Description: At the Cap Gemini Ernst & Young Center for Business Innovation, Josh Epstein of the Brookings Institution refers to visual synthesis produced during a session with Nokia.
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Benefits of Graphic Facilitation
... illustrates a complex flow of activity,
... provides an explicit structure for thinking.
... creates a structure to organize information,
... maintains sufficient focus to work together,
... manages the complexity of group discussions.
... energizes a group towards creative participation,
... accelerates any process of strategic planning or brainstorming.
... makes connections between thoughts to develop a systemic view,
... reflects back the expression of multiple vantage points and opinions,
... facilitates the resolution of conflicts by going beyond a solely verbal approach.
Illustration done on-site during a conference or meeting using foam core boards or white walls and markers. Purpose is to produce a useful and effective visual maps and strategic models.
Text Documentation
Using a laptop, we listen intelligently to capture the salient ideas and produce a synthesis document. This is not a transcription, but an executive summary.
Webjournal
Our goal is to produce a web document with photos, artwork and text documentation in real time: two to 24 hours after the event. This is dependent upon the complexity of the event, the level of documentation required and the number of edit cycles. The deliverable can be published directly to any host server or delivered to participants on CD-ROM.
[ see more examples of webjournals ]
above: A screen of 20" x 30" foam core panels produced by Peter Durand and Joe Sterling at the 5th Embracing Complexity Conference in Paris,
The Value of Synthesis
Meetings are times when we can gather in person to explore new information and, through discussion, synthesize new knowledge as a group.
At best, such gatherings afford participants a truly authentic, shared experience. The sad reality, however, is that invaluable time and attention is wasted with the all-too-typical canned speech, garish slides, and bullet points.
At the 2001 Chicago Humanities Festival, linguist Michael Silverstein of the University of Chicago called bullet point lists "the last resort of a scoundrel!" He goes on to critique the habit of organizations that use meetings to generate copious laundry lists as a masquerade for order and productivity.
Silverstein emphasizes that lists serve us best when they are constructed with a serial order, either crescendo or diminishing in importance. He warns us that bullet lists "truly signify that those items listed are important things to be thought about and acted upon by people other than ourselves!"
In conclusion, Silverstein says: "If companies want to have meetings which produce something useful, then they ought to conceive the arrangement of active symbolic pieces of text and images effective in communicating important and vital knowledge."
Experience and Learning
4 Deadly Sins of Off-site Meetings
from Fast Company, October 2001
1: Booking first, thinking later.
2: Placing too much trust in trust-building exercises.
3: Investing too much power in PowerPoint.
4: Giving too much time to Mr. Big.
A memorable and productive experience engages many modalities of learning at once: the interpersonal, the intrapersonal, the emotional, the linguistic, as well as the visual. The visual modality of communicating is by far the most direct and efficient method that we have of conveying messages, and yet it is so often underutilized or misappropriated.
Graphic Facilitation allows participants to witness original content as it grows in front of their eyes. Models and metaphors are created in real-time with points and counterpoints from the audience incorporated as they occur. Systems thinking is made easier as context and connections are generated; metaphors and symbols emerge to deepen meaning and association.
When incorporated into the resulting minutes, web site (see sample) or paper document, these images constitute a living, visual publication that allows the viewer to instantly access the discussion and relive the shared experience.
In the October 2001 Issue of Fast Company article, "Can This Off-Site Be Saved?", author Cheryl Dahle asks: "How do you plan off-sites that pay off?"
Dahle offers several tips for coordinating memorable and productive off-site:
- Agree on a definition of victory that matters.
- To get the right results, invite the right people.
- If you want mind-blowing results, expose people to mind-blowing ideas.
- To make it work, keep it real.
- You don't always have to beat the clock.
- What gets measured gets attention.
In the final takeaway, one story leaps out about the influence of a visual generated during an event that directly affected the bottom line of the U.S. Mint.
Even the most exciting and energetic off-site will be remembered as a failure if it doesn't produce tangible business results. The best off-sites build quantifiable goals into the event and the follow-up to make sure that everyone's time was well spent.
After the US Mint retreat, for example, the depiction of the coin-minting process was turned into posters that now hang in every location. Just sharing that information allowed each Mint employee to see how his or her job related to the big picture -- and how changes that they might make in their jobs could ripple through the rest of the process. The changes that employees themselves suggested over the next year helped the Mint increase production from 20 billion coins in 1999 to 28 billion in 2000 -- without increasing the resources required to produce them.
The Real Value of Graphic Facilitation
The need to quickly comprehend complex systems and the forces that influence behavior is a key leadership quality. This skill to navigate information allows for effective decisions to be made and executed on a moment-to-moment basis. Having effective visual tools increase the speed of that decision-making process exponentially, saving time, money and energy.
When these visual tools can literally be "grown" in real-time from content generated in the moment, they are even more stimulating, effective and valuable.
"Research has shown that visual language used in meetings shortens meeting time by 24%. Visual language also aids the decision making process, 64% of participants made decisions after seeing visual displays."
~ Hands on Graphics
Notes from Edward Tufte's Seminar on the Visual Display of Quantitative Information
Edward Tufte is considered the world's expert in the visualization of complex data. His books are on the shelf of anyone serious about giving form to information in order to communicate with speed, accuracy and aesthetics. In Visual Explanations, Tufte has an entire chapter dedicated to the importance of visuals to strategic thinking, subtitled, "Displays of Evidence for Making Decisions". In this chapter, Tufte details the horrendous miscommunication between engineers, contractors and NASA officials which led to the Challenger disaster:
On the day before the launch of Challenger, the rocket engineers and managers needed a quick, smart analysis of evidence about the threat of cold to the O-rings, as well as an effective presentation of evidence in order to convince NASA officials not to launch. Engineers at Thiokol prepared 13 charts to make the case that the Challenger should not be launched the next day, given the forecast of very chilly weather. Drawn up in a few hours, the charts were faxed to NASA and discussed in two long telephone conferences between Thiokol and NASA on the night before the launch. The charts were unconvincing; the arguments against the launch failed; the Challenger blew up. [p. 40]
The message: in order to make the critical decision about any complex topic, you need to truly see the information!
Who uses this stuff?
We have worked on a wide variety of projects and teams serving the real world needs of Fortune 500 companies, educational organizations and public service groups.
Uses for Graphic Facilitation
Brand Strategy
Change Management
Curriculum Design
Complex Adaptive Systems
Conflict Resolution
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Distribution
eCommerce
Enterprise Workforce Management
Human Resources
Implementation Strategies
Marketing
Mergers and Acquisitions
Process Flows
Product Design
Production
Restructuring
Supply Chain
Systems Thinking
Vision and Positioning
Photos
Description: the Joint Chiefs of Staff in sessions at the US War College (left, center) and at the Pentagon (right) on improving flexibility and communication between the branches of the armed services, especially in regards to an asynchronous battle on terrorism.
Description: Annual conference in French Alps for Aventis Pasteur, makers of immunization medicines.
Description: Members of World Business Chicago as they design a marketing and positioning plan to promote the city as a place to conduct international business. Brenda Williams of the Russell Williams Group facilitates.
