Still, setting out the options and the possible ranges and their likelihood allows for a rational debate.

I feel though that most people will be voting on an emotional rather than rational basis. That may well be a future post…!

For example, it seems a reasonable initial assumption to me that a competent government looking after only Scotland will be marginally better at managing Scotland’s economy than a similarly competent government looking at the whole of the UK but how much this is worth is uncertain and it probably depends on the quality of the democracy that the new government puts in.

Quite a lot of what are being described as transitional arrangements I don’t think we can decide until we’ve decided what our country is about or indeed for once it becomes a separate state – which might actually take us some time.

Then there is the question for whom is the economy better. Are we after a high growth but highly unequal society or one with more moderate growth but more evenly distributed opportunity.

On balance I think independence is more likely than not to lead to an improving economy, which I see as one with slightly better growth, slightly greener and slightly more equal and slightly more collective than we currently have.

I’m not sure we can start talking about transitional arrangements until we’re sure what we want and I’m not sure we’ve even started that conversation properly yet – leave alone a fact based conversation about what the economy or foreign relations might look like.

Given a transition much might then depend on London’s willingness to be cooperative during that period!

I wonder if different improvising in different media work in different ways – music, mime, spoken, dance?

And there is something about social here, too, that I can’t quite get my head around – whether improvising with others (where you have to take others with you) and/or in fornt of an audience are actually different things.

I am afraid I have too limited an experience of improvising myself to guess at the answer!

Everyone can improvise and does so all the time. Any conversation is a form of improvisation. People tend to improvise within well understood structures of status and conversational rules. We have rituals, conventions and protocols and status and running jokes. People need to practise how to do it when asked to and they often do it in quite structured ways even when going about their daily lives. Theatrical improvisation isn’t quite the same as improvising in real life.

I like Cochrane’s model of improvisation and it matches my own experiences.

For me there are three things going one when improvising. Firstly, what’s going? What is the offer that is being made. Secondly, what are the applicable improvisation structures or standards or protocols? What are other people expecting me to do? What makes sense next? Are there any rules or guidelines I need to be aware of. Third, how does what is happening fit in the with the narrative or character requirement of the scene

This is the comic about improve that I was thinking of. The main structure for theatrical improv that applies here is the one about jumping the curve. You can do anything you want but in order to bring everyone else with you, you need to do something obvious.

http://storyrobot.com/improv/intro-to-improv/

The interesting thing is why do managers and owners – and as shareholders, that means us (or at least our proxies, the funds managers) – let them get away with it.

Again, this is I think the principal/agent issue. Employees and managers have more information than we do. And fund managers don’t want to rock the boat…

If the answer is “Gaming the system” then that’s something I’d like to get to the bottom of.