The Painted Sky's first Workshop in Kuwait

A special two days, with some special new friends. Two day Team-Effectiveness and Positive Reinforcement workshop, in Kuwait.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stop Thinking Outside the Box

The exhortation to think outside the box has become ubiquitous in business. So much so that it has become the new box inside of which everyone thinks. It pays lip service to the notion of transformation without really understanding the difference between transformation and change, and often without tolerance for the real thinking that must occur for an idea to be truly outside the existing paradigm.

But worse than that, the advice is backwards. You cannot possibly think outside the box unless you understand the nature of the box that bounds your current thinking. You must come to know that nature deeply. You must have real insight into it. You must accept it, and embrace it at some level, before it will ever release you.

There's a Zen saying, "What you resist persists, and what you allow to be disappears." Thinking outside the box without understanding the box is a petulant exercise in resistance — every idea that comes from the process has the box written all over it. It's a reaction to the box. It's fighting the box. It's a child of the box. Zune was Microsoft trying to think outside the box, which they saw as the lack of a product to compete with the iPod. The doomed MP3 player became a monument to the real box, which was Microsoft's inability to innovate. It was screaming so hard "Look, we're innovative" that it never had a chance of being anything but the antithesis of innovation.

In our work at my firm, Advertising for Humanity, we always start by trying to grasp the nature of the box within which we're thinking. It is a process bordering on meditation. If you're not calm, it won't come to you. The box thrives on your impatience with it.

Years ago, after I had created California AIDS Ride and the other AIDS Rides around the country, we were still struggling for a pithy slogan to describe the incredibly rich, philanthropic, selfless, and yet paradoxically self-nourishing experience that those events were for people. The events themselves were the result of a meditation on a particular kind of box — that box being charities' always asking people to do the least they could do for their causes. In fact, the charitable-event business was in a race to the bottom to see how little they could ask people to do. Instead of just accepting gifts, charities started making gifts — bribes you might say — to get people to support them: jackets and tote bags and all kinds of other prizes. Once I understood the dynamic, I realized that charities had it backwards. We started asking people to do the most they could do — pedal their bikes 600 miles from San Francisco to Los Angeles, sleep in a tent, ride in the rain and the mud, and raise a minimum of $2,000 for the privilege, with no tote bags, toasters, or other prizes for their efforts. They raised more money, more quickly for AIDS than any event had in history.

But our slogans in the first two years sucked: "The adventure of a lifetime." Or, "Challenge yourself, and you will grow," and so on. We began to ask ourselves what we were afraid of. What was the box we were trying to avoid? We realized that we didn't want people to think the events were too hard — we were afraid we'd scare people off. That was the box confining us. And with that insight, the slogan came to us in a word: impossible. For the average person, these events are impossible. The slogan had been right under our noses all along, sitting inside that box. We saw that there were two words in that one, and our new slogan became two things in one, almost like one of those pictures whose image changes when you move your head to the left or the right: "I'mpossible." It embodied the deepest truth about the events: that they were impossible, yes, but that in that impossibility you could discover a possibility you never knew existed in yourself. The word was autological.

We never looked back, nor did our customers, who took it on as their life mission statements.

When we were asked to design an event for prostate cancer, the organization felt that a bike ride would be the butt of too many jokes. (Pun dynamics there are infinite.) Instead of resisting that, we leaned into it, so the headline became, "Four out of five men will make jokes about this. The fifth will be diagnosed with prostate cancer." In the breast cancer fundraising field, it's all about who can out-hope the competition. Hope, hope, hope is the mantra everywhere. So our campaign for the National Breast Cancer Coalition became: "We're giving up hope." The message was that hope is not what overcomes great obstacles. Deadlines and commitment do. And the organization has committed itself to an end to breast cancer in 10 years.

A new campaign we developed focuses on the touchy issue of overhead in the humanitarian sector. Instead of running from it, the campaign embraces it, with ads that show a person looking into camera, stating, "I'm overhead," and the meat of the ad explaining what that person does and how fundamental it is to the cause — the subtext being that overhead is a catalyst for the growth of our favorite charities, not a drain on it.

So figure out the box you're in. If you try to get out before you understand the box's parameters, you'll just stay stuck inside of it. And that's exactly what it wants.

DAN PALLOTTA

Dan Pallotta is an expert in nonprofit sector innovation and a pioneering social entrepreneur. He is the founder of Pallotta TeamWorks, which invented the multiday AIDSRides and Breast Cancer 3-Days. He is the president of Advertising for Humanity and the author of Uncharitable: How Restraints on Nonprofits Undermine Their Potential.

Are Our Companies any Different?

Art-Based Training for Finance Managers

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Latest Images for our Art-Based programme, for Finance Managers from across the APAC region, held in Bangalore.

BOOK SUMMARY : A Whole New Mind, by Daniel Pink

© 2008 Donald A. Phin

This is a powerful book. It catalogs and explains the benefits of working on the right side of the brain. In 1990 I was heavily influenced by John Naisbitt’s book Megatrends. One of those trends was to begin developing high-touch in an era of high-tech. 23 years later, Pink has created a reference for us to consider right brain activities. Design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning. He says we should bet our business on understanding Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (survival, security, belonging, ego, spirit). According to Pink, “Artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big-picture thinkers – will now reap society’s richest rewards and share its greatest joys”. Pink claims that we are in a “conceptual age” where an MBA isn’t worth what it use to be.

What follows are some tidbits I gathered from the book as well as some of my favorite quotes:

• Pink encourages us to ask three questions: Can someone offshore do it cheaper? Can a computer do it faster? Is what I am offering in demand in an age of abundance? You can’t answer no to the first two and no to the third, you’re in trouble.

• Pink claims more Americans today work in art, entertainment and design than work as lawyers, accountants and auditors. I don’t know about you but that was a shocking statement to me.

• “Meaning is the new money.” – Daniel Pink

• Design – rather then merely quote what Pink says, I will ask how the following concepts apply to managing our workplaces. For example, what does the design of your employee handbook look like? Is it ugly back and white? What story does that tell? How can anybody relate to such a document? As Don Miguel-Ruiz states in his book The Four Agreements: we have the opportunity to be artists with our stories. The story of how we relate to our work and the people that we work with. The story of who we serve and how we do it. I see this concept of design applying to our interiors, our management literature, visualizing our SOP’s and more.

• “An organization’s knowledge is contained in it’s stories.” – Steve Denning, World Bank executive

• “Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we are all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.” – Allan Kay, Hewlett-Packard.

• Story – If our organization is a series of collective stories, what stories are being told around your place? How can we give people a more empowering story to focus on? Would I know your story when I walk in the front door?

• Symphony – this is about seeing the big picture. About pulling the pieces together. In order to play in a symphony, you have to be using the same score. Is everybody in your organization playing the same tune? Do they even know the score?

• Empathy – Empathy is about the ability to be present. To be in the now. Unfortunately, so many of us are running so hard it is a difficult thing to accomplish whether at work or at home. One of the most successful insurance agents that I ever met said that his primary job was to “make people feel good about themselves”. He said that he did this by “finding the good in them”. No wonder he is a multi-millionaire. How does your organization make your employees feel good about themselves?

• Play – Does if feel safe to laugh at your company? Have we forgotten how to have fun? I watch my three year old and observe our natural way of doing things. Of curiosity, experimentation, failure and learning, laughter and play. In a sense we have to become childlike again if we want to produce creative innovative organizations. This means that we have to have permission and feel safe in doing so.

• Meaning – “People have enough to live, but nothing to live for; they have the means, but no meaning.” – Robert Fogul, Nobel Laureate economist. These words echo those of Victor Frankel written a half-century earlier. I know that I have been on a search for meaning and perhaps you have been as well. This search caused me to quit a successful litigation career so that I could become, in Maslow’s terms, “one with the work that I do”. Where is the “meaning” in the work that your company does everyday? Whether it is manufacturing widgets, selling insurance coverage, or a retail operation, any real hope at finding meaning comes from service. Service Master certainly recognized this and it made them the largest janitorial service in the world. So did the folks at Southwest Airlines. And it made them the most successful airline ever. The greatest meaning of all comes from our relationships. The relationships that we have with our work individually, the relationships that we have with our co-workers and the relationships that we have with our customers and clients.

Conclusion

Perhaps the greater question is what fear lies in the way of making this right-brain transformation? Whose judgment are we concerned about? As Shakespeare stated, “To work we love with delight we go.” Here’s to thinking Pink.

What a season this has been!

Wow! What a season this has been for The Painted Sky! And the next few months, all the way up to March 2012, look choc-a-bloc!

Starting with small Art-Based team-building sessions, more for fun and bonding, our offerings have developed into a full-fledged bouquet covering various aspects of people development. Today, we run Art-Based Learning programmes covering:
• Leadership and team development
• Strategic Planning
• Problem Solving and Conflict Management
• Developing Communication and Building Rapport
• Fostering Cultural Sensitivity and Respect
• Appreciative Inquiry and leading Change
• Ideation and Vision Alignment
• Creativity and Innovation Workshops
• Brand development

Our programmes have evolved based on a lot of reading and research, and we also build in various Emotional Intelligence and Transaction Analysis tools in our trainings, which aim to:
• accelerate and strengthen team performance
• identify imaginative and novel ways to find solutions
• generate multiple viable solutions
• foster creativity and innovation, out-of-the-box and non-silo bound thinking
• help leaders understand the people in their organization
• facilitate change management
• enhance problem-solving skills and techniques
• improve effective communication
• help relieve stress and develop camaraderie

Not just Art-based, but our other soft skills programmes are also in great demand. Our Skill Building programmes leverage our decades of industry and training experience, to deliver innovative, current and practical (read, non-bookish and applicable) trainings to participants, across industries. Some of our key programmes include:
• Assertive communications at work
• Business language and grammar
• Advanced Presentation skills
• Effective Negotiation Skills
• Cultural Sensitivity & Cross-cultural Effectiveness
• Time Management & Goal Setting
• Sales & Sales Management

With clients ranging from Banking, IT, Retail, Telecom, Pharma and other industry stalwarts, its never a dull moment at The Painted Sky. And, to quote inappropriately, we're "Lovin' it!"

Team-Palette: An Art-Based workshop for senior leaders on Problem Solving, Team Building and Communication

Our Leadership development programme in Hyatt Regency Mumbai - a long day of thinking, introspecting and analysing, in groups and individually, to identify strengths and improvement areas, address issues, talk, listen, build bridges and seek solutions. It was fun and colours no doubt, but with the underlying goals clearly defined and delivered upon. Another successful and satisfying workshop.