shocking people to trigger their imagination

"I love shocking people" is what Art Burshy told me today.
Let me explain you what happened.

Art asked me to join a meeting with his team.
He wanted an objective observer to evaluate the meeting afterwards.
I asked why this was required, as Art must already have lots of experience in such meetings and presentations.
I asked him:
"is it because you do not know the people?"; but he denied.
"because it is a difficult topic?", and he shook his head...so why could that be
"maybe because you strive for continuous improvement, like Plan-Do-Check-Act...?" I tried a last time.

Then Art told me: "when I think it goes very smooth it often turns out to be dramatic... and when I think it is difficult it turns out people are quite enthusiastic..."
"It is like making an art work; when you start and think it is becoming the perfect art work, it ends as a dramatic pompous failure. But when you start out with a struggle, the end result is truly surprising."
I did not really understand but will ask Art to explain me in the future in more detail.

Well, here I was, joining a meeting with many people I do not know at all.
Art Burshy had put 2 paintings in front of the crowd...
Why was that?
- did he want them all to paint, like sort of 60's creative hug session?
- was he going to explain the paintings to a bunch of non-creative business people?
- was there a hidden message in the paintings?

Then Art pointed at a very dark painting saying: "This is where we are today..." and after pointing to a bright one and adding "...and this is where we need to go".
I observed the people looking around, making eye-contact with each other as if to say "WTF is he talking about..."
I was getting worried...did Art always work like this...did he intend to shock them...

Art started asking them questions, like what they saw in the paintings, what they liked in the coloured and bright one. Then moving to 'how-this-reflects-what-needs-to-be-improved'.
During the session more people started to participate and Art wrote down all their comments on the white board;
- the things they wanted to to change
- what it is they could bring to the group in achieving that
- behaviour that could no longer be tolerated

I spoke Art again after the session, when we were biking home sharing with him my observation of the session, he listened and nodded.
Then I asked him what the session really was about, and why he had used art work
Art Burshy explained;
- many people in large companies lose sight of what they are trying to achieve,
- many never speak to a client or do not make a tangible product
- they start blaming others for what is going wrong
As a consequence they live as zombies repeating every day the same actions in the same way; and we call that 'being reliable'.
"You need to shock people to trigger their imagination' he added.

So then I asked why he used this method; how it helps the people, how paintings add value...?
I expected him to explain much about special elements that art brings to the table, deeper insights in inspiration, methodology that has been researched and has demonstrated that art helps in break-through events with teams...
He just replied:
"I love having an excuse to shock people. And for me it's more fun to do that with art..."