Posts Tagged ‘theatre’
Improv and Gamification: Structure
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
Werbach and Hunter use the structure element to ask: “Can the desired behaviors be modeled through a set of algorithms?” For San Francisco firm Keas, structure comes in the form of challenges participants undergo during the workday to improve their wellness, Microsoft gamified identifying translation errors in Windows 7 dialog boxes, and airlines provide better service as you accumulate more miles.
Measuring results in improv is a less exact process, but ComedySportz gets around the problem by having the audience vote to see which team gets the points for a pair of competing games. The idea that the show is a competition, where the players try to win but don’t care if they lose, provides a hook that makes the experience more than simple entertainment.
For businesses, organizational performance is often based on revenue, market share, and similar targets identified by the executive team. Individual employee performance is measured versus criteria set for each employee, but how do you provide an overall structure for a project, department, or division? Chip manufacturer Intel uses a Plan of Record, or POR, to identify goals and, in some cases, methodologies at all levels of the enterprise. That which adhereth to the POR is blessed; that which doth not is condemned.
Developing a structure to measure performance can be difficult, especially when applied to creative workers. Don’t feel compelled to gamify a process — the best gamification structure might be none at all.
Improv and Gamification: Introduction
You can divide improvisation into two rough categories: short-form and long-form. Short-form improvisation consists of games (also called “scenes” or “forms”) that last about 3-8 minutes and, generally, have specific guidelines to which the players should adhere. Many organizations, including ComedySportz and Theatresports (from which ComedySportz was derived, with the permission of Keith Johnstone), use team-on-team competition to enhance the audience’s experience. Winning a round gets a team points, which are compared on a scoreboard, and provide a clear metric for the state of the show.
Gamification, the practice of applying game elements to business and social activities, has become increasingly popular. Kevin Werbach of Penn’s Wharton School and Dan Hunter of New York Law School (and adjunct faculty at Wharton), two leading gamification proponents, wrote For the Win, a book that’s available inexpensively on Amazon through Wharton Digital Press. In their book, they describe how companies have gamified internal processes and customer/product interactions to add fun to what might otherwise be boring situations. If you’ve ever become mayor of a business by checking in on FourSquare, you’ve been gamified.
Werbach and Hunter go into significant detail on how gamification works, but I’ll focus on four points (mentioned on p. 44 of the book) over the next few posts. They are:
- Motivation
- Meaningful choices
- Structure
- Potential conflicts
I’ll tackle each point from the perspective of an improviser who also spends time in the business world.
If you’d like to learn more about gamification, you can take Werbach’s Gamification course on Coursera.org. The next section of the course starts on April 1, 2013, but he offered it in the Fall of 2012 and, with luck, it will be available again for readers who learn about the course after the current session ends.
Managing Post-Project Doldrums
We’ve all fought our way through huge projects and felt the satisfaction of releasing a product to market or finishing the run of a show. The feeling of relief that washes over you is amazing…you see everything you worked for come to fruition and hope your audience appreciates it.
With that relief comes relaxation and, on many occasions, a sense of being adrift, without immediate purpose. Some companies help you “manage” your feelings by throwing you right onto another project, but freelancers are always in search of their next gig. It’s hard to turn down work, but it’s also hard to manage your energy and emotions after a big project concludes. This concern is especially true if you’ve already started a new assignment and have to work while you’re dealing with the end of the previous one.
I’ve found the following techniques help me deal with the end of project blues:
- Thank your colleagues for the work they’ve done. Very few projects are solo efforts, so you should make the time to acknowledge others’ contributions. It’s hard to throw a party for a virtual team, but emails and phone calls serve the same purpose for information workers.
- Walk away, even if just for a day. I have a hard time with this one. Because I work from home, I can work any time I want and for as long as I want. When I need to decompress, my wife and I like to disappear to Vancouver, BC for a couple of days. Yes, I take my laptop or (now) Surface device with me, but I strictly limit checking email to twice per day.
- Spend time with friends. I’m lucky to have been part of ComedySportz Portland for 17 years. I’m an employee of the company, as are all of our players, but I’ve become close friends with many members of the group. For me, getting on stage and performing is often the therapy I need to attack a new project.
- Sleep.
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.
“Yes…and” isn’t always your friend in business
Improvisers are trained to accept other players’ offers so scenes can move forward. In fact, it’s nearly impossible for an improvised performance to succeed unless the actors say “yes” to others’ contributions “and” extend or heighten those offers.
In negotiations of all types, and especially in a business context, part of the battle for victory hinges on establishing the reality you’re discussing. As a writer, I have to place a value on my services and the benefits they bring to my clients. A potential client who’s interested in getting the best service at the lowest possible price could point out that they are a new company acquiring lots of content, so they aren’t in a position to pay me what I think I deserve. The “Yes…and” approach pushes me to accept what they’ve said as truth and take the contract as offered. The problem is that I’m not in a scene meant to entertain an audience — I’m in a negotiation over whether I get paid what I deserve. Many factors influence the decision, such as whether I’m bored or need the work, but in the end I have to live with the consequences of my choice. Accepting less than I’m worth drives down my value and, worse, my self-perceived value. Unless the situation is dire, you shouldn’t bend to the version of reality they’ve put forth.
You should also watch out for internal battles at a company, even one where you’ve worked for a while and established a trusting relationship with your colleagues. Your co-workers might misunderstand a situation or, if you’re competing for a promotion or assignment, want to influence how a situation is perceived. “Yes…and” can be a weakness others exploit. It’s tough to maintain a proper balance between acceptance and skepticism, but it’s worth the effort to try.
Improspectives 
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