No Posters, How About a Process and Outcomes?

I was recently contacted by a potential client who had been referred to me. The client request: Could you draw five posters of the problem statements?

A few years ago I would have quickly come to the end of this conversation, thinking that what this client was looking for was a graphic designer or an illustrator or someone who could "draw." I might have managed to engage the client in this request after I got their expectations down to my comfort level regarding my ability to draw. This would have been a missed opportunity for me.

I no longer feel insecure about my drawing abilities, yet saying "yes, I can draw five posters" would have been a missed opportunity for this client. Yes, I can draw and my area of expertise and experience is as a process designer. I design processes that help groups of people work more effectively together to reach the outcomes they need to reach at the end of the day or the end of the meeting. What that looks like often includes drawing, but that is just the icing. Successful visual facilitation is mostly process with some nice looking products as an output.

That initial client inquiry, "Can you draw five posters of the problem statements" was the beginning of an hour long conversation where I mostly asked a lot of questions about what they were going to do with the posters, why they thought having a visual representation of the problem would be useful and what they were hoping to get out of a full day of people gathered to solve problems. What we ended up with was a process design that cost about the same as what I would have scoped for the number of hours and iterations we would have spent coming up with some cool looking posters of the problems.What they got instead was a process for 40 people to work through and tangible evidence of the solutions this group co-created.

Here is what we came up with:
Design a template for each group to work on as they dove into the five problem areas. This template would take them through a day long solution process inspired by design thinking. The template would track their progress, keep them on track and enable them to show how they their thinking and tell the story of their solution to the rest of the  group at the end of the day.

I think this was money well spent. For nearly the same amount of time and much less effort we focused on generating a solution for solution generation rather than investing a lot of time and money making the problems look pretty.
First I co-designed a template for each team to use throughout the day that included the problem statement on the left and the other two-thirds of the template guided the groups through a solution process:

On the day of the event, I supported the facilitation of the teams, though largely they were self-facilitated:

At the end of the days, each team presented their finished template:

 

During their report out, I created a synthesis map that captured the insights in presenting their solutions to the larger group:

 

No "posters" but an actual process and tangible outcomes from bringing together 40 people to create solutions to critical issues faced in the world. Money well spent. The client was pleased, not only in the output, but in discovering a new way of working together. Here is some of what they said about the process: