets—describes the approach as treading “a very, very fine line.”
What’s the lesson here? It’s not simply that whenever a company has a meltdown, it should respond with self-deprecating jokes. Green says that subsequent efforts to meet a customer complaint with humor have sometimes fallen flat. After some of the customers involved in the most-retweeted exchanges with O2 found themselves on TV talk shows, people would fire off abuse at O2 in the hope of triggering a witty response and winning fifteen minutes of fame. The company dialed back, adopting a blander tone for a while. What worked in one situation will not work forever.
Rather than try to specify what tone to use when, O2’s approach to social media is to recruit and retain a social media team with wit, courage, and, above all, good judgment. It’s to establish, through training and management feedback, that an informal tone is acceptable. Tweets aren’t micromanaged; instead there’s a review every couple of weeks to discuss whether O2’s social media team is on the right track. This allows them room to improvise and adapt to circumstances. “The guys are tweeting at the moment, and I don’t know what they’re tweeting,” Nicola Green told me. “It’s wrong to be prescriptive: we have to trust people’s judgment.”
Another example of trusting employees’ judgment comes from a well-respected—and expensive—Manhattan restaurant. Kate Krader, a restaurant critic, was reminiscing with a college friend about “Beerios,” the popular student combo of beer and cereal. A waiter overheard, someone quietly slipped down the block to pick up some cereal, and within minutes Krader and her friend were presented with two bowls of Beerios. The beer was good, too: “Chocolate porter, it was amazing.”25 Of course, such service is a luxury, but when compared with the other ways in which high-end restaurants pamper their customers, the simple act of listening and improvising is both cheap and delightful.
Perhaps the company most famous for giving its staff freedom to improvise customer service is the online shoe retailer Zappos. One woman ordered boots for her husband and then wanted to return them after he died in a car accident; the Zappos rep who took the call immediately sent her flowers. A best man faced giving a wedding speech without proper footwear because the Zappos courier, UPS, had screwed up; on hearing his tale, a Zappos rep rushed him free shoes by express delivery. Another Zappos rep took a call from a customer who was staying in Las Vegas, not far from Zappos HQ. The customer was trying to get a pair of shoes that Zappos no longer stocked; the Zappos rep found them in stock at a rival retailer at a nearby shopping mall, left the call center, bought the shoes, and delivered them to the customer by hand.26
Zappos would soon be out of business if every customer received such treatment. But in each of these cases the customer was in an unusual situation: I’m returning my husband’s shoes because he just died; my shoes haven’t arrived and I am best man at a wedding tomorrow; I can’t get the shoes I want and I’m just a couple of miles from your office right now. That means that in each case the Zappos rep had to have a genuine unscripted conversation to figure out what that unusual situation was. Yes, the reps went to extraordinary lengths, but before any of the spectacular customer service stunts came a very simple act: listening.
Miles Davis once explained his approach to jazz improv as creating “freedom and space to hear things.”27 The phrase is fascinating: not freedom and space to play things, but to hear things—what the other instruments were doing, even the sound of your own playing, and to respond. Any of us can have that freedom and space if we’re willing to listen. Whether we’re giving a speech, waiting on tables, or sitting in a corporate call center, the messier, improvised response is the one that takes in the entire context: the ambient noise, a customer’s tone of voice, the reaction of an audience, even the weather. Sometimes it’s only when a speaker delivers a line and sees the body language, hears the laughter, or senses the sharp intake of breath that she instinctively understands what she must do next.
• • •
Trained theater improvisers learn something called “the habit of yes.” The idea is to keep opening up new conversational possibilities rather than shut them down. Always add to what has been said so far. Never say “no”; always say “yes, and . . .”; another way this is sometimes phrased is “Enter their world.”
The idea of “yes” has applications far beyond customer service and stagecraft. Here’s one student of improv describing how it has affected her parenting:
Friday, my eight-year-old, Samantha, burst into the kitchen with a gleam in her eyes. “Mommy, Mommy, there’s a monster in the closet!” she shrieked. Normally, I would have thought my best reply to be a reality check for her. I would have said something like: “No, dear, there is no monster in the closet. It’s just your imagination, sweetie.” Instead, considering the rule of yes, I turned from the dishes I was washing and said: “There is? Wow, let’s go see!” I accompanied her to the closet, where we had a dynamic encounter with the monster, capturing it and squealing with delight as we tickled it into disappearing. It was a magical shared adventure. I would never have thought of joining Samantha’s fantasy before considering the rule of yes! Thanks, improv.28
Here’s another example of two improvisers at work. Their names are Virginia and Mondy. Virginia points at Gus, a dog, who is rooting around for a bone in the garden.
Virginia: He’s digging for his life.
Mondy: Oh yeah. Gus is busy working on his caverns. He’s starting a coal mine. So he’s going to get it started and you’re going to finish it up, right?
Virginia: [laughs] I am—
Mondy: The coal mine.
Virginia: The coal mine? I never worked in a coal mine.
Mondy: I know . . .
But Mondy wants that to change. Virginia needs to go down the mine. There are bills to pay; Mondy needs the money. Virginia’s laughing but she says no.
Mondy: Oh well, we’ll have to shut down the whole operation then. All right, Gus. No, she doesn’t want to go in, man . . . stop digging.29
While it’s not the funniest dialogue in the world, this isn’t a fully professional cast. Mondy is an actor with plenty of improv experience; Virginia, on the other hand, is his mother-in-law.
She has dementia.
By using his improv skills and his willingness to say yes and enter Virginia’s bewildered world, Mondy keeps her joyful in the face of a terrible affliction. There is a name for this sort of approach: “validation therapy,” and while we don’t have a great deal of evidence on how well it works, what evidence we do have hints that it might help people with dementia feel less depressed and less likely to be agitated or aggressive.30 What is the alternative? It is to continually remind dementia sufferers that it is Tuesday, that they live in a nursing home, that this is their name and these are pictures of their family. That provokes anger and frustration, and no wonder. To the sufferer, these constant admonitions are a long stream of “no.” It is much more fun to hear “yes.”
There is a cost to this, as the journalist Chana Joffe-Walt discovered while recording Virginia, Mondy, and the woman who brought them together—Karen Stobbe, another improv actor. She’s Mondy’s wife and Virginia’s daughter. For Karen, validation therapy isn’t quite such a blast. It’s hard work, psychologically. Mondy has a blank slate and Virginia has a blank slate. But Karen has a lifetime of memories with Virginia, her mother—memories that Virginia doesn’t have. Saying “yes, and . . .” isn’t hard for Mondy; for Karen, it also means denying all her childhood memories. Still, in an awful situation, it is the least painful strategy. Karen now teaches improv skills for dementia caregivers.
Listening is easy, in principle. In practice it can be terribly hard—especially when, like Karen, you have so much to lose. A really good conversation is mentally demanding. Listening and responding is messy, exhausting—and exhilarating. A great conversation is a rare joy because it is full of surprises and thus requires constant improvisation. As the philosopher Gilbert Ryle wrote, “To a partly novel situation the response is necessarily partly novel, else it is not a response.”31
• • •
From the accidental birth of Kind of Blue to a mother and daughter tickling a monster together, improvisation is fast, exciting, and very human. But improvisation can be dangerous, too. It is hard to forget the sad figure of Gerald Ratner—the man who had created a mighty jewelry empire, only to find himself ejected after going off script in search of a good joke. He bounced back in some ways, setting up a chain of health clubs, but no matter what he achieved nobody ever forgot his gaffe. He endured severe depression, and almost a quarter of a century later still bitterly regrets his mistake. “People ask me if I’m glad I said what I said. They’re ridiculous. How could I be grateful? I lost everything.”32
No wonder we hesitate to improvise. No wonder we fear letting go. Yes, improvising can be cheap and fast, flexible and responsive to the situation, authentic and conversational and breathtakingly creative. But it is truly risky.
But then, not improvising is risky, too.
Because the truth about Gerald Ratner’s off-the-cuff remark about his products being “total crap” is this: it wasn’t off-the-cuff at all. It was chosen with care. Ratner had told the joke in speeches before, without running into problems. And as he prepared to deliver the speech on a larger stage, he sought advice. Several people advised caution; others encouraged him to tell even more daring jokes. They thought Ratner would sound self-deprecating and that his audience would love the jokes—which on the night, they did. But when written up in the newspapers the next morning, in the depths of a recession, Ratner simply sounded like a millionaire mocking his struggling customers.
Ratner’s downfall was caused not by a lack of preparation, but by a lack of judgment. Ratner did exactly what he planned to do—he had simply failed to foresee the consequences. Improvisation was not to blame.
What about Ed Miliband and Rick Perry, two politicians humiliated by their forgetfulness on a public stage? Again, improvisation didn’t cause their downfall. Ed Miliband put his remarks down in black and white, distributed them to the media, and then promptly forgot what he was intending to say. That isn’t improvisation—it’s amnesia. Rick Perry, similarly, could have avoided embarrassing himself if he’d stuck to vaguer principles such as “small government.” His failure was being unable to finish a list of three things; his mistake was to start listing them in the first place.
Improvising does expose us to new and different risks—but even careful preparation cannot remove risks entirely.
• • •
Sometimes it is wise not to improvise. If you never speak in public but must say something at a wedding, and your highest ambition is not to embarrass yourself, then the risk-reward calculation is likely to point to writing a script. But if you are delivering a talk that should be informal and interactive, yet you are reading out a backdrop of bullet-point slides, you’ve cast a vote of no confidence in yourself—just as a telemarketing script is the micromanagers’ vote of no confidence in their junior staff.
So what does it take to successfully improvise? The first element, paradoxically, is practice. Comedians and musicians must also practice their craft until much of what they do is entirely unconscious. “Reflection and attention are of scarcely any service in the matter,” wrote the pianist and teacher Carl Czerny, back in 1839. “We must leave nearly everything to the fingers and to chance.”33 But the most common form of improvisation is human conversation, and that is something all of us have been practicing all our lives.
The second element is a willingness to cope with messy situations. Miles Davis’s drummer on Kind of Blue was Jimmy Cobb. Here’s how he was recruited in 1958, as an emergency replacement for a drummer with a serious drug habit who had quit abruptly.
When I first got the call from Miles it was like six-thirty in the evening and he said, “We’re working tonight.” I said, “Great, where?” He said, “In Boston.” I was in New York and we hit at nine!
With full drum kit, Cobb dashed to Boston. When he arrived at the venue, the band was in full flight without drums. He set up his drum kit onstage behind them, and by the time they hit the interlude of “Round Midnight”:
The horn line says Bah-bah-bah-bah-bah. That’s where I started. I played that lick and from then on I was with the band.34
If you can cope with that sort of mess, you can cope with a lot. The “habit of yes” helps.
The third crucial element is the ability to truly listen, whether you’re a jazz trumpeter, a corporate tweeter, on a date, or working as a customer service rep at Zappos.
But perhaps the most important element in successful improvising is simply this: being willing to take risks and to let go. That is much easier when you have little to lose, but even when there is a lot on the line, improvising can be the best way forward. Consider the situation faced by Marco Rubio, seeking to consolidate his momentum as the Republican establishment’s favored candidate going into the last debate before the New Hampshire U.S. presidential primary in February 2016. He needed only to avoid mistakes, and relying on memorized chunks of speech rather than thinking on his feet must have seemed like a safety-first strategy—until a rival mocked him for it, and Rubio responded disastrously. He blinked, he began to sweat, and he reached for another memorized chunk of speech; unfortunately, the line that came out was the same, word for word, as the one that had just prompted the mockery. A little later he said it all again. And again. The media were full of jokes about the “RuBot,” a Twitter account called “Rubio Glitch” appeared (it repeats itself), and Rubio’s campaign was over not long after.
A script can seem protective, like a bulletproof vest; sometimes it is more like a straitjacket. Improvising unleashes creativity, it feels fresh and honest and personal. Above all, it turns a monologue into a conversation.
In December 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested after refusing to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, to a white man.35 As a local church leader and already an orator of some renown, Martin Luther King was asked to organize a boycott of Montgomery’s busses. He hesitated. He was exhausted; his newborn baby daughter, Yoki, wouldn’t stop crying in the night. He wanted time to think. But an influential local activist, E. D. Nixon, would have none of that: “You ain’t got much time to think, ’cause you in the chair from now on,” he told King.
So it was that King found himself in an unfamiliar situation: he had to prepare his inaugural speech as president of the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association, but he was in a hurry. He arrived home from the meeting with Nixon and the activists at half past six; he had to head to the venue, Holt Street Church, at ten to seven. He told his wife, Coretta, he would skip supper, although he had not eaten since breakfast. King retreated into his study and closed the door. He was terrified, “possessed by fear . . . obsessed by a feeling of inadequacy,” he later wrote. Newspapermen would be there, perhaps even television crews. Yet just as the stakes were highest, the tidy habits of careful preparation that served him so well all his life were useless to him now: he couldn’t research, draft, redraft, and memorize. He had no time.
King looked at his watch—already five minutes had ticked away while he fretted. Every Sunday he delivered a sermon based on fifteen hours of hard work. Now he was about to deliver the most important speech of his life, and he had just fifteen minutes. He sketched a couple of thoughts with his hand shaking. He stopped, reversed, turned the problem around in his head. He mentally sketched out the balance he had to strike in his comments, and the themes that he had to touch on. He prayed. That was all the preparation he could spare before driving to the Holt Street Church.36
Ten thousand people stood outside, unable to cram themselves in, listening to the proceedings via loudspeaker. The Montgomery police were there in force. So were the television cameras, pointing at the pulpit as King stepped up and began to speak.
“We’re here this evening for serious business,” he began. And then, without notes, without a careful script lovingly prepared and committed to memory, his words began to trickle out, and then to pour forth freely. He had had no time to prepare, but he had found something more valuable: in Miles Davis’s phrase, “the freedom and space to hear things.” As he spoke, King listened to the crowd, feeling out their response, speaking in the moment. His early sentences were experiments, grasping for a theme, exploring how each sounded and how the crowd responded. Each phrase shaped the phrase that followed. His speech was not a solo; it was a duet with his audience.
After a cautious opening, King talked of Rosa Parks, of her character and “the depth of her Christian commitment,” and of how “just because she refused to get up, she was arrested.” The crowd murmured their assent. And after a pause for breath, King changed direction.
“There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression.”
“Yes! Yes!” replied individuals in the crowd, and suddenly those individual voices turned into something more, a roar of approval, of shared anger, of joy, too, at the sense of community. King had crested a rhetorical hill to find that behind it was a mountain of emotion and noise. That noise climbed and climbed. It was inexorable. And just when it seemed that the volume had reached a summit, an even higher peak emerged and those inside the church became aware of the voices of the thousands outside. The cheering continued. The sound was everywhere. And then, as at last it began to fade, King’s voice rose again, to repeat the theme that he and the crowd had selected together.
“There comes a time when people get tired of getting pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July, and left standing amidst the piercing chill of an Alpine November. There . . .” The roar of the crowd became too loud again. Amid the sound of feet thundering on the church’s wooden floorboards, King was forced to pause.37
As with any extemporaneous performance, King’s was imperfect. His conclusion was limp. Some lines fell flat: “I think I speak with—with legal authority—not that I have any legal authority—but I think I speak with legal authority behind me—that the law—the ordinance—the city ordinance has never been totally clarified.”
He had never in his life delivered a sermon with such flaws. Fifteen hours of preparation always ironed out every wrinkle. And yet despite those wrinkles, this improvisation, this free-for-all, was easily the finest speech that King had yet given.
“That was the great awakening,” said one witness. “It was astonishing, the man spoke with so much force.”
“Nobody dreamed of Martin Luther King being that sort of man under these conditions,” said another.
King himself, one suspects, had not truly understood what he could unleash once he let himself go. He didn’t want to improvise the speech. He preferred the tidy approach, not the messy one. But when the situation gave him no alternative, he came to understand what older preachers had told him: “Open your mouth and God will speak for you.”
The days of meticulous preparation were behind him: as the civil rights campaign took shape with King at its head, he would travel from church to church, from speech to speech, and rarely have the time to prepare speeches of tidy perfection. But seven and a half years later, in 1963, he found himself faced with speaking to a quarter of a million people who had marched on Washington, D.C., and live on every national television network. This speech demanded the preparation of old. It was too important to be left to chance.
Dr. King and his aides had prepared a typewritten script, unpromisingly titled “Normalcy, Never Again.” King’s team was trying to navigate complex waters with the text of this address. King needed to reach out to white allies, to rebut the hard-line approach of Malcolm X and others, and to respond to President Kennedy’s civil rights bill. Was it to be criticized as inadequate, or welcomed as progress? There was much politicking behind the scenes.38 And each speaker had been given just seven minutes; there was no exception for Martin Luther King. All these constraints called for tidy, precise drafting.
“Normalcy, Never Again” was over-formal and flawed. Parts of it read like poetry; others were clumsy legalese. As King read out the speech, it did not stir the soul. But then, toward the end, came a biblical flourish: “We will not be satisfied until justice runs down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Approving cheers rippled up and down the Mall as King delivered the line, the crowd responding to its emotive imagery.
Then King looked down at his script. The next line was pretentious and limp: “And so today, let us go back to our communities as members of the international association for the advancement of creative dissatisfaction.” He couldn’t bring himself to say the words, and so instead, he started to improvise: “Go back to Mississippi. Go back to Alabama . . .”39
Behind him stood his friends and colleagues. They knew that King had stepped away from his script, and at the moment of maximum danger and maximum opportunity, the climax of his speech, he was looking for something to say—something that would touch the people there at the Mall, and people watching across the country.
“Tell ’em about the dream, Martin,” yelled the singer Mahalia Jackson. It was a reference to something Dr. King had been talking about over the previous months as he preached to church congregations—a dream of a brighter future, in which whites and blacks lived in harmony. And so, facing the television cameras and the expectant crowd, responding perfectly to the situation, Martin Luther King began to create on the fly one of the most famous speeches of the century. He spoke of his dream that “one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood . . . that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
“Normalcy, Never Again” was forgotten. King’s impromptu words provided the conclusion to a speech that shook the twentieth century. That speech would forever be known as “I Have a Dream.”