I walked around my house this morning for what I thought might be the last time.   The forest fire which began here yesterday afternoon had headed in our direction and the civil guard had warned us to be ready to leave.  My wife took the children down to the town and I stayed for a while to close up and as I wandered through the house I was wondering if the next time I was here it would be a charred wreck.  It was a moment for noticing allright - noticing how I felt about all the stuff we have (”just stuff”), what I wanted to take (next to nothing) what I would miss and how I would feel if it all went.  So there was quite a lot of feeling and noticing going on, but the overwhelming feeling was actually one of calm, the tranquility of noticing, for real, not in any imagined sense, that in fact my life does not depend on things but on people and relationships and that should we be forced to start all over again, there would be something liberating about that…..

No smoke without fire

Someone told me the other day (I have a feeling it was Andy Middleton) that the biologist Janine Benyus (whose thing is biomimicry) said that what life does is create the conditions for life itself (maybe it was in her TED talk?).   Yet according to Paul Hawken (and plenty of others) every major living system on the planet is in decline as a result of human activity.  So what exactly are we doing I wonder, and what kind of life are we, that we are creating the conditions where other life is more difficult?

   

A rare outing for that t shirt

Nirankar rocks

Simon, Conrad, Carlos rapt

 

Gary joins in

A few weeks back I threw a party at my home for the book (and my birthday). I felt I should, after all the people who live in Arenas have, knowingly or not, been companions along the way, they have seen (and put up with) my swinging mood, sudden disappearances or constant distractions.

The thing is, that most of them don’t understand (or read) English any too well. Which made the whole thing rather more inventive than it might otherwise have been. Food, music, games and stories were all improvised and the bits of the house that feature in the book bore witness and were pointed out - much to the delighted embarrassment of its creators, who were amongst the very varied crew that turned up to play. There was much to savour, from Fidel’s curried prawns, to the expression on Simon’s face in one of the more sublime moments of musical improvisation conjured out of thin air by Sergio Fulqueris and Nirankar Khalsa - who had only just met. But most of all, what I loved about it was that it seemed so perfectly planned, when in actual fact, very little had been planned at all. Not for the first time I was told “you sure know how to throw a party”. If so, it seems to me that remarkably little is required and that the art is simply to let things happen.

Whilst we were recording a podcast this morning Mark Earls brought to my attention this morning an article in yesterday’s Observer that likens Western Management to centrally planned Soviet style economies. As Simon Caulkin puts in that article: “The truth is that much conventional management is central planning in western disguise. This is why most companies are zombie-like in their structural and strategic similarity. This is why, too, they are unable to learn.”

This reminds me of Igor, the Franciscan Monk/fighter pilot turned ad man (from Vilnius Agency Garage 4×4, now Not Perfect) who referred to himself as ‘homo sovieticus’. The point I make in the chapter named for Igor (”Homo Sovieticus and other control freaks”) is that we are all more addicted to control on this micro scale than we realise, or care to admit - a theme Mark, Johnnie Moore and I explored in our conversation this morning. And there is a great asymmetry here - we like to control others it seems, as long as no-one controls us. Hence the CEO’s who want to be free from any government ‘interference’ but in firm, manly control of all who work for them.

Improvisers, by contrast, set up simple structures that introduce an element of constraint, rather than try to control things. Otherwise they allow themselves a high degree of freedom. Thus they can create a scene which is funny and engaging even whilst obliging themselves to begin each speech with the next letter of the alphabet. And by doing so they demonstrate an exceptional ability to create learning and action for their audience. Improvisers would clearly make ineffectual dictators or “hero CEO’s”. But isn’t that a good thing?

How many words of a second language do you need to know before it becomes useful?   Very few I suspect.  It follows that if, as I suggest in Chapter 15 of ‘Everything’s an Offer’ the improv practise can be regarded as a second language, then you don’t have to become brilliant at it, or even fluent.  As a complement to the dominant way of thinking and acting, even pidgin improv could make quite a difference…..

A couple of days ago, yet another reader (this is the third) admitted, in a rather apologetic way, that my book was in his toilet (or ‘half bathroom’ as you might put it in America). Far from being offended I thought this was wonderful. For ‘Everything’s an Offer’ to have made it into that most intimate of personal spaces seems a very fine thing indeed and nothing to apologise about - unless he meant that he had been flushing it down the toilet….

Funnily enough there was a bit in an early version of the manuscript about toilet reading. It didn’t make the cut but there were some ideas I very much liked.  So in the spirit of ‘using what you have’ here it is:

“A book about improvisation might seem something of an oxymoron. The fluid, dynamic nature of improvisational theatre (on stage or in a workshop) is the very opposite of the long line of words that make up a book. Which is perhaps why so many people’s knee jerk reaction has been to suggest that this book should be highly unconventional. An encounter in a San Francisco bathroom convinced me otherwise.

The bathroom in question was just off Haight and Ashbury, at the house of my friends Mark and Doris. Their bathroom is always stocked with stimulating reading and on one visit I came across a book that seemed to be just the kind of thing that people were telling me this book should be. It was a marvel of design and combined images, text and graphics in an original and inventive way. But it left me completely cold. It looked like a website yet behaved like a book; which to my mind gave it the virtues of neither and the flaws of both; being printed on paper you couldn’t leap instantly from one place to another and being designed like a website, there was no narrative to draw you forward. I left the smallest room in the house with a clear idea that I wanted to write a conventional book, of the kind you now have in your hands - one word after another, forming sentences, paragraphs and chapters and relying primarily on the meaning of the words to engage you, rather than how they are arranged on the page.”

 

A world class violinist plays a 3.5 million dollar violin in the subway and people barely notice (apart from a small child). Which throws into sharp relief the importance of noticing more. It is an example of how our senses are anything but objective, being “tuned” to what we choose to give importance or pay attention to. There are more interpretations out there than facts, even at the level of our senses, even before we begin to abstract. For the full story, click here: Joshua Bell plays the subway

Yesterday, Gary and I were talking to Chad Dick about collaborating with eatbigfish.  Chad is the only person I know who has read the book cover to cover at one sitting (indeed, he may be the only person to ever do so) so I think it is fair to say that he liked it.  And he has a purple one.  Coincidence? I wonder. Maybe the colour of the image on the jacket shapes people’s response to the content in some profound way….

(p.so. At least here on the blog I get to use English spelling!).

I found ‘Everything’s an Offer’ on someone’s bookshelf, alongside Guy Kawasaki (Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition), Paul Ormerod: Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction and Economics, Fareed Zakaria (The Post-American World: “Not a book about the decline of American, but the rise of everyone else.”), Daniel H. Pink: A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age and Ken Robinson: Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative.

Good company to be in. And you’ll notice that my book was top of the list….(how’s that for a status play?)

Yesterday afternoon I had arranged a call with Gary, but it turned out he had double booked himself. He suggested we do it another time and I heard myself say “but I have planned my afternoon around this”. How insolent of the world in general, and Gary in particular not to submit itself to my plans…. Oh dear. Strong evidence that ‘homo sovieticus’ is still alive and kicking in me (you’ll need to read the book to understand this reference!`). Still, it won’t help to beat myself up (i.e. be in judgement), so best to have a good laugh at myself and set about today with a new enthusiasm and respect for practise and a good dose of humility.