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