Interesting video!

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

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

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!

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

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...

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

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!