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...