Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

group of eight people up on a stage without a net, creating a play before our eyes.

Improvisation comedy is a wonderful example of the kind of thinking that Blink is about. It involves people making very sophisticated decisions on the spur of the moment, without the benefit of any kind of script or plot. That’s what makes it so compelling and—to be frank—terrifying. If I were to ask you to perform in a play that I’d written, before a live audience with a month of rehearsal, I suspect that most of you would say no. What if you got stage fright? What if you forgot your lines? What if the audience booed? But at least a conventional play has structure. Every word and movement has been scripted. Every performer gets to rehearse. There’s a director in charge, telling everyone what to do. Now suppose that I were to ask you to perform again before a live audience—only this time without a script, without any clue as to what part you were playing or what you were supposed to say, and with the added requirement that you were expected to be funny. I’m quite sure you’d rather walk on hot coals. What is terrifying about improv is the fact that it appears utterly random and chaotic. It seems as though you have to get up onstage and make everything up, right there on the spot.

But the truth is that improv isn’t random and chaotic at all. If you were to sit down with the cast of Mother, for instance, and talk to them at length, you’d quickly find out that they aren’t all the sort of zany, impulsive, free- spirited comedians that you might imagine them to be. Some are quite serious, even nerdy. Every week they get together for a lengthy rehearsal. After each show they gather backstage and critique each other’s performance soberly. Why do they practice so much? Because improv is an art form governed by a series of rules, and they want to make sure that when they’re up onstage, everyone abides by those rules. “We think of what we’re doing as a lot like basketball,” one of the Mother players said, and that’s an apt analogy. Basketball is an intricate, high- speed game filled with split-second, spontaneous decisions. But that spontaneity is possible only when everyone first engages in hours of highly repetitive and structured practice—perfecting their shooting, dribbling, and passing and running plays over and over again—and agrees to play a carefully defined role on the court. This is the critical lesson of improv, too, and it is also a key to understanding the puzzle of Millennium Challenge: spontaneity isn’t random. Paul Van Riper’s Red Team did not come out on top in that moment in the Gulf because they were smarter or luckier at that moment than their counterparts over at Blue Team. How good people’s decisions are under the fast-moving, high-stress conditions of rapid cognition is a function of training and rules and rehearsal.

One of the most important of the rules that make improv possible, for example, is the idea of agreement, the notion that a very simple way to create a story—or humor—is to have characters accept everything that happens to them. As Keith Johnstone, one of the founders of improv theater, writes: “If you’ll stop reading for a moment and think of something you wouldn’t want to happen to you, or to someone you love, then you’ll have thought of something worth staging or filming. We don’t want to walk into a restaurant and be hit in the face by a custard pie, and we don’t want to suddenly glimpse Granny’s wheelchair racing towards the edge of a cliff, but we’ll pay money to attend enactments of such events. In life, most of us are highly skilled at suppressing action. All the improvisation teacher has to do is to reverse this skill and he creates very ‘gifted’ improvisers. Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action.”

Here, for instance, is an improvised exchange between two actors in a class that Johnstone was teaching:

A: I’m having trouble with my leg.

B: I’m afraid I’ll have to amputate.

A: You can’t do that, Doctor.

B: Why not?

A: Because I’m rather attached to it.

B: (Losing heart) Come on, man.

A: I’ve got this growth on my arm too, Doctor.

The two actors involved in this scene quickly became very frustrated. They couldn’t keep the scene going. Actor A had made a joke—and a rather clever one (“I’m rather attached to it”)—but the scene itself wasn’t funny. So Johnstone stopped them and pointed out the problem. Actor A had violated the rule of agreement. His partner had made a suggestion, and he had turned it down. He had said, “You can’t do that, Doctor.” So the two started again, only this time with a renewed commitment to agreeing:

A: Augh!

B: Whatever is it, man?

A: It’s my leg, Doctor.

B: This looks nasty. I shall have to amputate.

A: It’s the one you amputated last time, Doctor.

B: You mean you’ve got a pain in your wooden leg?

A: Yes, Doctor.

B: You know what this means?

A: Not woodworm, Doctor!

B: Yes. We’ll have to remove it before it spreads to the rest of you.

(A’s chair collapses.)

B: My God! It’s spreading to the furniture!

Here are the same two people, with the same level of skill, playing exactly the same roles, and beginning almost exactly the same way. However, in the first case, the scene comes to a premature end, and in the second case, the scene is full of possibility. By following a simple rule, A and B became funny. “Good improvisers seem telepathic; everything looks pre-arranged,” Johnstone writes. “This is because they accept all offers made—which is something no ‘normal’ person would do.”

Here’s one more example, from a workshop conducted by Del Close, another of the fathers of improv. One actor is playing a police officer, the other a robber he’s chasing.

Cop: (Panting) Hey—I’m 50 years old and a little overweight. Can we stop and rest for a minute?

Robber: (Panting) You’re not gonna grab me if we rest?

Cop: Promise. Just for a few seconds—on the count of three. One, Two, Three.

Do you have to be particularly quick-witted or clever or light on your feet to play that scene? Not really. It’s a perfectly straightforward conversation. The humor arises entirely out of how steadfastly the participants adhere to the rule that no suggestion can be denied. If you can create the right framework, all of a sudden, engaging in the kind of fluid, effortless, spur-of-the-moment dialogue that makes for good improv theater becomes a lot easier. This is what Paul Van Riper understood in Millennium Challenge. He didn’t just put his team up onstage and hope and pray that funny dialogue popped into their heads. He created the conditions for successful spontaneity.

3. The Perils of Introspection

On Paul Van Riper’s first tour in Southeast Asia, when he was out in the bush, serving as an advisor to the South Vietnamese, he would often hear gunfire in the distance. He was then a young lieutenant new to combat, and his first thought was always to get on the radio and ask the troops in the field what was happening. After several weeks of this, however, he realized that the people he was calling on the radio had no more idea than he did about what the gunfire meant. It was just gunfire. It was the beginning of something—but what that something was was not yet clear. So Van Riper stopped asking. On his second tour of Vietnam, whenever he heard gunfire, he would wait. “I would look at my watch,” Van Riper says, “and the reason I looked was that I wasn’t going to do a thing for five minutes. If they needed help, they were going to holler. And after five minutes, if things had settled down, I still wouldn’t do anything. You’ve got to let people work out the situation and work out what’s happening. The danger in calling is that they’ll tell you anything to get you off their backs, and if you act on that and take it at face value, you could make a mistake. Plus you are diverting them. Now they are looking upward instead of downward. You’re preventing them from resolving the situation.”

Van Riper carried this lesson with him when he took over the helm of Red Team. “The first thing I told our staff is that we would be in command and out of control,” Van Riper says, echoing the words of the management guru Kevin Kelly. “By that, I mean that the overall guidance and the intent were provided by me and the senior leadership, but the forces in the field wouldn’t depend on intricate orders coming from the top. They were to use their own initiative and be innovative as they went forward. Almost every day, the commander of the Red air forces came up with different ideas of how he was going to pull this together, using these general techniques of trying to overwhelm Blue Team from different directions. But he never got specific guidance from me of how to do it. Just the intent.”