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!

























