Learning About Words and Pictures …

I would like to introduce you to Scott Adkins, Operations Manager, PCL Construction, BC Region. Scott is a Civil Engineer who has the responsibility for pursuing, winning and building civil projects.

Working on civil projects means that when PCL builds bridges, highway interchanges, LRT stations, wastewater treatment plants, pump stations and the like on Canada’s west coast, Scott will be somehow involved. He has been with PCL for 15 years and I first met him when he was chosen to be one of the 2007 PCL Leadership Course participants.

Being named to this course is a bit of an honour, since it is only offered once-a-year and only accepts 32 participants at-a-time … so you can imagine that in a company of 4,500 salaried employees, seeing your name and picture go up on the Leadership Wall as part of the company’s bright future is not an everyyear occurrence. It is an honour to be selected and it should be, it is a whale of a learning experience (now there’s a word picture!).

At the course, which is a 4-day, intensive, immersive, residential program, the instructor team works hard to offer every participant multiple opportunities to:

learn each of the Kouzes and Posner 5 Leadership Practices and integrate into one’s daily habits

understand where one’s personal strengths and personal development challenges are; and

make (hopefully!) a leadership commitment to model the way for others in family circles, in the company and in the communities in which each we live.

The course culminates with a final banquet, a major encourage the heart event that requires each participant to publicly share something personal about the learning week and a sense of their commitment going forward. We do not record these declarations, although if we did, they would be the stuff of motivational posters and a few leadership bestsellers, they are nothing short of inspirational. This final event on this final evening is unlike anything any of the participants have experienced before and naturally the instructors try their best to select a final speaker, a class valedictorian who epitomizes that class, someone who has clearly demonstrated skill and character in applying the 5 practices and who has helped others ‘get it’ along the way. To use the words of The Last Crusader in that marvelous Indiana Jones movie, we try to “choose wisely”.

In 2007, we did indeed “choose wisely”, we chose Scott Adkins. Now, you need to know that our valedictorians are not been forewarned of their selection, all they know is that they seem to wait for ages for their names to be called. I was at the podium in 2007, the ringmaster if you like, calling out names, saying a few laudatory words about each participant as he/she came up, and I remember watching Scott as I spoke about him and told the class he would be their valedictorian.

As he heard this announcement, his head dropped as if a heavy weight had just been placed on it: it was obviously an honour he was not expecting, not even suspecting. In a moment, though, he leapt to his feet and wound his way around the dining tables towards the podium, carrying a roll of flip chart papers. This is different, I remember thinking, usually people bring up a small piece of note paper containing the elements of their ‘speech’. Scoot arrived at the podium and said to his classmates that he indeed had words to share, but that he thought the pictures he drew of his words would do a better job of letting us all know how he felt.

He then walked to the front of the podium and revealed his drawings one-at-a-time, dropping each one to the floor as he finished with it (à la Bob Dylan, if you ever saw his wonderful music video of Subterranean Homesick Blues?). Here’s what he “said” to us:

For me as one of his “teachers”, this was the reward of a lifetime. Not only did I (I should say “we”, because everyone in that room ‘got it’ instantly!) realize that we had chosen just about as freaking wisely as we could have, but Scott had used an important element of inspiring a shared vision, that of connecting powerful imagery to his words. He literally demonstrated his learning through illustration. It is a moment I will never, ever forget.

In our leadership development efforts, and very particularly in our personal visioning process, we encourage people to strengthen their word-picture language so that when their followers hear words like: “stronger”, “humble”, “noticed”, “focused”, “recharged” and “blessed”, they see the same images that the speaker has in mind. And we do this because we know this is how our memories work: we store and retrieve images much more easily than we do facts and figures … and if emotion is attached to those words and images, like the ones I am feeling right now, as I write this blog some 13 years later, they resurface quickly, accurately and with great power.

Thank you Scott!

P.S. I should add that, after the evening had come to a close and everyone was leaving the room, I saw Scott bend down and begin to clean up his loose paper, with the obvious intention of scrunching up these works of art and throwing them out. Here’s another memory I have of that event: me running frantically across the room to Scott to save these treasures from destruction. I took them home and asked my photographer son Sean to see if he could record them in a smaller, more permanent format and what you see in the photos above is his work. They stayed on my office wall until I retired in 2012, at which point I gave them to Mike Olsson, who was officially taking over the running of the leadership course (although he claims he had been ‘unofficially’ running it from the day he arrived as a participant in 2008!). They now have a home in Mike’s office.