Posts Tagged ‘management’
Chicken in Business
In my previous post, I discussed the game of Chicken, where two kids in denim jackets and James Dean haircuts get into cars and drive toward each other at high speed. The first one to swerve loses, but there’s a real possibility neither one will blink and both will be hurt. If you’re an improviser, it often pays to be the one who blinks. Yes, you go with someone else’s ideas instead of your own, but the scene and show will be better for it.
In business, one of the most common ways to play Chicken is what’s called Schedule Chicken. In Schedule Chicken, managers face off against each other in a meeting room and none of them is willing to admit that they will not meet whatever obviously unrealistic deadline has been placed in front of them. Because they agreed to that schedule at the start of the project, whoever blinks will be blamed for causing the project to slip if they have to ask for more time.
Unrealistic schedules are deadly. In her Harvard Business Review article “How to Kill Creativity”, Teresa M. Amibile notes:
Organizations routinely kill creativity with fake deadlines or impossibly tight ones. The former create distrust and the latter cause burnout.
In business, it can be tough to say that you have no chance of meeting a schedule, regardless of how optimistic it might be. If the other managers or workers on a team say that they can make their deadlines with no problem, it means that you are the one causing the slip. Of course, it might be complete fiction that the other teams could have been ready in time, but if you’re the first one to admit that you won’t make it, you’re the one who gets the blame.
How you solve the game of Schedule Chicken depends on your corporate culture. Companies that follow a philosophy of not shipping until something is ready can reduce the possibility of Schedule Chicken, especially if they don’t set final deadlines until the project is well underway. For multiyear efforts, final deadlines and announcements should be kept out of the press as long as possible. Companies that use agile development and roll out small updates frequently avoid Schedule Chicken by shipping when the update is ready and not announcing times until the next increment is ready to go.
Improv and Limitations
This post continues my brief series on how you can learn about improv and business from non-improvisers. I’m drawing this set of examples from 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School, by Matthew Frederick.
Frederick points out that limitations encourage creativity. Some improvisers, particularly younger ones, want to perform with either no or minimal constraints on their creation. For them, true improvisation isn’t constrained by suggestions or game rules. Instead, they might not even get a suggestion before starting…something… based on whatever comes to mind. This type of production can work, but the process relegates the audience to the role of passive observers. As I’ve said several times before: if audience members expect to see improvised theatre but have no chance to affect the performance, how do they know what they’re seeing is truly improvised?
Like architects who work within the constraints of space, physics, budget, and client desires, improvisers should strongly consider ceding more control to their audience. Stepping out of the constraints imposed by high school and college instructors and spreading one’s wings feels wonderful to the performer, but it’s not as satisfying for audience members who expect to participate in the process. Rehearsals, workshops, and performances for other improvisers present wonderful opportunities to work from scratch and indulge. Paying audiences deserve the chance to play their role, too.
When Not to Improvise
One of my go-to statements about improv is:
Improvisation is like car racing. It’s only a good idea if everyone is doing it and you’re all going in the same direction.
We as improvisers should remember that assuming others will adapt to us can greatly complicate our business relationships. As a case in point, I just finished recording a course for lynda.com. I record most of my courses from home, so I’m teamed with a producer assigned to remote authors. I’d deviated from the original table of contents, but hadn’t updated the Excel worksheet for my producer. What I assumed would happen is that he’d see that my recordings didn’t match the original structure, change the file himself, and fill in his notes.
What went wrong? His workflow is to review the files when I’m done recording, which means he’s not adapting as I go. As soon as his notes didn’t match with the original TOC, he had to come to me to find out what had changed. I submitted the accurate TOC based on my actual recordings, but now he has to go back through his work, determine which notes apply to which movie, and update his the spreadsheet for the video editors.
If I’d taken a few seconds to update the TOC worksheet as I moved along, I’d have saved my producer an hour of tedious, detailed work reconfiguring his notes. Sorry, Ian.
Improspectives 