graphic reflections

Summertime, and the living is...

noreply@blogger.com (Avril Orloff) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 05:05:00 +0000

....getting easier by the day! Yup, things are slowing down for the summer, and I don't mind. I totally love my work — but I also love my holidays, and have never quite gotten over the idea that July and August are supposed to be Summer Holidays. So here's to long, lazy days, sunsets on the beach, reading juicy novels in sidewalk cafes, and catching up with what's really important: friends & family. OK, OK, and a bit of work, just to keep my wits about me.

Today I'm posting a couple of pieces I did for the BC Healthy Communities conference last month. BCHC was one of my first graphic recording clients and I've continued to work with them on several projects. I love their holistic approach to healthy development, which draws heavily on Ken Wilber's Integral Theory and its 4-quadrant model of consciousness (intentional, behavioural, cultural and social). (I make it sound like I know something about this! But I'm still at the steep end of the learning curve. But it's really interesting stuff. Check it out.)

Here is the chart from the first presentation, on — wait for it — integral capacity building (remember to click on the image for a larger view):

It's interesting looking at these pieces after the fact, since I feel I hardly know what I'm doing while I'm doing it. I often think this work must be like being a simultaneous translator, except that instead of translating people's words into another language, I translate them into images. But you're really 'in the moment' as you're doing it — not much time to reflect until later. I'm quite happy with the pieces I did for BCHC. I feel I'm beginning to develop a style of my own, and am also (gradually) beginning to organize the material better.

Next up is a fun piece. I'm attaching an unretouched photo here, as the poster had streamers attached to the bottom, which don't clean up well in Photoshop.

The idea of the streamers was that people would write their ideas for the 'imagined culture' on each one, and in the final session of the conference we were going to have another exercise where people 'wove' their ideas together. In the end we wound up jettisoning the final session, so these ones wound up as a standalone. I like the effect, though. And I like that people contribute to the artwork.

Finally, I include a chart I did for Robert Kegan's keynote presentation on Day 2 of the conference. This was one of the best presentations I've ever had the pleasure of attending, and I am thrilled to have made Bob's acquaintance. Aside from being absolutely brilliant, he is also funny as hell, and his presentation was liberally peppered with witty stories and wry observations.

As you can see from the chart, the subject was Understanding and Overcoming the Immunity to Change. He presented a really interesting theory about this, which I'm going to quote a bit below, just because it's really interesting.

“We think we have discovered a powerful dynamic that tends to keep us exactly where we are, despite sincere, even passionate, intentions to change. A recent study concluded that doctors can tell heart patients that they will literally die if they do not change their ways, and still only about one in seven will be able to make the changes. These are not people who want to die. They want to live out their lives, fulfill their dreams, watch their grandchildren grow up—and, still, they cannot make the changes they need to in order to survive.

“If wanting to change and actually being able to are so uncertainly linked when our very lives are on the line, why should we expect that even the most passionate school leader’s aspiration to improve instruction or close achievement gaps is going to lead to these changes actually occurring?”

What this implies, says Kegan, is that more knowledge is needed about the change process itself, and more understanding of the “immunity to change.”

“Our work pays very close—and very respectful—attention to all those behaviors people engage that work against their change goals. Instead of regarding these behaviors as obstacles in need of elimination, we take them as unrecognized signals of other, usually unspoken, often unacknowledged, goals or motivations.” The countervailing tension between these two sets of equally sincere motivations creates the “immune system,” and sustains the status quo.

What I also loved about his presentation was that it was highly interactive. He didn't just stand there and talk — in fact, I'd guess that he only spent about 1/3 of his time talking. The rest of the time he had people pairing off and doing the exercise he lays out in his book. The buzz in the room was palpable — so much so that I drew it into the chart because the energy was a presence in itself!

My only complaint was that because I was recording his session I couldn't do the exercise myself. But never mind: Ali has promised to do it with me some time over the summer. Can't wait!

Long time no see...

noreply@blogger.com (Avril Orloff) — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 06:30:00 +0000

Well, hello there! Fancy running into you here. I haven't been here lately myself — have you? Ah, well, you've probably been busy too. I sure have.

Apart from an explosion of work, I've spent the past several months being a Full Time Daughter as my mother landed in and out of hospital with health issues of increasing severity. It's been a sobering education on many fronts — not least being the confrontation with mortality, which most of us would rather avoid. But the good news is: we both survived! My mother is back home now and doing much better, I'm finally able to breathe again, and we're both keeping our fingers crossed that things stay this way for awhile.

Talking about mortality, in between everything else I went to a Bruce Springsteen concert (♥♥♥) and realized that the first time I saw him in concert was...half my lifetime ago!! Talk about sobering. Well, he is still THE BOSS — and I still have my rock & roll spirit. So all is not lost in my world.

Oh, and I did some work too! Actually, a lot of work. And what follows are the fruits of my labour. First up: some charts I did for a terrific conference on food security earlier this year. Food security isn't a topic I knew a lot about going into the conference, but I was able to sit in on a few sessions that I didn't have to record, and I learned a lot! That's one of the things I love about this work — I get to go to all kinds of interesting events and learn about things I didn't know much about before. Or learn more about things I did know something about. And, of course, meet all kinds of interesting people in the process.

Below are the charts from the World Cafe sessions that took place each afternoon of the conference. Here is the World Cafe 'harvest' from Day 1:

And here's Day 2:

An added bonus of this conference was the opportunity to collaborate with my great friend Ali Grant, who is a most engaging facilitator (with a gorgeous Scottish accent) and a terrific creative partner. This is another aspect of this work that just delights me: the fact that I get to team up with some of the brightest, most thoughtful people around and co-create processes for change together. What I learn from my colleagues on the job is priceless!

And now for something quite different...

noreply@blogger.com (Avril Orloff) — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 06:09:00 +0000

Sometimes something emerges from my pen that I really don't expect. That was the case with a piece I did for the Burnaby School District. We were trying to chart the many projects and initiatives they've put in place to support literacy in Burnaby, and came up with the idea of representing it as a tapestry. I had an idea that I'd include words, drawings, and some collage elements (which I've long wanted to play with), and that the 'tapestry' would be built around the 5 participant groups Burnaby's programs support. But beyond that I was pretty fuzzy.

So I rolled out a l o o o o o o o n g piece of paper — the longest chart I've ever done — sketched in a pencil outline of the edges, and started drawing. I sketched in the boxes containing the main categories. Then I sketched in boxes containing the subsections. Then I started adding colour…and images…and collaged in some photos of Burnaby student art…and thought, "Hmmm." I wasn't at all sure that I was going to like what came out. But I kept on. I added connector lines, added more colour, added texture…and bit by bit it started taking shape. I started liking what I saw after all.

By the time I finished the second section it was starting to look quite rich. Then it was time for the Aboriginal section. Instead of doing it in a square like the others, I made it round to match their Aboriginal Circle Program.

After four days of work, the tapestry was finally finished. (I had somehow imagined I'd get it done in a day — talk about underestimating the time things will take…) I added a bit of pastel to the main headings to punch them out a bit — and it was done! It didn't (and doesn't) look quite like anything else I've done in this genre, and I don't think I really had a clue what it would look like till I was about halfway through. But I have to say, I'm pretty pleased with the final result. More importantly, Burnaby S.D. is delighted with it. Here's what it looks like:

C2D2

noreply@blogger.com (Avril Orloff) — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 05:37:00 +0000

Righto, I said I would post a few charts from C2D2 (the Canadian Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation), which happened here in Vancouver in mid-November. As I said in my previous post, it was both fun and exhausting — fun because graphic recording is inherently fun, and it was cool to actually be doing this at C2D2 when it was at the first C2D2 two years ago that I was first introduced to graphic recording! Life is a circle. It was also fun because I got to work with two other graphic recorders, Sue Davis and Deborah LeFrank, whom I had met at Christina's 'Graphics Bootcamp' last spring. I love working as part of a team, and as you can see from the picture at left, we had a good time working together!

It wasn't all goofing around, though: we worked HARD! That's where the exhausting part comes in. It was 2.5 days of very intensive charting, both up front during the plenaries and on sketchpads during breakout sessions. By the end of the conference, I was well and truly bagged. I haven't got good photos of all the charts yet, but here are a couple of the main ones.

This one was done for the first plenary, in which Adam Kahane spoke about "Facing Complex Issues." He talked fast — so we had to work fast!

Just so you can see how very differently two graphic recorders can capture the same talk, I'm attaching Deb LeFrank's chart here as well. (I don't think Deb has a web page or I'd include a link...) I like the way Deb organizes her material, and particularly how she handles text. One thing I realized when I looked at her work is that most of my body text is the same size, whereas Deb works with more variety of text size, which creates focal points and an interesting typographic 'texture'. Note to self!

The chart at left is from the Day 2 plenary panel. This one went even faster than Adam Kahane's; I was so busy scribing that I hardly took in anything they said! I think that's an occupational hazard of this work. You listen, you get it down, you let go, you move on.

The one below is a collaborative effort. I did the bits around the edges at home before the conference (Welcome to C2D2, the map, and the drawing at bottom right), then we filled in the centre on Day 1 as people called out things they discovered they had in common with others at their table. As you can see, some of the things people had in common were pretty funny!

Well, actually, maybe you can't — some of the writing is pretty small. My favourite is "have all done laundry". Yeah!! That's something that'll bond ya.

Here's the last one for today: another chart I created at home (my bedroom wall is serving as my studio these days) — this one is a chart showing what topics were being addressed at what tables.

And that pretty much brings us up to date! So farewell to 2007, and here's looking forward to what 2008 will bring...

It's catch-up time again...

noreply@blogger.com (Avril Orloff) — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 06:43:00 +0000

One of the things I mean to do this year is to keep my blog relatively up to date! (Are you listening, Avril?) Actually, what I'd really like is to make enough money to hire someone to design me a real website — but that's a wish for another day, and this column is about today. Or rather, about the past few months, since what I mean to do here is to update this site with examples of stuff I did since my last post, which was...whenever...

So, without further ado:

This is part of a big mural I did for a school in Surrey — they wanted a graphic representation of their staff Pro-D day.

And this is another part of the same mural. (There's more, but this covers most of the visually interesting part of it.)

I quite like this one just above, which illustrates a collective vision for a successful supported child development program. It was done live but I had more time than usual to think about the layout and organize the content.

On the other hand, this is an example of a custom chart I created at home for a conference I later graphically recorded live. I like going back & forth between live chartwork (on-the-spot recording) and advance chartwork that I can do on my own time. The live work is exhilarating and challenging, and I love the interaction with people. But the home work allows me time to design the mural and to think more carefully about what images I'll use. And to research new images that then (hopefully!) get stored in my memory bank for future live work. And so it goes...

OK, it's late and I need to get my beauty sleep. My next post will feature images from C2D2, the Canadian Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation. That was a 3-day marathon, which was both fun and exhausting. What was especially fun about it was working as part of a graphic recording team. But I'm getting ahead of myself. More tomorrow (which of course will appear above this post, thus appearing to have been written before it, but oh well...)

Happy New Year!

noreply@blogger.com (Avril Orloff) — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 06:19:00 +0000

Well, I don't know about the rest of you, but I had a pretty good year in 2007. So I'm feeling optimistic that 2008 will be even better!

Yeah, I know the world didn't get any better; in fact, in many respects it seems to keep getting worse. But I remain stubbornly confident that what's bad can be improved and what's good can be sustained, and I remain steadfast in my resolve to do my bit for both.

And to stay awake and attentive throughout. It's so easy to get caught up in rushing from one task to the next and forget to take time to notice the world...or to really experience it. No more. From now on, this girl is Taking Back Her Time!

This lovely photo taken from my kayak on Galiano Island last summer will hopefully remind me what it's all about...

I'm on the World Cafe website!

noreply@blogger.com (Avril Orloff) — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 05:47:00 +0000

Wondering what happened to me? I'm still here! Just haven't posted in awhile - the usual excuses apply. I've got some new images to post, and will do so over the holidays. But meanwhile, I just had to share the exciting news that I have a presence on The World Cafe website!

If you're not familiar with The World Cafe, I heartily recommend checking out their site - and their resources on convening World Cafe dialogues. I first became aware of TWC about 4 years ago, when I attended a World Cafe-style dialogue in Edmonton. I was hooked from the get-go and remain a big fan of the process, which I find stimulating, generative - and FUN.

Anyway, a few months ago I created a poster of World Cafe guidelines. The poster has been pretty popular and copies of it have been making the rounds, to my great pleasure. Somehow or other it made its way to the good folks at World Cafe central, who asked if they could make it available for download from their website. Needless to say, I was honoured by the request and delighted to comply! And so you too can download my poster of World Cafe guidelines from the World Cafe website, should you so desire. Enjoy!

Another day, another year...

noreply@blogger.com (Avril Orloff) — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 21:26:00 +0000

It's a classic October day in Vancouver: everything is grey, and a steady rain has been falling all day. A perfect afternoon to stay indoors, drink tea, do laundry – and update my blog. It's also the day before my birthday – thus the reference to Another Year in the title. All the usual cliches about time apply – I can't believe how fast one year turns into the next these days. I have this theory that life is a bit like a cassette tape: it spools fairly slowly in the first half, but as you pass the middle of the roll, it unwinds at an increasingly rapid pace!

So much for melancholy philosophy. It's been a great year, in fact, and I have high hopes for the year to come. My graphic facilitation biz has taken off like a shot, and it looks like I will actually be able to make a living at this work – and a decent living, at that. You know the universe is in alignment when people are paying you to have fun!

In addition to my day work, I'm involved in aspects of the upcoming Canadian Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation (C2D2), which takes place in Vancouver from Nov. 12-14 this year. I'll be doing graphic recording at the conference (of course!), and am also coordinator for the GR team, which will include at least one and possibly 3 or 4 up and coming graphic recorders. It'll be fun to have colleagues at the wall with me; usually I'm on my own. In a perfect world there would be a veteran or two in the room as well – I still feel I have a lot to learn from those who've been in the field for a long time. But it looks like I'll be the "veteran" in the room, with my all-of-1.5 years' experience in the field. Oh well...

I've been busy with regular work as well, and have a couple of images to share here. Here's one that looks at collaborative literacy initiatives in Burnaby.

Bit of a potpourri of visual metaphors – but I couldn't make up my mind which one to go with, so I used them all! (Sounds a bit like the story of my life, actually....)
* * *
In a couple of weeks the Internat'l Forum of Visual Practitioners is taking place in Santa Fe, and I wish I could be there. I really want to connect with my "peeps" in the field, and I've never been to Santa Fe. But I've blown my professional development budget for the year already, and with the C2D2 conference coming up hard on the heels of IFVP, there's just no way I can go this year. Next year, though, fer shure.....!!

September harvest

noreply@blogger.com (Avril Orloff) — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 02:30:00 +0000

No, I haven't fallen off the face of the earth – I just got distracted by summer – or what passed for summer in these parts. I also treated myself to (gasp) an actual vacation in August, which included an intense but rewarding week doing a Theatre For Living workshop with David Diamond, followed by a blissfully peaceful week on Galiano Island, practising that great Italian pastime of dolce far niente. No, I'm not Italian – but I deeply get this concept!

And with the end of summer came the beginning of a whole bunch of new work. But first, one I did earlier in the summer, for a day-long community workshop on sustainability. The idea was to develop a Sustainability Charter for the township, engaging as many citizens as possible in the process.

More recently, here is a poster I created for executive coach Carollyne Conlinn:

Among all her other activities (creator of the Excelerator Coaching™ Program and The Great Question!™ Game, President of Full Spectrum Coaching, partner in Limitless Leadership Inc., etc. etc.), Carollyne is also on the faculty of the Executive Coaching Program at Royal Roads University, and she asked me to create a poster for her course. I started with the image Carollyne developed for The Great Question! Game of a head with a question mark and 3 spirals, and built the rest of the poster around it, based on information from her powerpoint presentation.

These are just a few examples of the work I've done since I last posted to this site. I've got a few more coming down the pike, so come back again in a couple of weeks – you may see something new!

Article on graphic facilitation

noreply@blogger.com (Avril Orloff) — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 17:09:00 +0000

Below is a link to a good article on graphic facilitation by Peter Durand, creative director of Alphachimp Studio Inc. and the brains behind the Center for Graphic Facilitation. I've never met Peter, but he very kindly responded to my query about how to clean up my images in Photoshop, which I've used ever since. Click here to view the article.

More stuff…

noreply@blogger.com (Avril Orloff) — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 04:06:00 +0000

OK, the last post was all words; here are a couple of pictures. These are from the Spirit of BC regional roundtables that are taking place around the province. The roundtables are intended to help the communities involved come up with concrete objectives or legacies they'd like to accomplish for their region by 2010, and to brainstorm ideas for celebrations to mark BC's 150th anniversary in 2008.

This picture is from last week's session in Victoria (click on the image for a larger view – it looks blurry here but it 'cleans up real good' in the larger size!)

And this one is the chart from the BC2008 session in the Okanagan the week before.

As you can see, the quality of the photographed images is still uneven. So much depends on the available light in the room and how steady my hand was that day (note to self: buy a tripod!), to say nothing of my rather uneven approach to Photoshop at the other end.

What I like about these two is that I feel I'm getting a better handle on organizing the material. The lower one is very simple graphically – not much imagery at all. But I think it hangs together quite well and moves the eye along around the edges and toward the objectives in the centre, which is what I wanted it to do. The upper one is more elaborate and not quite as clean graphically, but it represents an advance for me, viz: I remembered to leave space around each idea so that when someone called out a related idea, there was room to put it next to the one it fit with instead of simply trying to find an empty spot on the page. That is, I managed to create visual clusters this time, which I then framed in red to bring them out.

I was also glad that participants felt free to add their own comments here and there (e.g. the V.I.R.C. column at left, which I framed). I really like it when people 'claim' the work by writing or drawing on it themselves. It makes me feel like they're really engaging with it – and entering a real conversation with the artwork. Yay!

Value statement

noreply@blogger.com (Avril Orloff) — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 03:35:00 +0000

Never a dull moment around here. As I said in my last post, June is chock-a-block with work, and I'm starting to get calls for July and beyond. Who'da thunk it?

When I was preparing for my demo for the BC Centre for Quality last month, I was asked to put together a one-pager describing how my work contributes to the quality of a process. It was a good exercise, because it forced me to think about the real value of this work. Of course other practitioners have written about this work (Christina Merkley's website is particularly rich in that regard) – but I need to articulate it in my own words to make it real to me. Here's what I came up with:

MEETINGS CAN BE FUN!
In fact, I’d go so far as to say they should be. If the quality of a product is at least partly dependent on the quality of the process, then it stands to reason that meetings – which are an integral part of any process – should harness the best energy and ideas of the people in attendance. And that’s most likely to happen when those people are engaged, excited and energized – in short, when they’re having FUN!

That’s where graphic facilitation comes in.

As a graphic facilitator, I create a visual map of the conversation at meetings, workshops, dialogues and other group processes, using words and images to literally draw out people’s thinking and surface the “big picture.” Listening carefully for meaning as well as words, I create a graphic depiction of the conversation as it unfolds, drawing out patterns, themes and connections to weave the parts into an integrated whole.

And how does this contribute to the quality of the process? Simply put, graphic facilitation helps make meetings more productive. Here are some reasons why:

People process information in different ways. By adding a visual element, you’re more likely to engage visual learners (who make up over 80% of the population, according to researchers).
Graphic recording literally gets everyone “on the same page” and enables people to build on each other’s ideas.
Thoughts become visible and explicit, which increases clarity and reduces misunderstanding.
People feel acknowledged and heard when they see their ideas take concrete shape. This, in turn, increases trust and reduces conflict.
Creative listening begets creative thinking, creative thinking begets better ideas, and better ideas beget more effective processes and products.
Participants get a unique and attractive “takeaway” that they can refer back to, share with others who weren’t present, and incorporate into reports to show (not just tell) what went on.
And last but not least, graphically facilitated meetings are energizing, engaging, enjoyable…and FUN!

As I was saying...

noreply@blogger.com (Avril Orloff) — Thu, 24 May 2007 04:22:00 +0000

...something about the difficulty of keeping up with a blog! If you note the date of my last post and the date of this post, you will get my point exactly. How do other people manage to update theirs daily and still have a life?? I'm sure there used to be a lot more hours in the day when I was young (she said creakily).

Well, never mind. That's not what I came here to write. If I'm going to ruminate about the vagaries of time, I will do it on the phone with my friends or in the journals I no longer have time to write. This is my Show n' Tell space for my graphic recording work and my ruminations thereon. And so, on that note...

It's been an amazingly busy month with lots of interesting gigs – I can hardly believe how quickly things are coming together! Since the last time I posted, I graphically recorded a conference on storytelling, another BC Healthy Communities session, a curriculum planning session for Leadership Vancouver, a community meeting on literacy, and a regional roundtable for Spirit of BC, among other things. And I did a graphic recording demo at "Quality in Action," the annual conference of the BC Centre for Quality. (The latter ably co-facilitated by my coach and friend Evan Renaerts.)

Whew.

And it's just going to get busier in June, which is a head-spinning thought. I'm scheduled to do five-count-em-5 more sessions for Spirit of BC, and they're going to be all over the province, which is hugely exciting to me. I've long wanted to see more of my home province, and this will get me started. Not that there will be time to see much more than the conference rooms we're working in – but at least I'll get a glimpse of the scenery on the way to and from the airport! But more about those after they're done. Meanwhile, here's a little gallery of some of the things I've done in the past 6 weeks…

This one shows highlights from 3 workshops at the BC Healthy Communities conference in Abbotsford last month.

This one was prepared in advance for a Literacy Now roundtable, to provide a snapshot of the Burnaby community.

And this one shows the outcomes of that same roundtable.

Oh, there's lots more! But I'll save them for another post. And will try not to let a month elapse between postings...oy.

Spring harvest

noreply@blogger.com (Avril Orloff) — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 22:22:00 +0000

Whew, blogs are such a responsibility! Eager as I am to share my work with the world, keeping this thing up to date ends up just being one more Thing To Do in an already overheated schedule. But I'm not complaining! Au contraire, I'm very grateful to be kept fairly busy. Of course, at this stage of my career it's not all graphic recording that I'm being kept busy with – but each month I get a bit more graphic work than I had the month before, and I'm confident that it will continue to multiply.

I've got a whole spate of interesting gigs coming up, but meanwhile here's some work I did last month. This one was the outcome of a very fortuitous connection with Brenda Chaddock, facilitator extraordinaire, who invited me to do the graphic recording for a session she was facilitating for BC Healthy Communities (Vancouver Coastal Region). I started by doing something I hadn't done before, which was to prepare some custom chartwork in advance – in this case, a poster outlining the guidelines for hosting a World Cafe dialogue. I'm particularly pleased with this piece, as I think it's inviting and has a nice flow. (Click on the graphics to see larger images.)

One thing I especially enjoyed about this session was that I was very involved in the planning conversations, which allowed me to really integrate the graphics into the day and introduce a couple of innovations (or what seemed to me to be innovations, at any rate!) Brenda was going to start off the day by having people pair off, introduce themselves to each other, and talk about what called them to be there that day. I suggested we pass out paper and pens and ask folks to draw an image symbolizing how they were feeling as they came into the session – what kind of energy they were bringing with them. Brenda liked the idea and added it to the intro section. We wound up using sticky notes, which I collected, grouped into themes, and stuck on a large sheet of paper to create a kind of 'tapestry' of the collective energy in the room. This is what it looked like.

I like this piece not because it's particularly stunning visually, but because it creates more interaction between the people in the room and the graphics. Usually it's just me drawing and writing and recording people's comments – but this puts the pens in the hands of the participants and invites them to unleash their own 'inner artist'! This is something I want to bring into this work more and more. I'd really like to make as many of these pieces as possible a true co-creation between me and the other folks in the room – perhaps even others who weren't in the room at the time but are somehow involved in the process!

OK, I'm going into my mid-afternoon coma – time for a break, and I'll come back with more later.

My first presentation!

noreply@blogger.com (Avril Orloff) — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 05:36:00 +0000

Well, although this is a bit after the fact, I'd like to report that in January I gave my first-ever presentation! The group I presented to is the BC Centre for Quality – a professional organization that describes itself as "a forum for learning where quality practitioners explore the principles and applications of organizational excellence." The president of BCCQ, Ann Brown, is an enthusiast of graphic facilitation and wanted to show the impact of the process to their membership. She had somehow discovered my blog (this in itself is exciting), liked what she saw, and wondered if I'd be willing to make a presentation at their next breakfast meeting. Of course I said yes!

So on a windy January morning, I showed up at their meeting room on the top floor of the Coast Plaza Hotel (fabulous view), and proceeded to explain the process and purpose of graphic facilitation and graphic recording. Of course, GF is something best experienced by experiencing it, not by being told about it – so I kept the presentation fairly short and quickly swung into the actual process. The idea was to pose a question to the group and then record the ideas that flowed in response. Since their breakfast meetings are a core part of the way BCCQ interacts as a group, the question was: What makes a great breakfast meeting? The ideas flowed thick and fast, and this is what they looked like:

The folks were really enthusiastic about the process, but several lamented that they "were not artistic" and could never do this themselves. All the more reason to hire me, sez I – but I don't like to see people downgrading their own creativity, so I thought I'd try something fun. On the spur of the moment I handed everyone a piece of paper and a coloured marker, and announced that I was going to prove to them that they could draw.

A few looked skeptical, others looked downright chagrined, but I assured them artistic talent was not a prerequisite. "I'm going to give you 2 minutes," I said, "and in those 2 minutes I'd like you to draw a picture of how you're feeling at the end of this session." It can be a picture, a symbol, or just a scribble, I said, but it has to be an image, not words. "Ready? Go!"

For the next two minutes I watched as everyone in the room turned into a playful kid. Their faces were a fascinating combination of amusement, puzzlement, seriousness and glee as they put their minds to the problem. After the requisite two minutes, I asked everyone to hold up their page and show it to the rest of the room. Every single person had created an image that clearly expressed a feeling. "Congratulations," I grinned at them: "You're now all officially artists!" Everyone beamed.

I'm going to talk about this more in a later post, because there's something important here. What is it about drawing that both scares and frees us? Stay tuned...

New address

noreply@blogger.com (Avril Orloff) — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 06:27:00 +0000

Greetings from my new address!

Yes, I've changed my URL from axisofemail to my own name. "Why?" you ask? Well, when I set up this blog last summer, I was in a political snit. "Axis of email" popped into my head in response to the Axis of You-know-what that we kept hearing about in the news. And I confess, I thought it rather witty. However – it's not exactly an intuitive address. You don't think, "Avril Orloff – I wonder where I might find her – oh, of course, she's at the Axis of Email!"

So I thought, well, how about using my actual name? Especially since, as far as I know, I'm the only Avril Orloff in the world! That would make it really easy to find me. So that's what I did. Or rather, my friend Elen did it for me. Elen is a computer maven who understands the strange language that lurks behind the thin veneer of user-friendliness on the surface of computers – a world I dare not enter. She offered to do what was necessary to transfer my blog to my domain. And minutes later, voila! A new address. Thank you, Elen!

The only downside is that apparently Blogger users who switch to FTP transfer no longer have access to all the easy set-up features that Blogger Beta included. So now it's back to trying to figure out which of those strings of HTML I need to tweak to make any changes to the look of this thing. Sigh...

PS: By the way, Elen also has a fascinating blog, and turned a lot of her material into a book. Don't Shoot! I have another story to tell you… Check it out.

A different use of visuals

noreply@blogger.com (Avril Orloff) — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 09:09:00 +0000

A few weeks ago my friend Kate Sutherland asked me to do something a bit different. Instead of asking me to record a meeting, she wanted to use visuals to present a proposal for a conference she's designing. She thought that presenting her ideas visually would be more engaging than a standard, straight-text proposal. So we went to work. Kate had prepared a mind map of her concept, and we spent some time going over it and refining the design. Then I got busy with my markers, and here's what emerged a couple of hours later:

As soon as it was done, Kate rolled it up and whisked it off to the group. The next day I got a delighted email from her, telling me the presentation had been a huge hit! "Presenting the community engagement proposal through graphic images was very powerful," she wrote. "The colours and images and large scale of the paper immediately drew peoples' interest and sustained attention. It was a wonderful and quick way to get all the people in the meeting up to speed, on the same page, and buying in. And committee members felt freer to interact with the graphic presentation than they do with a Power Point — for example, suggesting additional images and arrows."

Needless to say, I was very excited. Both by the fact that the drawing had such a strong effect, and by the fact that people felt free to interact with it. I wasn't present at Kate's meeting, but when I'm in the room I always check in with the people there to make sure I've heard and recorded their thoughts correctly. Sometimes I leave a space for people to add their own words and doodles, or provide sticky notes so they can add other thoughts, corrections, etc. Ultimately I'd like to find ways of building more interactivity right into the process so that people can express their own creativity!

Catching up...

noreply@blogger.com (Avril Orloff) — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 01:20:00 +0000

Here, at last, are some more pictures of work I've done in the past couple of months. This batch is from a strategic planning session I recorded for a community centre in North Vancouver.

These were all done "live" – that is, I captured the conversation as it was taking place. Sometimes I'm given info in advance, such as for some pieces I did at the Sechelt session. Other times I do my work during breakout sessions when I'm not required to record on the spot (e.g. the second drawing for the Sea to Sky session). This gives me more time to organize the ideas into clusters – something that's hard to do when the talk is flying thick and fast! But sometimes I manage to organize as I go. I think I got it this time...

I'm looking forward to having more opportunity to practise at home now that I've got a nice big place with a whole separate room for an office! Beats hell out of working off the kitchen table...

Happy New Year!

noreply@blogger.com (Avril Orloff) — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 07:58:00 +0000

How time flies when you're having fun. It's already 2007! HAPPY NEW YEAR, faithful readers!! (All two of you.)

I know bloggers are supposed to post regularly, but I've got an excuse for being remiss: December was a very moving month for me. Literally. I moved. If you've ever moved house, you know how chaotic your life becomes before, during, and for a good while after. I'm in the middle of that chaos right now. But I will have some new pix to post very soon. Meanwhile, here is a picture of my living room — an artwork in progress. Please ignore the randomly scattered furniture and admire the colour. It's called Velvet Red. I've always wondered who dreams up all the names for all those paint colours. Wouldn't that be a great job?

Well, here's to health, happiness, prosperity, and of course, WORLD PEACE in 2007! Stay tuned for developments...

Further to an earlier post…

noreply@blogger.com (Avril Orloff) — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 03:38:00 +0000

A couple of entries ago I expressed a hope that I'd get permission to post the drawings from a session I did up in Whistler with the Imagine BC Sea-to-Sky group. Well, I got permission, so here are the drawings: (click on a picture to view a larger image)

Confession: the top drawing is just a detail, not the whole sheet. When I looked at the original with a critical eye I realized it was kind of chaotic — the information from one area spilled over into another area so it was difficult to distinguish between the discrete parts. So I just posted the good bits here! The bottom drawing is better organized, I think — but then, I had the advantage of doing that one a bit after the fact, whereas the one above was done "live" as people were talking. That's the big challenge, trying to organize ideas and information that's flying at you thick and fast.

My mentor Christina Merkley subsequently coached me on how to organize information better on the page, with frames, heads and subheads, bullets, separator lines and so on. I tried to put those ideas into practice in my Sechelt drawings (Charrette Syndrome, below), and think I was fairly successful.

Another day, another lesson learned…

Avril learns to lighten up

noreply@blogger.com (Avril Orloff) — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 07:18:00 +0000

I'm so excited — I have just learned to lighten up!

"What are you talking about?" say those who know me. "You're one of the lightest people we know!" (As in light-hearted…and perhaps, at times, somewhat light-headed.) No, no, no. I'm not talking about me. I'm talking about my photos. Yes, folks, I just learned a terrific technique to lighten up the photos I take of my work, so that the background knocks out to white and the colours pop out brightly and clearly.

Not sure what I'm talking about? Well, a picture is worth a thousand words — so here's a picture to explain. Or rather, in this case, two pictures — the Before and After shot.

Quite a difference, no? The Before shot, on the left, is just how it came out of my camera. Which, because of imperfect lighting and the fact that the camera picks up all the gradations of light and shadow on the paper, comes out kind of grey. The After shot, on the right, is how it looks after I doctored it up with this nifty technique I learned a couple of days ago. Amazing, eh?

And it's not even difficult. A huge thank-you goes to Peter Durand of Alphachimp Studio in Pittsburgh. Peter edits the blog for the Center for Graphic Facilitation, which is a treasure trove of good information and ideas for people working in this field. Maybe he runs the Center too — or maybe the blog is the Center. I'm not too sure. Anyway, I registered as a GF on his site and asked him about cleaning up digital photos of drawings. I had learned about some software called Whiteboard, but it turns out not to be Mac-compatible (boo!!), so I wondered if there was some other way to do the job without having to shell out an awful lot of money to buy Virtual PC to make my computer compatible with the software… you get the general idea.

Well, there was! Apparently Peter had given a demo at the 2006 Visual Practitioners Conference on just this topic, and he generously shared the information with me. And you can learn it too, because it's posted on his blog: click here to get the tutorial.
So now of course I'm sitting up till all hours of the night obsessively cleaning up all my drawings. And as I do, I will replace the old ones on my blog with the fresh new versions — and give thanks to the generosity of all the mentors out there who are helping the rest of us do our work better each day.

Charrette syndrome

noreply@blogger.com (Avril Orloff) — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 10:08:00 +0000

Last week I had the privilege of being part of a team for a 6-day design charrette that kicked off a community visioning process for the District of Sechelt.

What is a charrette, you ask? Well, according to Wikipedia, it can be any collaborative session in which a group of designers drafts a solution to a design problem. In urban planning, "the charrette has become a technique for consulting with all stakeholders. Such charrettes typically involve intense, possibly multi-day meetings involving municipal officials, developers and local residents, …[and] promote joint ownership of solutions."

That's a pretty good description of what we did in Sechelt. Our session included several community meetings, two days of one-on-one interviews, and many hours spent distilling the information and classifying it into major themes. The results were then translated by the architect/planners on our team into sketches illustrating possible directions Sechelt might want to consider, and presented back to the community for feedback and refinement.

The project was headed up by my pal John Talbot (see below for an earlier job I did with him), and included his associate John Stark, four architect/planners, and moi as the graphic recorder. Talk about dream teams — I can't imagine a nicer, more supportive, more creative group of people — or more fun! (Ask the staff at the Blue Heron Inn, where we convulsed ourselves and the staff with our, um, high spirits!) As I said to John, if work was always this much fun, everyone would be thrilled to go to work each day. I feel very lucky to be doing work I love with people I love to work with.

Speaking of which, here's what I did at the charrette. Below are the left- and right-hand sides of a piece illustrating the results of interviews with high school students about what they liked and disliked about Sechelt, and their ideas for the future (click on any picture for a larger view):

And here's the piece I put together to illustrate the major themes coming out of the meetings and interviews:

(Sorry about the less-than-brilliant photography. I'm still learning to use my digital camera and haven't mastered the settings yet — and the lighting was too uneven to clean up in Photoshop as I did with the other two. I'm hoping to be able to rephotograph the image and touch it up properly.)

All in all, it was a wonderful and intense experience, and a great learning experience for me. Keep 'em coming!

This is your faithful scribe after the final meeting, where I did live recording of feedback from the participants (as opposed to after-the-fact recording, which the others were). Live work definitely keeps you on your toes, because there isn't much time to think. The trick, I believe, is to hone your listening skills to the point where you just know what needs to be recorded and what doesn't. I'm still trying to get down everything I hear! Well, it'll all come with practice...

Late night musings

noreply@blogger.com (Avril Orloff) — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 06:58:00 +0000

A couple of days ago I visually recorded a session in Whistler, BC (am hoping I'll get permission to post the images here). Someone at the session told me that one of the things they loved about this process was the fact that they could see their thoughts taking concrete shape almost as soon as they uttered them. There must be something magical about seeing your words materialize into images as you speak them, because this is something I hear almost every time I do this work. It's not the same when only words get recorded. People do that at meetings all the time, and it doesn't generate the same kind of excitement.

Clearly there's some kind of alchemy that occurs when you add colour, images and symbols to the words. I'm trying to think of what it is (over and above what I said in my previous post) – and the image I come up with is baking a cake. You have your eggs, flour, butter, sugar and so on – but they don't become a cake until you put them all together in a particular way. And when you do – they combine to become something that is considerably more than the sum of their parts!

I hope that's not a totally dumb analogy. I'm hungry, so that might have something to do with it – but it makes sense to me… What do you think?

The picture above shows some of the tools of my trade.

Why do this stuff anyway?

noreply@blogger.com (Avril Orloff) — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 05:18:00 +0000

If you're new to the idea of graphic recording, you might wonder what the point of it is. Sure, it looks pretty and colourful – but is there really anything to be gained by recording information and ideas this way, rather than just jotting notes down in bulleted lists on a good old flip chart?

Well, yes, actually, there is.

For one thing, in graphic recording, information is organized differently. Instead of the standard list format, which sets up the appearance of linear relationships between ideas, this process organizes ideas in a more organic way. Which is how ideas relate to each other in real life, if you think about it. Far from lining up one, two, three, four, they arrive in clouds…or branch out from each other…or veer off on tangents…or orbit around each other…and so on. With graphic recording, all this is depicted on the page, so you get a more accurate representation of how ideas actually relate to each other than you'd get from

the usual
bulleted
list
(yawn)

...and you can SEE those relationships on the page. It also seems to more closely resemble how people actually think; one person, seeing this process for the first time, said: "Your drawing looks like how the thoughts look in my head!" I thought that was pretty cool.

Then, of course, there's the old saw about one picture being worth a thousand words. Now, I happen to be just as verbal as I am visual (as anyone who knows me will attest!), but it's really true that you can often capture in a single image something that would take a couple of pages to describe in writing. And there's nothing to stop you from combining images from a graphic recording session with a "wordy" report of the proceedings, like a book with illustrations. Double your pleasure, double your fun, I say.

Another thing about graphic recording is that the visuals help people remember details of a meeting much better than a written report alone can do. And certainly better than those cryptic flip chart notes that are often almost unintelligible later…

And last but not least, graphic recording is dynamic, energizing and fun! Not just for the person doing it, but for everyone present. I've found that creating a real-time visual representation of people's ideas generates a level of involvement and interaction that I haven't seen in other settings, and unleashes people's own creativity and imagination. Plus it seems to loosen folks up and put them in a good mood. Because, along with everything else, graphic recording is pretty darn entertaining.

OK, disclaimer time. Not everyone twigs to this stuff. Some people just think better in words and think pictures, like Trix, are for kids. That's OK too. There is really no one method or process that works equally well for everyone. But sticking to just one way of capturing info and ideas is like living in black & white when you could have access to a full range of colour. The more senses you can engage, the richer your experience of the world - and the more likely you are to retain, enjoy, and learn from that experience.

That's how I see it, anyway. And I guess I would, eh - otherwise I wouldn't be doing this work!

Back to the visuals

noreply@blogger.com (Avril Orloff) — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 01:57:00 +0000

As you know, Vancouver and Whistler are hosting the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games in 2010. But the Olympics aren't just about sports - there's also a lot of planning going into the cultural and artistic events that will accompany the Games. Last week a group of disability arts organizations met to discuss ways they could collaborate on an agenda for disability artists' involvement in the 2010 cultural events – as well as potential legacies thereafter. I was invited to graphically record the meeting, and have gotten permission to post the photos here. Here are a couple of them.

It's too bad they didn't take a picture of my hands after I was finished - I think there was more marker ink on my hands than there was on the pages! I guess it's one of the occupational hazards of this profession...