Russ Cullingworth August 2024
I'm sure we've all used the term "out-of-the-box", looking to encourage colleagues, students or employees to come up with innovative thoughts and ideas. Here's a story of the birth and challenges of creating a truly new idea where there really is no existing box, and trying to convince your clients to create one.
I realized that an "out-of-the-box" idea truly does not fit into existing categories or boxes. Sounds exciting, doesn't it? A truly new idea. It became one of my most significant challenges because people seem to not like things that they can't label or categorize.
“We have a FIFO principle when we hire people here” said the fat and sweating man sitting across the table from me in a crumpled grey suit and blue shirt. His dark grey tie was loosened and the top button of his shirt undone, revealing folds of hairy fat on his neck. He took off his glasses and wiped them on his shirt, grinned at me and looked at me with his puffy grey eyes, enjoying his power over this young eager new recruit.
Then he smiled and said “FIFO - Fit in or Fuck Off!” (please excuse the expletive in the context of a direct quote).
The partner of Price Waterhouse in South Africa looked rather pleased with himself and what he thought was a very clever accounting pun referring to the FIFO (first-in-first-out) accounting principle for inventory.
I was 21 years old and interviewing for a job as an articled clerk with Price Waterhouse. This Chartered Accountant (CA) was the “esteemed” Partner who was to be my mentor and exemplar in the integrity, principles, ethics and morals of the CA Profession.
“Fit in or Fuck Off!” Nice! Well done Mr. Partner - how clever of you. Being innocent and fairly naïve for my age, I didn’t quite know what to make of his comment. I wasn't impressed, I thought it was rather stupid and I didn't understand it, but I was happy nonetheless when he offered me the job and the opportunity to article under his supervision– little did I know that his comment would become an ever-present and haunting theme for my career as I struggled to fit into the Accounting culture where I didn't belong.
Where (as a general culture) Accountants are focused, I am easily distracted, where formal and serious, I tend to be casual and funny, where meticulous, I have attention-to-detail disorder (ATDD, my own made-up term) and where Accountants are quiet and prefer to work alone, I am gregarious and engaging, and wanting to connect and spend time and socialize with everyone in the organization (For those who know Jungian psychology, you may recognize an Extroverted Feeling preference or ENFP).
After a difficult start at Price Waterhouse in South Africa, after a few years I mastered the technical demands of the role and, when I came to Canada in 1996 I became the Controller for a national Accounting Association - the Accountant for Accountants - all my bosses, the President and VPs, were all accountants. Throughout my career though, while I was able to do the work, and I had no negative evaluation comments about my work, my bosses really didn't like my personality.
In 2010, following a life-changing Insights Discovery portfolio and workshop that helped me to understand my Extroverted Feeling strengths and preferences, I decided to take the PwC Partner's advice to "F-off", and left the Accounting profession for good. This led me to start "The Centre of Excellence for Young Adults" in 2010, hoping to help young adults ages 18-30 to understand themselves and their relationships at a deeper level. This didn't pay very well, so I changed my target market to all ages and the company name to "EQAdvantage Learning and Development", which is where this becomes interesting.
“You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future." Steve Jobs
Because I had my background in Accounting, and having worked in the National Accounting Association CGA Canada, I was very familiar with them and their CPD programs, so my best clients was the three BC Associations at the time - CMABC, CGABC and ICABC through which I offered in-person emotional intelligence sessions from around 2011-2017.
In 2016 I began to think about making my full day session "Leading through Influence" into an online course - a bit more effort but a lot more scalable. I happened to be taking a not-so-enjoyable online marketing course on Coursera, where I was forced to watch the instructor's face talking at me for a number of hours, with PowerPoint slides and some very poorly acted scenarios, which just became boring and frustrating. I didn't want to create anything like that.
My wife Christine and I love podcasts, so I said to her "why can't we create a course in audio, where people can just listen during their commute or walking the dog, or doing the dishes?" I realized that we'd have to make the learning interesting and engaging, with stories, scenarios, interviews, media clips, music and sound effects. And that's where the idea of ProDio's "StoryStyle" learning came from. If you're interested, take a listen to the opening story of the audio course "Leading through Influence" https://prodiolearning.com/course/NA==/what-is-influence
Our idea was to partner with professional associations to make these courses available to their members, which would be a lot more challenging than I thought. The problem was, Associations had a number of boxes, or categories, for their learning content. Most had in-person workshops, live webinars, recorded webinars and online courses. The most progressive had a box for "podcasts". We were none of these things. WE HAD NO BOX! We had no category. Some categorized us as online learning. Some as podcasts. Some categorized us as other. We were a square peg in a round hole.
It dawned on me one day that an "out-of-the-box" idea truly does not fit into existing categories or boxes. Sounds exciting, doesn't it? A truly new idea! This became one of my most significant challenges because people seem to not like things that they can't label or categorize. It just seems weird and people don't know what to expect. Our most common evaluation comment is "This was a lot better than I expected", which says a lot about our challenges around perception of what the audio learning experience will be like.
Thanks to over 50,000 learners enrolling in our 5 courses on LinkedIn for Learning, and over 6,000 on our platform, plus a few thousand through Association LMS', we are slowly creating the recognition and acceptance of the hidden superpower of "StoryStyle" audio learning - the ability to ignite imagination in our learners, which leads to all kinds of good healthy brain activity.
I guess in some ways I am still trying to fit in, and to create a box where I truly feel I belong and where we are valued for the exceptional products we're creating.
Please feel free to share, comment or connect with me to find out more about how neuroscientific evidence shows that engaging in imaginative activities activates and strengthens neural pathways, enhancing cognitive flexibility and creativity and innovative thinking (Dietrich, 2004; Sawyer, 2011). Other proven benefits include engagement, retention and emotional connection with learning content.
#neuroscience #learninganddevelopment #professionaldevelopment #innovation #imagination #trulymobile #storystyle #audiolearning #CPD #CPE #CPA
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