August 1998 Was it Something I Said?: A Night at the OR Improv By Vijay Mehrotra For a few years, I've been living a dual life. In the daytime, I'm an entrepreneur, a consultant and an OR/MS analyst all wrapped into one. Each of these roles is demanding in its own way. The stress of juggling characters provides an additional challenge. Several traits have enabled me to become reasonably good at what I do: the ability to (at least occasionally) frame a problem and concentrate on it, the willingness to take chances, the discipline to stay focused on an array of objectives, the desire to persuade/convince other people about the correctness of my point of view (hmmm...that's what this column is about). With my clients and with my peers and on my own, I struggle to bring solutions to problems procedural, mathematical and organizational. But one night a week, I leave this world to study Improvisational Theater. Improv is instant theater, with actors creating a scene in "real time" based solely on the suggestions given to them by audience members. After completing a training program, I have had many opportunities to perform in front of people who have paid good money to be entertained, to laugh, to escape. While I haven't quit my day job (yet), I have developed some solid improv skills. When I started taking improv classes, I assumed that my quick thinking and analytic mind would be a great asset in helping me become a star. When I first watched improv, I imagined every new scene as a game of high-speed Jeopardy ­ an opportunity to display my quick wit and impress people. (It has struck me that this expectation is fairly similar to what people trained in OR experience when they leave university and join the business world.) In learning to perform, however, what I've gotten is sort of a trip to a Zen monastery, a trip that has required me to pause, to simplify and to create from nothing. For example, the fact that you know something about Measure Theory or Stochastic Programming doesn't mean a thing when you're up on stage: it's just you and the other performers in front of the audience, trying to simultaneously devise and deliver a scene that is cohesive, insightful and worth watching (because if you don't, they won't). At its core, improv is a pretty pure creative form. What this means is that as a performer you are very exposed, and that what comes out of the process is sometimes beautiful and sometimes horrendous. What have I learned from Improv that is "relevant" to the professor, the consultant, the programmer and/or the analyst? No Right Answers. In improv, you make it up as you go. Outside of the "initial conditions" of the problem, you are not constrained at all in your scene, which means that the output has a chance to be really interesting. For example, during the early Saturday Night Live years, most sketches emerged not from carefully crafted scripts but rather from scenes improvised on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. We, as a profession, have traditionally taken a narrow view of what we do and don't do. Most of us have a stringent definition of what is and isn't good work, which not only turns off some of our students but leaves those who get off the traditional OR/MS path somewhat bewildered by the breadth of possibilities, without the inclination to deal with them creatively. Solutions, Not Tools. Having spent many, many hours watching Rob Reiner's "This is Spinal Tap," I do a pretty good Cockney accent. When I first started, I used this voice in roughly one out of every three improv pieces. My instructor soon pointed out that this was in almost all cases not contributing to the development of the scene and was actually angering my fellow performers. Sound familiar? We as OR people have a lot of tools to work with, powerful techniques that we are quite proud of. Yet in the business environment, we often pull them out indiscriminately, out of context, and then wonder why our work is not valued or understood. In the academic environment, we are often too quick to applaud a tool for its own elegance without really challenging its potential value as a solution provider. This perhaps has as much to do with the cutbacks in research funding for our profession as the end of the Cold War. Thus, I argue that relevance ­ on stage, in business, in research ­ is, well, relevant. "Clarity of Expression" and "Listen, Listen, Listen." So far, I've told you to be sure that you're relevant in a world where there are no right answers. You have a right to be confused. This stuff is hard. But hear me out. Improv, like most of life, is a cooperative venture. Once a process has started, on stage or on a conference call, you are working toward a goal with others. The individuals and forces that you will contend with are not independent random variables (nor is their behavior distributed the same way as yours). Your commitment, your enthusiasm, your clarity of thought and purpose can all have a major impact on their opinions, their responses, their decisions. In this sense, you are a leader. Similarly, the other players are expressing their own ideas and desires to you. It is crucial to listen to them (easier if they express themselves clearly). Good listening helps you to resolve uncertainties and to incorporate assumptions and concepts into an evolving view of what's going on, which enables you to see what you can contribute that's relevant. In this sense, you are a follower. Multiple roles, multiple goals. This is where we came in. I don't expect all of you to start investing your free time learning how to create and conduct scenes based on random suggestions (if interested, let me know and we'll get you enrolled in a good beginning course). Just trust me, and yourself, enough to bring these things into your day-to-day professional lives. Interesting things could happen. Vijay Mehrotra is the CEO of Onward, an operations management consulting firm in MountainView, Calif. He holds a Ph.D. in operations research from Stanford University and can be reached via e-mail at vijay@onward-net.com Vijay Mehrotra is the CEO of Onward, an operations management consulting firm in MountainView, Calif. He holds a Ph.D. in operations research from Stanford University and can be reached via e-mail at vijay@onward-net.com Table of Contents OR/MS Today Home Page OR/MS Today copyright © 1998 by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. All rights reserved. Lionheart Publishing, Inc. 506 Roswell Street, Suite 220, Marietta, GA 30060, USA Phone: 770-431-0867 | Fax: 770-432-6969 E-mail: lpi@lionhrtpub.com URL: http://www.lionhrtpub.com Web Site © Copyright 1998 by Lionheart Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.