Maxim #51
Paint their picture, not yours
One of our partners wanted to work in advertising right out of college. He got an interview with the creative director at a Boston firm and brought along some paintings and drawings to help support his application. The creative director patiently looked through the pictures and then asked, “Why did you bring these?” Before there was time to answer, the director went on to explain, “You started all of these paintings with a blank canvas and a clear image in your head.” He paused, and continued, “Each time you applied paint with your brush the image in your head changed just a fraction so that it matched what was developing on the canvas. Eventually the image in your head matched the image you ended up with… Unfortunately, that’s not what we do. A fine artist paints a picture of what’s inside his or her head, like you did. The commercial illustrator has a much more difficult task – paint a picture of what’s inside someone else’s head.”
Fortunately for Carpedia, our partner didn’t get the job, but the insight carried over to the firm. Anyone involved with managing change is more like the commercial illustrator than the fine artist. People do things or don’t do things for their own personal reasons. To get someone to buy something or change what they do, you need to understand their picture, not your own. Your picture of why the organization will be a better place for everyone by changing some of the ways things are done may be perfectly logical and rational. But people affected by the change will have their own pictures of the new organization, and those pictures may be very different from the one you painted.
To get people to buy into your idea, you need to understand their picture first, and then design and describe the change so that it addresses the key issues and problems they envision.
