Facilitating Collaboration

Eileen Clegg collaborated with me on this book and is a visual journalist, artist, writer and educator. She and I worked together to create a A history map of educational trends. This is an except from an article she wrote on facilitating collaboration that uses the history map to explain the power of thinking and learning using visual imagery.

"This History Map depicts major historical, business, education, and social events of the past 100 years. It was used as a springboard for executives of a multinational telecommunications company to discuss corporate values, employee learning, and corporate ethics. One of the effects was to uncover “memes” (the social equivalent of genes - succinct repeatable statements that diffuse throughout an organization) explaining identity and goals to employees, customers and shareholders.






The social and psychological components of visual communication can be leveraged to facilitate collaboration. In her book, Vizability, Kristina Hooper Woolsey wrote about how graphics function within a group that is striving to work effectively together:
“Collaborative drawings have a neutral quality that can be very effective. By focusing on a drawing, people tend to concentrate on ideas on the table, rather than the different personalities and social dynamics involved. They also keep discussion focused on specifics rather than on vague and nebulous generalities.”
Often people on the same team believe they share the same goals but lack a shared framework. Progress is impeded due to clashes of assumptions that have not been expressed. A visual process to identify embedded assumptions, underlying principles and motivations moves everyone on to the page, creating a shared context before defining the goal and steps to reach it.

David Sibbet, founder of The Grove Consultants International, who has been using visuals as a strategic tool for 30 years, describes graphic facilitation as “public listening.” Participants in a meeting immediately see their ideas captured and reframed – making it possible for them to clarify their thoughts. The image can then be diffused for others to respond and elaborate upon the idea.

Organizations increasingly are using group graphics as a “high touch technology” that works on a meta-level to develop a shared focus. Visual storytellers may use a landscape background as a way to bring people together to a familiar-looking “place” – literally “grounding” them. Similarly, history maps can show “where we’ve been” and “where we’re going.” Facilitators can use time-lines and arrows to show forward movement.

The Agility Factor
In a time of rapid and extreme change, there is little time for traditional process. There is no longer enough cycle time for an executive decision to go through training and education departments to bring employees up to speed. Rather we are in an era that demands just-in-time, relevant information. That changes the definition of what it means “to learn.” It has been suggested that the best definition of learning today is “constructive interaction with change.” The “Agility Factor” describes the process of moving ideas quickly through a company and continually improving upon them.

Visuals are one item in the toolbox for quickly conveying context and content in a form conducive to ongoing change. Simple art forms and shapes communicate movement, change, and impermanence. They invite people to tweak, develop, and improve upon ideas. There is a wide spectrum of visual communication approaches – from The Grove’s templates, designed to help people in corporations conduct their own strategic visioning, to highly individual visual interpretations by people who synthesize and amplify information in idiosyncratic art forms as they record it. The list of approaches is growing: graphic recording, graphic facilitation, reflective graphics, mindscaping, visual thinking, information architecture, scribing, visual synthesis, graphic translation, group graphics, interactive graphics, ideation specialists, communication graphics, visual storytelling, visual journalism, integrative graphics.

Although artistic talent may enhance presentational graphics, visual communication is above all functional – on-the-fly, unpolished, and transient, particularly during conversational phases. Sometimes called “primitive art” or “tertiary art,” it is a visual snapshot of what is known at the moment – when a CEO first describes a proposed change, when an expert describes a new approach, when executives add their input to a vision, when groups respond to a proposal, when ideas are disseminated.

Photographs, audio clips, and power points can be part of an evolving web package – continually being updated and improved upon as the cycle of communication continues.

To learn more about this or to contact Eileen, click here.