Things Will Never Be the Same

Nice little snippet from an old Steve Jobs’ interview that says it all.

What Improv Comedy Can Teach You About Innovation

A couple of years ago, one of our Fishbird leaders spent the summer up in NYC with the Upright Citizens’ Brigade, a well-known improv group that now offers classes on everything from comedy writing to acting. Suffice to say, we heard our fair share of punchlines that year. But we also heard something interesting that’s stayed with us in Fishbird, and throughout our personal lives. The idea of saying yes. In order for improv to succeed, all participants must say yes to everything that comes out of another colleague’s mouth. You have to run with what you’re given and build upon it. For example, if you’re starting off a scene walking down a street, and one of your fellow actors says, “Aren’t you that famous chainsaw juggler?”, you’d kill the energy in the room by saying, “No, I’m not.”

This is a powerful lesson that can be applied to our everyday work.

Conversations are nothing more than movements of energy, positive and negative. When we’re trying to innovate, we’re just like an improv comedy group starting a story. Nothing’s been established. There are no boundaries. No stops. Everything is open game. We can only build our stories into something fun and exciting by allowing them to grow. Yes is integral in this. It pushes the positivity forward and creates new places for the story to go. The best improv actors in the game understand this concept.

And now so do you.

Poster We Quote

It’s been a photo/video posting last couple of weeks. This one’s from our friends at The Imaginary Foundation. It brings up an interesting point about organizations’ unresponsiveness to change in the form of new ideas. This is something we constantly hear about in Fishbird, and it speaks to the learned belief of continuing to do what’s worked in the past in order to achieve incremental, N+1 results in the future.

The thing about old ideas, though, is that they’re only relevant to old conversations. If you’re interested in having a new conversation, you need to forget where your brain has been and throw it into places it doesn’t recognize.

No Fear, No Future

“Fear can not exist because the future does not exist.”

Game for Anything

Our April Fools’ post turned into a weekend-long discussion about the importance of playing life like a game. Looks like we aren’t the only ones with this mindset. Check out the TED Talk above from last year, where Jane McGonigal, in her work with the Institute for the Future, discusses the power of gaming in the real world.

Committing to the Unknown

It’s no surprise that we’ve got plenty of Ironmen, ultra-marathoners and regular old marathoners on the Fishbird team: adventure shares a kindred spirit with our work. And while people often remark that they could never run one of those races, we’re quick to point out that they most certainly can. For the race, the adventure, is the easy part. The hardest thing takes less than a second and comes at the very beginning. Committing to the unknown. The hours. The training. The conditions. The injuries. The emotions.

Simply put, the future.

In the latest issue of Outside magazine, there’s an article that speaks directly to this (funny how that works). We liked it so much we decided to recap it here.

Last September, a group of five unsponsored kayakers — dubbed Team Beer — made a first descent of Peru’s Río Huallaga: a Class V whitewater, 300-mile canyon deep in the Andes with three unscoutable gorge sections and rumors of a 150-foot waterfall. The team waited until the river was at its lowest flow before setting off into the 7,000-foot-deep canyon with nothing but their kayaks, 12 days’ worth of food, 200 feet of climbing rope, and one satellite phone.

The rubber hit the road on the second day of the trip, when the Huallaga crashed through a Class V rapid and entered one of the three unknown gorges. If the river turned unrunnable, the team would have no way to escape.

“The hardest part was committing,” said Matt Wilson, at 33 the leader of Team Beer. But commit they did. The box canyon they dropped into was barely more than ten feet wide, but it was clean and easily navigable. The following two unknown gorges were the same — beautiful and easy.

The 150-foot waterfall never materialized.

By committing to big, unknown futures, we usually find ourselves in beautiful places that aren’t so scary after all.

The Fukushima 50

In the wake of last week’s tragic tsunami across northeastern Japan, we’ve seen an equally proportionate outpouring of thoughts, words, and images from around the world: some hopeful, supportive, and downright creative; some treading in a strange gray area; and others hurtful, close-minded, and toxic.

And yet, through it all, Japan has continued to move forward, showing a resiliency that can perhaps only be understood if you’re standing in the same shoes. We can’t fully imagine the countless acts of unreported fearlessness and bravery that are being required to overcome such a disaster. But a story we caught here gives us a brief glimpse at what it’s taking to get the job done.

On Tuesday, a small crew of fifty workers remained at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, braving radiation and fire in an attempt to keep the station’s reactors from melting down.

“The workers are being asked to make escalating — and perhaps existential — sacrifices that so far are being only implicitly acknowledged: Japan’s Health Ministry said Tuesday it was raising the legal limit on the amount of radiation to which each worker could be exposed, to 250 millisieverts from 100 millisieverts, five times the maximum exposure permitted for American nuclear plant workers.”

Who the Fukushima 50 are has remained a mystery. Tokyo Electric, the power station’s operator, refused to release the names or any other information about the team, including how long a worker is expected to endure exposure. Still, the few details that have slipped out paint a troubled picture: five workers have died, 22 have been injured, and two are missing.

So how do these noble 50 press on?

How do you work when you have no past to rely on?

No experience to go off of?

The answer is simple, though the execution is seldom seen in our world: you work from your imagination, from a perceived future that is bigger than self. We have no doubt that somewhere, deep in the hearts and souls of these 50, there is a picture of a better future for their countrymen that they are moving toward. Fishbird believes in the possibility of bringing this mindset to our everyday work. We can all learn something from The Fukushima 50 about moving beyond fear to become something extraordinary.