Can A Question Trump A Script?
Don’t Prepare. Just Show Up. Improv Wisdom by Patricia Ryan Madson
A confession: it’s hard for me to break free from notes when speaking.
Maybe notes are a crutch. But I think there is more to it. I spend my days writing so I have an affection and affinity for words on pages. And this: there is specificity to writing that is not quite so available for speaking. It’s a specificity that allows me to work an idea and move the parts around even as I deliver that idea to my audience.
Speaking does not allow that.
Or so I thought.
Patricia Ryan Madson’s Improv Wisdom is helping me see things differently. This well-written, easily digestible book (NY: Bell Tower, 2005) is full of all manner of notes about how to move off the page. In particular I’m struck by how Ms. Madson deftly turned scripted notes into an opportunity for spontaneity. 
Check out the photo below, where she reformats scripted remarks into a series of prompts—questions—that result in something alive and conversational versus the usual bad voice-over quality that comes from reading a script.
The result of her work and approach is spot on with all we’re trying to do at Conversation is an Engine: live out loud with each other, mistakes and passions all available to each other as we show up. Day after day.
Here’s Ms. Madson speaking at Google (Authors@Google) on her notion of just showing up. I cannot help but notice that she put lots and lots of time preparing before she just showed up. Plus: I am completely taken with Ms. Madson’s willingness to make mistakes in public.
Patricia Ryan Madson may be my new aural hero.
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When will Your Mission become Mutiny?
Look Boss: It is Written
One of my favorite bosses, when privately presented with a wallet-sized card imprinted with the corporate mission and asked what he thought of it, pretended to use it to wipe his derriere.
Was my boss in open rebellion?
Not in the least.
My boss was responding to a ridiculous communication tool. At that point in the history of that particular medical device company, it was all mission and everyone knew it. Patients and physicians were front and center and no one needed reminding. We were all directly involved in the mission and to think otherwise was to dismiss the conscious and vocal choices people made to work there.
Then again, perhaps the communication tool was a bit prophetic. It wouldn’t be long before many in the firm started taking their eyes off the mission to focus instead on quarterly profit goals to the exclusion of patients, physicians and common sense. These things happen when big bonuses are at stake.
But it need not be that way and you may well be the one to say so.
Unless you simply wanted a job and any job would do, you likely joined your firm because of mission. You found yourself in some level of agreement with the firm’s vision and wanted to help move this thing forward. For many of us, the mission is a motivating and ennobling force, even if we may not think of it constantly.
We know that even the best-intentioned organizations stray from their intended goals and go rogue with evil intent. This happens at high and public levels. It also happens at day-to-day levels, in quick decisions and in small furtive meetings among colleagues. For-profit companies do it. Non-profits do it. Churches do it. Hobby clubs are also capable of it.
That’s when any of us needs to come back to the mission and openly ask whether this quick decision or that furtive meeting is accomplishing our shared mission. Sometimes our best and smartest move is to reprise the mission openly, verbally and with gusto. We all need reminding of our purpose and mission from time to time.
If you care about your organization’s mission, you may need to lead a mutiny today. You’ll want to count the cost, of course, because mutiny can be very expensive.
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Darling, let us now speak of love (Jacques Derrida)
Or shall we speak of death?
Allow Mr. Derrida to dampen any small flicker of emotion you may still retain.
Oh, philosophers: You romantic…bunch.
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via Biblioklept
Is blogging bad for writing?
Thoughtful reflection from bottledworder on how blogging helps develop good writing, and perhaps where it does not.
Do you want to become a good writer? Keep writing! Practice makes perfect.
Or does it?
Keep writing is usually the advice new writers are given to help them launch a journey onto the uncharted waters of how to write well, a practice that doesn’t usually have any proven rules of success although there’s plenty of advice going around.
I realized that as in every good thing in life, blogging too comes with its own share of pitfalls. Where there is opportunity for improvement in writing, there is also a need for tremendous caution.
Some of the pitfalls might not be that obvious in the first few months when the novelty of producing writing every week obscures many a nuance of habits picked up, where the unsuspecting traveler of the blogosphere might encounter a dangerous writer’s sinkhole.
Writing becomes work. A hobby becomes a job.
Most experienced bloggers recommend…
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