Drawing Collaboration
Graphic Facilitation for Engagement and Results
Meet Tom Russell, a fine gentleman I’ve worked with once or twice and had some training from. Tom is a graphic facilitator which is a discipline within Organizational Development. I love graphic facilitation. I love the effect and the impact it has on the way people work together, I love the outputs it creates. I love so much about it I just had to have Tom on to talk about what seems almost magical: its ability to get people talking to each other in deeper, more powerful ways. Enough gushing about why I like it. I’ll let Tom, tell us a little bit about it. - Carlos
Well, I like it, too, which is great. I’ve been a graphic facilitator for about 10 years now, doing that full time. In the past I was in human resources, which was the career path I chose after studying organizational behavior. I’ve worked in different sectors. During that time, I encountered OD and facilitation within that. Not long before making the transition, I discovered the whole graphic focus – graphic facilitation and graphic recording as well. So, facilitation and graphics melded together seemed like the perfect combination, and here we are 10 years down the line.
So, 2 questions:
Generally, what is graphic facilitation?
What’s the distinction between graphic recording and graphic facilitation?
What is Graphic Facilitation?
Graphic Facilitation is, to put it crudely, where you’re enabling facilitation within a group, but you’re using large-scale imagery to help them reach a particular outcome or goal. That group is interacting with that imagery at the same time during the conversation. Hence, it’s a visual facilitation.
The distinction between graphic facilitation and graphic recording is straightforward although the terms can often get interchanged. Graphic recording is passive. You may have been to a conference where someone is capturing on a large piece of paper or digitally - of course given recent events - the key points in the messages from the conversation or presentation. So building up an engaging visual picture which then forms a visual reminder of the conversation that is often given to participants after a conference or a meeting.
Essentially, graphic facilitation is much more active with a group, recording more passive.
I’m one of those people who has gotten one of those .pdfs of a giant poster - I mean these things can be 12’ – 15’ wide - capturing a 3-day offsite conference, for example, in images. Words as well, but mostly images. How much training did you have in art or graphic design did you have before you got into this?
Very little, though my parents are artists and graphic designers and I was lucky enough in that they worked from home. They used to have a studio up on the top floor of our home. There were no computers in those days. It was all pens, inks, artist boards, and there was plenty of stuff for me to pinch and draw and learn and watch. So I point the finger at my parents for the artistic bent in me. That stuck with me, really Carlos. No bigger qualifications in art. Just an acute sense of art and design, and a passion for it, so it stuck.
If you were interested in pursuing this career, if one said, “Wow, that sounds like a cool job, but I’m a terrible artist”, what would you say to them?
I’d say, “you can do it.” Carlos, I’m sure you could do it. Graphic recording is more illustrative and artistic, of course. It takes practice. We could all do that. Above all the output needs to be practically useful. I can be beautiful, great, that’s fantastic. Is it practically useful? That’s the key question that participants need to be asking after seeing this image to which you refer after a conference.
Graphic facilitation doesn’t require as much artistic ability. It’s useful, but there are plenty of people who can get stuck into this without much trouble.
And there are training programs, like the Sibbet organization?
Yes, you can find a course. I coach people to graphically facilitate. Do you know, Carlos, the number of people who say, “I’m not a visual thinker. I’m rubbish. Please excuse my lack of ability here.” And when they get stuck into it they realize just how much skill they have.
I think the world needs more graphic facilitators.
A Practical Application of Graphic Facilitation
Okay, so here’s what I’d love: think of an example where you’ve used graphic facilitation with a team where you had a very pragmatic outcome required. Just walk us through what that situation was and how you did what you did.
The example that springs to mind was a road show of workshops that my colleague and I designed and facilitated for a big technology company. The groups that we were facilitating were essentially partners of this company. The context was a go-to-market plan to introduce a particular service to the partners’ end-clients. Our client had a vested interest in the outcome and of course so did the partners because they wanted to sell as much of the service as they could. Our approach was to work top down, starting with what is the vision for the sales, for the distribution, for the communication of this product? What is the end goal? So it was great having a product and levers to pull, but we need to have something to aim for. Working with a group to understand quite simply what that vision is. We used for example large charts, Post-its, getting that view out and being able to see it, alter it, and explore it, draw that ambition in or push that ambition out to make it even more stretching.
So you described this planning process which started with vision. What sort of things are you capturing? What are you putting on your chart on the wall?
Before I answer the question, Carlos, I feel it’s important to note that it’s the group that is putting the information on the chart. It’s a mixture. So what I’m doing in that context is I’m designing the conversation or the meeting process, creating templates and charts which are often graphical or visual in their appearance. The group is interacting with those templates using Post-its, using markers, but also I’m leading and enabling that conversation to happen.
So the types of items that would be on that chart would be, for example, what do they want people to be seeing, saying, and feeling about their product in five years’ time. What might the sales figures be? It could be numerical as well as qualitative. It could be about the team themselves. Where do they see themselves in 5-10 years’ time having achieved the best possible launch for this product that they could possibly achieve?
It’s a variety of things. But the beauty of that is enabling the group to be able to see what the future might look like, and also to start feeling it. There are questions you can use in facilitation that start to encourage participants to imagine what it must be like to be able to achieve this.
Making the Future Graphical
Is there ever a time when you say, “Draw your future, draw your feelings, give me images?”
Absolutely. And some groups, Carlos, prefer to work that way. Others do so more simply. But yes, drawing what the future looks like is really powerful. And that could just be vignettes in small images or it could be something bigger which might describe a whole context or scenario. So it depends on the group. I would never discourage anyone who wants to draw out what their future looks like to do so.
There are examples I can think of where we have deliberately focused on a graphical, visual representation of what the future might look like. It also depends on the group and the outcomes you want to achieve.
So it sounds like anybody could get their group working this way, if you come up with the right question to answer, you can work in this way with your group?
Planning for Graphic Facilitation
Yes, absolutely. It’s about the questions, you’re right Carlos. It’s also about the preparation and the design. So, anyone could lead a meeting where you’re working graphically with the group. The important part is the preparation. So,
being able to be clear on the outcomes you want to achieve
being clear on the process you’re going to follow to reach those outcomes
being mindful of the expectations from the team
Also, who have you got in the room? What types of people are they? For example, you’ve got people from different functional backgrounds, different personalities and ways of working. There’s a lot to think about before you get into a meeting, but it pays off. I guess the devil’s in the details. Do the preparation right and as long as you can flex your facilitation as the conversation progresses because we know that the conversation doesn’t always happen in a linear way, then you’re as best prepared as you can be.
The Power of the Shared Experience
They’re not sitting around a table debating what should be in this plan. You get people up on their feet, moving to a chart on the wall or a set of flip charts around the room, interacting with each other as they do this?
Absolutely, Carlos. It’s a shared process, a shared experience. I remember one of these workshops that we facilitated in the States, and by the end of the workshop we had a whole set of walls with these charts on them where it just told the story from the big vision, what we want to achieve to what are the barriers, what are the enablers, who needs to be involved right through to an operational plan and next steps. They called their war room. In fact, they left the charts in the room, and that was the room the group worked on that particular project because they had all that information on the walls around them easily accessible. It was a joint experience they’d had. Also, if someone came in that wasn’t in that workshop, they could explain it to them quite easily because it was all there.
Engagement and Ownership
What’s the power in this? What makes this work better than a bunch of people sitting around a table discussing a question and having someone writing their conclusions on a flip chart later?
Engagement and ownership, in the sense that if you and I are sitting just around a table with some others, and we’re having a conversation. That might be a great conversation. But if you’re working visually with a team where they can get up, let the blood flow, start to introduce some more dynamic movement to the conversation, and start to see each other’s thinking emerge in front of them, it’s not in the head anymore. It’s on the wall. It encourages a conversation.
If you and I were sitting around a table we might not have the same kinds of conversations than we would do if we were up and working in a very graphic way. So the power is in drawing out, excuse the pun, what’s inside and to unlock the potential in the group.
Getting People on Their Feet
It feels as if the kinetic part is important. Being on your feet has some magic to it, somehow it creates a shift when you get people up and moving?
It creates a buzz. And people in meetings can see other people working away, clearly have conversations going, they have movement. It’s a very different dynamic to simply being passive and taking in the information rather like at a conference where you’re taking in the presentation material.
A key difference here, and this is a really important point that I encourage every leader to consider, is that the people in your meeting or conference should be regarded as participants. The word participants implies participation. It implies a two-way level of engagement, and that leads to ownership. Whereas, if you consider your meeting participants as attendees or delegates, it’s a rather passive way of thinking about it.
Virtual Graphic Facilitation
It’s estimated 40% of us are working from home. Now, I’m at my desk with my Zoom running. What are you doing to practice graphic facilitation when you’re all in different rooms on different computers, not on your feet, not with paper on the wall?
It’s a great question, and one we’ve had to grapple with pretty quickly in the last 12 months. Technology, to start with, is great. We know that there’s been virtual meeting platforms around for a while. Certainly the last year has focused our minds on how we use virtual meeting technology as best as we possibly can, rather than taking a normal way of working and just using virtual technology to enable us to do that. So from a facilitation perspective there are differences. You can’t see everybody. There are ways of working as simple as just being able to see each other with video on. That makes a big difference. There are many meetings where people might have their video off for whatever reason. It cuts away one of the last important messages you have about how that person is working.
It could be as simple as asking people to keep their video on. It might be tempting to keep your video off. Maybe you’ve got kids running around, or the room where you’re at isn’t the prettiest but that’s ok, it’s life right now. Being able to see each other on a virtual call means a lot just now. If you were in a meeting room and you were unable to see each other working, then that would be weird. The same applies to a virtual setting as well.
Being able to raise your hand virtually, for example. We know that the functionality is there, it’s really straight forward. Then you can take that all the way to more sophisticated calls like we use in the virtual whiteboard tools, like Mural for example, where you can encourage people to interact with each other as if they were putting Post-its on a board in a room.
Yeah, you’re not there in person, but they’re designed in a way that’s dynamic. You can see each other’s thinking, you can change each other’s thinking, and you can facilitate a conversation about what the group is doing.
There’s advice, guidance videos around to help people understand how to use these tools as well as support from the individual companies themselves. For me, it was a case of getting stuck in and trying to learn as we went on, and also using my network to help me understand how to best use it. I’ve also been on the receiving end of a couple of Mural meetings as well, so I was able to see what the participants saw and felt as they were participating in the meeting.
I have played with it. I have to admit I’ve struggled a bit with the software and I’m interested in finding ways to become more adept at it. We’re both dealing with this. How are you feeling about it?
Great question, Carlos. I imagine that, like a lot of people, I miss the people connection. I’ve had to pedal harder to maintain that connection with others. But I do so using different media: Zoom, of course, Skype and others. There are different ways of connecting. And also, rather than sitting in front of a screen like I’m doing with you now, Carlos, I might give you a call and go for a walk to get some exercise because we’re sitting at our desks for a large part of the day. Just being able to shift your perspective maybe be a little bit more active when you’re connecting, for me, helps. It leads to a better conversation at the end of the day.
Yes. Before we started this conversation I went out for a 15-minute brisk walk to clear my mind, get away from my desk.
Getting Results, Virtually
Are you finding that graphic facilitation adapted to remote working Is giving you and your clients the kind of results that you’re used to getting?
You know yourself that when you’re working with a team to develop high performance collaboration, you might have a one- or a two-day workshop at a particular point in time knowing that there are going to be other meetings and conversations about that later on down the line. We find that in a virtual workshop, that one- or two two-day workshop is now split over a longer period because people can’t sit and have a two-day meeting on Zoom. It’s not great for productivity nor well-being. Being able to chunk those down into smaller parts works a lot better for participants. And we can still broadly get to the outcomes. Clearly you don’t have the face-to-face human interaction, but you get to either achieve the tasks or the outcomes that you want to achieve, I’d say, as much as you would achieve if you were face-to-face.
What do you think the longest time you keep people engaged in a virtual interaction with still being effective?
The longest single period of time? I would say about 3 hours. Clearly you’d need a break in there. And, of course, you can have shorter breaks. It’s a bit like having shorter sprints within a working period. You might have three working sessions within a 3-hour period. And you give people a chance to stretch. You could probably push it more, but if you want to leave people feeling they haven’t wilted by the end of the session, then 3 hours is a reasonable maximum.
A 3-hour slot, 3 different chunks of work. It’s been my experience that about an hour per unit of work seems to be about right.
Yes, particularly if you’re stretching the group’s thinking. We know that in some meetings there are interactions where the work is more straightforward. Some conversations which are more taxing intellectually and emotionally, those conversations will leave people tired more quickly than the straightforward conversations.
The Importance of Non-Verbal Interaction
If there’s anything you’ve learned, what would you carry forward? What lessons?
I think the last 12 months have shown how much non-verbal communication has an impact on the success of an interaction or a meeting. I was aware of that before, but more aware of it now. When we go back, and we are in the room with other people, the silence will be deafening in the sense that we’re seeing different behaviors, emotions, and a lot of non-verbal communication which we’ve probably not seen for a while. And I think that’s a good thing because it will shine a light on the importance of understanding each other beyond what we say to each other.
I think we’ve learned something about attention span and how long people can stay engaged. I went to visit West Point, and the guy who headed up their Neuro-Leadership program there, his contention was, “You got about 55 minutes if you’re lucky, from the average person, and you should design everything around that notion.” I didn’t really buy it. Working virtually has shown me that may well be true.
Absolutely. And we’ve got a really great opportunity to learn. I suspect that you, like myself and a lot of people, might have taken the virtual meeting space, and applied the same kinds of rules that we applied in a face-to-face environment. And if we’re not careful, we’ll do it in reverse. So let’s check ourselves before we get back into the meeting room, and take the best of the virtual way of working and the best of the face-to-face way of working, and make it work when we get back together again, rather than forcing the virtual way of working into the face-to-face environment. Probably easier said than done, but it’ll be interesting to see what happens.
That is a very interesting watch-out, and a very appropriate one as we wrap up. Tom, thank you. If you have more questions for Tom, you can reach him best on LinkedIn or visit his website InkyThinking.com.