Enigmedia Marketing

Reflections on how to wear a cape to get noticed, from The Magnificent Chameleon!

Ok, so I am a bit of a thespian, and I have been known to dress up in odd stuff and prance about on stage, but usually the stage is the limit of my dressing up activities. However, in the recent past I’ve been proudly parading around the NEC in Birmingham wearing a yellow cape and superhero mask, all in the name of business development.

Before our two-day stint at World of Learning, showcasing ‘Pants on the Outside’ to the movers and shakers of Learning & Development, I wasn’t fully aware of the benefits that wearing a cape in public can bring. I certainly am now!!

Here’s the first in a series of 5 posts about the benefits of wearing capes!

Benefit #1/5 – It’s a real conversation starter.

Wandering about in my yellow cape provoked numerous “I like your…

So, over the last 2 days we have shown the World (of Learning) our “Pants”! We’ve spoken to the movers and shakers of Corporate Learning & Development and enthusiastically shared our philosophy for team development, showing them how we deliver that philosophy in our own unique way.

What do we do now? Well…..today we reflect!

Those of you familiar with learning theory will know that John Dewey stated, “We do not learn from experience…we learn from reflecting on experience.” The Learning Cycle, developed by David Kolb, is based on the belief that deep learning (learning for real comprehension) comes from a sequence of experience, reflection, abstraction, and active testing – it’s a form of mental processing, a form of good quality thinking.

Before we do anything else, before we race to take action on the many stimulating and thought-provoking conversations we had over Tuesday and Wednesday this week, we are…

To mark the launch of Pants On The Outside at World of Learning this week, we have something special for you from Ian Pettigrew of Kingfisher Coaching. Ian has been kind enough to share some of his thoughts on resilience and its importance to Superheroes everywhere.

I appreciate that all Superheroes are busy and under pressure. There’s a whole world to save and a Superhero’s work is never done! Now everybody (including Superheroes) can have a bad patch once in a while when challenges and difficulties throw us off course. But as Superheroes, we need to put on a brave face and make sure that nobody realises, right? Well, actually: wrong.

There is a real paradox in resilience in that actually trying to remain rock-solid can cause us problems in the longer term. The easiest way to illustrate this is to look at the difference between a tennis ball…

When was the last time you allowed yourself to stop ‘doing’ and take time to sit quietly and reflect on what was going well in life and celebrate this with the people who are important to you?

Life this week has been pretty manic at Superhero H.Q. we’ve been preparing to launch ‘Pants on the Outside’ to the world and meet the people who will work with us to help us make it a success. We’ve also been running our businesses (The Clear Thinking Partnership & Newmill Media) and one of us, namely the Magnificent Chameleon, has been treading the boards every night in Calendar Girls. We are all without a doubt, busy, busy, busy!

Busy is great, busy gives you a hit of adrenaline and serotonin that fires you up and keeps you running at 100%, but we are also more than aware that being busy all of the…

One of the more notable characteristics of many a comic book superhero is their determination and single-mindedness. In the face of adversity they vanquish villains and overcome obstacles against all the odds in order to save the day. As part of the Pant of the Outside ™ experience the teams that we work with get to do this for real.

The point could be made here that commonly Superheroes are lonesome souls who use their Powers to succeed and often don’t need others in their struggle for success.

Questions might be asked about their ability to collaborate well if required to work with each other as part of a team? Would Spiderman be an effective team player if he joined up with Batman and Robin? Or how would the Fantastic Four perform if they were hooked up with The X-Men? Would they be able to recognise their own and others…

In the world of gaming, Power-Ups are objects that instantly benefit or add extra abilities to the game character. Think Power Pellets from Pac-Man and the Super Mushroom from Super Mario Bros and you’re on the right track.

In the world of Pants On The Outside™ the Power-Up equivalent is the Margerison/McCann Team Management Profile. Using this elegant psychometric profiling tool we enable teams to pick out their personal Power-Ups, cunningly disguised as work preferences and use them to propel the team to peak performance.

Let’s take Liv as an example. This is Liv who, in real life works as a Teacher, and in TMP terms is described as a Thruster Organiser. What we know about Liv is this……
– She relates to other people in an Introverted way
– She handles information in a Creative way
– She has a preference for being Analytical in her decision-making
–…