The Three Paintings

The Three Paintings – getting started with visual metaphor    (gallery)

I first used these three abstract paintings about twenty years ago. I was meeting a management team that was struggling over how to get themselves a meaningful corporate identity and had stacked up a number of expensive failures. I wanted to elicit lots of open ended and agenda free discussion about what we broadly understand about an image when it is being used to represent a company. The three paintings proved to be able to do just that and it was fun, so in the nature of things I refined and developed it a little more and started using it more and with more and different types of groups. Then it became something of a short exercise that I used as an opener for lectures and demonstrations.

This is the exercise. There are three abstract paintings and there are two questions. Look carefully at the three paintings – then consider that each of the three paintings represents the characteristics of an organisation, think broadly about how you see them, for example what might be the the size, structure and purpose of each of them. In effect, the painting sums up the individual character of the company.  Now, to the first question. You are lucky enough to be holding job offers from all three companies: the conditions of the job itself and what it might offer to you, in terms of the remuneration package and opportunities, these are all equitable. So the question is, based on how you feel about each image and the character of the company it seems to represent, which do you choose to work for? Don’t linger or agonise over your choice, but allow yourself to be just drawn, to be attracted, and to make a choice.

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Now let’s move on to the other question. Look again at all three paintings – they are still representing organisations but now I tell you that they from the same sector and they are airline companies. The question is – when taking a long haul flight in particular, who will you choose to fly with? During all the years I ran this exercise, most people choose a different painting to fly with from the one they would work for and people decide rapidly and usually with a laugh! Typically there has been a greater convergence over the choice, in fact with a majority of about eighty percent opting for one painting. However, with this broad agreement over who it is best to fly with comes an altered perspective over how to think of the choices made in the first question. there is also and quite inexplicably a subtle shift in how we now view the choice we made for the first question, and serves in a quiet way to reinforce the values that we hold about ourselves and what we might think of the values of the people around us.

Neither of the two questions are directly about our aesthetic preferences for the paintings, but more about our values and how we assign them to categories and furthermore how we, over some things, differentiate ourselves through these values. We now know from neuroscience that as we formulate our thoughts we appear to initially use a combination of image and memory, and only then introduce words so it is not surprising that this exercise surfaces a good deal of stuff in no more than ten minutes, and for our neurons ten minutes is a lot of processing time! Image significantly contributes to our decision taking processes.

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The range of information generated by the conversations with the paintings is on its way to being given classificatory frames but isn’t quite there yet. It has the embedded richness that the psychologist Antonio Demasio suggests is important for sustained and consistent decision taking and it mirrors in an approximate kind of way the early formulation of thought. This is processed by us in a different way than when we start out In a more focussed and formulaic way. It helps us to trust and understand where each of us is coming from even when we do not and cannot share a mindset. Not being of a single mindset is frequently the case in development projects: even within an industry like the auto industry, a drive train engineer and a suspension engineer have differing frames within which they think. It is likely that any initiative beyond the routine will be made up of people who are not and never will be in a position to know beyond all doubt when and when not they are thinking along similar lines. And the goal is not to get to a point where they are similar but more that each individual has a kind of deeper and probably quite tacit comprehension about the entire range of mindset within a team and therefore a better way to think about how development and overall thinking will or might play out without an endless need to reel back when things don’t pan out as expected, a kind of shortcut or a handy hook to use to check in or check back. Starting out by creating something like this is to take a pragmatic approach to the needs and vagaries of collaboration, it requires a time commitment to set it up and this in turn requires a recognition that collaboration is not the poor relation to leadership but maybe an appropriate form of leadership in development.

When multi-nationals in the Western world were enthusiastically adopting aspects of Japanese techniques for managing manufacturing and supply chains, I took to asking an additional question about the three paintings. The question was this; which painting do you think a group of Japanese managers would choose to work for? Invariably, unless there was an individual who had worked for a Japanese multi-national or had lived in Japan, the group always made a selection that a group of Japanese managers and engineers never did make and never considered  bore any relationship to their own company. Japanese managers generally selected the most random appearing painting as closest to their own enterprises. However, their choice on who to fly with was the common choice, the choice of just about everyone, everywhere. And so this question always led us to an interesting and wide ranging discussion about assumptions and understanding. About how to go about gaining better understanding prior to the adoption of techniques used in organisations with different cultures. The question also arose as to whether the integration of a technique might be adversely affected when our underlying assumptions about the technique itself might be flawed?

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The three paintings exercise serves to remind everyone that making and using a metaphor not from words but from images and objects is a capacity that most of us have and triggers interesting conversation. Scoping out some of the elements of a new initiative through visual metaphor will not of course provide a familiar looking document, none of the so called rational props could possibly be in evidence through a visual metaphor but this does not mean that there is nothing related to the pragmatic issues of getting a new initiative up and running. A visual metaphor can carry a different order of information and data, nuanced and subtle with lots of meaning absolutely impossible to capture in a spreadsheet or even a power point presentation. This is data that will have higher emotional content and by this point I should have no need to say why this is so vital to effective decision taking. It is not that emotion is not present, conviction and the smooth management of doubt, to take just two aspects commonly associated with management style, actually do get encoded even if not obviously so, they are manifest in the ubiquitous spreadsheet, there residing in the numbers, even if no one is going to talk about them this way. As the visual metaphor is created, a mix of  things surface very rapidly and in a way that a group of individuals find easy to recognize though not necessarily as easy to give voice to, so they find themselves having forms of conversations that run a broad gamut of themes that can include concerns and fears. It is then that the visual metaphor and something such as a policy document or a spreadsheet can be put to work dynamically, creating ways to talk about things which typically don’t get voiced, and later actually have the power to derail an otherwise solid initiative. Factoring in the underlying emotive currents is just pragmatic: once we have comprehended how affected we are by emotion in our collaborative ventures. Not using a mechanism whereby we can factor it in would then be to act in a way that is perverse and unproductive.
What can be generated through the conversations allied to the three paintings exercise are insights about the range of values and the way that metaphorically based conversations can surface these in a form that is non confrontational and really rather speedy. A form of rough and ready categorisation, knowledge about one another that exists somewhat informally, more implicit than explicit and vitally in a form that does not cross over the personal boundaries that should be off limits in the workplace.

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