I guess it may seem a bit unusual for a company to have something called a Manifesto. What’s wrong with a good old Mission Statement like we were taught?
Well, to understand why we call how we think a ‘Manifesto’, you need to know the back story.
If you’ve ever joined an established company, particularly ones big enough to call themselves Corporations, you’ve probably encountered some sort of induction programme. You know the sort of thing. Lots of PowerPoints that lay out the company values and tell you where the toilets are.
Not so at CR Squared. When I joined, the induction was a million miles from being anything formal. It was a series of ad-hoc conversations, driven by whatever issue was on the table, with Dr Conor Hughes. Far from being an indoctrination, it was a dynamic exploration of her evolving ideas about the future of NLP training.
And then the Covid pandemic came along and these conversations which had been optimistic up until then, began to happen under a cloud. It was a time when NLP training in its established form shrunk and migrated to self-help platforms like Udemy. To us, the pandemic galvanised the need to take a fresh look at how to teach NLP. We’d sit gloomily on the stoep, confined in isolation, wondering what next. So, instead of doing that, to paraphrase that famous quote from the Shawshank Redemption, we decided to get busy being flexible, or get busy dying.
In conversations with other trainers, it soon became apparent that our ideas needed to be brought together in a single page for all to see.
The document was written in a hour, flowing effortlessly onto the page, the product of hours and hours of passionate conversations. For us it’s much more that a set of business values or mission, and as such, it needed a bigger word. It needed something that reflected the passion behind it; a word with a bit of revolutionary energy about it. A Manifesto!
What is fascinating to me is that the manifesto was not a response to the pandemic. We were already a long way down the road we’ve chosen when it happened. The pandemic simply made the ideas seem even more relevant.
To see what we wrote click here