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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Daniel Coyle
Read between
April 24 - May 8, 2023
in his hometown of Toronto,
the Upright Citizens Brigade.
All were influenced by the late comedy legend Del Close;
Most improv games are built on simplicity and speed—creating brief sketches in response to audience prompts—but the Harold is different because it is long and complex. It requires eight people, contains nine interweaving scenes, and lasts around forty minutes—an eternity in the attention-deficit-disorder world of improv.
steamrollered
the Harold is a group brain workout in which you experience, over and over, the pure, painful intersection of vulnerability and interconnection.
UCB’s brilliance on stage and screen is not an accident. It is the product of thousands of microevents, thousands of small interpersonal leaps that were made and supported. These groups are cohesive not because it’s natural but because they’ve built, piece by piece, the shared mental muscles to connect and cooperate.
toniest
Some believed the Panthers to be former members of a paramilitary unit called Arkan’s Tigers,
“The experience of going through the communist regime and then the free-for-all nightmare of the war that followed, that really bonded them.
zavodnik, a “seducer”
magare, or muscle for getting the jewels;
jatak, who arranged l...
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When Cooper gave his opinion, he was careful to attach phrases that provided a platform for someone to question him, like “Now let’s see if someone can poke holes in this” or “Tell me what’s wrong with this idea.” He steered away from giving orders and instead asked a lot of questions. Anybody have any ideas?
when you’re in an urban environment, windows are bad,” he tells me. “You stand in front of one, and you can get shot by a sniper and never know where it came from. So if you’re a new guy and you see me standing in front of a window in Fallujah, what are you going to say? Are you going to tell me to move my ass, or are you going to stand there quietly and let me get shot? When I ask new guys that question, they say, ‘I’ll tell you to move.’ So I tell them, ‘Well, that’s exactly how you should conduct yourself all the time around here, with every single
After-Action Review,
AARs
“It’s got to be safe to talk,” Cooper says. “Rank switched off, humility switched on.
You have to ask why, and then when they respond, you ask another why.
You ask and ask and ask.”
The goal of an AAR is not to excavate truth for truth’s sake, or to assign credit and blame, but rather to build a shared mental model that can be applied to future missions.
if you keep getting together and digging out what happened, then after a while everybody can see what’s really happening, not just their small piece of it. People can share experiences and mistakes. They can see how what they do affects others, and we can start to create a group m...
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the paradoxical nature of the task: a relentless willingness to see the truth and take ownership.
group members have to combine discipline with openness.
being vulnerable together is the only way a team can become invulnerable.
“The real courage is seeing the truth and speaking the truth to each other.
Claude Shannon, a brilliant polymath who liked to ride through the halls on his unicycle while juggling, Bell Labs
Harry Nyquist.
Nyquist by all accounts possessed two important qualities. The first was warmth.
The second quality was a relentless curiosity.
he combined breadth and depth of knowledge with a desire to seek connections.
If I could get a sense of the way your culture works by meeting just one person, who would that person be?
Roshi Givechi.
“I’m more of a nudger. I nudge the choreography and try to create the conditions for good things to happen.”
the interesting part wasn’t the healing but the listening, and the relationship being formed.
he also found special moments, in certain conversations, when the two curves fell into perfect sync. Marci called these moments concordances.
“Concordances happen when one person can react in an authentic way to the emotion being projected in the room,”
the most important moments in conversation happen when one person is actively, intently listening.
“It’s very hard to be empathic when you’re talking.
the more concordances occur, the closer the two people feel.
the changes in closeness happen not gradually but all at once.
while questions comprise only 6 percent of verbal interactions, they generate 60 percent of ensuing discussions.
Building habits of group vulnerability is like building a muscle. It takes time, repetition, and the willingness to feel pain in order to achieve gains.
Make Sure the Leader Is Vulnerable First and Often:
“The key is to ask not for five or ten things but just one,”
Overcommunicate Expectations:
Collaborate and Make Others Successful: Going Out of Your Way to Help Others Is the Secret Sauce.
Deliver the Negative Stuff in Person:
oenophile.
When Forming New Groups, Focus on Two Critical Moments:
