TransFormance Theatre Art Gallery
After all, a picture IS worth a thousand words…

Original TransFormance Theatre paintings, created expressly for your event or initiative, represent another component of multi-modal learning, appealing to the visual mode.

The TransFormance Gallery, below, brings to life some of the core experiences from meetings with Boeing, Hewlett Packard, and Tropicana Beverages Corp/CSX Transportation.

So Much More Than a T-Shirt
These colorful paintings graphically capture the key themes of your meetings or consulting intervention. Copies of these custom-created paintings are framed and given to each meeting participant along with a sheet of key learnings -- a compelling and visually appealing way to leverage the power of the meeting experience.

The visual impact of fine art heightens and sustains the learning attention of project participants, by graphically depicting your organization’s challenges and opportunities against the backdrop of the broader business environment you are operating in.

Long after the event has passed, your people will continue to ponder the issues and key meeting messages vividly illustrated in the paintings. They’ll remember the shared experiences and breakthroughs of the meeting, and can renew their commitments to success and growth on a regular, even daily, basis.

This visual mode of learning demonstrates, in vivid color, another aspect of how TransFormance Theatre can be used as an on-going tool for creating unforgettable meetings.

Boeing 777

This painting is from a story about the production of the first 777, Boeing's new airplane. The story concerned the odyssey of manufacturing and engineering learning to work together more intimately than had ever been the case before. Because of time and schedule pressures, the two functions had to throw down their individual "rice bowls" (i.e., silos, turf, or separate worlds), and give up their budgets and resources to each other (unheard of at the time), in order to make good on their delivery commitment to the customer.

This sharing of destinies constituted a revolutionary leap of faith across a chasm of time pressure and fear, while the teams were trying to put together the puzzle pieces of the new airplane with its multiple systems and literally millions of parts. The story recounted the tremendous emotional breakthrough it required to really share destinies between the functions, and how difficult it is to sustain that level of collaboration, trust and teamwork in the ongoing production process.

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This painting, from an offsite meeting of senior managers of Boeing's Business Processes Group, illustrates the challenge of moving from the old operating environment -- characterized by a silo organizational structure, lack of empowerment, reactive fire-fighting/crisis mentality, fear and stress.

The new environment is characterized by open, honest, direct communication, sharing information, collaborating, putting out fires locally and with minimum disruption to business operations.The new environment is a key prerequisite for a successful future.

As a leader crosses the bridge from the old environment into the new, he wistfully sheds his fire-fighting outfit -- which served him so well in the old environment. That old outfit, that old habit of fire-fighting, was part of how he became a leader, and it's difficult to replace the old mentality with the new one of more empowered people working together in a more horizontal organizational structure.

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This painting evolved from a story of a large and very successful division of Hewlett Packard. The story is about the challenges facing a traditional Unix-based software services organization as it dives headlong into the roller-coaster world of the new computer environment -- Microsoft NT, the Internet, and the multitude of hyper-competitive distribution channels.

Entering this new market required that HP change its traditional focus on delivering 100% solutions, to a much more rough-and-ready 70% solution strategy. This meant creating a faster, more flexible and nimble way of developing new products and services, and introducing them to market much more rapidly. At the same time, HP didn't want to lose its reputation for excellent quality and support.

In the painting, the competition is shown as being already out on the track while the HP car is just being launched, even though one of its tires and the steering wheel aren't quite on yet! The driver is looking at the road ahead with a panicked expression on his face -- while the support team argues over the 100% vs. 70% solution issue, and others are rushing to put the tire and steering wheel on as the car rolls out into the race.

On the horizon, the organization's goal of $2 Billion by Year 2000 challenges the HP team to find better ways of collaborating and communicating in order to succeed in the new customer-driven roller-coaster operating environment.

This painting captures the essential images of a joint initiative to build a more productive business relationship between CSX and Tropicana, replacing the 30-year, adversarial relationship they'd had before. The spirit of "Your Success is My Success" enabled the two companies to collaborate in getting the time-sensitive Tropicana juice to the market on time, to satisfy the hungry and unforgiving customers in the Northeast. The new, emerging collaboration between the two companies is depicted, as they, together, solve the myriad problems and intricacies in getting the juice transported by CSX over 1200 miles of track.

TransFormance Theatre's integrated art & science approach in this case featured a strong emphasis on measuring success -- through the Success Scoreboard and other tools -- in a way that links adoption of desired new behaviors, such as better communication and collaboration, with achievement of bottom line improvements in performance, e.g., on-time deliveries to Tropicana's Jersey City Distribution Center.

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