Posts Tagged ‘live performance’
Gamification: Describing Your Players
My previous set of posts described elements of gamification (such as meaningful choices and conflict) and how to incorporate them into business and improv. Kevin Werbach and his coauthor Dan Hunter also identify six steps to gamification (For the Win, p. 86), which I think provide an excellent framework for business and theatrical endeavors. I just spoke about delineating target behaviors. In this post, I’ll talk about describing your players.
As a quick review, the authors’ six D’s are:
- Define business objectives
- Delineate target behaviors
- Describe your players
- Devise activity cycles
- Don’t forget the fun!
- Deploy the appropriate tools
The Gamification course’s final written assignment asked us to create a reasonably detailed gamification plan for a company with a business model similar to Airbnb and other shared-resource mediation sites. I described my typical players using a set of personas that captured a range of user backgrounds and motivations. The prof changes his example scenario every time he offers the class, so I don’t mind giving you this segment of my answer.
As the site grows to include thousands of players, it would be impossible to break them down into a small number of categories. However, it is possible to create personas to characterize typical players that will engage in the ShareAll system. The following paragraphs describe four personas that represent the players.
Andrew: Andrew, a 43 year-old white male, is in upper management at a small web-based services firm. He can work wherever he has an internet connection, so he travels frequently and uses ShareAll’s lodging and car rental features when he does. He has been known to perform a quick pickup or errand for other members, but does so infrequently. Andrew is a focused user who sees ShareAll as a provider of specific services.
Helen: Helen, a 62 year-old African-American female, retired from a 35-year career as a clinical psychologist. She uses the task-running elements on the ShareAll site to have members pick up her groceries once or twice a month and to rent a car when she travels. She has also listed her basement apartment on the site, which brings in the occasional renter. Helen appreciates the convenience of the task providers and the income she generates when she rents out her apartment.
Timothy: Timothy is a 22 year-old Chinese-American male office worker who is taking a year off before going on to graduate school. He earns a good supplemental income by signing up for the task-oriented side of the ShareAll site, mostly by running errands but also as a driver for individuals who need rides to the airport. He has rented a car through the site on a few out-of-town trips, but he is not a frequent user of the site outside of his tasks. He networks with his friends to get as many referral Shares as he can. He also cares deeply about his reputation and does his best to provide excellent service. Timothy is working hard now so he can get an advanced degree without worrying too much about paying for his groceries when he’s back in school.
Steph: Steph is a 28 year-old white female who works as a waitress. She usually gets 24-30 hours of restaurant shifts per week, so she makes herself available for tasks such as house cleaning during her off hours. She also travels around the U.S. when she can and has used the ShareAll site to find rooms in the cities she visits. Like Timothy, Steph networks with friends to general referral credits. She does her best to earn money when she can to improve her life.
As the ShareAll site increases its player base, we can analyze their demographics and activities to create more meaningful segments and personas.
Many companies use personas to describe their customers, so take a look at these brief descriptions in terms of goals, backgrounds, and behaviors to get a feel for how you can create your own personas. What was fun for me, and is often fun for improvisers and business people alike, is including people you know in your work. Andrew is a good friend of mine, and Helen (not her real name) is establishing her professional credentials as a clinical psychologist. I see her having a long, successful career after she finishes jumping through the hoops required for licensure.
Written by curtisfrye
June 10, 2013 at 3:36 pm
Posted in Gamification, MOOCs, Uncategorized
Tagged with audience, business, business management, collaboration, competition, cooperation, coursera, coursera.org, critical thinking, gamification, Improspectives, improv, improvisation, leader, leadership, listening, live performance, management, managing, motivation, performance, persona, responding, strategy, Werbach
Gamification: Delineating Target Behaviors
My previous set of posts described elements of gamification (such as meaningful choices and conflict) and how to incorporate them into business and improv. Kevin Werbach and his coauthor Dan Hunter also identify six steps to gamification (For the Win, p. 86), which I think provide an excellent framework for business and theatrical endeavors. My previous post covered defining business objectives. In this post, I’ll talk about delineating target behaviors.
The authors’ six D’s are:
- Define business objectives
- Delineate target behaviors
- Describe your players
- Devise activity cycles
- Don’t forget the fun!
- Deploy the appropriate tools
Defining business objectives is the most abstract element of the process, in the sense that the results (increase attendance or driving more visitors to your site) are long-range goals that result from other efforts. Delineating target behaviors means identifying the specific actions you want your players to take. For example, you might want your players to fill in their profiles completely, perhaps showing a progress bar like the one LinkedIn uses. You can also reward behaviors such as inviting one’s friends to join a site, making purchases, and attending events.
In an improv context, you should think about what you want your audience members to do. Of course you want them to attend your shows and tell their friends how brilliant and funny you are, but you should also focus on what you want them to do during the show. For example, how do you get suggestions, and how does the process affect the suggestions you get? How do you reward audience members for following your instructions, and how do you correct them if they don’t?
Businesses of all types, whether manufacturing, web services, or theaters, must structure their offerings to get the desired responses from their customers. It helps to know what those responses are.
Written by curtisfrye
May 4, 2013 at 3:41 pm
Posted in Gamification, MOOCs, Uncategorized
Tagged with audience, business, business management, collaboration, competition, cooperation, coursera, coursera.org, gamification, Improspectives, improv, improvisation, listening, live performance, management, managing, performance, responding, strategy, theater, theatre, Werbach
Gamification: Defining Business Objectives
My previous set of posts described elements of gamification (such as meaningful choices and conflict) and how to incorporate them into business and improv. Kevin Werbach and his coauthor Dan Hunter also identify six steps to gamification (For the Win, p. 86), which I think provide an excellent framework for business and theatrical endeavors.
The authors’ six D’s are:
- Define business objectives
- Delineate target behaviors
- Describe your players
- Devise activity cycles
- Don’t forget the fun!
- Deploy the appropriate tools
Defining business objectives seems like an easy step — you want your customers to buy your products or engage your services. In this context, though, you’re thinking about the business objectives for your gamified system. You might want to retain customers or build brand loyalty. These objectives are more general than target behaviors, which are covered in the next item. Improv groups face the same challenges when they try to define their business objectives. Obviously you want to encourage customers to be loyal to your brand, but what other goals do you have? Do you want them to become active consumers of theatre in general?
It’s often tough to distinguish between business objectives and target behaviors, but Werbach and Hunter provide a useful exercise for identifying business objectives. (p. 87) They encourage you to make a list of what you think are your objectives; then, go through the list and cross out anything that’s a means instead of an end. For example, “Build brand loyalty” is an end but “Have visitors view the company’s mission statement” is a means.
Working through this exercise will bring your business objectives into better focus. Plus, if you’re like me and don’t always distinguish between objectives and behaviors on the first pass, you’ll find you’ve identified several target behaviors, too.
Written by curtisfrye
April 29, 2013 at 7:42 pm
Posted in Gamification, MOOCs, Uncategorized
Tagged with business, business management, collaboration, cooperation, coursera, coursera.org, critical thinking, gamification, Improspectives, improv, improvisation, leadership, listening, live performance, management, managing, performance, strategy, theater, theatre, Werbach
Improv and Gamification: Potential Conflicts
I’m taking the free Coursera course on Gamification, taught by Kevin Werbach from the Wharton School of Management. The book For the Win, which Werbach coauthored with Dan Hunter, mentions four basic elements of gamification:
- Motivation
- Meaningful choices
- Structure
- Potential conflicts
Their final item, potential conflicts, addresses how game elements can come into conflict with organizational goals and intrinsic (internal) motivation. The traditional management case study of conflicting elements is suboptimization, where an employee focuses on a specific task to the detriment of the overall project or even the entire enterprise.
As an example, suppose you’ll receive a substantial bonus for releasing a product to market by a specific date. It’s natural for you to evaluate your incentives and get that product out the door regardless of what corners you need to cut. If the product’s not as a good as it could have been, your employer must take a substantial portion of the blame. After all, they structured your incentives in a way that rewarded you for focusing on the subgoal instead of releasing a quality product.
In improv, you can suboptimize by going for the joke instead of playing a good scene and letting the laughs come naturally. I was especially guilty of this practice early in my career, but I’ve gotten away from it. The idea is that you want to keep the scene moving forward smoothly instead of stopping it with a joke. A joke’s punchline is an artificial endpoint that stops progress, pulls focus from the scene, and forces everyone to reset. Are jokes always bad in improv? No, but they make everyone’s job harder, especially when more than one person is going for the joke in a scene. Then it’s a travesty.
Written by curtisfrye
April 18, 2013 at 4:10 pm
Posted in Gamification, Improv Performance, MOOCs, Teamwork, Uncategorized
Tagged with audience, business, business management, collaboration, cooperation, coursera, coursera.org, gamification, Improspectives, improv, improvisation, leader, leadership, listening, live performance, management, managing, performance, responding, strategy, suboptimization, theater, theatre, Werbach
Improv and Gamification: Meaningful Choices
I’m taking the free Coursera course on Gamification, taught by Kevin Werbach from the Wharton School of Management. The book For the Win, which Werbach coauthored with Dan Hunter, mentions four basic elements of gamification:
- Motivation
- Meaningful choices
- Structure
- Potential conflicts
The second item, meaningful choices, is a foundation of well-being and self-esteem. Everyone likes to feel that they have some control over their lives — that their choices make a difference in how events turn out. Improvisers’ choices have direct and immediate impact on the show, for good or ill. Your scene partners can find ways to exclude you, of course. A former member of our group was a guest performer in another city, but the other players on the team apparently didn’t care to have him around. They were polite to him before the show, but after he exited a scene, one of the other players stepped on stage and said “You know the guy who was just here? I killed him.”
So much for collaboration.
It’s little better to have teammates ignore offers you make within a scene, preferring to wait for another player to come on and further the action. It’s hard to make progress when no one listens to you, even if you are the junior member of a group.
The same considerations hold true for the office. I’m not saying less experienced workers should be given complete autonomy, but they should have their opinions given a fair hearing. There’s very little that’s more demotivating than disappearing into the bowels of an organization and losing the connection between your work and a company’s success. Of course you can add points, badges, and levels to attach some (albeit artificial) meaning to their tasks, but Werbach and Hunter point out that it’s possible to gamify work unethically, in such a way that the “game” structure works against the employees’ best interests. Much like the sales competition in the movie version of David Mamet’s play Glengarry Glen Ross (first place is a car, second place is a set of steak knives, third place is you’re out of a job), you can use gamification for good or evil. One of their colleagues turned down such a consulting assignment. Rightfully so.
Written by curtisfrye
April 4, 2013 at 10:11 pm
Posted in Gamification, Improv Performance, MOOCs, Teamwork, Uncategorized
Tagged with audience, business, business management, collaboration, competition, cooperation, David Mamet, game theory, gamification, Improspectives, improv, improvisation, leader, leadership, listening, live performance, Mamet, management, managing, motivation, performance, responding, strategy, theater, theatre, Werbach
Improv and Gamification: Motivation
In my previous post, I mentioned four basic elements of gamification put forward by Wharton School faculty members Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter. Those elements are:
- Motivation
- Meaningful choices
- Structure
- Potential conflicts
Motivation is tricky. I’ve stated my belief that all motivation is internal, but I admit it’s a reductionist and curmudgeonly view. Many individuals, particularly extroverts, gain energy by interacting with others. Yes, you can argue they use these interactions to stoke their personal fire, but the truth is that the external forces affect their performance.
I’ll still use my “all motivation is internal” line at parties, though. It’s fun to argue and often leads to interesting discussions.
Gamification uses game elements such as points, badges, and leader boards to set goals, measure performance, and reward individual and team success. One example, which is near to my heart because I’ve written books for Microsoft Press since 2001, is how Microsoft used gamification to get their employees to identify errors in Windows 7 dialog boxes. Windows 7 is available in 35 languages, meaning that the dialog boxes and other text was translated into tongues as diverse as Chinese, Swedish, and Polish. Microsoft tracked which teams (usually members of the same business group) discovered the most errors and posted their names on a leader board displayed in the tool. Some team leaders decided to focus their efforts on the contest, which led to impressive performance.
Improvisers receive feedback from their audience immediately, usually in the form of laughter, but also as appreciation for what’s been done. Some performers can be thrown off by a quiet crowd, especially if they feel they’re having a good night but the audience just isn’t laughing. If you’re not getting the audible feedback you’re used to, check for eye contact. If your spectators meet your gaze and smile, you’re doing fine. They just prefer to express themselves quietly.
Written by curtisfrye
April 2, 2013 at 12:42 am
Posted in Gamification, Improv Performance, MOOCs, Teamwork, Uncategorized
Tagged with audience, business, business management, collaboration, competition, cooperation, extrovert, gamification, Improspectives, improv, improvisation, introversion, introvert, listening, live performance, management, managing, motivation, performance, theater, theatre, Werbach
Knowing and Respecting Your Audience
How many times have you heard a prominent entertainer say something like this:
I create art that I enjoy and trust that my audience will feel my passion and live my dream with me.
This sentiment sounds great, but it’s just another variation on the “law of attraction” crap made popular by the book The Secret and used by preachers who rely on their congregation buying into the “gospel of prosperity” to fund their own lifestyles.
For every successful entertainer, there are tens of thousands (at least) who create art they love and yet, somehow, can’t get their audiences to buy into what they’re doing. It’s not because you don’t love what you do enough — your audience just has different tastes or your work isn’t of sufficient quality for them to appreciate it. Remember, your audience decides whether they’re entertained, not you.
That last bit can be hard to admit, especially for individuals who are new to a profession. Regardless of whether you’re a speaker, an entertainer, a writer, or a lawyer, you’ll suffer through significant growing pains while you figure out what works and what doesn’t. I’m not saying you should join the race to the bottom and crank out derivative drivel. Please, in the name of all that might or might not be holy, don’t. What you should do is put out the best product you can and listen intently to audience feedback. If they understand you want to improve and are putting forth your best effort, they’ll be much more likely to offer helpful advice instead of the normal platitudes.
And who knows — you might find someone who likes what you do and is willing to champion your work. It’s a numbers game, after all. The more work you do and the more you pay attention to and incorporate feedback from your audience, the more likely you are to entertain with art you love and connect with individuals who can help you.
Written by curtisfrye
February 6, 2013 at 11:13 am
Posted in Improv Performance, Uncategorized
Tagged with attraction, audience, collaboration, cooperation, feedback, gospel of prosperity, Improspectives, improv, improvisation, law of attraction, listening, live performance, performance, prosperity gospel, responding, strategy, The Secret, theater, theatre
A Genius, in Retrospect
Mikhail Tal, the Latvian chess grandmaster and one-time World Champion, played a raging, attacking, seemingly bizarre brand of chess. His willingness to sacrifice his pieces for nebulous compensation led to some embarrassing losses but resulted in many fantastic wins when his opponents couldn’t, as Tal put it, see their way out of a forest where 2+2=5.
As an improviser, I admire his courage to randomize a position and put both him and his opponent on the spot. It’s easy to think of his creations as “just games”, but he was a professional player in what was then the Soviet Union. The tournaments to which he was invited and, more to the point, allowed to participate in depended on both his style of play and his results. Of course, it wasn’t until a game was over and the chess world had a chance to analyze his moves that the verdict for a particular sequence was known.
The same consideration is true for improvisers. We don’t know whether what we do is brilliant or not until a scene is over, but we have the luxury of working with a team to make all of our choices brilliant. And that’s why I have such respect for a competitor like Tal, who told this story (paraphrased):
I was in the middle of a tournament game when I began to wonder how one might rescue an elephant stuck in a swamp. Over the next 45 minutes, I imagined a series of pulleys and levers arranged in various configurations but came to no satisfactory conclusion. Then, seeing that I was running low on time, I looked at the board and played the first sacrifice I saw.
The journalist covering the game reported that, “After 45 minutes of thought, Tal unleashed a deep and powerful sacrifice that resulted in a won game.”
We can, and should, look at the mechanics of our work, but we must never dismiss what the audience takes away from a performance. The show exists in their memory as well as ours.
Written by curtisfrye
January 17, 2013 at 5:31 pm
Posted in Creativity, Management, Uncategorized
Tagged with audience, chess, collaboration, competition, cooperation, elephant, game theory, Improspectives, improv, leader, leadership, live performance, management, managing, Mikhail Tal, performance, sacrifice, strategy, swamp, Tal, theater, theatre
Introverts and Crowds
One of the most difficult aspects of being an introvert is finding a way to get ahead in a world dominated by extroverts. The unfortunate truth is that, especially in our early years, we overcompensate.
I was particularly guilty of this type of behavior in high school. I didn’t understand that other, more outgoing students weren’t just being loud and aggressive. Instead, they were simply acting the way their instincts told them to. Social awkwardness and much unintentional hilarity ensued.
I found my way out of this particular trap by joining and staying with a couple of improv groups, one in DC for three years and my second here in Portland for seventeen. I highly recommend improv, or theater in general, as a way to break out of one’s shell and learn how to cooperate with others in the business and in life. Don’t expect immediate results, but it’s like going to the gym — your friends will probably notice the change before you do.
Written by curtisfrye
December 2, 2012 at 4:01 pm
Posted in Introverts, Teamwork, Uncategorized
Tagged with business, business management, collaboration, cooperation, Improspectives, improv, improvisation, introversion, introvert, live performance, management, performance
Improv and Business for Introverts
One of the best-known yet still strangely prevalent misconceptions about comedians is that we’re all extroverts, energized by more or less showing off in front of an audience. Many of us are, but many others are introverts searching for connections from the safety of the stage.
Wait…the safety of the stage? Performing for a crowd is somehow less intimidating and awkward than going to a party? For many people, myself included, it’s true. A show, even a solo act, is a team effort. You have the house staff, the technical crew, and perhaps other performers on your side of the curtain to share the experience with. You are a team of individuals with a stake in making the show successful. Even though they’re not in front of the audience, the crew and house staff benefit from good shows. No one wants audience members to remember they saw a horrible show at the XYZ Theatre – there’s a very real possibility they’d never go back.
Rehearsals, workshops, and pre-show technical checks are all ways for the team to bond and make the performance space their home, at least for a bit. And as anyone who has been on stage can tell you, the “fourth wall” between the audience and performers is real. There is a tangible separation between the stage and the seats. Improv groups and other performers often break the fourth wall and permit direct interaction with the audience, but the distinction between performer and audience member remains. When the performers turn their attention from the audience and to the action on the stage, audience members understand they should return to the role of observors.
Well-functioning business teams provide a similar environment for introverts to work in comfortably, but both improv groups and business teams can be dominated by individuals with forceful, extroverted personalities. The growing cultural emphasis on in-person teamwork and outward expression puts introverts at a severe disadvantage. In-person meetings and brainstorming sessions emphasize immediate participation, not the quiet reflection and careful communication introverts prefer.
I’ll devote the next few posts to introverts and how we interact with the world, starting with a review of a book I hope you find the time to read.
Written by curtisfrye
November 12, 2012 at 1:16 pm
Posted in Introverts, Management, Uncategorized
Tagged with audience, business, business management, collaboration, competition, cooperation, Improspectives, improv, improvisation, introversion, introvert, leader, leadership, listening, live performance, management, managing, performance, strategy, theater, theatre
Improspectives 
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