Action Painting

What it is

People split into small groups and paint on canvas with brushes and acrylics. The subject is set: you start from the company’s values and ideas and you have to arrive at an image everyone agrees on. Choosing the theme is how the leadership points the group at a goal above its own, and then leaves it to organise itself. The canvases combine into a single work, which stays with the client.

The format also comes as decoupage, mosaic decoration, graffiti on a wall, body painting, or a project built entirely from materials the company already has lying around.

Making the company’s values visible

One of the hardest things a company anywhere has to do is get its values across to the people who work there. It sounds like a soft problem. It stops sounding soft the moment you try to do it in practice.

People need to know what their leadership actually stands for if they’re going to follow its decisions, and above all in the difficult moments. We wanted our own answer to that, built on creativity and imagination rather than on a slide deck.

That’s Action Painting, and it’s become one of the most requested experiential formats we run.

The practical side is easy. It’s quick, it’s effective, and we bring everything, canvases, paints and the rest. There’s no real limit on where it can happen: your own offices, an indoor venue, or outdoors as long as the space is big enough.

A team that leaves more motivated than it arrived

The format is a way to walk people into the company’s values and culture without lecturing anyone. Creativity and imagination get all the room they need, and they arrive with company they can’t do without:

• teamwork,
• communication,
• collaboration,
• the motivation of the group as a whole.

It’s worth repeating that the format runs in several variants, so that there’s room for personal taste and for different ways of expressing it. Body painting turns the group itself into the surface, and the images only take on their meaning when everybody steps back and looks. A mosaic gives each person a piece that matters, and the pieces only read as a work once they’re together. Graffiti starts with a set of team tasks that earn the spray cans, and ends on a wall. The recycled version builds a project out of cuttings, paper and objects the company already owns, from the first sketch to the presentation.

An example that worked: the Big Picture

In a standard Action Painting each team paints its own canvas. In the Big Picture variant the canvases are sections of one single work: the teams are split up, each takes a portion, and they all follow the same theme and the same style without ever seeing the whole thing while they paint.

At the end the pieces get put together and the work appears. It can be a landmark of Dubai or of the Emirates, or an image built out of the company’s own values. The moment the sections line up, and the joins either match or don’t, is the most useful minute of the day.

What’s interesting to watch, and most of all interesting for the teams to watch, is how hard it is to agree on something that means something to everyone, and that is, as any decent company objective has to be, specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound. In other words an objective that genuinely represents the group, made of pieces that had to hang together well enough for the finished work to be readable.

The day after, the painting is hanging somewhere in the office, and everybody knows which part of it is theirs.