What Visual Facilitation Really Looks Like

Process Over Product - The Real Super Powers of Visual Facilitation

David Sibbet presented recently at the International Forum of Visual Practitioners, the professional association of people who draw images and words in real-time while people talk. At this conference we had 85+ practitioners there from the newest practitioners, picking up pens and walking to the wall for the first time, to some of the pioneers in the field. There was mind-boggling, gorgeous work on the walls. No doubt. In MY OPINION, the most powerful chart in that room, after three days of visual productivity was this one:


Later when the plenary room was papered with the multitude of glorious and colorful charts generated from the conference, I did a double take in seeing this one again. My initial thought was, "What the hell is that?" It looked messy compared to some of the well executed illustrations that sat to either side of it. It is. However, this chart was, for me, the most powerful chart of the entire conference. In my opinion, this chart visually facilitated my experience and understanding of the conversation that accompanied it more than anything else in the room. Then I was reminded of the wise words I have heard David say many times about our work as Visual Facilitators: It is the process, not the product.

I think that our clients often miss this and I think many of us practitioners miss this as well. We get distracted by the beauty of the product and forget to take deeper consideration of the value it may or may not add to the process.

You don't need help

Recently I was not able to work with a client in the room, so they wanted me to create some templates and maps that they could use in my absence. This is fabulous! This is a client that has only ever though the markers should be in my hands. Good news for my business, as this increases capacity. Better news for the world with more visual facilitation taking place.

Many visual practitioners will tell you that at almost every meeting, while hanging paper or moving charts, someone steps up and wants to help you. How lovely is that? I always appreciate the generosity of spirit and willingness to collaborate that seems to be a part of having creative engagement in the room. Well, the fact is, it is easier to hang a chart by yourself, if you know how. You wouldn't know how unless someone showed you. Every visual practitioner was shown or witnessed the more effective ways to handle those big sheets of paper in the beginning of their career. The process is not usually instinctive. Once we see it we say, "Of course!"

After I finished the large charts for my client, I wrapped them in a tube to pass off. It occurred to me that I would not be there to hang them. I imagined the cumbersome antics that might happen, involving multiple people and loud paper wrinkling. I didn't want to give my client a five paragraph essay on "How to Hang a Chart." Instead, I created a visual step-by-step.

I offer it to you and the world, demystifying how one person alone can effectively hang a huge piece of paper.

How Do I Listen?

How Do I Listen?

I am a professional listener. I get paid to listen and respond to what groups and individuals say. The ability to listen in a way that is valuable for people is not that I reflect back everything l have heard, like a human audio recorder. What they pay me for is how I respond to what is said and what I reflect back. A question I often get, usually in corporate environments, is, "How did you know what to capture? Did you study our business processes? You got all the important stuff. How did you know how to do that?"

My candid short answer: I try not to pay too much attention.

Seems flip, and I usually don't say this, but it is in fact, the very truth. What does that mean? Well, unlike a machine that will record every word that is said, no human is likely able to capture and keep up with that, unless you are a court reporter. Capturing everything is not necessarily valuable to a group. When your friend tells you about a conversation they had last week, they tell you the highlights, the interesting points, the sense of the conversation. They do not proceed to iterate everything that was said, in the way it was said. That would be tedious, and probably not give you the sense of what happened in the way that your friend wants you to know.

So when people are talking about business processes, steeped in their own esoteric language and ideas, how do I listen in order to capture what is most meaningful? I describe it this way: I listen to the sound of the conversation and also the words themselves. The sound of a conversation is like music. The cadence indicates to me what is most important to the person speaking at that moment. It helps me sort from the onslaught of content. I listen for what rises to the top and wants to be on the map.

Another way to describe how I listen comes to me from a painting teacher I had in college. In our instruction about composition, he suggested we look at paintings from a distance and with squinted eyes. This would allow us to see the composition of the image from a meta-view, without the distraction of the detail. This is exactly what is valuable as a professional listener. You want to hear the shape of the conversation, with access to the detail, but to first hear the meta-view. This guides the organization, the relationship between the line and shape in the dialogue that contributes to the overall composition of the conversation. So I listen by squinting my ears, which enables me to not get lost in the details of everything, and to hear the larger shape of what is being said.

Not all visual practitioners listen in this way, or describe how they listen in this way. How do you listen?

Picture More Effective Communication

My lovely collaborators at the Lightbox Collaborative invited me to blog. Fortunately I had editing goddess, Lauren Girardin from the collaborative help me to take my writing and give it some verve! You can read the Lightbox Collaborative blog here.

Below is my post:

Picture more effective internal communications

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April 12th, 2011 by Julie Gieseke

We are inherently visual creatures. We approach the world around us with eyes wide open, and speak about what we see in metaphors that paint a picture of our experiences. Visuals and language are interdependent ways of conveying information. So, what does our visual nature mean for effective communications?

Pictures can convey a lot of complex information, which is where we get that “worth a thousand words” adage. Pictures can also serve as a common reference point for a group, helping align everyone to the same process. This efficiency and unity can help the group move more quickly to deeper conversations and to the real work that needs to be done. In other words, pictures can be a powerful internal communications tool to align your team in preparation for external action.

Using visuals can be an effective way to brings groups together, to galvanize a team, and co-create big ideas. The power of communicating with pictures is at the core of visual facilitation – an approach that can breathe new life into your next team meeting.

But I’m no Van Gogh

People often assume that I’m an artist. But, I haven’t had any formal training. Why do they make that assumption?

As I work with groups, I track their conversations to create large-scale visual maps, drawn in real time, to facilitate a group toward their desired outcome. Besides the color and design of the shapes, they figure an artist must have been at work because the resulting images have meaning. Yet, the power of the images is actually due to the connections they themselves made with the images. The images represent their experience in that room that day, which is powerful, personal stuff. They made their own meaning. I just provided the pictures.

By watching something being drawn, the viewer’s memory becomes anchored in that moment. When they see the image again, they will recall that moment in a more visceral way.

Images engage

The most powerful quality about using visual tools is not the resulting picture your group creates together, but rather the enhanced engagement you gain from working together in a visual way. Working with ideas that can be touched, moved around, and seen together will result in more opportunities for individual insight, innovation, and involvement in the group process. The picture becomes an anchor for the content the group worked on, triggering sensory recall of the work that cannot be accessed in a Word document or bullet point summary of the session.

So bust out those markers and crayons to picture your way to greater team engagement and more effective internal communications. If your team had a shared picture of your common goals, what would it look like?

Julie Gieseke is a LightBox collaborator with a knack for responding creatively in the moment. She urges you to create your own pictures for impact.

Mapping for Me vs for the Collective

I recently attended an exceptional workshop through the Institute of Noetic Sciences. I was first introduced to IONS when I mapped their 2008 conference in Tucson. It is a great community of people that blends the science minded and the spiritually minded. They have their fingers in everything that is fascinating to me. They are on the edges of the gap between science and spirituality. That gap is the same one we often leap across when we bring "art" (visual facilitation and other creative engagement methods) into business environments.

The workshop last week was called "Engaging Fielding of Consciousness in a Living Universe | For Group Leaders." I could not resist. As a Visual Facilitator and having spoken to many people who do this kind of work, the visual reflections we create for groups are often the result of tapping into some content other than just what is being said. I won't go into more of that now, but save that for a future post. This workshop was lead by Duane Elgin and Christopher Bache. They were a perfect combination. Christopher provided specific practices to support and engage fields within group and Duane provided the visionary context and importance for this way of working at this time in our universe.

I was inspired by the leaders and the possibilities for working in this way with groups. I am attaching my notes from the weekend. I don't imagine they will do more than spark interest and curiosity for you. For me, they trigger memories of not only the content but the experience and field that was created by the fourteen people who were in that room at the Earth Rise Retreat Center last weekend. The notes are also a window into how I take notes for myself, rather than when I am being paid to produce a visual record for a broader audience. I enjoy being solely responsible for what I want to capture and how. I shared these notes with other workshop participants and they resonated to some extent for them, because the content is familiar. If I had been "working" this event, I am sure my notes would be very different. In part because I would have been working on a wall. I would have been listening to the collective and for the collective, rather than for me and my interests. I would have been sensing and hearing in a different way just by standing to the side, rather than sitting in the circle. I would have been more diligent to capture details that were not as pertinent for me alone.

I am curious to see other visual practitioner's personal sketchbook notes and the differences between what they capture for themselves and what they capture for everyone else...

Visual Facilitation: An OD tool, a systems tool, and support on the doctoral path

Below is a short article I wrote for a Fielding Graduate University newsletter for doctoral students in the Human Organization Development Phd program.

Visual Facilitation: An OD tool, a systems tool, and support on the doctoral path

Visual Facilitation is a tool that is used in many ways by OD practitioners, coaches, facilitators, trainers, educators and individuals to support big picture thinking, engage different ways of knowing and enhance creativity and innovation. Fielding has been a leader in OD and continues to push the edges of our practice. One of these is the inclusion of Visual Facilitation in their continuing education graduate courses. Fielding is the first academic institution to offer a full credit course in Visual Facilitation and it is entirely virtual. The course engages the learner in visual methods as well as integrating the tools of Visual Facilitation into one’s practice.

Whether you have the time to take the course or not, there are many ways you can begin using some Visual Facilitation techniques to support your doctoral work and your journey along the Fielding path. I have worked with a few doctoral candidates, using visual maps to explore the research questions, build visual models of the findings, define a timeline and order for the learning journey and as one way of data collection.

One misconception with the use of tools like Visual Facilitation is that one needs to have artistic skills. This is mistaking the product for the process. The most powerful quality about using these visual tools is not the map or document that is created by you or by the group, but rather the enhanced engagement that happened as a result of working this way. With a simple mind map structure, you could explore the connections between your literature as part of building the Literature Review. Using a wall to plot out your topics, will allow you to see the connections between content that may be more challenging at first, in a linear, written format.

Using post-its to identify the bigger topics within each KA and see all of the KAs together will provide an opportunity to see patterns and connections. Making a large mind map of the whole dissertation structure, with an arm for each chapter, and branching out the needs and requirements for each section can offer a view of the whole project that may be difficult to see in traditional formats.

Besides the dissertation and research itself, there is a tremendous amount of information from different areas about navigating the path through Fielding to complete your PhD. These multiple streams of requirements and deadlines can be complex. Creating a visual timeline, plotting these dates and deadlines, including your own goals and objectives, and your personal and family timelines can allow you to see opportunities and prepare for challenges with greater foresight.

Though the Fielding course, “Leading Change that Matters with Visual Facilitation” may not be on your learning path, you could also consider the resources of fellow Fielding students who are interested in using Visual Facilitation and looking for opportunities to expand their skill and knowledge. Perhaps partnering with one of these students for some part of your work could be mutually beneficial. In addition, Regina Rowland and I are co-facilitating the course and are resources if you want to consider engaging Visual Facilitation in some part of your work or learning journey.

The twelve week course begins September 26. Registration opens in July!

Below is a link for more information about the course:

http://www.fielding.edu/programs/ProfessionalDevelopment/development

Feel free to contact me with questions:

Jgieseke@fielding.edu