"They sold cars, skin care, refrigerators, insurance, and medical research. They had held their jobs for years, even decades. Yet they were all failing. Their performance was described by their peers as below suboptimal … tragically hopeless … like a donkey trying to climb a staircase. One had sunk so far that if he tripled his commissions, he'd still rank last among his sales force.
They'd been sent to me because their companies viewed them as long past their prime. And certainly they seemed to have exhausted their powers of growth. They slouched into the classroom and slumped into chairs, staring catatonically at the blank projector screen. When I engaged them in small talk, they became superficially jovial but quickly turned defensive. They did not like to be questioned about their jobs — or really about anything. They preferred to tell me: Sales is about relationships. They repeated this mantra over and over, drawing great comfort from it. When I asked how they cultivated relationships, they replied: Time. It takes time to cultivate relationships. You can't do it overnight.
Leaving the projector blank, I got the salespeople onto their feet. Then I led them out of the classroom and into a museum gallery. The gallery was filled with curious paintings, creatively drawn and brightly colored. I invited the salespeople to find a painting that surprised them and to study it for a few minutes. I asked them to imagine what would happen if the scene in the painting were rewound like a movie — and what would happen if it were fast-forwarded. After that, I led the salespeople back into the classroom and ran them through a ten-minute exercise. Then I sent them back to their jobs.
Two months later, I checked on how they were doing. About 40 percent were still failing or had been fired. The other 60 percent had shown improvement — strong improvement. Taken as a group, they had risen in their companies' metrics from poor to average, and several had achieved more considerable gains. One had shot to the top of his sales team, jumping from dead last to runaway first. “The only way I can figure it," his boss remarked to me, “is that you sawed open his head and transplanted his brain.”
These turnarounds prompted their companies to ask: What was the exercise I'd run? What ten-minute training had produced such a dramatic uptick in performance? But that wasn't the right question to ask. The right question was: What was the difference between the 60 percent who improved and the 40 percent who didn't?
I got the answer by asking the salespeople to draw the painting they'd selected in the museum. The 40 percent recalled vague details or no detail at all. The 60 percent remembered one unique detail about the painting — and remembered it with specificity. They vividly saw the detail in their imagination. And even now, after months had passed, they could still recall, often with a smile or a jolt of wonder, how strange the detail seemed.
That recall revealed: The salespeople had rediscovered a youthful power of their brain. The power of intuition."
