The majority of the eight-day sections involved four to six hours of faculty presentation per day, with each section leading to approximately 45 total hours of scribing onto more than 100 linear feet of dry-erase walls and sometimes extra boards. This yielded 118 unique images over the three full cycles, including on topics such as Systems Thinking, Leadership and Organizational Change, Strategy, Finance and Macro-Economics, and Operations—most of which I did not initially know well or at all.
A classroom at MIT, where drawings offered visual and content containment
What was unique here was not the volume of time or images, but the necessary weaving of content over the educational arc. One approach could have been “one topic, one picture.” The more expansive value, though, was in the wrapping of heavily-related drawings around the group, stitched nest-like, providing a solid visual container for extended cultural learning.
—
As initially indicated, the extension of new experience directly relates to the depth and steadiness of the soil in which it grows.
Visual practice, as a key “seeing” and anchoring device within the containers we support, serves a foundational role in our understanding of, and the evolution of, social fields. Thus, a visual practitioner’s grasp of the correlation between our role as scribes and the fields in which we draw cannot be underrated. As artists participating in societal transformation, we are implicate3 in both making apparent, and expanding, discovery.
Our times are riddled with disconnects, ideological entrenchment, crisis, fear. It is a time then, with open eyes,4 to see. It is a time to expand, to scale, to facilitate societal sight. All inner preparation—and all holding spaces we reinforce—enable the very act of making that meets this call.
Each crooked nook, fault line, gorgeous arc, blotch of color, textured application in our drawing offers some structural integrity and some sense.
As artists, as visual practitioners of any kind, it is up to us to stretch “larger than the largest disturbance in the room.”5
Increasing our ability to embrace current discomfort, and simultaneously represent the possible, we participate in the engagement and ushering in of tentative, emergent realities.
Kelvy Bird • Steady, to Scale
KELVY BIRD is an internationally recognized graphic facilitator, supporting groups by translating content and dynamics into visual formats that aid with reflection and decision-making. She leads creative design at the Presencing Institute, and is on the core team of Otto Scharmer’s edX offering u.lab: Transforming Business, Society, and Self – launched January 2015, with over 70,000 students participating globally. Kelvy also cofounded dpict llc, a firm specializing in scribing to advance social understanding at all scales. Long-standing partners have included: The Value Web, MIT, Harvard, The Ashland Institute, Dialogos, and MG Taylor, as well as Fortune 500 and local community organizations alike. An artist by training, Kelvy received her BFA in painting and BA in Art History from Cornell University. Her current residence is Somerville, MA. Find more information at: www.kelvybird.com.
References
Otto Scharmer, “Levels of Listening,” as found in Theory U: Leading from the Future as it Emerges, 1st ed., Society for Organizational Learning, 2007. See also a video clip from u.lab here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLfXpRkVZaI
The Hindu story and much of my understanding of containers comes from working with Dialogos, www.dialogos.com, and the Circle of Seven,
www.ashlandinstitute.org
Here lies a subtle reference, honoring physicist David Bohm’s theory of the “Implicate Order” and undivided wholeness. Any interested reader can start to lean more via: www.david-bohm.net
Months after the official Bauhaus closing, Josef Albers was invited to teach at the newly-formed Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina. Despite knowing little English, he knew enough words to convey his purpose for teaching: “To open eyes.” Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College, 1933–1957. Exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston MA, October 2015–January 2016.
William Isaacs, shared during the capacity development program: Leadership for Collective Intelligence. Isaacs is the author of Dialogue: The Art of Thinking Together, The Crown Publishing Group, 1999.
A Learning Journey
Connecting self to planet
Stina Brown
I was on a conference call last year with 600 other people, listening to (and taking part in) a conversation on “Shaping a New Narrative for a New Economy” with David Korten and Otto Scharmer. The number of times the word mystical came up surprised me; I’ve never heard the economy and the mystical discussed simultaneously. There are—in some conversations now—people discussing their inner and outer worlds as congruent, or at the very least related. The Dalai Lama has said, “We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves.” This principle is showing itself in my meetings as well.
In late 2014, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives asked me to design a series of four full-day meetings over the course of two months as an engagement aspect of their Climate Justice Project (CJP), led by Marc Lee, Senior Economist. The CJP “asks how we can tackle global warming with fairness and equality. Our challenge is to build a zero carbon society that also enhances our quality of life.” This series of “deliberative dialog sessions,” which took place in the Metro Vancouver area, was intended to advance the outreach work of the CJP and deepen understanding of effective engagement processes. It also held the potential for expanded activities across BC and Canada to spur climate action.1
“Strangers are more beautiful than I have been led to believe,”
“climate change is essentially just a people issue.” – CJP Participants
In this chapter, we will explore how I, in the role of visual facilitator, together with Sam Bradd as a graphic recorder, guided a group of strangers toward self-determined transformation—connecting their individual experiences with each others’ to see themselves in relationship with the larger context of the planet and our collective future.
This experience demonstrates how design and visual facilitation can create the conditions to:
Connect to and increase awareness of the self and others;
Build community by creating the space for conversation;
Enable deep and empathic dialog through shared and visual awareness; and
Help participants find new hopeful ways of relating and
taking action to move their own “worlds” into a future of
their own making.
Graphic facilitation by Sam Bradd
Stina Brown • A Learning Journey
Connect: awaken to a relationship with yourself and others
There is a science to drawing out and managing a group’s peak energy, creativity, and participation. I believe it begins with connection—
awakening to a relationship with yourself and others. Once you are present, you are available to engage in conversation with others, to share, envision, discover, grow, etc. Visuals help anchor this process.
The process we were undertaking would need to be one that would engage the whole person, whole brain, and whole group. I would need to guide the group through a mix of reflection, dialog, self-organizing, presentations, and collaborations, with many of the outcomes emergent. This was an experiment, and the participants and leaders were in discovery mode together.
Before participants arrived at the first in-person meeting in mid-February 2015, we asked them to consider the following questions: “Why are you choosing to be a part of this conversation on climate justice?” “What are you passionate about?” “What are three to five values that guide your life?” I made these “data” into word clouds and posted them in the room on the first day.
Creati
ng the conversation: participate, share, discover, envision, transition, un-limit
The first morning of our first day together, 40 of us sat in a wide circle with Sam’s graphic recording wall set up nearby, and four flipchart pages filled with pre-meeting survey answers in the middle, oriented around a green and blue fabric Earth. On the wall, in those word clouds I’d created, participants could see each other’s names and job areas, and just as significantly, their new colleagues’ values, hopes and concerns.
Marc and I welcomed the group, discussed our roles, and gave an overview of our time together in this “learning journey” as well as the desired outcomes. These outcomes were to:
Learn about the local connections between climate change and overall quality of life today and in the future
See the “big picture” with up-to-date science and research
Explore participants’ personal and shared assumptions
and values
Connect with others to ask questions, envision the future, and share stories, concerns and ideas
Reflect on the participants’ own role in addressing climate change
We established “Group Agreements” to create transparency around forming group norms, articulate a way to build trust, and encourage self-regulation and inclusion. Setting our group agreements became one of our most significant keys to success; we posted them on the wall and re-read them every day. We noticed over the course of the four days that as long as the group kept their agreements, they thrived.
But group conversation is collaborative—and even with my interventions, at times the group struggled to stay balanced. If people no longer feel a sense of psychological safety (because others are breaking agreements), dialog loses its diverse viewpoints and energy plummets. I learned when you bring a widely varying group of people together—strangers who are diverse in almost every way—there is even more of a need to facilitate closely and wisely and to provide variation in activities.
Learning shared awareness: exploring assumptions and perspectives, activating knowledge
Participants’ awareness about reality—and their role in creating reality—can be explored more fully through conversations that invite them to see their own assumptions more clearly, bring out their perspectives, and link new knowledge or understanding with existing knowledge. They begin to see a bigger picture, to expand or shift the way they relate to themselves, their actions, their community, and maybe even their world. Through the process of dialog (both internal and external), their systemic understanding of individual and collective action grows and creates new possibilities.
Hearing about the dire state of the world can surface a wide range of emotions in a group. We wanted to offer people a chance to reflect on their response to the question, “How are you feeling about climate change?” I provided a handout with two articles: “Climate Change and Emotions: How We Feel Matters More Than What We Know”2 by David Ropeik3 and an article by the David Suzuki Foundation titled “Coping With Climate Change is a Family Matter.”4
Stina Brown • A Learning Journey
On the wall, I put images of faces demonstrating a range of emotions (hopeful, interested, helpless, worried, sad, afraid, depressed, angry, disgusted), and asked the group to reflect on them and place Post-It notes beside the expressions that resonated with them.
Sam Bradd
Stina Brown
The comments people wrote and shared on the wall revealed, to our surprise, that the majority of them felt inspired and even happy; they were experiencing feeling part of the solution already, just by participating in these conversations. Even on their first day, participants came to see that they were not alone, their opinion mattered and this conversation was just the beginning. They learned strangers “are more beautiful” than they had been led to believe, and that “climate change is essentially just a people issue.”
At times I saw group members experience feelings of guilt, grief, anger, and frustration—even mild depression. This sparked deep compassion in me, related to my own waves of ups and downs in my personal awareness of climate change. I encouraged participants to ride the waves with self-care, knowing their emotions will change many times around this topic—and that it’s healthy to feel so deeply.
Relating differently to the world
A key element of our agenda became shifting the focus from becoming overwhelmed by the up-to-date research on global climate change and our own emotions, toward understanding the skills and solutions that already exist—even locally—giving us what we needed to create a compelling future vision of what our world could look like.
Sam Bradd
Stina Brown • A Learning Journey
I believe hope can be born in meetings where people can relate to each other as human beings and discover new things about themselves, each other, and the world along the way. And, as hope was born on the first day, regardless of what people’s ideas of what the future would look like exactly, the group’s focus quickly became mapping solutions.
Reflection
Sam’s large live chart work over the four days, along with his daily debriefs throughout the process, brought additional rich layers of perspective, insight, reflection, memory, and integration of the learning—literally showing the group their progress and new history together. The value of this dimension cannot be overstated! I would often benefit from chats with Sam while the group was working; his presence added a set of facilitator eyes and ears on the process.
In Sam’s words, “graphic recording made visible the learning and emotional transformation that was happening in the room. Looking back over an entire room whose walls were covered in pictures, the group could see how far they’d come together. They could see their beginning questions—layered with information and presentations by guest experts—shift into the later stages of planning for action. It was all there. The graphics grounded their reflection, it was part of their notes, and they could take the pictures into their lives to keep the conversation going.”
Sam Bradd
Participants learned how to work with people with opposing or differing views in small group table conversations. Report-outs made their words visible as Sam created graphic records. They shared ideas on what solutions could look like through hands-on neighborhood energy-mapping with templates, transportation planning with large maps, visioning with visual story-telling cards, and by conducting online research, sharing their findings with Post-It notes.
Rather than focusing on the “crisis” of climate change, we encouraged the group to explore what complete communities could look like, making it local, visual, holistic, and fun. Volunteers whom we named “synthesizers” took notes on the meta-learning of the group to help us reflect at the end of each day. Between sessions, participants had “homework,” such as talking with a friend or family member about what they were discovering, or taking photos of their neighborhood’s buildings, green spaces, or places they shopped for food to create a learning gallery for the group.
By the time we met for our last session, eight weeks after our first day together, there was a sense of ease in the room. The walls were covered in over 380 square feet of Sam’s graphic recordings! People were eager to catch up with each other, dive into the agenda, and meet the community “climate champions” who presented and stayed for deeper conversations. This was the day they had been waiting for from Day One, when we asked, “How do we take action in our homes, at our workplaces, in our communities, cities, province, as a country?” It was obvious: “regular folks” need to connect with people who are working every day on solutions to all of these issues—and succeeding. One “champion” spoke about change happening in a non-linear way, in “bursts,” and to illustrate described how Rosa Parks had just returned from a civil disobedience training where she learned about things like refusing to give u
p her seat on the bus when that fateful act became a spark of profound action and positive change.
Hope can be born in meetings where people can relate to each other as human beings and discover new things about themselves, each other, and the world along
the way.
Stina Brown • A Learning Journey
In the closing circle, the fireman in the group commented that he was so grateful to have this group to talk with about these issues. He said someone would literally throw something at him if he tried to talk about these important topics at work. Others agreed that they had no other “safe space” to have these conversations, even in their families.
It became “cool to care” in this group of strangers who had evolved into a community over the course of two months and who were now prepared to be change-makers in their own communities.
It’s true, this was just the beginning of the conversation for many in this group. But now, they have a felt experience of becoming a community of people who cared enough to ask the hard questions, share and learn together, and take one step toward seeing and creating a future in which they can—and will—be active participants.
Drawn Together Through Visual Practice Page 15