graphic reflections

Interesting video!

a.orloff@shaw.ca (Avril Orloff) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 16:46:00 +0000

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.

...and now for something completely different

a.orloff@shaw.ca (Avril Orloff) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 06:33:00 +0000

Most of the work I do is "live", i.e. mapping in real time as people are talking. But sometimes (and lately it's happening more often), I'm asked to create a chart in advance based on information the client has given me. The completed or partially-completed chart is then presented at the meeting to provide a snapshot of how things currently stand, and to serve as a springboard for further discussion. Because I'm not tracking a conversation while it's happening, I have more time to plan out the image and revise it, if necessary. So these custom charts are usually 'neater' than the live charts and I can get fancier with the illustrations – like actually draw in perspective, for example!

Here is an example of one of these custom charts. It's a timeline I created for Central City Foundation to illustrate key points in their 100-year history. The fun part was drawing the actual line: instead of a straight line – because, really, when does life ever run in a straight line? – I suggested we draw a crazy line that dips and loops and doubles back on itself. The CCF folks loved the idea, so I scrawled a wild line across the page and hung everything off that.

I can't claim originality for the wonky line: it came to me from my friend & colleague Julie Gieseke, who I believe got the idea from another IFVP colleague, John Ward. I loved the idea and figured I could use it in my own way. I hope others are doing the same with ideas they got from me! (I hope others do get ideas from me!)

Addendum

a.orloff@shaw.ca (Avril Orloff) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 05:25:00 +0000

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!

Hello Dalai!

a.orloff@shaw.ca (Avril Orloff) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 03:47:00 +0000

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!

August update

a.orloff@shaw.ca (Avril Orloff) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:46:00 +0000

Gad, it's already more than 3/4 of the way through summer – how did that happen!? I'm officially on summer vacation right now, but it doesn't quite feel like it. I've been taking plenty of time off and have caught up on some reading and some much-needed sleep ... but there are still emails to answer, phone calls to return, and household STUFF (there's that great, all-purpose word again) to take care of. This leads me to the conclusion that so-called "staycations" are a lot more "stay" than "vacation", and I mean to remedy that next year by getting as far away from my desk as possible ... say, Spain? France? Italy? Turkey? The general idea being to put a large body of water between regular daily life and moi. Better work hard in between now and then so I can earn enough money for a big trip...

Speaking of work, I just got permission to post the charts from the Teslin Official Community Plan that I referred to a couple of posts ago (see Summer Update, final paragraph, with the nice photos of the almost-midnight sun). Over several days, members of the community weighed in with their vision for the Village of Teslin on several topic areas, ranging from housing and infrastructure to recreation and cultural heritage. Every conversation was mapped, and here are a couple of the results:

More new stuff...

a.orloff@shaw.ca (Avril Orloff) — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 06:29:00 +0000

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 update

a.orloff@shaw.ca (Avril Orloff) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 18:02:00 +0000

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!

A little bit of this, a little bit of that

a.orloff@shaw.ca (Avril Orloff) — Wed, 13 May 2009 06:25:00 +0000

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?

OK, I'm back from vacation!

a.orloff@shaw.ca (Avril Orloff) — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 05:16:00 +0000

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!

So now it's back to normal life – whatever 'normal' is in my world. One piece has been to clean up a whack of photos I took of charts I produced for the PNCIMA Forum, a conference to help develop an integrated approach to oceans management for the Pacific North Coast Integrated Management Area (PNCIMA). Between the volunteer graphic recorders and myself, we generated over 20 charts – that's a lot of cleaning up! The charts from the plenaries are now done (yay) and I'm working my way through the breakout sessions. Here's one of the plenaries as a teaser – you can see the rest of them on the PNCIMA website.

More pix

a.orloff@shaw.ca (Avril Orloff) — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 01:19:00 +0000

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.

There are several more where these came from, and you can see them on the CFC website if you're really keen, but these are the ones I like best.

The next couple of images were for Gaaysiigang – An Oceans Forum for Haida Gwaii, which was held in January in (no surprise here) Haida Gwaii, aka the Queen Charlotte Islands. This was a source of great excitement for me, because I've long wanted to visit Haida Gwaii, which I envisioned (correctly, as it turns out) as a rather magical place. So when my pal John Talbot told me he'd lined me up for this gig, which he was moderating, I was over the moon!

I learned a lot about the state of our oceans at this forum, almost all of it truly depressing. I was subsequently contracted to map several other oceans forums, and what I've learned since is even more depressing. From what I can understand, we're rapidly killing most of the life in the world's oceans, with predictably catastrophic results. But I don't know enough to comment intelligently, and anyway that's not what this blog is about.

What was different and fun about this job was that I trained a couple of volunteers to help with the mapping, and we often worked on the same charts together! It was wonderful to see the newbies jump into the fray with such enthusiasm – and fascinating to see what came out, and how our styles meshed on the page. Here are 3 charts from the Haida Gwaii forum – see if you can figure out where my work stops and the others' stuff start!

A couple of days ago I mapped another big oceans forum. This time I had seven (7!!) volunteer graphic assistants! They were to record the breakout sessions while I did the plenaries, but we wound up joining forces on a few of the charts – to great effect, in my humble opinion. Between us we generated some 24 charts, so it'll be awhile before I get them cleaned up and post-worthy. But stay tuned....!

A different kind of job

a.orloff@shaw.ca (Avril Orloff) — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 06:39:00 +0000

Last October (yeah, I know – it's taken me this long to post this) I had the rare privilege of heading up a whole team of graphic recorders at the National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD). In Austin, Texas, no less, which was a kick in itself! But the gig would have been great even if we'd been in Podunk, because (a) I had such an amazing team to work (and play) with, and (b) I felt that we integrated graphic recording into the program more tightly than ever before, and that it was a high-water mark in terms of people's awareness and appreciation of the process.

In addition to real-time mapping of plenary presentations and panels, we were presented with 5 'challenge' areas for the field of Dialogue and Deliberation. Since there were 5 graphic recorders (what luxury!), we were each responsible for one of the challenges. I chose 'framing' – i.e. how to present D+D in a way that is accessible and attractive to different interest groups and audiences. The night before the conference started, we each stretched out our paper on the wall and put in the title and a couple of pertinent comments and images. Then we spent the next 3 days building our charts, with input from conference participants throughout. My finished chart is above.

One of the most interesting talks at NCDD, in my view anyway, was a panel of conservatives whose conversation I mapped. My politics are not conservative, so it was quite a mind-expanding experience for me – and especially interesting to find myself agreeing with the speakers as often as I disagreed with them! I was particularly taken with Joseph McCormick, who heads up an organization called the Transpartisan Alliance, which seeks to de-polarize politics and find ways of cooperating across political divides. Hey, sign me up! I'm soooo over partisan politics and blaming the "bad guys" on the other side of the room. But that's a discussion for a whole different blog, so let's get back to the graphics.

Here is the graphic from the Conservatives Panel:

Visually it's not the best chart I've ever done – I think it's too wordy and it doesn't flow as well as I'd have liked. But I'm including it here just because I was so intrigued by the conversation and I think it deserves posterity.

Speaking of posterity, I can't close this item without a shout-out to my fabulous teammates: Mariah Howard, Julie Gieseke, Sunni Brown and Marilyn Martin. They are all kickass graphic recorders and wonderful women, and I would work with any and all of them again in a heartbeat!

Springing forward...

a.orloff@shaw.ca (Avril Orloff) — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 07:28:00 +0000

It's March 1st, and at least in Vancouver, March brings with it intimations of spring – YAY! I've always felt a bit of a Bad Canadian in my dislike of winter. Our literature, our icons, supposedly our very identity, are bound up with cold and snow and ice.... But I grew up in Vancouver, which is more about chilly and rain, and... more rain. And early springs that start in February and stretch gloriously through to June.

So today I was walking along in the rain, and was pleased to note lovely clumps of crocuses, snowdrops and purple heather, and despite the rain I realized spring is just around the corner. And I say again: YAY!

And on that note, I'm going to spring into action by updating my blog with a few images I should have posted a long time ago.

Here is one I did some time ago for a session for the Burnaby Understanding the Early Years Project. The team members were invited to celebrate their accomplishments, and this is what they looked like (click on images to see larger):

This is still one of my favourite charts – I just like the way the words and images flow. It feels celebratory to me even when the words are too small to read!

Fast forward several months, and I'm co-facilitating a session with a group of youth workers who were charting the journey they had taken as individuals and as a team. To help me choose a resonant image for their map, I asked them to think about what the journey looked like to them. A river? A winding road? Climbing a mountain? They thought for a few minutes and then one of them said, "To me it looks like ... a rainforest!" And he proceeded to explain exactly why. And everyone on the team agreed that yes, a rainforest was the very image to describe their journey!

Well, who knew? Of all the images I might have come up with myself, a rainforest would not have been among them! Which just goes to show the value of asking people what things look like to them. Here is their rainforest journey:

(The blue-rimmed boxes contained names, which I removed for confidentiality's sake.)

What was especially fun was that once they had chosen the visual metaphor themselves, they really owned it. They used the imagery in talking about their journey, and situated their accomplishments and challenges within the framework of the rainforest. And it was on the group's instruction that I included the giraffe in the corner!

Here is one last one for today. This one was done for a visioning day for the staff of Maple Creek Middle School, who were looking to explore their vision, what their school represents, and their "true north". I can feel their pride in their school as I look at the image we created.

Happy New Year...so what if I'm late?

a.orloff@shaw.ca (Avril Orloff) — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 09:08:00 +0000

Happy 2009! Yeah, I know I'm way late, but on the Jewish calendar we've just celebrated Tu b'Shvat, the New Year of Trees, and in a month or so we'll be celebrating Passover, which is another New Year date on the Jewish calendar. (We have a lot of new years on our calendar – maybe so we can renew ourselves several times a year??) Anyway, I'm sure every day is New Year somewhere in the world, so why be parochial about it?

And anyway, whatever the date, it's always a good time to set intentions (something I like a lot better than making "resolutions"). And this year, I set only one simple intention – but one that has lots of branches. I decided that in 2009, I would simply dedicate myself to finding the magic in life. I phrased it that way deliberately (i.e. "finding" magic vs. "making" magic), because the magic is always there. We just lose sight of it sometimes. Most of the time, actually. We stumble through our days in a mild fog, attending to our routines and our tasks, and falling into the trap of ordinariness. Yet, if we only looked a little closer – or perhaps a little off to one side instead of straight ahead – we'd see that nothing in this world is ordinary. Magic is inherent in everything, every moment, and all we need to do is notice it. Find it. Like Michelangelo finding the sculpture inherent in the block of marble, we just need to chip away the extraneous material in order to reveal the art at the heart.

Easier said than done, of course. I get so caught up in the daily details and distractions of life that I can't even find my glasses, let alone any magic! But I figure that if I at least say it out loud once in awhile, I'll remember that that was my intention, and perhaps it will burn away a bit of the fog, like the sunrise in the photo above. (Taken from lovely Rivendell retreat on Bowen Island last month.)

Life in the slow lane...

a.orloff@shaw.ca (Avril Orloff) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 03:30:00 +0000

Not life in general, of course, but when it comes to updating this blog, I seem to be as slow as the proverbial molasses. I blame it on the 6 years I spent writing term papers when I went to university in my 40s — I did enough writing in those years to last me the rest of my life!

So now I have to make up for lost time, since there's a lot to update since my last post. In between then and now, I attended two quite momentous events: the IFVP (International Forum of Visual Practitioners) conference in August, and in October, NCDD — the National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation, in Austin, Texas (yee-ha). And work has been coming in thick & fast since mid-September too — but I'll leave that for another post. So starting with first things first…

IFVP: This was my first time attending IFVP, and what a delight it was! We graphic recorders are rather few and far between, so it's a rare treat to find oneself in a room full of other folks who are also engaged in this work. Imagine a place where you can say "I'm a graphic recorder" and not immediately see little question marks float up above people's heads! Plus it was in Chicago, which is really a splendid city. (That's a night-time shot of downtown Chicago at the beginning of this post.)

There were about 60 folks in attendance, from legendary veterans like David Sibbet and Nancy Margulies to total newbies. Most folks (like most visual practitioners) came from the U.S., but there was also representation from Australia, England, Brazil, Denmark, Japan — and of course, Canada (I think there were 6 of us!). Over the course of 3 days we were treated to a juicy variety of talks ranging from lessons we could learn from the ancient Greeks, to facilitating 3D image-making, to visual metaphors, to the latest emerging technologies, and much more. Participants were invited to volunteer to graphically record the various sessions, and I wound up mapping a session called Growing Our Businesses by Appreciating Our Gifts. (That's me, at upper left, with Susan Kelly, who gave the talk, and scribbling away on my chart at right.)

Besides the talks, there was also open space to chat with others about areas of mutual interest, and time for fun, including a kick-ass graphic jam, and an evening on the town. All in all, a terrific experience, and one I hope I will be able to repeat next year, wherever IFVP is held next!

Here is a picture of the chart I did for Susan's talk:
I got a lot of nice compliments on the drawing, but I wasn't completely satisfied with it. Not that I ever am — we are always our own worst critics, I suppose — but I still felt something was missing. Eventually I buttonholed David Sibbet to get his opinion, and he too was very kind, praising the level of artistry in my work. When I asked for further comment, he told me what I wanted to hear, which was that there were ways I could organize my material more coherently, and he gave me suggestions for how I might do so. Yes! And I do think that I've taken his suggestions to heart and that the work I've done post-IFVP reflects a level of improvement in that regard.

Next up (but not tonight): NCDD! Which, due to the upside-down nature of blogs, will appear before this post. One day I will get a real website and my postings won't unfold in a long stream like a big roll of toilet paper!

Summertime, and the living is...

a.orloff@shaw.ca (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...

a.orloff@shaw.ca (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...

a.orloff@shaw.ca (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

a.orloff@shaw.ca (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...

a.orloff@shaw.ca (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!

a.orloff@shaw.ca (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!

a.orloff@shaw.ca (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...

a.orloff@shaw.ca (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

a.orloff@shaw.ca (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

a.orloff@shaw.ca (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.

Value statement

a.orloff@shaw.ca (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!