Once again, it’s time for our CPSI Blogging Party! CPSI is the How to Create, Innovate and Lead Change Conference and it will be held in Buffalo, NY June 21-25. Will I be attending? Hell, yes! I’ll even be presenting a PACE workshop – The Ten Commandments of Improv in the Workplace.
As a member of the CPSI e-marketing team, I was excited to organize the blogging parties again this year. And so I posed a question to my fellow bloggers (links below): How has CPSI helped *you* create, innovate and lead change? I thought it was a clever question, and that everyone should be able to tell a story or share an insight that fit the theme.
Then it occurred to me that *I* would need to answer my own question. Oh, shit. This is hard!
It’s not that I haven’t learned anything at CPSI – I’ve learned TONS. Nor is it that I can’t tell good stories – I like to think that I can deliver a good narrative. It’s not even that I can’t wax poetic about the creativity community that arises around CPSI every year – I could go on for days. Actually, that’s my problem – I could go on for days. How to synthesize all that CPSI has taught me about creating, innovating and leading change? This blog party’s only a day long, you know!
So I thought maybe I’d tell you about the time CPSI saved our business from certain death. No, really. Last year was a bad year, business-wise. (You may have noticed.) In March, we had barely booked a single job and our cashflow projections looked like Niagra Falls. Banks were still closing, the government was still bailing out the big boys, but none of that had trickled down to the small businesses like ours.
One morning, Mom was watching another doom-and-gloom news report and suddenly started laughing. After telling us that she had not, in fact, gone off her rocker (because really, when your mom starts laughing at the news, you start to wonder) she explained: Dad used to love to play around with futures and commodity trading. And when Mom would read something in the paper about pork bellies or somesuch being on the rise, she would tell him to go invest in pork bellies and he would tell her “No. It’s too late. Once it’s in the news, it’s already happened. I have to go sell my pork bellies now.” So hearing all those awful, terrible, very-bad news stories, Mom realized – it’s over. The news just hasn’t caught up yet. Brilliant!
The only problem was that our clients hadn’t gotten word that the recession was over yet, either. And so we scheduled a full-on Creative Problem Solving session for our own little business, to figure out new ways to get business and how we would weather the storm until everyone else caught up to us. We figured that we had been CPSI-trained, and we use the Osborne-Parnes CPS model with our clients (even if we don’t always market it as such) so we better use it for our own good, right?
I was the facilitator, we made mom the “end client”, Jan was an active and vital participant and we even made my brother, Jonathan, come in as a trained brain. We rearranged the living room and went through the whole process, unearthing long-term wishes and goals for the company and coming up with some wonderful new marketing strategies for New Directions Consulting. The invaluable tools, techniques and tips I had learned from the generous creativity community at CPSI paid off.
Sadly, we never got to start half of our new marketing campaigns. The phone started ringing off the hook the next day and we got busy.
I think the phone started ringing because of something else I learned at CPSI: once you put your intention out there in the universe, it starts to come true. We basically told the cosmos “we are OPEN FOR BUSINESS, DAMMIT!!” and the cosmos responded with enough business to take us through the rest of the year.
So that’s how CPSI helped me lead change in our small business. See what the other blog party participants – Jonathan Vehar, Amy Basic, Cynthia Rolfe, Gregg Fraley, Maggie Dugan – are saying today. And don’t forget to register for CPSI, early bird rates are still in effect.
UPDATES – More bloggers have joined us, make sure you read their posts, too!
