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 way more fun!

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

• Basic techniques for drawing simple objects, icons and people
• Effective use of colour and typography
• Translating concepts into images using visual metaphors
• Visual frameworks for organizing information
• Designing posters, templates and charts for your meetings
• Different techniques for graphic facilitation
• …and more!

You’ll get some theory and a lot of hands-on practice, and you’ll walk away with enough skills to begin creating your own graphics for meetings. Some of you might even fall in love with graphic recording and start doing it seriously yourselves! (I’m not kidding. Some of my former students are now in the biz and doing some pretty nifty work!)

If this is something you’ve been thinking about doing, here’s your chance! The Artful Visual Facilitator is offered through the Masterful Facilitation Institute. 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 December 5-6!

But what’s really cool is what the clever folks at Delta did with the chart afterwards. All throughout the visioning process they shot videos of students, teachers and others talking about their vision for the District and showing their values in action. They then enhanced the chart with flash graphics and embedded the videos right into it, to create a multi-dimensional visual that really brought the whole thing alive. I can’t reproduce the animated chart here, but you can click here to go to the actual site.

I’m thrilled with it and see lots of possibilities for taking this approach even further, turning the original chart into a kind of base map from which you can link to all kinds of other related material – videos, audio clips, documents, other weblinks…

What do you think?

Major excitement! After I mapped Karen Armstrong’s talk in Vancouver I got a call from Kristin Miller, editor of the Charter for Compassion website in New York, saying she’d like to use my images on their site and write a little profile about me to go with them. Well, who’s going to say no to an offer like that?? So a couple of days later I found myself having a delightful chat with Kristin, and a week or so after that, a friend told me the story was up on their website! I raced to check it out, and sure enough: there it was. I’m beyond thrilled, and am happy to share the link with you here: She Sees What You’re Saying: Avril Orloff’s Compassionate World

So imagine my thrill when I was asked to graphically record a talk she was giving at an academic symposium on “Working Compassion” earlier this week! Needless to say, I jumped at the opportunity, and the organizers have given me permission to post my charts here. The first is my graphic recording of Karen’s talk, and the second one maps the conversation of the “witnessing panel” who spoke after her talk. (Click on either image to see it larger and clearer.)

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.

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!