Outside the Lines

Looking for ways to spice up your meetings? Consider adding some visual skills to your palette! On January 17-18, 2012, I’ll be teaching my Artful Visual Facilitator course, a fun, hands-on introduction to graphic recording and graphic facilitation.

Why should you take this course? Well, if you’re a facilitator – or really, anyone who convenes meetings, dialogues, conferences and so on – you want your session to be as engaging, meaningful and productive as possible, right? And you want a record of the session that shows how engaging, meaningful and productive it was. Yet too often, all you have at the end of the day is a wad of flipchart pages covered in bullet-pointed scribbles that you have to work hard to decipher and that no one remembers afterwards. You can do so much better than that!

That’s where visuals come in. As Dan Roam (Back of the Napkin) put it succinctly: “Whoever draws the best picture wins.” Another way to phrase it might be: “Whoever best describes the problem is most likely to solve it.” Because the fact is, most ideas can be made clearer with a picture. Pictures move us from the abstract to the concrete, show us connections we couldn’t see before, and engage the creative parts of our brain where our best ideas live. By adding visual techniques to your facilitation palette, you literally help people see what they mean, draw connections between various ideas, get everyone on the same page,and facilitate big picture thinking. (Note how I cleverly incorporated just about every visual cliché in the book here, eh?) Oh – and by the way, meetings that are graphically facilitated are just way more fun!

Here are some of the topics we’ll cover in the two day course:

• Creating simple images using basic shapes
• Linking concepts and images (visual metaphors)
• The art of hand lettering
• Visual organizing frameworks
• Designing meeting templates
• …and much more!

The course is offered through the Masterful Facilitation Institute, and you can learn more about it on their website. CLICK HERE  for details and a link to the registration form – and register soon to take advantage of the reduced early bird fees!

Hope to see you on January 17-18!

What you’re seeing above is a mural that was co-created over 3 days by Mariah Howard, Mary Corrigan and myself at a splendid event in July called the Mount Madonna Chautauqua. (Click on the image to see a larger version, and go here to see close-ups of different sections.) The Chautauqua is the brainchild of the brilliant (and brilliantly subversive!) educator Ward Mailliard, who for the past 6 years has created a space each summer where a group of people who care about learning can, as he says, “engage in meaningful conversation about our own learning and discover…new ways of transforming our work in education.” This year Chautauqua was structured around the theme of the “Learning Journey,” and from the very beginning of the planning, it was designed to put art and music at the centre of the learning process. And what a learning took place! In future posts I’ll talk more about some of the “AHAs” and epiphanies I (and others) experienced there. For now, suffice to say that it was one of those truly transformative events that one is occasionally blessed to experience, and what I learned at Chautauqua will be informing my work for a long time to come.

If you feel like reading more about Chautauqua right now, click on the link to browse around the blog that Ward and his crew put together after the event. It’s full of rich and juicy details, including several videos, transcripts of talks, and written reflections from various participants. For specific reflections on the role of art, check out Artists’ Reflections, On Art/Graphic Facilitation, and Peter Block’s article on Art and Community.

Research is definitively showing that visualization fosters knowledge-sharing in teams and dramatically improves the productivity of meetings. Hey, we knew that! But it’s nice to have hard evidence to back us up. Thank you to the University of St. Gallen in Lugano, Switzerland and Prof. Martin Eppler.

In my last post, I included 3 of the charts Mariah Howard & I did for the Connecting for Change event in September, and provided a link to the C4C website for the rest. I’ve decided to post the other 3 charts here … but you should still visit the C4C site for our little blurb about visual recording and for all the other interesting stuff on the site!

It’s a good thing I don’t try to make my living from blogging, otherwise I’d be broke! But never mind. I’ll just restyle myself as the Quarterly Blogger, and all will be well. It’s all in the framing, right?

Well, lots of fun since the last time I posted. The Big News this fall was co-mapping Connecting for Change (C4C) with Mariah Howard in September. Mariah is one of the most talented and thoughtful visual recorders I know and I was just drooling at the prospect of working with her. Plus she’s smart, funny and gracious, and I’m proud to call her a friend.

C4C was a 3-day dialogue that brought business, social sector and philanthropic leaders together with the aim of learning “with and from each other about how we can create new and advance existing cross-sector collaborations in service of addressing the most pressing issues of our time.” It would take me the entire post to describe the event, so I’ll just mention a few key details:

• It was part of the Vancouver Peace Summit, organized by the Dalai Lama Center, and included a day at the summit where we got to hear the Dalai Lama and various other luminaries speak about compassion, forgiveness, peace, and educating the heart – topics we need to keep talking about and hearing until we finally absorb the lessons;
  
• C4C facilitators included Meg Wheatley, Peter Senge, Juanita Brown, Dawna Markova, and Peter Block, which is pretty heady company to keep! (Not that I actually talked to all of them, but I at least got to breathe the same air – and I did give Peter Block a couple of pages from my sketchbook!)
• The organizing team was made up of some of the coolest people on the planet and I’m thrilled to be able to say my name in the same sentence with theirs;
• The Dalai Lama shook my hand!!
  

I’ve worked with Mariah before, at the NCDD Conference in 2008, but we worked on separate charts that time. This time we actually co-mapped on the same sheet of paper, and once I got the hang of it, it was like doing a dance together. We’d each start out on one side of the chart, then weave back & forth to mix things up over the course of the session, and act as a sort of tag team to capture different bits of the dialogue so neither one had to do it all. I thoroughly enjoyed the process, as I love working as a team, and it takes a lot of pressure off when there are two sets of ears and hands at work!

The images I’ve interspersed here are 3 of the 6 we created for C4C. (Click on the images to see them more clearly.) You can see them all on the Connecting for Change website, along with a little descriptor we wrote about graphic facilitation. Can you tell which of us did what bits on the charts? I think our styles mesh very well!

PS: Yes, I took the picture of the Dalai Lama at the top of this post! I squeezed my way into the media scrum just before the second half of the session and snapped off several pix. Training for the Paparazzi Brigade!

I love the word “stuff” – it just encompasses so many things! Once I met a person who had a business card whose tagline said, “We do stuff for folks”. I thought that was one of the best taglines I’d ever seen! Pretty much says it all, no?

Anyway, here’s some more of my stuff. The images here are from a pair of community events that were convened to support the District of North Vancouver’s Official Community Plan. (OCPs seem to be a recurring theme for me this year…) At these events, participants were invited to talk about issues that mattered to them relating to (a) people and (b) places in the District. As I stood at the chart, people came up to me with their ideas, dreams, wishes and concerns, and I drew them all out. This is what they looked like:

(There are more circles to the right of these, but you get the drift…)

It was really quite wonderful, because everyone was so passionate about what they wanted to see for the District, and wanted to make very sure their ideas were fully drawn out. If I missed a detail, I heard about it! For example, the proponents of community gardens made sure there was a composter in the picture. And the folks who wanted to see vibrant urban spaces made sure I drew children into the picture and that I noted that vibrant space meant “night AND day”.

What this tells me is that the drawings really mean something to people. I see it as a way of making abstract ideas concrete. Pictures are so much more solid and real than mere words, and I think people feel their ideas become real when they see them translated into images. It reminds me of my favourite story when I was a little girl, which was a story about a little girl who had a magic pencil, and whatever she drew with her magic pencil came to life. I always wanted to have a magic pencil like that … and lo and behold, now I do!

Summer in Vancouver, and the livin’ is easy – aaahhh! I don’t care what all those Canadian writers and composers say about “Winters R Us” – my seasons are spring and summer, and I come into bloom with the sun and warmth.

Spring is also a time when everyone wants to get all their work done before the summer, so May and June are busy months for me. In April I connected with Keli Anderson, Executive Director of The F.O.R.C.E. Society for Kids’ Mental Health – a well-named organization, because Keli is definitely a force of nature! We worked together with a group of strong and dynamic Aboriginal mothers on a session devoted to Aboriginal child and youth mental health, and then in May Keli hired me to map the FORCE’s Child and Youth Mental Health Day Forum and roundtable discussion.

The April session contains private information, so I can’t publish the charts here, but I’m authorized to post charts from the Forum, so here they are (remember to click on the images for a larger view):

The last week of May found me up in the village of Teslin, Yukon, working with my old friends Bev Suderman and Mike Kelly, who were doing an Official Community Plan (OCP) review for the Village. Over 5 days, Bev and Mike convened a series of community conversations around the visioning/values clarification/objectives-setting part of the project, and my job was to map the conversations. I’m just waiting to get permission to post some of these charts. Meanwhile, here’s what it looked like outside at 11pm and midnight:

I’d always wanted to see the midnight sun, and we got pretty close this time! Quite a sight, eh?

More to come…I’m on a roll!

These are some more images from the plenary sessions of the PNCIMA Forum to add to the one I posted just below. For the two charts above I worked alone, but for the two below, I joined forces with the volunteer graphic recorders who helped out at the forum. This was a group of young women with artistic ability but no previous training in graphic recording. I gave them a 2-hour basic training a few days before the conference, then left them to their own devices to record the breakout sessions. They did a stellar job on their sessions, and for the breakout updates and final plenary I asked any of them who wanted to help me map the conversation. Can you tell where my work leaves off and theirs begins?

That’s what I get for not updating my blog more regularly: people are still asking me if I’m enjoying my vacation. Actually, I’ve been back for almost 2 weeks. And yes, thank you – I had a splendid time. First of all, I got to hang out with my dearest friend Robin and celebrate the silver anniversary of our friendship, as well as (belatedly) her graduation from the Mills College MBA program last spring. That in itself, as we say, would have been Dayenu!

But on top of that, I also had the pleasure of:
(1) Hiking on beautiful Mt. Tam on a gorgeous, sunny day with Ken Homer, a smart, funny guy who knows more than most about one of my favourite topics: how to convene great conversations that make things happen;
(2) Getting a tour of The Grove from David Sibbet and being invited to play with his cool Wacom tablet!
(3) Spending a delicious afternoon in the company of three brilliant graphic recording colleagues, Julie Gieseke, Mariah Howard and Leslie Salmon-Zhu. We had all kinds of plans for what we would do that day, but wound up just sitting and talking, talking, talking…and laughing our heads off in between all the talk. It was such an inspiration to hang out with these women and share stories, questions, ideas and giggles, and I only wish I could do this regularly!

What joy: in a few days I’ll be heading off on vacation – long overdue, and (if I do say so myself) well-deserved! I’m going to San Francisco where, among other things, I’m looking forward to a day of fun & inspiration with a group of lovely colleagues, and hopefully a visit to The Grove, which is kind of like Mecca for graphic facilitators.

Meanwhile, in my ongoing (and possibly futile) attempt to catch up with myself, I’m posting a few more pieces of work I’ve produced in the past few months. The first 3 are from the Community Foundations of Canada conference held in Montreal last November.