doing things that might not work, might be what works best
Transcript of this video:
I was hosting something here the other day with my friend Alison Wood and we had 15 minutes left of our morning session and we were trying to think of something to do and we were thinking, well, should we end it early and have an early lunch? Should we do a go round? And then I said, well, maybe we could play a game.
Alison said, what game? And we had this kind of conversation, to ing and fro ing, about games we could play and I said, We could do dolphin training, and she said, Oh, yeah, but they won’t like that name. And I said, Oh, well, we could use its other name. The other name for this activity is Magic Music. And she remembered that game, and then we thought, Well, who would we get to go out of the room for this game?
It’s one of those sorts of games, and I suggested maybe she would do it, and she wondered whether she should. And somewhere in this conversation, I said, It might not work. And then half a beat later, I said, As I often do, Ah, all the more reason to do it. So after this debate we took a risk and played this game and it worked It actually worked brilliantly as things often do when you take that kind of risk And I was thinking of this and a lovely quotation by the brilliant improv guru Viola Spolin who said something like, creativity is not the clever rearranging of the known now If you’re into AI The clever rearranging of the known might strike you as potentially quite a creative thing.
I don’t think it’s what Viola had in mind. I think what she was pointing to and what my story was about is actually the most joyful form of creativity I think only happens when you do take a risk. When you do something leaning into the uncertainty. And the other thing Viola Spolin said that I think connects to this she said something like, perhaps what we call talent is simply a greater capacity for experience.
Which is, I think, a rather lovely and slightly deeper thought. And I think it points to what we, flesh and blood humans, can do that I don’t think AI will be able to do, because AI is disembodied. It can’t have a visceral experience. It can’t actually have the experience of, for example, feeling a little bit anxious and then going with, if you like, the choice of deciding to treat it as exciting, which is what we did on that occasion.
In case you’re wondering what this game Magic Music is, it’s a wonderful game I learned from fabulous Gary Schwartz. One person is sent out of the room, out of earshot. Everyone in the room then decides three physical actions they’re going to ask that person to perform when they come back in. In this case it was to get Alison to walk to a person, pick up her, walking stick Then go to the middle of the room, lie on the floor, on her back, and then stand up and do a star jump.
But when they come back in, the only way we can signal to them what we want them to do is to sing a song, I think we sang Happy Birthday, loud if we think they’re heading in the right direction, and softly, or not at all if they’re going in the wrong one. It’s a bit like warmer, colder. And it’s the only signalling you’re allowed to do.
And, if you think that sounds impossible, that is basically what everybody thinks when we set this activity up. And, surprisingly, most times they do get there, sometimes with a little bit of agonizing. And Alison did it in about six minutes. And the whoop of satisfaction was out of all proportion to the significance of the event in world history.
But I think these games illustrate something about some very deep need we as humans have, for experiencing a bit of uncertainty and being open to a bit of surprise.
Photo by Bianca Ackermann on Unsplash
