Posts Tagged ‘leadership’
Memories Change Over Time
Memories of dramatic events seem to be burned into our minds. It seems easy to recall where we were when we learned JFK was assassinated (before my time), Ronald Reagan was shot (middle school gym at the end of the day), Elvis died (in a car near the top of Massanutten Mountain on our way to my grandparents’ place), or on September 11, 2001 (checking email after sleeping late).
It all seems so clear, but how reliable are our memories of the events and the circumstances surrounding them? Not very, especially as time passes and discussions of the events contain information not available at first. For example, a Smithsonian magazine article notes that Karim Nader, a neuroscientist, examined his own memories of September 11 and found he had made some mistakes.
Nader, now a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, says his memory of the World Trade Center attack has played a few tricks on him. He recalled seeing television footage on September 11 of the first plane hitting the north tower of the World Trade Center. But he was surprised to learn that such footage aired for the first time the following day. Apparently he wasn’t alone: a 2003 study of 569 college students found that 73 percent shared this misperception.
These changes are normal and expected. You store long-term memories by associating new information with things you already know. As you continue to receive information about an event, it becomes difficult to distinguish what occurred when. That’s why legal experts view eyewitness testimony as unreliable – humans are fallible, our memories especially so.
When you’re an improviser, this fallibility works to your advantage. Long-form shows can run for 45 minutes or more and, given the huge number of choices performers make, inconsistencies crop up all the time. The good news is that your audience wants you to succeed and, unless the error is too big to ignore, they’re almost always willing to go along with the new reality. Not doing so would undermine their enjoyment of the show, so they have an incentive to play along.
This forgiving atmosphere isn’t present in politics and business, at least not for your competitors. They want you to fail and will bring up every instance of you ignoring or, in their opinion, attempting to mischaracterize the past. It doesn’t help when a campaign adviser admits that’s what you plan to do. As reported in a CNN.com article on March 21, 2012:
Eric Fehrnstrom, Romney’s senior campaign adviser, was asked in a CNN interview Wednesday morning whether the former Massachusetts governor had been forced to adopt conservative positions in the rugged race that could hurt his standing with moderates in November’s general election.
“I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes,” Fehrnstrom responded. “It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up, and we start all over again.”
Ouch. I anticipate the Etch A Sketch will be a theme in the 2014 and 2016 election cycle. Regardless, the lesson to draw from this incident is the same for both improv and business: Don’t abuse your audience’s goodwill.
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/How-Our-Brains-Make-Memories.html#ixzz2BfHlkdVx
http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/21/politics/campaign-wrap/index.html
Episodic and Semantic Memory
If I ask you to tell me what 3+2 equals, you would probably do so instantly. On the other hand, if I ask you to name in the last movie you saw the theater, you might have to think about it for a second or two. Those two different types of recall illustrate the differences between semantic memory and episodic memory.
I’ll start with episodic memory first. As the name implies, episodic memory is a form of long-term memory that records events from your life. Such episodes might include your wedding, the birth of a child, or something as mundane as getting out of a cab and stepping directly into a puddle. These episodes make up your internal autobiography, which is your personal record of your experiences.
Semantic memory, by contrast, refers to a subconscious knowledge that forms the basis for how we speak our native language, perform tasks we’ve done thousands of times, or interact in social settings. Semantic knowledge is often tacit, meaning that it is hard to quantify or describe. In many cases there is no need to write down the rules of behavior because everyone in the situation knows precisely what they are supposed to do. You’ll find this is true of families around the dinner table or groups of friends who go out for drinks after work.
Episodes from your life provide terrific fodder for scenes if you’re an improviser or for presentations in business. The trick is to find episodes that are directly relevant to your audience’s needs and to resist the temptation to stray too much from the truth. It’s one thing to tell your significant other a slightly exaggerated version of your exploits, but it’s quite another to tell an obviously untrue story in a business presentation. Conference goers have seen lots of presentations and they can smell a fake a mile away. Play it straight—don’t give in to the temptation to exaggerate too much.
Prisoner’s Dilemma, Part 5
This is the final post in my series on the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Five blog posts might seem like a lot, but many doctoral dissertations have been written on the ramifications of this deceptively simple game.
Robert Axelrod was one of first researchers to study how competing strategies for playing the Prisoner’s Dilemma interacted in a tournament setting. One of Axelrod’s main conclusions is that you can maximize your payoff in a Prisoner’s Dilemma tournament by following a nice strategy. That is, not defecting first. He also noted that it was possible for other strategies to beat the winner, Tit for Tat, by defecting first to get the higher payoff and then defecting every turn thereafter to ensure that the other program could never retaliate effectively. Over time, this strategy does not yield a higher payoff than the nice Tit for Tat; the aggressive strategy did not win either tournament.
But what happens if you put the nice Tit for Tat in an environment with a lot of aggressive programs? The answer is that Tit for Tat will always give up the higher payoff to its opponent in the first round and get the minimum payoff in every subsequent round. Based on those rules, Tit for Tat is guaranteed to lose. If you were to put a set of strategies into a tournament and then eliminate the bottom half of the field, Tit for Tat would always be eliminated, and the other more successful strategies would continue on. Those strategies being the aggressive, not nice, strategy of always defecting first and continuing to do so on every subsequent turn.
This type of attack is called an invasion. If you run a tournament and eliminate the bottom half of the field at the end of each run you’ll find certain strategies win out. If you introduce even a small number of these dominant strategies into a tournament, they will eventually take over. The problem becomes even worse if you create a series of strategies that can recognize kindred spirits, enabling them to work together to maximize their payoff by cooperating.
You can find the same type of behavior in business. In many cases when the group or company starts, you’ll find that everyone cooperates. The problem comes in when someone who doesn’t cooperate starts to get some success in the company. As the aggression is rewarded, other individuals adopt the same strategy. In time, those players can squeeze out the players who play a nice, cooperative strategy within the business. It’s a true management headache, one that is extremely difficult to stamp out once it gets started. Plus, as the aggressive players get promoted higher and higher, the reward structure changes. Now individuals who are willing to work with the aggressive individuals are rewarded with their own promotions and higher responsibilities.
In most cases, the company can continue on with this type of environment, despite the fact that there is a lack of trust among the players. In fact, this type of environment can fuel creativity for those individuals who revel in interpersonal conflict and feel it helps their creativity. At the same time, though, an organization might begin to experience problems associated with a lack of cooperation. Always looking to put one over on the other guy makes it difficult to trust anyone else, especially when you’re looking over your shoulder to see who will get the next promotion. These behaviors can lead to stress, burnout, and high turnover. In a company that requires highly skilled personnel, losing a solid contributor because of a toxic work environment is extremely costly.
In improvisational comedy groups, you find the same thing happens especially at the beginning of the group’s life. As individuals jockey for position within the group and try to have an impact on how things will be run, you will often find that individuals who started in the group either drop out or get kicked out after they try to change the group through aggression or passive aggression by not following directions of the group’s leadership. Well-established organizations with a solid player roster and workshops from which to bring in new players are less susceptible to this sort of issue. The group’s culture is solid, and the workshop process allows management to decide which players will be promoted and included in the team.
Smaller groups, such as touring companies with only four or five players, can be susceptible to problems. The trick, as always, is to select your fellow performers wisely. In many cases, it’s better to join another group or start a new group of your own than it is to continue on in a bad situation. Sometimes leaving a bad job is the best thing you could possibly do.
Prisoner’s Dilemma, Part 3
My previous two posts discussed the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a classic 2 x 2 game structured so each player feels compelled to violate the trust of the other player. Researcher Robert Axelrod tried to find the best strategy for playing the Prisoner’s Dilemma by holding a tournament among computer programs playing the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Every program would play every other program, a second copy of itself, and a program Axelrod created that randomly chose whether to cooperate or defect. In that first tournament, which had 14 entrants, a program by Anatol Rapoport named Tit for Tat won.
The strategy behind Tit for Tat is extremely simple: Start out by cooperating, but if the other player defects, defect on the next turn as punishment. If the other player did not defect on the next turn, the program would switch back to cooperating. So why would this program win? As Stevens points out in his course, the best the program can hope to do is to tie. It never tries to take advantage of the other player, so it will never get a higher payoff in any round than the other program. What happened was that Tit for Tat minimized its losses. It punished other programs for defecting, but it only did so once if there was just a single defection. This strategy of minimizing its own losses while minimizing the other programs’ gain due to bad behavior made Tit for Tat the best program of the bunch.
The key to the success of Tit for Tat is that it elicits cooperation. Axelrod noted that the program is nice, provokable, forgiving, and straightforward. Among humans playing the game, or for computer programs with a memory of past turns, playing Tit for Tat lets other player accurately predict the consequences of their actions. In the first Prisoner’s Dilemma tournament, the top eight programs were all nice, which meant that they were never the first to defect.
The participants included a program called JOSS, which was the same as Tit for Tat but threw in the occasional defection at random intervals. The program’s design was meant to take advantage of the occasionally high payoff from an unchallenged defection while retaining the benefits of cooperation. Unfortunately, this strategy resulted in extremely low scores because its actions weren’t predictable. One very negative consequence was that it created a series of moves versus Tit for Tat, and variations of Tit for Tat, in which each program defected on alternate turns and led to dismally low scores.
In Axelrod’s analysis of the first tournament, he noted that there were three strategies not included in the tournament but that, if submitted, would have won. With these results made available to potential entrants, along with randomizing the number of rounds each pair of strategies competed against each other to invalidate “late round” tactics, he ran a second tournament. This new competition attracted 62 entries. Tit for Tat won again. From the results, it’s easy to see that there is a penalty for being the first to defect. Axelrod wrote:
What seems to have happened is an interesting interaction between people who drew one lesson and people who drew another from the first round. Lesson One was: “Be nice and forgiving.” Lesson Two was more exploitative: “If others are going to be nice and forgiving, it pays to try to take advantage of them.” The people who drew Lesson One suffered in the second round from those who drew Lesson Two….The reason is that in trying to exploit other rules, they often eventually got punished enough to make the whole game less rewarding for both players than pure mutual cooperation would have been.
The lessons for improv and business are obvious, so I won’t belabor them. I would point out that the Prisoner’s Dilemma is an inherently grim scenario, so it’s best not to get into this type of situation in the first place. Because each player faces potential catastrophe if they don’t protect themselves, you can allow the players to communicate and not guarantee cooperation.
Next up: further insights into the nature of competition in the Prisoner’s Dilemma scenario.
Stag Hunt Across Species
In the Stag Hunt, also known as the Assurance Game or the Coordination Game, two hunters have the option of going after a hare or a stag. If a hunter targets a hare, he will get one for a small payoff every day. If both hunters go after a stag, they will each receive a much larger payoff, but if you target a stag and the other hunter goes after a hare, you will get nothing. Your choice as a player is whether to go for the reliable but small payoff or the larger, riskier payoff.
As with most of the other classic 2 x 2 games, we assume that the two hunters can’t communicate. At least, not so that they can coordinate their efforts before they choose which strategy to follow on a given day. What they can see, however, are the payoffs both for themselves and for the other hunter after they play a round of the game. This situation leads to some very interesting outcomes, especially when you consider it across species.
The authors of a paper titled “Responses to the Assurance Game in Monkeys, Apes, and Humans,” using equivalent procedures, tested whether capuchin monkeys, chimpanzees, or humans would perform better at the Assurance Game. The research team chose these three sets of primates because they all show tendencies toward cooperation in their natural environment. What made their research interesting was that they did not allow the humans to talk while they were being tested.
As you might expect, the humans performed better at the task than either the chimpanzees or the capuchin monkeys, but the difference was not as large as one might expect. Specifically, the researchers found that the humans who discovered the hare-hare approach thought that they had beaten the game and were always getting a reliable payoff. Game theorists call this approach the risk dominant strategy. Once the players achieve a reliable outcome, they tend not to move away from it and explore alternate possibilities.
The paper’s authors summarized their results this way:
Finally, despite being the species for which the highest frequency of pairs achieved the payoff dominant outcome, even among humans fewer than 20% in pairs did so (this increases to 27% when borderline pairs are included). An additional 38% of pairs achieved the risk dominant outcome (hare-hare), and 12% matched their partner. It is worth reiterating that despite success of humans compared with the other primates, a nontrivial proportion of pairs failed to achieve the payoff-dominant outcome. This underscores the difficulty of finding outcomes when the typical human procedures (instructions, payoff matrices, pretest for understanding) are absent, common handicaps for nonhuman species.
Obtaining the highest possible payoff from any venture, whether it is in improv or in business, means taking risks. Even in this artificial situation, in which communication was limited, some pairs of humans managed to find the payoff-dominant outcome for the Stag Hunt experiment. The problem was that many of them did not. As the authors of the study note, this is most likely a case of humans being risk averse. In an improv context, being risk averse might mean always asking for the same type of suggestions or doing the same type of scene, regardless of which suggestion you get. Some so-called improv groups even get a single suggestion from the audience, use it once by stating it during their scene, and then do the rest of the scene according to a script. It’s a cheat, one that takes a lot of the fun out of doing your performances unless you change the script every night, but it does reduce the risk of having something terribly wrong and not entertaining your audience. Over time, however, taking larger risks will yield greater rewards as long as you have competent individuals on the stage with you.
Dialogue and Cooperative Play
Success at improv and business requires the clear communication of ideas and a willingness to incorporate others’ contributions into your work. This interchange doesn’t just happen verbally…among architects, this type of exchange happens on paper. In an opinion piece published in the September 2, 2012 New York Times, architect and Princeton professor (emeritus) Michael Graves wrote about an unspoken dialogue he had with a colleague during a boring faculty meeting:
While we didn’t speak, we were engaged in a dialogue over this plan and we understood each other perfectly. I suppose that you could have a debate like that with words, but it would have been entirely different. Our game was not about winners or losers, but about a shared language. We had a genuine love for making this drawing. There was an insistence, by the act of drawing, that the composition would stay open, that the speculation would stay “wet” in the sense of a painting. Our plan was without scale and we could as easily have been drawing a domestic building as a portion of a city. It was the act of drawing that allowed us to speculate.
Players from the ComedySportz Portland improv group love the game of Paper Telephone. The idea is that you write a starting line at the top of a piece of paper, then pass it to a friend. Your friend reads the first line, writes a second line, and then folds the paper so only the most recent line is visible. You continue passing the paper around until there’s no more room, then unfold the paper and read the story. A fun variation is to have as many pieces of paper as there are players so you get lots of stories. The results are often hilarious and the similarities among stories can be eerie.
If you haven’t played Paper Telephone, you might have written stories with a friend, trading off after every paragraph. I’ve found this method works well for developing business presentations. Sit down with two or three of your colleagues and take turns telling a story or building an outline one line at a time. Don’t worry about coherence or order yet — all you want to do is get the information down so you can revise it later. This type of cooperative play helps you get beyond the creative person’s nightmare: a blank page.
Learning from non-Improvisers
My current favorite improv book by a non-improviser is Matthew Frederick’s 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School. Frederick distilled the wisdom he’s developed over his career as an architect, urban designer, and instructor into 101 aphorisms meant to help burgeoning architects deal with the rigors of their undergraduate training and assimilate that knowledge into a viable creative process. As it turns out, most of his advice applies directly to improvisational comedy and to the business world.
After noting that architectural design springs from an idea, Frederick states that “the more specific a design idea is, the greater its appeal is likely to be.” His example shows two churches, one that represents itself as being for everyone and the other for purple-striped vegetarians. The church that’s targeted at a very specific group is much better attended than the other generic church.
Improv scenes are based on offers, which are scene details that come out of a player’s statement or action. An offer such as walking through a door; stamping one’s feet; and then taking off earmuffs, coat, and gloves tells us that the character just came in from the snow. The player’s emotion and intention give even more information. If she moves quickly and yanks off her hat, it might mean that it is bitter cold outside. If she moves slowly and sets down her purse before taking off her cold weather gear, she might have trudged for half a mile through foot-deep drifts because the bus was on a snow route and couldn’t get up her hill.
Frederick’s nineteenth dictum, that one should start a composition with general elements and add details once the outline has been drawn, fits well within the context of improvised theatre but does have its limitations. An offer such as the one I just described, which provides details but doesn’t drive the scene in any particular direction, gives the second player a lot of room to work. He could open a window, for example, signaling a conflict between his perception of the room as too hot and the first performer’s obvious chill.
In business, this type of conflict occurs in many contexts. To move forward through the conflict, you must find a way to honor what your colleagues have said and done while making progress toward your goals. And you do have the same goals, right?
Improspectives 