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Wondering what happened to me? I'm still here! Just haven't posted in awhile - the usual excuses apply. I've got some new images to post, and will do so over the holidays. But meanwhile, I just had to share the exciting news that I have a presence on The World Cafe website!
If you're not familiar with The World Cafe, I heartily recommend checking out their site - and their resources on convening World Cafe dialogues. I first became aware of TWC about 4 years ago, when I attended a World Cafe-style dialogue in Edmonton. I was hooked from the get-go and remain a big fan of the process, which I find stimulating, generative - and FUN.
Anyway, a few months ago I created a poster of World Cafe guidelines. The poster has been pretty popular and copies of it have been making the rounds, to my great pleasure. Somehow or other it made its way to the good folks at World Cafe central, who asked if they could make it available for download from their website. Needless to say, I was honoured by the request and delighted to comply! And so you too can download my poster of World Cafe guidelines from the World Cafe website, should you so desire. Enjoy!
It's a classic October day in Vancouver: everything is grey, and a steady rain has been falling all day. A perfect afternoon to stay indoors, drink tea, do laundry – and update my blog. It's also the day before my birthday – thus the reference to Another Year in the title. All the usual cliches about time apply – I can't believe how fast one year turns into the next these days. I have this theory that life is a bit like a cassette tape: it spools fairly slowly in the first half, but as you pass the middle of the roll, it unwinds at an increasingly rapid pace!
So much for melancholy philosophy. It's been a great year, in fact, and I have high hopes for the year to come. My graphic facilitation biz has taken off like a shot, and it looks like I will actually be able to make a living at this work – and a decent living, at that. You know the universe is in alignment when people are paying you to have fun!
In addition to my day work, I'm involved in aspects of the upcoming Canadian Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation (C2D2), which takes place in Vancouver from Nov. 12-14 this year. I'll be doing graphic recording at the conference (of course!), and am also coordinator for the GR team, which will include at least one and possibly 3 or 4 up and coming graphic recorders. It'll be fun to have colleagues at the wall with me; usually I'm on my own. In a perfect world there would be a veteran or two in the room as well – I still feel I have a lot to learn from those who've been in the field for a long time. But it looks like I'll be the "veteran" in the room, with my all-of-1.5 years' experience in the field. Oh well...
I've been busy with regular work as well, and have a couple of images to share here. Here's one that looks at collaborative literacy initiatives in Burnaby.
Bit of a potpourri of visual metaphors – but I couldn't make up my mind which one to go with, so I used them all! (Sounds a bit like the story of my life, actually....)
* * *
In a couple of weeks the Internat'l Forum of Visual Practitioners is taking place in Santa Fe, and I wish I could be there. I really want to connect with my "peeps" in the field, and I've never been to Santa Fe. But I've blown my professional development budget for the year already, and with the C2D2 conference coming up hard on the heels of IFVP, there's just no way I can go this year. Next year, though, fer shure.....!!
No, I haven't fallen off the face of the earth – I just got distracted by summer – or what passed for summer in these parts. I also treated myself to (gasp) an actual vacation in August, which included an intense but rewarding week doing a Theatre For Living workshop with David Diamond, followed by a blissfully peaceful week on Galiano Island, practising that great Italian pastime of dolce far niente. No, I'm not Italian – but I deeply get this concept!
And with the end of summer came the beginning of a whole bunch of new work. But first, one I did earlier in the summer, for a day-long community workshop on sustainability. The idea was to develop a Sustainability Charter for the township, engaging as many citizens as possible in the process.
More recently, here is a poster I created for executive coach Carollyne Conlinn:
Among all her other activities (creator of the Excelerator Coaching™ Program and The Great Question!™ Game, President of Full Spectrum Coaching, partner in Limitless Leadership Inc., etc. etc.), Carollyne is also on the faculty of the Executive Coaching Program at Royal Roads University, and she asked me to create a poster for her course. I started with the image Carollyne developed for The Great Question! Game of a head with a question mark and 3 spirals, and built the rest of the poster around it, based on information from her powerpoint presentation.
These are just a few examples of the work I've done since I last posted to this site. I've got a few more coming down the pike, so come back again in a couple of weeks – you may see something new!
Never a dull moment around here. As I said in my last post, June is chock-a-block with work, and I'm starting to get calls for July and beyond. Who'da thunk it?
When I was preparing for my demo for the BC Centre for Quality last month, I was asked to put together a one-pager describing how my work contributes to the quality of a process. It was a good exercise, because it forced me to think about the real value of this work. Of course other practitioners have written about this work (Christina Merkley's website is particularly rich in that regard) – but I need to articulate it in my own words to make it real to me. Here's what I came up with:MEETINGS CAN BE FUN!In fact, I’d go so far as to say they should be. If the quality of a product is at least partly dependent on the quality of the process, then it stands to reason that meetings – which are an integral part of any process – should harness the best energy and ideas of the people in attendance. And that’s most likely to happen when those people are engaged, excited and energized – in short, when they’re having FUN!
That’s where graphic facilitation comes in.
As a graphic facilitator, I create a visual map of the conversation at meetings, workshops, dialogues and other group processes, using words and images to literally draw out people’s thinking and surface the “big picture.” Listening carefully for meaning as well as words, I create a graphic depiction of the conversation as it unfolds, drawing out patterns, themes and connections to weave the parts into an integrated whole.
And how does this contribute to the quality of the process? Simply put, graphic facilitation helps make meetings more productive. Here are some reasons why:
- People process information in different ways. By adding a visual element, you’re more likely to engage visual learners (who make up over 80% of the population, according to researchers).
- Graphic recording literally gets everyone “on the same page” and enables people to build on each other’s ideas.
- Thoughts become visible and explicit, which increases clarity and reduces misunderstanding.
- People feel acknowledged and heard when they see their ideas take concrete shape. This, in turn, increases trust and reduces conflict.
- Creative listening begets creative thinking, creative thinking begets better ideas, and better ideas beget more effective processes and products.
- Participants get a unique and attractive “takeaway” that they can refer back to, share with others who weren’t present, and incorporate into reports to show (not just tell) what went on.
- And last but not least, graphically facilitated meetings are energizing, engaging, enjoyable…and FUN!
...something about the difficulty of keeping up with a blog! If you note the date of my last post and the date of this post, you will get my point exactly. How do other people manage to update theirs daily and still have a life?? I'm sure there used to be a lot more hours in the day when I was young (she said creakily).
Well, never mind. That's not what I came here to write. If I'm going to ruminate about the vagaries of time, I will do it on the phone with my friends or in the journals I no longer have time to write. This is my Show n' Tell space for my graphic recording work and my ruminations thereon. And so, on that note...
It's been an amazingly busy month with lots of interesting gigs – I can hardly believe how quickly things are coming together! Since the last time I posted, I graphically recorded a conference on storytelling, another BC Healthy Communities session, a curriculum planning session for Leadership Vancouver, a community meeting on literacy, and a regional roundtable for Spirit of BC, among other things. And I did a graphic recording demo at "Quality in Action," the annual conference of the BC Centre for Quality. (The latter ably co-facilitated by my coach and friend Evan Renaerts.)
Whew.
And it's just going to get busier in June, which is a head-spinning thought. I'm scheduled to do five-count-em-5 more sessions for Spirit of BC, and they're going to be all over the province, which is hugely exciting to me. I've long wanted to see more of my home province, and this will get me started. Not that there will be time to see much more than the conference rooms we're working in – but at least I'll get a glimpse of the scenery on the way to and from the airport! But more about those after they're done. Meanwhile, here are a couple of the things I've done in the past 6 weeks…
This one shows highlights from 3 workshops at the BC Healthy Communities conference in Abbotsford last month.
And this one was prepared in advance for a roundtable on literacy, to provide a snapshot of the Burnaby community.
Oh, there's lots more! But I'll save them for another post. And will try not to let a month elapse between postings...oy.
Whew, blogs are such a responsibility! Eager as I am to share my work with the world, keeping this thing up to date ends up just being one more Thing To Do in an already overheated schedule. But I'm not complaining! Au contraire, I'm very grateful to be kept fairly busy. Of course, at this stage of my career it's not all graphic recording that I'm being kept busy with – but each month I get a bit more graphic work than I had the month before, and I'm confident that it will continue to multiply.
I've got a whole spate of interesting gigs coming up, but meanwhile here's some work I did last month. This one was the outcome of a very fortuitous connection with Brenda Chaddock, facilitator extraordinaire, who invited me to do the graphic recording for a session she was facilitating for BC Healthy Communities (Vancouver Coastal Region). I started by doing something I hadn't done before, which was to prepare some custom chartwork in advance – in this case, a poster outlining the guidelines for hosting a World Cafe dialogue. I'm particularly pleased with this piece, as I think it's inviting and has a nice flow. (Click on the graphics to see larger images.)
One thing I especially enjoyed about this session was that I was very involved in the planning conversations, which allowed me to really integrate the graphics into the day and introduce a couple of innovations (or what seemed to me to be innovations, at any rate!) Brenda was going to start off the day by having people pair off, introduce themselves to each other, and talk about what called them to be there that day. I suggested we pass out 
paper and pens and ask folks to draw an image symbolizing how they were feeling as they came into the session – what kind of energy they were bringing with them. Brenda liked the idea and added it to the intro section. We wound up using sticky notes, which I collected, grouped into themes, and stuck on a large sheet of paper to create a kind of 'tapestry' of the collective energy in the room. This is what it looked like.
I like this piece not because it's particularly stunning visually, but because it creates more interaction between the people in the room and the graphics. Usually it's just me drawing and writing and recording people's comments – but this puts the pens in the hands of the participants and invites them to unleash their own 'inner artist'! This is something I want to bring into this work more and more. I'd really like to make as many of these pieces as possible a true co-creation between me and the other folks in the room – perhaps even others who weren't in the room at the time but are somehow involved in the process!
OK, I'm going into my mid-afternoon coma – time for a break, and I'll come back with more later.
Wondering what happened to me? I'm still here! Just haven't posted in awhile - the usual excuses apply. I've got some new images to post, and will do so over the holidays. But meanwhile, I just had to share the exciting news that I have a presence on The World Cafe website! 
