graphic reflections

A little bit of this, a little bit of that

2009-05-12T23:25:00.006-07:00

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!

2009-04-24T22:16:00.010-07:00

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

2009-03-29T18:19:00.012-07:00

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

2009-03-16T23:39:00.004-07:00

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...

2009-03-01T23:28:00.007-08:00

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?

2009-02-23T01:08:00.007-08:00

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...

2008-10-13T20:30:00.024-07:00

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!

Summertime, and the living is...

2008-07-03T22:05:00.011-07:00

....getting easier by the day! Yup, things are slowing down for the summer, and I don't mind. I totally love my work — but I also love my holidays, and have never quite gotten over the idea that July and August are supposed to be Summer Holidays. So here's to long, lazy days, sunsets on the beach, reading juicy novels in sidewalk cafes, and catching up with what's really important: friends & family. OK, OK, and a bit of work, just to keep my wits about me.

Today I'm posting a couple of pieces I did for the BC Healthy Communities conference last month. BCHC was one of my first graphic recording clients and I've continued to work with them on several projects. I love their holistic approach to healthy development, which draws heavily on Ken Wilber's Integral Theory and its 4-quadrant model of consciousness (intentional, behavioural, cultural and social). (I make it sound like I know something about this! But I'm still at the steep end of the learning curve. But it's really interesting stuff. Check it out.)

Here is the chart from the first presentation, on — wait for it — integral capacity building (remember to click on the image for a larger view):

It's interesting looking at these pieces after the fact, since I feel I hardly know what I'm doing while I'm doing it. I often think this work must be like being a simultaneous translator, except that instead of translating people's words into another language, I translate them into images. But you're really 'in the moment' as you're doing it — not much time to reflect until later. I'm quite happy with the pieces I did for BCHC. I feel I'm beginning to develop a style of my own, and am also (gradually) beginning to organize the material better.

Next up is a fun piece. I'm attaching an unretouched photo here, as the poster had streamers attached to the bottom, which don't clean up well in Photoshop.

The idea of the streamers was that people would write their ideas for the 'imagined culture' on each one, and in the final session of the conference we were going to have another exercise where people 'wove' their ideas together. In the end we wound up jettisoning the final session, so these ones wound up as a standalone. I like the effect, though. And I like that people contribute to the artwork.

Finally, I include a chart I did for Robert Kegan's keynote presentation on Day 2 of the conference. This was one of the best presentations I've ever had the pleasure of attending, and I am thrilled to have made Bob's acquaintance. Aside from being absolutely brilliant, he is also funny as hell, and his presentation was liberally peppered with witty stories and wry observations.

As you can see from the chart, the subject was Understanding and Overcoming the Immunity to Change. He presented a really interesting theory about this, which I'm going to quote a bit below, just because it's really interesting.

“We think we have discovered a powerful dynamic that tends to keep us exactly where we are, despite sincere, even passionate, intentions to change. A recent study concluded that doctors can tell heart patients that they will literally die if they do not change their ways, and still only about one in seven will be able to make the changes. These are not people who want to die. They want to live out their lives, fulfill their dreams, watch their grandchildren grow up—and, still, they cannot make the changes they need to in order to survive.

“If wanting to change and actually being able to are so uncertainly linked when our very lives are on the line, why should we expect that even the most passionate school leader’s aspiration to improve instruction or close achievement gaps is going to lead to these changes actually occurring?”

What this implies, says Kegan, is that more knowledge is needed about the change process itself, and more understanding of the “immunity to change.”

“Our work pays very close—and very respectful—attention to all those behaviors people engage that work against their change goals. Instead of regarding these behaviors as obstacles in need of elimination, we take them as unrecognized signals of other, usually unspoken, often unacknowledged, goals or motivations.” The countervailing tension between these two sets of equally sincere motivations creates the “immune system,” and sustains the status quo.

What I also loved about his presentation was that it was highly interactive. He didn't just stand there and talk — in fact, I'd guess that he only spent about 1/3 of his time talking. The rest of the time he had people pairing off and doing the exercise he lays out in his book. The buzz in the room was palpable — so much so that I drew it into the chart because the energy was a presence in itself!

My only complaint was that because I was recording his session I couldn't do the exercise myself. But never mind: Ali has promised to do it with me some time over the summer. Can't wait!

Long time no see...

2008-06-27T23:30:00.010-07:00

Well, hello there! Fancy running into you here. I haven't been here lately myself — have you? Ah, well, you've probably been busy too. I sure have.

Apart from an explosion of work, I've spent the past several months being a Full Time Daughter as my mother landed in and out of hospital with health issues of increasing severity. It's been a sobering education on many fronts — not least being the confrontation with mortality, which most of us would rather avoid. But the good news is: we both survived! My mother is back home now and doing much better, I'm finally able to breathe again, and we're both keeping our fingers crossed that things stay this way for awhile.

Talking about mortality, in between everything else I went to a Bruce Springsteen concert (♥♥♥) and realized that the first time I saw him in concert was...half my lifetime ago!! Talk about sobering. Well, he is still THE BOSS — and I still have my rock & roll spirit. So all is not lost in my world.

Oh, and I did some work too! Actually, a lot of work. And what follows are the fruits of my labour. First up: some charts I did for a terrific conference on food security earlier this year. Food security isn't a topic I knew a lot about going into the conference, but I was able to sit in on a few sessions that I didn't have to record, and I learned a lot! That's one of the things I love about this work — I get to go to all kinds of interesting events and learn about things I didn't know much about before. Or learn more about things I did know something about. And, of course, meet all kinds of interesting people in the process.

Below are the charts from the World Cafe sessions that took place each afternoon of the conference. Here is the World Cafe 'harvest' from Day 1:

And here's Day 2:

An added bonus of this conference was the opportunity to collaborate with my great friend Ali Grant, who is a most engaging facilitator (with a gorgeous Scottish accent) and a terrific creative partner. This is another aspect of this work that just delights me: the fact that I get to team up with some of the brightest, most thoughtful people around and co-create processes for change together. What I learn from my colleagues on the job is priceless!

And now for something quite different...

2008-01-09T22:09:00.000-08:00

Sometimes something emerges from my pen that I really don't expect. That was the case with a piece I did for the Burnaby School District. We were trying to chart the many projects and initiatives they've put in place to support literacy in Burnaby, and came up with the idea of representing it as a tapestry. I had an idea that I'd include words, drawings, and some collage elements (which I've long wanted to play with), and that the 'tapestry' would be built around the 5 participant groups Burnaby's programs support. But beyond that I was pretty fuzzy.

So I rolled out a l o o o o o o o n g piece of paper — the longest chart I've ever done — sketched in a pencil outline of the edges, and started drawing. I sketched in the boxes containing the main categories. Then I sketched in boxes containing the subsections. Then I started adding colour…and images…and collaged in some photos of Burnaby student art…and thought, "Hmmm." I wasn't at all sure that I was going to like what came out. But I kept on. I added connector lines, added more colour, added texture…and bit by bit it started taking shape. I started liking what I saw after all.

By the time I finished the second section it was starting to look quite rich. Then it was time for the Aboriginal section. Instead of doing it in a square like the others, I made it round to match their Aboriginal Circle Program.

After four days of work, the tapestry was finally finished. (I had somehow imagined I'd get it done in a day — talk about underestimating the time things will take…) I added a bit of pastel to the main headings to punch them out a bit — and it was done! It didn't (and doesn't) look quite like anything else I've done in this genre, and I don't think I really had a clue what it would look like till I was about halfway through. But I have to say, I'm pretty pleased with the final result. More importantly, Burnaby S.D. is delighted with it. Here's what it looks like:

C2D2

2008-01-04T21:37:00.000-08:00

Righto, I said I would post a few charts from C2D2 (the Canadian Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation), which happened here in Vancouver in mid-November. As I said in my previous post, it was both fun and exhausting — fun because graphic recording is inherently fun, and it was cool to actually be doing this at C2D2 when it was at the first C2D2 two years ago that I was first introduced to graphic recording! Life is a circle. It was also fun because I got to work with two other graphic recorders, Sue Davis and Deborah LeFrank, whom I had met at Christina's 'Graphics Bootcamp' last spring. I love working as part of a team, and as you can see from the picture at left, we had a good time working together!

It wasn't all goofing around, though: we worked HARD! That's where the exhausting part comes in. It was 2.5 days of very intensive charting, both up front during the plenaries and on sketchpads during breakout sessions. By the end of the conference, I was well and truly bagged. I haven't got good photos of all the charts yet, but here are a couple of the main ones.

This one was done for the first plenary, in which Adam Kahane spoke about "Facing Complex Issues." He talked fast — so we had to work fast!

Just so you can see how very differently two graphic recorders can capture the same talk, I'm attaching Deb LeFrank's chart here as well. (I don't think Deb has a web page or I'd include a link...) I like the way Deb organizes her material, and particularly how she handles text. One thing I realized when I looked at her work is that most of my body text is the same size, whereas Deb works with more variety of text size, which creates focal points and an interesting typographic 'texture'. Note to self!

The chart at left is from the Day 2 plenary panel. This one went even faster than Adam Kahane's; I was so busy scribing that I hardly took in anything they said! I think that's an occupational hazard of this work. You listen, you get it down, you let go, you move on.

The one below is a collaborative effort. I did the bits around the edges at home before the conference (Welcome to C2D2, the map, and the drawing at bottom right), then we filled in the centre on Day 1 as people called out things they discovered they had in common with others at their table. As you can see, some of the things people had in common were pretty funny!

Well, actually, maybe you can't — some of the writing is pretty small. My favourite is "have all done laundry". Yeah!! That's something that'll bond ya.

Here's the last one for today: another chart I created at home (my bedroom wall is serving as my studio these days) — this one is a chart showing what topics were being addressed at what tables.

And that pretty much brings us up to date! So farewell to 2007, and here's looking forward to what 2008 will bring...

It's catch-up time again...

2008-01-03T22:43:00.000-08:00

One of the things I mean to do this year is to keep my blog relatively up to date! (Are you listening, Avril?) Actually, what I'd really like is to make enough money to hire someone to design me a real website — but that's a wish for another day, and this column is about today. Or rather, about the past few months, since what I mean to do here is to update this site with examples of stuff I did since my last post, which was...whenever...

So, without further ado:

This is part of a big mural I did for a school in Surrey — they wanted a graphic representation of their staff Pro-D day.

And this is another part of the same mural. (There's more, but this covers most of the visually interesting part of it.)

I quite like this one just above, which illustrates a collective vision for a successful supported child development program. It was done live but I had more time than usual to think about the layout and organize the content.

On the other hand, this is an example of a custom chart I created at home for a conference I later graphically recorded live. I like going back & forth between live chartwork (on-the-spot recording) and advance chartwork that I can do on my own time. The live work is exhilarating and challenging, and I love the interaction with people. But the home work allows me time to design the mural and to think more carefully about what images I'll use. And to research new images that then (hopefully!) get stored in my memory bank for future live work. And so it goes...

OK, it's late and I need to get my beauty sleep. My next post will feature images from C2D2, the Canadian Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation. That was a 3-day marathon, which was both fun and exhausting. What was especially fun about it was working as part of a graphic recording team. But I'm getting ahead of myself. More tomorrow (which of course will appear above this post, thus appearing to have been written before it, but oh well...)

Happy New Year!

2008-01-03T22:19:00.000-08:00

Well, I don't know about the rest of you, but I had a pretty good year in 2007. So I'm feeling optimistic that 2008 will be even better!

Yeah, I know the world didn't get any better; in fact, in many respects it seems to keep getting worse. But I remain stubbornly confident that what's bad can be improved and what's good can be sustained, and I remain steadfast in my resolve to do my bit for both.

And to stay awake and attentive throughout. It's so easy to get caught up in rushing from one task to the next and forget to take time to notice the world...or to really experience it. No more. From now on, this girl is Taking Back Her Time!

This lovely photo taken from my kayak on Galiano Island last summer will hopefully remind me what it's all about...

I'm on the World Cafe website!

2007-12-19T21:47:00.000-08:00

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!

Another day, another year...

2007-10-06T14:26:00.000-07:00

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.....!!

September harvest

2007-09-23T19:30:00.001-07:00

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!

Article on graphic facilitation

2007-07-29T10:09:00.000-07:00

Below is a link to a good article on graphic facilitation by Peter Durand, creative director of Alphachimp Studio Inc. and the brains behind the Center for Graphic Facilitation. I've never met Peter, but he very kindly responded to my query about how to clean up my images in Photoshop, which I've used ever since. Click here to view the article.

Value statement

2007-06-09T20:35:00.000-07:00

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!

As I was saying...

2007-05-23T21:22:00.001-07:00

...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.

Spring harvest

2007-04-09T15:22:00.000-07:00

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.

My first presentation!

2007-03-05T21:36:00.000-08:00

Well, although this is a bit after the fact, I'd like to report that in January I gave my first-ever presentation! The group I presented to is the BC Centre for Quality – a professional organization that describes itself as "a forum for learning where quality practitioners explore the principles and applications of organizational excellence." The president of BCCQ, Ann Brown, is an enthusiast of graphic facilitation and wanted to show the impact of the process to their membership. She had somehow discovered my blog (this in itself is exciting), liked what she saw, and wondered if I'd be willing to make a presentation at their next breakfast meeting. Of course I said yes!

So on a windy January morning, I showed up at their meeting room on the top floor of the Coast Plaza Hotel (fabulous view), and proceeded to explain the process and purpose of graphic facilitation and graphic recording. Of course, GF is something best experienced by experiencing it, not by being told about it – so I kept the presentation fairly short and quickly swung into the actual process. The idea was to pose a question to the group and then record the ideas that flowed in response. Since their breakfast meetings are a core part of the way BCCQ interacts as a group, the question was: What makes a great breakfast meeting? The ideas flowed thick and fast, and this is what they looked like:

The folks were really enthusiastic about the process, but several lamented that they "were not artistic" and could never do this themselves. All the more reason to hire me, sez I – but I don't like to see people downgrading their own creativity, so I thought I'd try something fun. On the spur of the moment I handed everyone a piece of paper and a coloured marker, and announced that I was going to prove to them that they could draw.

A few looked skeptical, others looked downright chagrined, but I assured them artistic talent was not a prerequisite. "I'm going to give you 2 minutes," I said, "and in those 2 minutes I'd like you to draw a picture of how you're feeling at the end of this session." It can be a picture, a symbol, or just a scribble, I said, but it has to be an image, not words. "Ready? Go!"

For the next two minutes I watched as everyone in the room turned into a playful kid. Their faces were a fascinating combination of amusement, puzzlement, seriousness and glee as they put their minds to the problem. After the requisite two minutes, I asked everyone to hold up their page and show it to the rest of the room. Every single person had created an image that clearly expressed a feeling. "Congratulations," I grinned at them: "You're now all officially artists!" Everyone beamed.

I'm going to talk about this more in a later post, because there's something important here. What is it about drawing that both scares and frees us? Stay tuned...

New address

2007-02-26T22:27:00.000-08:00

Greetings from my new address!

Yes, I've changed my URL from axisofemail to my own name. "Why?" you ask? Well, when I set up this blog last summer, I was in a political snit. "Axis of email" popped into my head in response to the Axis of You-know-what that we kept hearing about in the news. And I confess, I thought it rather witty. However – it's not exactly an intuitive address. You don't think, "Avril Orloff – I wonder where I might find her – oh, of course, she's at the Axis of Email!"

So I thought, well, how about using my actual name? Especially since, as far as I know, I'm the only Avril Orloff in the world! That would make it really easy to find me. So that's what I did. Or rather, my friend Elen did it for me. Elen is a computer maven who understands the strange language that lurks behind the thin veneer of user-friendliness on the surface of computers – a world I dare not enter. She offered to do what was necessary to transfer my blog to my domain. And minutes later, voila! A new address. Thank you, Elen!

The only downside is that apparently Blogger users who switch to FTP transfer no longer have access to all the easy set-up features that Blogger Beta included. So now it's back to trying to figure out which of those strings of HTML I need to tweak to make any changes to the look of this thing. Sigh...

PS: By the way, Elen also has a fascinating blog, and turned a lot of her material into a book. Don't Shoot! I have another story to tell you… Check it out.

A different use of visuals

2007-02-04T01:09:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago my friend Kate Sutherland asked me to do something a bit different. Instead of asking me to record a meeting, she wanted to use visuals to present a proposal for a conference she's designing. She thought that presenting her ideas visually would be more engaging than a standard, straight-text proposal. So we went to work. Kate had prepared a mind map of her concept, and we spent some time going over it and refining the design. Then I got busy with my markers, and here's what emerged a couple of hours later:

As soon as it was done, Kate rolled it up and whisked it off to the group. The next day I got a delighted email from her, telling me the presentation had been a huge hit! "Presenting the community engagement proposal through graphic images was very powerful," she wrote. "The colours and images and large scale of the paper immediately drew peoples' interest and sustained attention. It was a wonderful and quick way to get all the people in the meeting up to speed, on the same page, and buying in. And committee members felt freer to interact with the graphic presentation than they do with a Power Point — for example, suggesting additional images and arrows."

Needless to say, I was very excited. Both by the fact that the drawing had such a strong effect, and by the fact that people felt free to interact with it. I wasn't present at Kate's meeting, but when I'm in the room I always check in with the people there to make sure I've heard and recorded their thoughts correctly. Sometimes I leave a space for people to add their own words and doodles, or provide sticky notes so they can add other thoughts, corrections, etc. Ultimately I'd like to find ways of building more interactivity right into the process so that people can express their own creativity!

Catching up...

2007-02-02T17:20:00.000-08:00

Here, at last, are some more pictures of work I've done in the past couple of months. This batch is from a strategic planning session I recorded for a community centre in North Vancouver.

These were all done "live" – that is, I captured the conversation as it was taking place. Sometimes I'm given info in advance, such as for some pieces I did at the Sechelt session. Other times I do my work during breakout sessions when I'm not required to record on the spot (e.g. the second drawing for the Sea to Sky session). This gives me more time to organize the ideas into clusters – something that's hard to do when the talk is flying thick and fast! But sometimes I manage to organize as I go. I think I got it this time...

I'm looking forward to having more opportunity to practise at home now that I've got a nice big place with a whole separate room for an office! Beats hell out of working off the kitchen table...

Happy New Year!

2007-01-01T23:58:00.000-08:00

How time flies when you're having fun. It's already 2007! HAPPY NEW YEAR, faithful readers!! (All two of you.)

I know bloggers are supposed to post regularly, but I've got an excuse for being remiss: December was a very moving month for me. Literally. I moved. If you've ever moved house, you know how chaotic your life becomes before, during, and for a good while after. I'm in the middle of that chaos right now. But I will have some new pix to post very soon. Meanwhile, here is a picture of my living room — an artwork in progress. Please ignore the randomly scattered furniture and admire the colour. It's called Velvet Red. I've always wondered who dreams up all the names for all those paint colours. Wouldn't that be a great job?

Well, here's to health, happiness, prosperity, and of course, WORLD PEACE in 2007! Stay tuned for developments...