Life in the slow lane...

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...

....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...

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...

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

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...

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!

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...