My first presentation!

Well, although this is a bit after the fact, I'd like to report that in January I gave my first-ever presentation! The group I presented to is the BC Centre for Quality – a professional organization that describes itself as "a forum for learning where quality practitioners explore the principles and applications of organizational excellence." The president of BCCQ, Ann Brown, is an enthusiast of graphic facilitation and wanted to show the impact of the process to their membership. She had somehow discovered my blog (this in itself is exciting), liked what she saw, and wondered if I'd be willing to make a presentation at their next breakfast meeting. Of course I said yes!

So on a windy January morning, I showed up at their meeting room on the top floor of the Coast Plaza Hotel (fabulous view), and proceeded to explain the process and purpose of graphic facilitation and graphic recording. Of course, GF is something best experienced by experiencing it, not by being told about it – so I kept the presentation fairly short and quickly swung into the actual process. The idea was to pose a question to the group and then record the ideas that flowed in response. Since their breakfast meetings are a core part of the way BCCQ interacts as a group, the question was: What makes a great breakfast meeting? The ideas flowed thick and fast, and this is what they looked like:

The folks were really enthusiastic about the process, but several lamented that they "were not artistic" and could never do this themselves. All the more reason to hire me, sez I – but I don't like to see people downgrading their own creativity, so I thought I'd try something fun. On the spur of the moment I handed everyone a piece of paper and a coloured marker, and announced that I was going to prove to them that they could draw.

A few looked skeptical, others looked downright chagrined, but I assured them artistic talent was not a prerequisite. "I'm going to give you 2 minutes," I said, "and in those 2 minutes I'd like you to draw a picture of how you're feeling at the end of this session." It can be a picture, a symbol, or just a scribble, I said, but it has to be an image, not words. "Ready? Go!"

For the next two minutes I watched as everyone in the room turned into a playful kid. Their faces were a fascinating combination of amusement, puzzlement, seriousness and glee as they put their minds to the problem. After the requisite two minutes, I asked everyone to hold up their page and show it to the rest of the room. Every single person had created an image that clearly expressed a feeling. "Congratulations," I grinned at them: "You're now all officially artists!" Everyone beamed.

I'm going to talk about this more in a later post, because there's something important here. What is it about drawing that both scares and frees us? Stay tuned...