Now consider the various roles you must take on at work. Like Linda, before you can act, you must determine which form of theatre it makes sense to perform given a certain time, situation, and audience. Figure 7-1 diagrams each of the four forms of theatre—improv, platform, matching, and street—drawing from the point made by Richard Schechner in his model of enactment (figure 6-2) that theatre is bound on the inside by script and on the outside by performance. The extent to which the performance and the script each change—whether they are dynamic (constantly changing) or stable (changing little)—for each audience determines how the actor must act. Each of these four forms of theatre thus represents a different way of performing work, a different approach to plotting a sequence of events to generate economic output. It is the nature of the offering and the circumstances in which a company engages its customers—or any actor engages his fellow workers—that determine which of the four to use.
Figure 7-1: Four forms of theatre
Improv Theatre
Improvisation involves imagination, creativity, and new-to-the-world performances. Improv theatre provides a spontaneous, liberating, and unpredictable mode of work based on finding value from something new: creating, inventing, moving laterally or even impulsively from one idea to another, or simply ad-libbing. The dynamic movement of improv theatre, however, does not entail only simple acts of free association or aimless mental wandering, void of any structure or routine. Quite the opposite: improv requires systematic and deliberate methods of originating creative ideas, fresh expressions, and new ways of addressing old problems. The script, while rarely written down (or codified) except in very broad terms, emerges from the improvisation.
In improv, those who stage the performance anticipate mistakes, even going so far as to cause situations to “go wrong” just to see what happens. This occurs even in the course of the actors' performing other forms of work, by responding to mistakes—improvising—as errors surface unexpectedly. In any situation, improv involves a certain set of learned skills (meaning they can be taught), as well as various tools and techniques that take seemingly unrelated notions and combine them in unusual ways to make previously unarticulated discoveries. The methods of improv theatre fill courses and handbooks and include speaking in gibberish, gesturing in pantomime, interacting with random props, and wearing masks. Each technique relies on deliberate stimuli to force a changed perspective, a different set of possibilities, or an alternative approach, all aimed at facilitating the improvisational flow of new ideas for taking action.
These techniques date at least as far back as the sixteenth- century Italian commedia dell'arte. This outdoor theatre drew on stock characters who employed broad physical gestures and who always wore distinctive masks and simple but instantly recognizable costumes. The names of these four-hundred-year-old characters remain familiar even today: Pantalone, Columbina, Il Capitano, Scaramouche, Arlecchino (from which we get the English Harlequin), Pulcinella (who became the puppet Punch), Zanni (from whom we derive the word zany), and so forth. Each play would be staged not from written dialog but from a scenario, which means, as John Rudin writes, “literally ‘that which is on the scenery,’ i.e. pinned up backstage. All it consists of is a plot summary, the bare bones of who does what when.”3 All of the dialog and much of the action would then be improvised, given the nature of each called-upon character, from this base scenario in the wings.
If you're “winging it,” you're doing improv. And whenever anyone assumes the role of a particular stock character with no preparation or rehearsal, such as that of car salesman and sales manager taking on “good cop/bad cop” roles with a prospect, that person draws from the tradition of the commedia dell'arte. Performers may also draw upon such improvisational characters in more complex selling situations. Suppose a four-person, cross-functional team from a travel agency—we'll call them Bob, Carol, Ted, and Alice—gets together to sell a company on outsourcing its travel operations. With little time to prepare, they quickly settle on the three distinguishing characteristics of the offer they believe will win the business: cost containment, quality service, and improvement in employee morale. In addition to their functional roles of, say, sales, agency operations, finance, and human resources (respectively), each team member chooses a particular stock character to create an impromptu cast for the sales call, and they quickly work out the proper scenario. Bob plays Glad-Hander, throwing smiles, filling coffee cups, and freely complimenting everyone's remarks. Ted unreservedly assumes the role of Penny-Pincher. He economizes his words, cuts off tangential conversations, and constantly pushes to keep the meeting on track. Meanwhile, Carol and Alice play Sports Analyst 1 and Sports Analyst 2 in a routine not unlike that of Mike and Mike in the Morning (two sports analysts who host a show broadcast on radio, TV, and the Internet), in which the two women debate various alternatives that will make the outsourcing proposal work. This improvisational selling performance expresses the company's proposed economic value in an engaging manner.
Companies can also use improv theatre whenever they must create wholly new offerings for customers, as do research and development groups, architects, and graphic designers, or when they must handle the new, unforeseen situations that come up in all lines of work. This form of theatre applies not only to what people do but also to how they think. The techniques of creative-thinking guru Edward de Bono, for example, provide improvisational exercises for the mind to stimulate new ideas.4 A definite structure lies behind de Bono's methods to focus, provoke, move to, shape, and harvest ideas. His techniques provoke active mental operations that structure one's cognitive improv work by setting up provocations and then stone-stepping from one notion to another. In one exercise, de Bono recommends the use of random words to stimulate new ideas about predefined areas in need of new thinking. Do you need new ideas for refreshing a marketing program? Then draw words at random from whatever source is handy: a dictionary, a newspaper, even a children's book. Let's see: what principle can we extract from … a turtle? (“Well, a turtle's head pops out of its shell. Maybe our ad campaign is a shell—only in the final ad in a series does the message ‘pop out.’”) Or how can we compare it to a … tricycle? (“An adult riding a tricycle would look contorted. The sacrifices customers endure with our competition make them look similarly contorted, whereas our mass customized product provides a ‘perfect fit.’ Now sell that!”)
The emergence of the Experience Economy coincides with, albeit not coincidentally, heightened interest in creative thinking. It also introduces a real need for greater improvisational skills in the workplace, especially for work performed in new venues.5 One example: Home Shopping Network, where sales associates employ a host of techniques drawn from improv theatre. They make sharp, sure entrances and exits. They emphasize visual props. And they play off other members of the selling team (or, in improv terms, what might be better described as a retail selling troupe). Note, too, the important use of voice training: learning to select pitch, adjust volume, alternate tempo, change emphasis, and establish rhythm, all often taught in improv classes. Why is it that HSN sales reps give such good performances? It's because they know there's an audience out there. Workers in all sorts of other situations demanding greater improv skills must come to the same realization.
Today these skills are often required from workers who interact over the phone. Here we can learn much from radio, which once was prominent in the theatrical landscape. Prior to the popularity of television in the years following World War II, the countless audience members huddled around radio receivers only heard actors performing in their favorite shows, and yet the performances captivated their imaginations. Even today, at the peak of television viewing, radio provides a stage for performing. Witness the popular shows hosted by Jim Rome, Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, and the many local “zoo crews” who create and cast engrossing characters for their listening audience. In these radio performances, the performers must rely on improv skills to do their work, at no time more so than
when hosts field calls from listeners. One may question the politics or caliber of these performances or simply dislike the shock jock mentality, but one cannot dispute the fact that these broadcasters perform acts of improv theatre. In fact, improv is their job!
So it is for those who use the telephone for a living: a phone line is empty space waiting to become a bare stage. How much more engaging might call center representatives be if they conducted their phone conversations as if they were performing improv? Take the worst type of live phone call—not the 900 numbers or even the psychic hot lines advertised on late night infomercials (these hired “psychics” surely understand that their work is theatre), but the telemarketing call. Does any other type of phone call come off more poorly? Could any other call benefit more from improv techniques? A telemarketer's script is intended to help the worker make more calls, but how often does a call truly engage the potential customer? Prospects tire of the telemarketer's prepared remarks and often hang up—an understandable response, since the prospect's answers have little or no impact on what question comes next. A telemarketing paradigm based on improv theatre would stand a real chance of drawing potential customers into stimulating conversations, because the customer's remarks would prompt innovative responses to unique needs. Requests for repeat performances would replace abrupt hang-ups.
Platform Theatre
The form of theatre that immediately comes to mind when most people think of the term is platform theatre. Its name harks back to the classical stage, where actors performed on a platform raised above the audience. The performance was further separated from the audience by a proscenium arch (a picture-frame opening, often covered by a drawn curtain between acts).6 The actors in platform theatre work from a formal script of lines known as a playscript.7 In business, playscripts exist in the form of drafted speeches, lines of programming code, or standard procedural instructions—anything, including a factory's production processes, that codifies work to generate value from something done. Platform work, linear and fixed, flows sequentially and so allows for little variation from the planned steps or prepared script. Platform performers seek to stabilize everything, through rehearsals, and then duplicate that one best way of working over and over again. No matter which performance one sees—be it a musical or product assembly—the lines delivered will be the same.
This stability is often a good thing, whether found in hard-coded routines set by cubicles of computer programmers or set talks to board members, investors, vendors, and employees meticulously developed and delivered by senior executives. For this reason, methodologies abound to help businesses develop information technology solutions and stabilize processes, and swarms of trainers (many with performing arts backgrounds) exist to coach presenters on their speeches. This assistance primarily addresses the delivery of lines. A mechanical reading of written words does not constitute good platform theatre; in fact, it can't even pass for bad acting! The Wall Street Journal reports that many chief financial officers take acting lessons to prepare for quarterly discussions with financial analysts, a situation in which improvising could land the company in financial hot water.8
In platform theatre, the actors must rehearse their lines, whether they intend to memorize them or read from cue cards or a teleprompter. They must internalize the lines until the script becomes second nature. When an actor knows his lines—really knows them—he doesn't merely recite them but brings them to life through intention.
There is a danger in relying too much on platform theatre. Too many companies, particularly mass producers, command their workers to follow standard scripts, having them do and say the same things repeatedly, in a vain attempt to gain efficiencies. (That's why telemarketers give the term scripting a bad name—they use platform scripts in an arena calling for improv or street theatre scripts.) The most bureaucratic organizations—think of the Department of Motor Vehicles or, to only a slightly lesser extent, airline service counters—create rules that workers must always follow, no matter what response the customer truly requires. But platform theatre can be the right form when workers perform standard activities in front of customers but do not directly interact with them. It may be the theatre of choice, for example, for the fast-food workers at the counter, for the technicians behind the glass at a one-hour eyeglass retailer, the maintenance workers fixing a bare stage, the flight attendants reciting FAA-scripted safety warnings, and anyone giving a keynote presentation.
Platform skills also befit people who follow a set script on audio or visual recordings, such as the pronouncements of every voice response unit or voice mail system. Consider the billion-dollar audiobook industry. While the audio book format as we know it is only a few decades old, major publishing houses and dozens of smaller firms now release hundreds of titles per year. Book publishers now call the William Morris Agency to schedule labor from a pool of trained voices! The industry often employs actors from Broadway and Hollywood to record audio versions of best sellers and specialty books. Rick Harris, executive producer of Harper Audio, relates, “Musical comedy actors do well at this because they know how to inflect, to color, to phrase.” The better reader, says Jenny Frost, president and publisher of Bantam Doubleday Dell's audio division, “really works hard on the scripts before going into the studio.”9 Other recordings in need of good speaking voices and great script reading include talking toys, hosted chat rooms on the Internet, video games, and training materials.
Annual meetings, investor relations get-togethers, and trade shows provide other venues for platform theatre, which is often staged by such outside companies as Populous, George P. Johnson, The Jack Morton Company, or dick clark productions. The latter, founded by Dick Clark of American Bandstand fame, charges $150,000 to $10 million to stage such platform events. “All these shows had the same format: a speech, a financial presentation with some graphics, then you'd end up with the chairman,” Clark relates. “I figured I could use what I knew from television: Get the audience in, entertain them, then get the corporate message across.”10 The work involves adapting a standard script and then producing the platform event according to that set script.
Matching Theatre
Matching theatre, exemplified by film and television, requires the integration of work outcomes from one disconnected time frame to another. The end product results from piecing together distinct portions of work, performed at different times and often in different places, into a unified whole. The producers of matching theatre must concern themselves not only with the quantity of material lying on the cutting room floor but also with the alignment of all those pieces, the way they should be linked to complete the entire performance. People in show business rarely use the term matching to describe their work, generally referring to it simply as “film” or as “jump-cut” theatre, in recognition of the need to jump between various takes and scenes and then cut and splice them together.11 As V. I. Pudovkin, the great Russian director of silent films in the 1920s and 1930s, put it, “the foundation of film art is editing.”12 Whenever companies integrate the outcomes of work across many disparate business performances, they, too, perform matching theatre.
Have you ever seen a movie or TV show in which (1) a character appears on screen, (2) the picture jump-cuts to another character, and then (3) the picture returns to the first character, whose position, pose, expression, temperament, or even outfit doesn't match that of the first shot? Then you've seen a poor performance of matching theatre. Not only does this fail to engage an audience, it all too often disengages them by focusing on how (poorly) the work was performed. The same potential for mismatching exists in many business processes, particularly when mass producers partition work into functional silos—vertical slices of activities that often do not quite fit together. Companies that embrace Continuous Improvement (or Lean Production) business models solve this problem by focusing horizontally, via matching theatre, on linking work activities into one seamless process.
While directors of matching theatre, as in p
latform theatre, generally start with a fully written script, it is the rare production in which the process of filming does not change the script, often significantly. Actually, such changes always occur. Why? It's because the actual filming reveals the flaws in a script, just as the actual production of any economic offering—commodity, good, service, or experience—reveals flaws in the codified processes followed to create it. So scripts in matching theatre are always dynamic, sometimes via wholesale corrections and revisions and at other times through real-time adjustments. (Script changes occur in platform theatre as well, but only during the development process, before production begins. As in Mass Production, workers are not allowed to make script changes on the fly.) And as in Continuous Improvement, all parties involved focus on the highest-quality outcome by getting better and better at their work activities, generating value from something improved.
Workers should thus employ matching theatre whenever they strive to improve the quality of the same basic outcomes. “Workers” includes marketing managers (as opposed to the advertising agencies they hire, who should use improv techniques to generate new campaigns), counter personnel at fast-food restaurants (as opposed to those in the kitchen, where platform theatre may be most appropriate), and retail shelf stockers (as opposed to sales associates, who should use street performance skills). Not to mention flight attendants greeting and sending off passengers and repeating the same salutations over and over, without conviction.
At a higher level, companies should embrace the techniques of matching theatre whenever the same customers interact with that company—often with the same workers—over and over again. Here, work must be matched across time. Consider a sales representative calling on the same customer on a periodic basis. What occurs during a visit should match the impressions left during the previous visit as well as match episodes to be performed in future visits. If, for example, sales reps want to give prospects the impression that they are professional, qualified, knowledgeable, and helpful, then every visit must reinforce at least one—preferably all—of these impressions, while no visit should contradict them.
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