L: I find commonly that new graphic recorders are usually very focused on developing the aesthetics of their work, sometimes at the expense of developing precious listening and synthesis skills. These skills are differentiators.
R: Yes. I’m looking for someone who has these down. I also want a clean visual look to the work and I want the graphic recorder engaged fully in the process as an expert listener. Can they hear what’s important to the process or meeting objective and actually capture that content correctly? Can they keep pace? Can they adapt on the spot if we need to change the process? Do they have helpful input on where we might go next? Do they bring valuable insights and observations about group dynamics to impromptu huddles during a meeting? These abilities all matter.
Meeting design
L: What is the lead facilitator considering in a meeting design? How do you decide when to use visuals, or when to bring in a graphic recorder?
R: I work from the presumption that there will always be a meeting design. It shows up in the proposal as the fabric of how I work. The entire first conversation occurs without even mentioning graphic recording.
L: I think this process of helping the client get clear on what they’re actually trying to do by having a meeting is a huge part of the value the consultant brings. And then, once everyone is clear on that, the conversation can shift to, “How are we going to do that?”
Once the basis for the meeting is established, our process design choices are driven by the meeting objectives. That’s where our collective creativity comes in. From the range of possibilities we conjure up, we then have to think about what is most fitting or appropriate for this group of people. Let’s brainstorm a little list of some of the things that go through our minds.
R: Okay, here are a few things:
What’s the topic of the meeting and culture of the group or profession? What’s the expected level of engagement?
What’s the necessary output? If we use a visual process, what type of output is needed? Will raw data captured into a template suffice? If this is the case, can I accomplish this with only one person in the room? Would a polished vision map (possible only when two practitioners are in the room) serve the group best?
What parts of the meeting process lend themselves to straightforward graphic recording?
What level of detail in capture is needed? In what way do the participants need to experience the information? Is a transcriptionist or videographer vs. a graphic recording required? Or all of the above?
What is the client’s experience with graphic recording? Do they understand the depth of the process? Have they had positive or negative experiences with it?
Do I know any good graphic recorders who are capable of showing up professionally with this type of client and are they available on that date?
Is that person someone who will represent my brand well?
What is their rate and what’s included?
L: When designing a meeting, we’re using healthy doses of both logic and intuition. We expect it to be an iterative process that directly involves the client (or an entire design team).
Hidden value
L: When you show up as a strongly grounded, seamlessly performing pair of solo practitioners, how does that contribute to the “meeting container”? What additional value does this create for the client and participants ?
R: People come up to us in meetings all the time and say, “Wow. Have you two worked together a lot? You two seem seamless.” That’s a huge compliment to us. We both see ourselves as integral to the container. Our relationship is wholly in service of that.
Lisa Arora and Robert Mittman • Solo-Practitioner Partnerships
As lead facilitator, there are many things I’m doing in my role (with the graphic recorder’s help) that are creating a container for the work to get done:
My job is to get participant egos and organizational positioning out of play. Graphics help do this by not distinguishing comments by name and status.
I’m there to ground and keep participants oriented to the content arc. The visual agenda helps, as do individual charts that each contain one part of the flow of the meeting.
I need to make sure everyone understands each other. This means I must identify and address miscommunication. A recording can show the group or me where something is muddled.
I’m also there to keep the conversation at the correct and most useful level of abstraction. Getting something that is “recordable” helps avoid useless contributions.
As an objective facilitator, I’m there to see the over-pattern that specialists or internal people can miss. The graphics can provide a supporting panorama.
There’s a lot of hidden value we’re bringing by combining our talents.
L: To go on a little more, I think participants can better trust the process when they’re supported by a strong duo that models the collaboration implicit in the facilitator-graphic recorder “dance” in the room. When they know you’re experienced, they are able to be more trusting in the meeting culture and say what needs to be said.
R: And, last but not least, it’s simply enjoyable for people to watch others who are passionate about, and good at, what they do. When meeting participants are with us and they see that we genuinely like and respect and enjoy each other. It’s like coming into our “play space.”
Partnership practice tips
Lead Facilitators and Graphic Recorders
Focus primarily on the effect your partnership has on the process/participant experience. For example, it supports the creativity of the group, improves productivity, creates group memory, allows us to extract deeper meaning, and allows non-linear thinking. Focus on the output secondarily.
Don’t associate the word art or artist with graphic recording and don’t allow the client or participants to either.
This is a fast way to put the focus on the aesthetics of the work and diminish the impact of graphics on the group’s thought process.
Graphic recorders, cultivate well-rounded and deep expertise (beyond graphic recording) so that you can legitimately sell yourself to facilitator partners and clients as a consultant, strategist, or meetings design expert first and foremost. Graphic recording becomes just one of the ways you go about doing what you do.
Graphic recorders, esteem your role and inhabit it fully. Be a true partner to your facilitator partner in all ways. Don’t just deliver graphic recording. Demonstrate your value by partnering in meeting design, preparation, setup, debrief, client relations, promotion of services, etc. Facilitators, tap into the depth of your graphic recorder’s skills.
Invest yourselves in being a seamlessly united team
focused on helping the client solve their problem and achieve their goals.
Invest the time early in your partnership to talk about what professionalism means to both of you. Share your expectations of each other openly and stay focused on bringing those things to the table for the benefit of the client.
Ask each other for feedback regularly. Debrief meetings and take note of what worked really well and what could be better next time.
Spend time together outside of the meeting. Actually get to know and care about each other.
Continually expand your repertoire of facilitation processes.
Pool your knowledge to give yourselves the greatest spectrum of choices.
Be open to each other’s suggestions. Don’t get too attached to your own ideas or let your ego get in the way. Stay focused on what will work best for the uniqueness of your group.
Get good at articulating the ways that visuals enhance a meeting and the added value created by having two practitioners in a room.
Lisa Arora and Robert Mittman • Solo-Practitioner Partnerships
Clients
/Consumers
Educate yourself on the range of things you want to consider when hiring a graphic recorder. No two are the same.
Expect graphic recording to be integrated into your meeting process, not just a sideshow happening in the room.
Where possible, invest some time and thought into formulating written objectives for your meeting before you engage a consultant/facilitator.
Expect to be a participant in a collaborative meeting design.
Stay open to new ways of conducting a meeting. Test and then trust your consultant/facilitator team’s expertise.
Focus on how graphic recording is enhancing the dynamics of the discussion (process), and not just on the visual products themselves.
Robert Mittman is a solo practitioner in his company, Facilitation|Foresight|Strategy, which he formed in 2002. He is primarily a strategist/thinking partner with his clients.
He is dedicated to the belief that the group has its own genius and it’s our role to elicit that genius. Robert has taken graphic recording training, so he is uniquely equipped to think about meeting conversations in layouts and anticipate the needs of his graphic recorder partners.
LISA ARORA is a seasoned graphic facilitator and graphic recorder who uses these skills on a wide range of management consulting projects with organizations all over the world. The rich, engaging communication experiences Lisa and associates of Get The Picture provide result in highly productive dialog, shared understanding, alignment, and high-quality decisions.
Lisa is dedicated to the idea that visual meetings must be well designed to integrate visuals in the process as thinking tools. She’s written 3 “How To” eGuides on the topic (available at www.getthepicture.ca). As a lead facilitator herself, Lisa is uniquely equipped in the graphic recorder role to listen and filter information like a facilitator and anticipate the needs of her facilitator partners. Currently Lisa is pioneering the field of private visual mediation. Find out more about how you can work with Lisa at
www.getthepicture.ca
Sensemaking through Arts-Infused, Person-Centered Planning Processes
Aaron Johannes
Sensemaking has been a useful concept to bring to planning for people with (or without) disabilities, team building, and other projects. As a mode of being, it involves intentionally listening for clarifying questions and directions. From these, diverse groups create “future forming” plans and the skilled person-centered planning facilitator uses processes that can be (after years of practice) as light as a feather. Simple person-centered planning processes can be used by amateurs and professionals in the places where people live and life happens. Each event changes the world just a little and shapes a future that welcomes diversity.
I had no idea what I was getting into when I took the job with an organization that had made person-centered planning central to all its work. I’d heard about Planning Alternative Tomorrows with Hope (PATH) as a planning tool, and it sounded great. The kinds of planning processes I was used to involved stacks of papers, forms to fill out, and a bunch of professionals telling people how they could live. In contrast, the PATH process involved identifying the dream, locating what was “positive and possible” within a given timeframe, and then moving from what was happening now through a sequence of questions. These questions were: who might be involved, how everyone would stay strong enough to accomplish these goals, some first steps to take right away, and then a step-by-step action plan. It was simple, elegant, and visual—the whole thing was created in pictures and words. It invited participation and created spaces for dreaming in the lives of people who had not been allowed to make decisions, much less dream and hope for an enviable life.
I would have my own PATH as part of my learning, to feel the vulnerability of the process. I invited over friends and with our desserts perched on our knees we sat and watched my life appear in simple graphics. The facilitators led us through the steps, listening for glimpses of the future, asking questions, inviting my friends and family to speak. At one point we had to pretend to be in a time machine and then “remember” how we’d gotten to the successful places we had envisioned just half an hour before. In those memories sometimes I could hear the potential, and other times something in the plan didn’t ring true: “No, that never happened.” “Okay, then what did happen?”
Aaron Johannes • Sensemaking through Arts-Infused, Person-centered Planning Processes
A week later I was flying from mountain to mountain in northern British Columbia, meeting up with families, sharing great food and celebrations of their communities, and drawing their conversations on big sheets of paper, facilitated by a person-centered planning guru, Linda Perry. I’d aced art school—lots of awards, lots of scholarships, lots of coddling—but I’d never drawn in front of people like these: plumbers, miners, loggers, dads, moms, siblings, coming together after work and gathering to dream with someone with a disability who had captured their hearts.
Listening to the stories of a young nonverbal woman who had almost died, again and again, and used a wheelchair to get around in a mountaintop community, I was amazed at how well they knew her and how certain they were of her dreams and their shared dreams—and I was also just having fun drawing. When they talked about her going swimming, I drew David Hockney pools, and when they talked about her love of dressing up I went all Holbein. She was in a supported skiing group, so I got into portraying some Turneresque slaloming. When it was done, everyone was thrilled—this graphic plan represented her (and those who cared about her) in a way that deficit-based, bureaucracy-centered planning never had.
Her grandfather came over as I packed up. “We appreciate this so much,” he said. “That you would come here, into our home—and with our family and friends make her… dreams… come alive for us.” He waved at the drawing. He sniffled. I beamed. I was good at this. I might have been waiting for this. He nodded and said, “Especially that you’re willing to stand up in front of all these strangers—my goodness….” I shrugged, humbly. “I could never do this… I mean, just look at it—you can’t even draw a real person and it was just so brave for you to try, in front of strangers!” I blinked. “It made us feel like we were part of it all as we watched! If you could really draw we would have just felt left out!”
I started laughing—I’d been surrounded by people who loved everything I did, for a long time, in classes and in galleries where my work hung behind glass, already judged by some curator as special and significant. But this was what I’d always wanted out of art and never been able to identify: a dialog. I was smitten in that unexpected moment. Twenty years later I can remember those first drawings exactly, and I continue to be just as fascinated by these planning processes.
Deborah Ancona of M.I.T. says that sensemaking “refers to how we structure the unknown so as to be able to act in it ... coming up with a plausible understanding—a map—of a shifting world; testing this map with others through data collection, action, and conversation; and then refining, or abandoning, the map depending on how credible it is” (2012). I work with various kinds of groups, visually mapping what’s credible within constantly shifting dynamics, and their responses lead us towards different “truths” which become potential plans—does this look like what you want? Does this seem possible? Like something everyone can work on together? The graphic mirrors the dynamics of the people in the room, and plans rendered to their essential parts in simple graphics become the visualization of a changed world.
In another meeting, Brent, a young fellow with autism, is sitting at the center of a circle of about 20 people who care about him. He’s got his family, some of their friends, people from his school, people who have supported him from every period of his life, including when he was a toddler, and they’ve all been invited in to dream of what his adulthood might be. I’ve been warned he hates meetings and he came in glowering at me, but now he�
�s grinning, hugging, delighted to be here with people who love him and snacks he likes!
He doesn’t speak in ways we expect. He’s decided to trade in his voice for a xylophone and now he plays songs. In the old days we might have ticked off “voluntary mutism” on a form and left it at that. He plays along with his boombox to three songs he’s lined up to introduce this topic of planning his adult life, but when the second song is done, he suddenly shakes his head “no,” goes to the boombox, and then plays this Elvis Costello song, instead of whatever he had intended:
Aaron Johannes • Sensemaking through Arts-Infused, Person-centered Planning Processes
Oh it’s not easy to resist temptation
Walking around looking like a figment of somebody else’s imagination
Taking ev’ry word she says just like an open invitation
But the power of persuasion is no match for anticipation
Like a finger running down a seam
From a whisper to a scream
So I whisper and I scream
But don’t get me wrong
Please don’t leave me waitin’ too long
Waitin’ too long
Waitin’ too long
Waitin’ too long
Hey
Oh oh oh oh oh (Costello, 1981)
He hits the keys with perfect timing and most of those who care about him have tears running down their faces. When he’s done, his mom says, a little shakily, “Thank you for coming out to support ‘Brent’s Big Dream’—now I want you to meet Aaron.” And I begin to draw…
Drawn Together Through Visual Practice Page 6