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!

A little bit of this, a little bit of that

These are some more images from the plenary sessions of the PNCIMA Forum to add to the one I posted just below. For the two charts above I worked alone, but for the two below, I joined forces with the volunteer graphic recorders who helped out at the forum. This was a group of young women with artistic ability but no previous training in graphic recording. I gave them a 2-hour basic training a few days before the conference, then left them to their own devices to record the breakout sessions. They did a stellar job on their sessions, and for the breakout updates and final plenary I asked any of them who wanted to help me map the conversation. Can you tell where my work leaves off and theirs begins?

OK, I'm back from vacation!

That's what I get for not updating my blog more regularly: people are still asking me if I'm enjoying my vacation. Actually, I've been back for almost 2 weeks. And yes, thank you – I had a splendid time. First of all, I got to hang out with my dearest friend Robin and celebrate the silver anniversary of our friendship, as well as (belatedly) her graduation from the Mills College MBA program last spring. That in itself, as we say, would have been Dayenu!

But on top of that, I also had the pleasure of:
(1) Hiking on beautiful Mt. Tam on a gorgeous, sunny day with Ken Homer, a smart, funny guy who knows more than most about one of my favourite topics: how to convene great conversations that make things happen;
(2) Getting a tour of The Grove from David Sibbet and being invited to play with his cool Wacom tablet!
(3) Spending a delicious afternoon in the company of three brilliant graphic recording colleagues, Julie Gieseke, Mariah Howard and Leslie Salmon-Zhu. We had all kinds of plans for what we would do that day, but wound up just sitting and talking, talking, talking...and laughing our heads off in between all the talk. It was such an inspiration to hang out with these women and share stories, questions, ideas and giggles, and I only wish I could do this regularly!

So now it's back to normal life – whatever 'normal' is in my world. One piece has been to clean up a whack of photos I took of charts I produced for the PNCIMA Forum, a conference to help develop an integrated approach to oceans management for the Pacific North Coast Integrated Management Area (PNCIMA). Between the volunteer graphic recorders and myself, we generated over 20 charts – that's a lot of cleaning up! The charts from the plenaries are now done (yay) and I'm working my way through the breakout sessions. Here's one of the plenaries as a teaser – you can see the rest of them on the PNCIMA website.

More pix

What joy: in a few days I'll be heading off on vacation – long overdue, and (if I do say so myself) well-deserved! I'm going to San Francisco where, among other things, I'm looking forward to a day of fun & inspiration with a group of lovely colleagues, and hopefully a visit to The Grove, which is kind of like Mecca for graphic facilitators.

Meanwhile, in my ongoing (and possibly futile) attempt to catch up with myself, I'm posting a few more pieces of work I've produced in the past few months. The first 3 are from the Community Foundations of Canada conference held in Montreal last November.

There are several more where these came from, and you can see them on the CFC website if you're really keen, but these are the ones I like best.

The next couple of images were for Gaaysiigang – An Oceans Forum for Haida Gwaii, which was held in January in (no surprise here) Haida Gwaii, aka the Queen Charlotte Islands. This was a source of great excitement for me, because I've long wanted to visit Haida Gwaii, which I envisioned (correctly, as it turns out) as a rather magical place. So when my pal John Talbot told me he'd lined me up for this gig, which he was moderating, I was over the moon!

I learned a lot about the state of our oceans at this forum, almost all of it truly depressing. I was subsequently contracted to map several other oceans forums, and what I've learned since is even more depressing. From what I can understand, we're rapidly killing most of the life in the world's oceans, with predictably catastrophic results. But I don't know enough to comment intelligently, and anyway that's not what this blog is about.

What was different and fun about this job was that I trained a couple of volunteers to help with the mapping, and we often worked on the same charts together! It was wonderful to see the newbies jump into the fray with such enthusiasm – and fascinating to see what came out, and how our styles meshed on the page. Here are 3 charts from the Haida Gwaii forum – see if you can figure out where my work stops and the others' stuff start!

A couple of days ago I mapped another big oceans forum. This time I had seven (7!!) volunteer graphic assistants! They were to record the breakout sessions while I did the plenaries, but we wound up joining forces on a few of the charts – to great effect, in my humble opinion. Between us we generated some 24 charts, so it'll be awhile before I get them cleaned up and post-worthy. But stay tuned....!

A different kind of job

Last October (yeah, I know – it's taken me this long to post this) I had the rare privilege of heading up a whole team of graphic recorders at the National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD). In Austin, Texas, no less, which was a kick in itself! But the gig would have been great even if we'd been in Podunk, because (a) I had such an amazing team to work (and play) with, and (b) I felt that we integrated graphic recording into the program more tightly than ever before, and that it was a high-water mark in terms of people's awareness and appreciation of the process.

In addition to real-time mapping of plenary presentations and panels, we were presented with 5 'challenge' areas for the field of Dialogue and Deliberation. Since there were 5 graphic recorders (what luxury!), we were each responsible for one of the challenges. I chose 'framing' – i.e. how to present D+D in a way that is accessible and attractive to different interest groups and audiences. The night before the conference started, we each stretched out our paper on the wall and put in the title and a couple of pertinent comments and images. Then we spent the next 3 days building our charts, with input from conference participants throughout. My finished chart is above.

One of the most interesting talks at NCDD, in my view anyway, was a panel of conservatives whose conversation I mapped. My politics are not conservative, so it was quite a mind-expanding experience for me – and especially interesting to find myself agreeing with the speakers as often as I disagreed with them! I was particularly taken with Joseph McCormick, who heads up an organization called the Transpartisan Alliance, which seeks to de-polarize politics and find ways of cooperating across political divides. Hey, sign me up! I'm soooo over partisan politics and blaming the "bad guys" on the other side of the room. But that's a discussion for a whole different blog, so let's get back to the graphics.

Here is the graphic from the Conservatives Panel:


Visually it's not the best chart I've ever done – I think it's too wordy and it doesn't flow as well as I'd have liked. But I'm including it here just because I was so intrigued by the conversation and I think it deserves posterity.

Speaking of posterity, I can't close this item without a shout-out to my fabulous teammates: Mariah Howard, Julie Gieseke, Sunni Brown and Marilyn Martin. They are all kickass graphic recorders and wonderful women, and I would work with any and all of them again in a heartbeat!

Springing forward...

It's March 1st, and at least in Vancouver, March brings with it intimations of spring – YAY! I've always felt a bit of a Bad Canadian in my dislike of winter. Our literature, our icons, supposedly our very identity, are bound up with cold and snow and ice.... But I grew up in Vancouver, which is more about chilly and rain, and... more rain. And early springs that start in February and stretch gloriously through to June.

So today I was walking along in the rain, and was pleased to note lovely clumps of crocuses, snowdrops and purple heather, and despite the rain I realized spring is just around the corner. And I say again: YAY!

And on that note, I'm going to spring into action by updating my blog with a few images I should have posted a long time ago.

Here is one I did some time ago for a session for the Burnaby Understanding the Early Years Project. The team members were invited to celebrate their accomplishments, and this is what they looked like (click on images to see larger):

This is still one of my favourite charts – I just like the way the words and images flow. It feels celebratory to me even when the words are too small to read!

Fast forward several months, and I'm co-facilitating a session with a group of youth workers who were charting the journey they had taken as individuals and as a team. To help me choose a resonant image for their map, I asked them to think about what the journey looked like to them. A river? A winding road? Climbing a mountain? They thought for a few minutes and then one of them said, "To me it looks like ... a rainforest!" And he proceeded to explain exactly why. And everyone on the team agreed that yes, a rainforest was the very image to describe their journey!

Well, who knew? Of all the images I might have come up with myself, a rainforest would not have been among them! Which just goes to show the value of asking people what things look like to them. Here is their rainforest journey:


(The blue-rimmed boxes contained names, which I removed for confidentiality's sake.)

What was especially fun was that once they had chosen the visual metaphor themselves, they really owned it. They used the imagery in talking about their journey, and situated their accomplishments and challenges within the framework of the rainforest. And it was on the group's instruction that I included the giraffe in the corner!

Here is one last one for today. This one was done for a visioning day for the staff of Maple Creek Middle School, who were looking to explore their vision, what their school represents, and their "true north". I can feel their pride in their school as I look at the image we created.

Happy New Year...so what if I'm late?

Happy 2009! Yeah, I know I'm way late, but on the Jewish calendar we've just celebrated Tu b'Shvat, the New Year of Trees, and in a month or so we'll be celebrating Passover, which is another New Year date on the Jewish calendar. (We have a lot of new years on our calendar – maybe so we can renew ourselves several times a year??) Anyway, I'm sure every day is New Year somewhere in the world, so why be parochial about it?

And anyway, whatever the date, it's always a good time to set intentions (something I like a lot better than making "resolutions"). And this year, I set only one simple intention – but one that has lots of branches. I decided that in 2009, I would simply dedicate myself to finding the magic in life. I phrased it that way deliberately (i.e. "finding" magic vs. "making" magic), because the magic is always there. We just lose sight of it sometimes. Most of the time, actually. We stumble through our days in a mild fog, attending to our routines and our tasks, and falling into the trap of ordinariness. Yet, if we only looked a little closer – or perhaps a little off to one side instead of straight ahead – we'd see that nothing in this world is ordinary. Magic is inherent in everything, every moment, and all we need to do is notice it. Find it. Like Michelangelo finding the sculpture inherent in the block of marble, we just need to chip away the extraneous material in order to reveal the art at the heart.

Easier said than done, of course. I get so caught up in the daily details and distractions of life that I can't even find my glasses, let alone any magic! But I figure that if I at least say it out loud once in awhile, I'll remember that that was my intention, and perhaps it will burn away a bit of the fog, like the sunrise in the photo above. (Taken from lovely Rivendell retreat on Bowen Island last month.)