Visual Facilitation
Meet Nevada Lane, MSOD, ACC, a visual facilitator, teacher and coach who started a company called Lane Change Consulting in San Francisco. She works with teams in the US and Europe and has been for about 18 years, really focusing on visual collaboration and graphic facilitation. Read what she has to say about the power of visual communication and thinking.
18 years. So what were you doing before you got into this – just curious?
I spent most of my time growing up obsessed about going into the Foreign Service and so I studied abroad and studied political science in undergrad. Then I went to DC my senior year in college and realized that was not for me. I made a huge pivot, moved to England and ended up in marketing communications. I did MarComm work before moving into the OD work.
What is Visual Facilitation?
So you went from marketing and communications into visual facilitation. Just a quick refresher: what the heck is visual facilitation?
It’s such a good question. I often interchange the terms visual facilitation, graphic facilitation, but others refer to it as graphic recording, scribing, harvesting…
Harvesting? That sounds like a horror movie.
There’s a group or practice called the Art of Hosting, and in that community they call this work of capturing ideas in a visual format “harvesting”. It’s kind of interesting how the same term can apply to many different things. I think of it as combining visual thinking and facilitation, mashing those two together in service of the client to help teams collaborate.
In your bio you talk about your work with teams. I have been to conferences where we’ve had a graphic recorder on the side of the room with a 20’ wide “taking notes” using images and some words to capture the flow and the content. Do you do that sort of work, or do you really focus on working with teams?
I used to do more graphic recording work which has less interactivity between the participants and the graphic recorder at the wall. That person often has their back to the audience because they’re in deep listening mode, they’re just in their zone doing the visual thing. I don’t do any of that any more. I have a team that will do that work for clients because I love working with the group so much. I’m really grounded in dialogic OD work, and thinking of that pull communication, which is what helps teams and team leaders be successful. That’s where my first love is.
Dialogic Organizational Development
We are nerding out a little bit in our space of organizational development. We’re talking now about dialogic OD which is a fairly recent way of labeling various ways of working with groups that have been around for a while. I think at the root of that practice are things that everyday people can use. Tell us a little about what dialogic OD is.
For me it’s that change comes out of talking with people and listening to people. That’s how I think about it. Then there are different methodologies in there from Open Space Technology and World Café and the art of hosting. But basically it’s listening to talk, having people talk together and figuring out what is happening and where this organization or team needs to go. That’s how I think about it.
Peter Block used to say that the role of leaders is to convene people. When I work with team leaders I encourage them to be conveners: not the ones with all the answers, not the ones who establish the agenda and drive to the finish line, but who convene people to have the conversations about the stuff that matters, draw conclusions accordingly. It’s a term for something that inspired leaders do naturally.
What comes up for me is that core skill of listening as a leader. If we don’t convene we can’t listen. I think most leaders and team leaders know how important listening is, but we have to do that convening in order to listen.
Adapting Visual Facilitation to Remote Meetings
Every day there’s an article out there on how to work better remotely. There was an article about that one person who does all the talking, and finding ways for those people to talk less and listen more. It’s funny, this idea of getting people to listen more is so foundational to leadership, to collaboration, and here we are talking about the visual and we’ve veered off into a discussion about how to hear. But I think that the visual does help us to hear.
I was just talking to you about having just finished this graduate school course at USF on Visual Thinking for Organizational Development and how I framed it up to them. These are folks that didn’t know anything about visual thinking and don’t know anything about facilitation particularly. But the core theme there was the reason we want to make the invisible visible is so that we can go from complexity. to clarity. There’s just something around taking the intangible in the field, in the air, and bringing some kind of tangible-ness to it so that we have something that we can do something with. This mental model that you might have is going to be different than the mental model that I might have, or that people on my team might have. If we can align on some visual of that mental model, it becomes a shared visible thing that we can now work with and move forward with. It doesn’t have to be fancy. That visual does not have to be fancy.
So, COVID. It’s been a long time. All of us who work with teams have had to adapt. Helicoptering up to 35,000 feet for a moment, we’ve learned a lot. We’ve adapted. What’s the most persistent challenge now for your clients?
To me the two things I’m seeing are meeting fatigue, Zoom fatigue, overall fatigue. And then prioritization. People aren’t doing that work to make the invisible visible. There’s a lack of alignment. People are working really hard and it’s very challenging to get people together and aligned to work toward the same goals. That may be recency bias, but that’s a big one.
Graphic Recording Technology for Remote Meetings
It does seem to shift every 3 or 4 months. I’m seeing an interest in sorting out what really matters.
So, staying with virtual teams for a moment, you went from using markers to what? How have you adapted your practice to working in this remote fashion? Because I know you’ve stayed busy, you’ve kept working. What’s worked for you?
It was a pretty dramatic pivot because my hands used to be covered in marker ink at the end of the day working with groups, large paper, off in a lovely conference room somewhere in the wine country was awesome. That beautiful energy in the room, we got to draw these beautiful pictures in real time with the team and have these incredible conversations and meals, it all felt great. And just reflecting back, we had so much time together. We could spend 8 hours with this executive team, or 2 days, and now it’s crunched to working in 2-hour increments in a virtual setting.
The tool that’s helped me the most in making that transition and trying to mimic the visual collaboration as much as possible has been using a tool called Mural. It’s very similar to Miro. Mural has been a lifesaver for me in helping re-create the environment as much as possible that we had in person.
I know you have to subscribe, it’s a monthly or annual fee. Does every team member have to sign up? What does it take to get using something like that?
It’s subscription-based but it’s fairly reasonable compared to some of the other tools that are out there. The team can have one and then you can invite collaborators. I have one account, and we can have a session with say, 70 people on it just using my account. They come in as a visitor, so they don’t have to create an account, it’s super easy set-up, and then they can collaborate in this. Think about it like a scalable whiteboard on steroids, so anything you can do on a whiteboard or a wall in a room you can do with Mural with images and adding .pdfs and adding video and drawing, lassoing things, stickies that can resize, the possibilities are endless for collaboration.
I find that, having experimented with Miro, it’s almost overwhelming to me. There’s so much you can do, and I can’t keep track and remember it all. I keep telling myself if I could find a live coure where we could try stuff out together I would do that. It’s impressive technology. And sometimes the most impressive technology can be the most intimidating to use. It has an endless length. You can keep going from left to right, and adding more stuff.
Yes, you never run out of room. And for graphic facilitators and visual facilitators who had this set piece of paper, maybe a 4’ x 8’ where you would eventually run out of space, this is endless. And I’ve heard you’re not alone in feeling like it is overwhelming to get up to speed, I do think that with a 2-hour investment with someone guiding you in how to use it, you would be ready to facilitate using the tool.
Where do we start with Visual Thinking?
The work I do is to help teams, and team leaders in particular, become self-sufficient. I make a fair bit of my income by people paying me to come and do things with them/for them. My wish is that I could impart my knowledge to teams so that they could do it themselves. Self-sufficient teams is the goal.
What would you say to someone who says, “I like this idea of visual thinking and using some graphical device or other to help me get my team where we want to go, but I don’t even know where to start.”
It always surprises me how much capacity for visual thinking people have without knowing it. Your grandchildren drawing on the floor: everyone has done that at some point in their life. Most people have had, as a child, the chance to draw something in a squiggly line and a circle. They’ve had some sort of experience using tools to create visuals as a child, and that capacity is human. It’s in each of us. What I’ve found with folks is they just really need permission and space to do it.
It’s amazing what people can actually create. For example, I do an activity in my workshops called Graphic Jam. Everybody gets a stack of Post-its, and I say, “I’m going to tell you a concept, and you’re going to draw something as simply as you can that represents this concept: Global.” Well, most people can draw a globe. Then we say, “What else can that globe represent?” It can represent diversity, it can represent travel, all these different things. So people start realizing they actually draw more concepts than they thought. It’s almost like the freedom or the permission to do it is all people need to actually be able to draw something.
Overcoming Art Trauma
I love that – the permission. I’m reflecting on teams that have been through a lot, and I’ve given them scented markers and a big sheet of paper and asked them to draw the past five years in a timeline. What about the one who says, “Oh, I can’t draw…” What is some good language for those folks? Because I think it’s very much about the language we choose. How do you talk to that person about getting engaged and not being too self-conscious about it?
People have art trauma. Maybe in 3rd or 4th grade, a teacher said something about something they drew, and from that moment on they decided they were not good at drawing. And they’re going to hold onto that for their whole life. I have a 2-day Visual Facilitation Boot Camp that I teach. I’m so proud of people who come and say that they can’t draw, and sign up for this 2-day intense deep dive into drawing. And the truth is they can draw. The crazy thing is that they can, but they have this belief that they can’t. Are they going to be Leonardo DaVinci? Absolutely not. The number one thing I tell folks is it doesn’t have to be fancy to be effective. We’re not going for representational drawing, where I want you to draw exactly all the light hitting this coffee cup. I just want you to simplify it down to the basic lines so you’re communicating, “coffee cup.” That’s it.
So it’s a much lower bar to set for folks so that they can feel like they can do it. They’re holding themselves to this standard of representational drawing when we just need icons.
Icons! I’m looking at the bottom of my screen and seeing all kinds of icons. If you can outline something that looks vaguely right, boom. It’s like symbolic thinking. And those bashful people will get up and draw their symbols and icons, and then we’ll talk about what the story is that all this is telling us, and they’ll get a good laugh about what some people have drawn, what they’ve drawn. It’s really very disarming and quite charming, I find. They do become a little more child-like, a little more innocent.
Drawing as equalizer
I love where you’re pointing there because there’s a humanity in the hand drawing that is important for the team. If you can get the team doing that there’s some level of psychological safety that hand drawing helps to create. We’re all on the same page, we’re all humans trying to do our best with this marker on a paper, and there’s something that supports the connective tissue of the team when we’re all in that space. There’s a different hierarchy. The boss obviously usually can’t draw better than anybody else on the team, so there’s this egalitarian thing that happens.
Interesting point. I’ve read that with Zoom or MS Teams, there is no longer a person at the head of the table anymore. And I love the idea that drawing or creating icons brings us all to a similar level.
What’s interesting is, there’ll be times when we create in the room a hand-drawn graphic where the team has contributed, and it looks kind of messy and a little childish, but the team has connection to that graphic. Sometimes they’ll say, “Nevada, can your team make this look nice, make a nice piece out of it?” Then we come back with a digital version of it. And sure, it looks good, but it doesn’t have the same resonance for that team as the original piece did. So the digitalization, I find, creates a remoteness. It moves in the direction of a graphic design and we’re all so inundated with amazing graphics, digital graphics, video graphics that it’s not even impressive anymore. We expect that level of amazingness, and what we’re missing is that human connection in the hand-drawn.
Whiteboarding on Zoom
And that’s the nice thing about Mural or Miro, you can go hand-drawn. I think Zoom has a whiteboarding feature, too. You can get a virtual marker and use your mouse to make shapes. You have a little less control than you do with an actual marker.
Yes, it’s a little wonky. The workaround is if you have an iPad and an Apple pencil, you can log into the Zoom as a separate user, than use the whiteboard on your iPad and have a little more control on that whiteboard.
Good to know if folks are using Zoom and want to do this kind of stuff.
The Enneagram
I noticed in your bio that you are certified in the Enneagram. I’ve known about it for years but I hadn’t heard a lot about it, but in the last couple of weeks it’s come up about 3 or 4 times. Can you tell folks a little bit of what the Enneagram is all about?
Sure. I just love Enneagram, it’s so powerful. In short, Enneagram is a map or a framework for thinking about self-development and human development. People tend to think about it as a personality typing system, and it is. There are 9 points around a circle, so there are 9 personality styles that are depicted on the Enneagram, but the personality typing on the Enneagram is fairly recent in the 2000+ year history of the Enneagram.
We don’t know where the Enneagram came from originally, but it shows up in all these amazing places from the desert mystics and Christianity to Sufism to Kabala. So it’s fascinating that now it’s become very popular when we think about personality types and understanding each other.
What is the other application? So if the personality type is a later development, is there another use that’s valid?
Yes, the deeper tradition of the Enneagram is about spiritual growth. The 9 types of the Enneagram really looks at the core motivation of each type. It’s less about what you do and more about why you do what you do. You can think about it as a spiritual development tool in the past.
I just want to re-ground us in the practical application of visual thinking for managers and teams. One of the things I spend time doing is to help teams think about their collaborative purpose, their team purpose. The idea groups of individuals in a conventional organization all reporting to the same person, for example, they know why they are together technically. Because of the shape of the organization, they know they’re together because their boss is their boss, or they all work in finance or marketing, or they’re all working on the project to build “XYZ” brand. So they’ve got a functional reason for being. That collection of people can very well contribute as individuals. I’ll do my bit, you do your bit and it will all get done. The person leading or coordinating the team will bring all the bits together, and we will basically be the sum of all our various contributions.
Teams and their higher purpose
Then there’s the idea that if we worked on things collaboratively, we could produce something that is greater than the sum of our individual efforts. That our actual collaboration – not just working near each other or in parallel with each other but actually working with each other, we can exceed the sum of the individual efforts. So the purpose is meant to capture what that potential is.
How might you start that conversation if you were using some concepts from your world if you were a manager and you wanted to get your team thinking about their higher purpose? (not in a spiritual sense.)
There are a number of things I’ve used over the years. The work of Simon Sinek thinking about their deeper why as a team is a wonderful tool to use. It has that simple golden circles framework that he uses.
There you’ve got three concentric circles. Would you have people just start throwing up words into that golden circle or would you have them draw images in it?
Yeah, they even have a book about it called “Finding Your Why” that is very word-heavy. I always have to do a twist on it to make it more visual. I think if we want to tap into people’s deeper aspirations for the team, to me visuals can be really important.
Don’t abandon the words. We have this thing called dual coding theory: the words and the visuals together is what actually creates the amped-up memory and recall retention. So don’t forget the words. But adding visuals any way you can - you can draw something, you could have the teams collectively draw what successful collaboration looks like for them, for example. Or you could have them do a collage. I’ve done that with a number of teams where you bring in old magazines and have them cut out pictures and create this huge collage.
And the important thing there is, don’t leave it at the collage. I think this is an important mistake some people make. You have the collage, in the same way that if you brought in Lego bricks, and say we’re going to build something that represents collaboration. Cool. That’s step one: you’ve done something around visual thinking there.
The most important part is the storytelling that happens around after you’ve created that visual piece. You look at it, and then you have people tell the stories about it.
What is it you’re seeing on the board?
Why did you pick the images you picked?
Why did you build that with the Legos?
That’s where the brain is doing the meaning-making, as they’re doing the storytelling. Then, you as the team leader or facilitator captures those stories. That’s really the essence of what people are aspiring to. That’s where the unified story or purpose comes together that you need to be listening for as the team leader.
Facilitating vs Doing
Lots of team leaders I work with have a hard time facilitating. It’s another thing I think there’s some baggage around, or some preconceived notions. “I’m not a facilitator, I’m a do-er.” What tips do you have for team leaders sharpening their skills as facilitators?
Yeah, you know I teach facilitation and it is hard. If you’re the team leader and you’re constantly feeling like you’re in doing mode, it is hard to take off your hat if you’re the driver and move into a facilitator mindset. It is like changing hats.
There’s a great book that came out recently called “The Surprising Science of Meetings” by Steven Rogelberg. It’s really directed towards team leaders about how to improve their meetings. It lays out the case for
why it’s important,
the cost of bad meetings,
how to do a meeting audit
how to know if you’re facilitating well in the first place
It gives some really practical tips. It’s a fairly short read, really practical. As I was developing my recent class that I teach online, Facilitation Fundamentals, which is a facilitation class but taught in a virtual setting, I went back to that book a number of times because I really liked the practical skills without getting fancy.
But it is something that I find, that producing results is the focus. And there’s an impatience for results: chop chop, we’ve got to get the work done. And by the way, when I coach people on how to run effective meetings, if it’s a collaborative thing, make the meeting about co-creation. We’re there to do something together, to create a tangible deliverable. We can focus our efforts around that. And I guess in doing that, there’s a chance that I do a disservice to my clients, because there is a certain when you just need to be together.
Being Together Mindfully
Pivoting a bit in our conversation, that’s been another issue in the pandemic. I just read a piece the other day about just making you structure the time to just be together, and make it just about that, because we need the connection.
I’ve seen clients do some really wonderful things with their teams as they’ve learned during the pandemic how to do that well. I found in the beginning people were doing happy hours, and people were wanting deeper connection. So with some of my clients we did a Mindfulness Hour. There was no work agenda. A space where we were going to be together but not just do chit chat. People could do chit chat happy hour, but they needed an invitation to go deeper and connect. This had nothing to do with visual facilitation. We started off with a mindfulness practice just to get centered, then we had a couple of prompt questions.
What’s the biggest thing you’ve been learning about yourself over the last few months?
What’s the biggest thing you’ve been learning about this team over the last few months?
What are you appreciating about this group of people that you didn’t appreciate before?
A few prompts that anchor the conversation and give them a little bit of space to be together. Of course, we’re still on a meeting, and yet it’s a break from the work.
It’s a break from the work and yet it’s important work. In the framework I use with teams, one of the six practices is called Sustain & Renew. And there’s work to be done around sustaining our energy and our spirits and our engagement, and renewing ourselves. Sometimes renewal involves reflection: thinking about where we’ve been, where we’re going, it’s so valuable. In my opinion, it is a tangible deliverable. We are creating learning. We’re creating understanding and meaning. Shared meaning, which I think is the foundation for the most powerful teams. Not every team has it. It’s one of the reasons I work with purpose. What’s the meaning of our work together?
I love that. There’s a sense-making. And people are working so hard, and often need to be invited into deeper sense-making around the meaning of their team, their purpose, and what does this all mean that we’re doing together? This is part of becoming a learning organization. Or a coaching culture. There has to be this thing about reflection and tapping into something a little bit deeper.
I heard about a deck of cards called “Actually Curious” which I now have in my hands. I will reach into this and pull a card out. I don’t think all these questions are appropriate for all occasions, but here’s one that is very business-y sounding:
How do you measure one’s potential?
What cultural or moral values do you hold in high regard, and why?
These are kind of a nice tool. They’re available online. If you have a hard time thinking of those provocative questions, this can be an aid.
Your questions were really simple and grounded in the team’s experience, something that managers could use. What have we been through? What’s it really about? You’re a great thought partner!
Nevada Lane, Lane Change Consulting. Reach out to her through her website or LinkedIn or Instagram.
Nevada is the founder and principal consultant of Lane Change Consulting, based in San Francisco. She is a graphic facilitator, teacher and coach, helping teams work better together using the combined powers of facilitation and visual thinking.
Nevada holds a B.A. from U.C. Berkeley and a M.S. in Organization Development from the University of San Francisco, where she is also an adjunct faculty member teaching Visual Thinking for Organization Development.
Nevada is also an Enneagram practitioner, Certified Virtual Facilitator, and the creator of two popular visual thinking courses on LinkedIn Learning.