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.)

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!