Looking for ways to spice up your meetings? Consider adding some visual skills to your palette! On December 5-6, 2012, I’ll be teaching The Artful Visual Facilitator - 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 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!