Opening
Teams do not struggle because they lack talent. They struggle because they have never been in the same physical predicament together, solving something with no script and no hierarchy.
Put four people in front of one canvas and you will learn more about how they truly collaborate than any survey can tell you.
The idea
Karen Grosz is a facilitator, author and TEDx speaker whose Canvas Creek teams have painted their way through connection with around 80,000 people, from bankers to teenagers. Her process is disarmingly simple.
Four people stand at a couch length canvas with brushes and a couple of colours and create art with no plan, and nobody is allowed to talk. The silence is the point.
Remove everyday communication and people discover quiet leadership, the theme of her latest book, and a way of communicating that grandfathers and quiet neighbours have always known.
She has tested it on herself too, going as far as 72 hours of silence without facilitation, and she says you truly listen in a new way when you are silent. The number four matters too. With three people the canvas stays segmented, each person guarding a corner.
With four or five you have to move around one another, and for the first seven minutes you literally bump shoulders.
“after 13 minutes of standing side by side, they’re so connected that there’s this creativity that just flows through the group”.
Karen describes bankers and lawyers arriving with folded arms, insisting they are not doing this, and leaving as a team. She watches them move through her three stages, from hesitance to connection to belief, and the artwork itself is almost beside the point.
She is now taking the process into virtual reality, refusing the simple version where each person paints in their own corner of a screen. Her team wants to carry across the process they perfected with 80,000 people, the minute by minute knowledge of how connection actually forms.
That instinct tells you everything about her method. The tool changes, the conditions stay sacred. Connection is prevention, her team’s motto in schools, and the same physics holds in boardrooms and kitchens.
What I took from it
I kept thinking of my children’s school art evenings, where painting side by side loosened parents who had never met, faster than any coffee morning had managed. My family has moved countries and raised children far from extended family, and shared making has often been our fastest route into a new community.
Karen’s seven minutes of bumping shoulders feels like an honest description of every new belonging I have ever earned. None of them arrived without a little friction first. Her silence rule also rearranged something for me.
I run conversations for a living, and it is easy to believe that talking is the work. Karen’s bankers prove that removing the talking can be the work. I am already wondering which meeting in my own week could survive ten quiet minutes and what would surface if it did.
The book I will read from this is quiet leadership, because the loudest people in my field are rarely the ones holding the group together.
Three things to try this week
- Try ten minutes of shared silence with a colleague or family member while doing one simple task side by side, then talk about what you noticed.
- Put four people around one problem with no discussion for the first ten minutes, and compare what emerges with your usual meeting format.
- Watch for quiet leaders in your next group, the people who influence without speaking first, and tell one of them what you noticed in their contribution.
Watch and go deeper
Karen’s enthusiasm fills the screen, and the canvas process makes more sense once you see her tell it. The full conversation is in the player below.
You can explore Canvas Creek at Karen Grosz.
New conversations land on the Rediscovering Connection channel most weeks
Close
Collaboration is a physical skill as much as a conceptual one, and our certification gives leaders the frameworks to build it into culture. Explore the certification, then ask what your team could create together with no plan and no words.