Essential tools for visual communications
This is the second of a two-part report on the September 27th meeting of Northern California Chapter of the National Speakers Association. On Saturday we heard from two communications experts: Speechwriter Pete Weissman and visual thinking expert David Sibbet. This posting is a summary of David’s material.
David Sibbet is President and founder of The Grove Consultants International, leaders in visually based services and tools that enable organization, teams and individuals to successfully envision and implement innovation and change.
He is author of the best-selling Visual Leadership book series:
Visual Meetings: How Graphics, Sticky Notes and Idea Mapping Can Transform Group Productivity. David’s first book in the series looks at how to use visualization to support a cycle of learning and implementation in meetings. Starting with imagination, moving to engagement, thinking and enactment–it is written for anyone who runs meetings. No special graphics skills are needed to make these methods pay off.
Visual Teams: Graphic Tools for Commitment, Innovation, and High Performance. This builds on the meetings book and explores how a team can use visual methods throughout their work. It suggests we can gain by working like designers–using prototypes, interaction and visualization.
Visual Leaders: New Tools for Visioning, Management, and Organization Change. This is a guide for leaders interested in increasing their own visual literacy. There’s a valuable section on how visual tools can accelerate organizational change and enable people to think of the total organization as a system while working on the parts.
Visual meeting facilitation
Drawing on content from his books (pun intended!) David shared how he was there at the start of the meeting facilitation industry in the 1970’s with people like Michael Doyle and David Strauss. Together, they built the field of group facilitation, community visioning, collaborative problem solving, and the development and management of task-oriented groups and teams.
Putting poster-making together with journalism led to David becoming a visual interpreter of meetings. Together with Evert Lindquist he developed a map to the world of visualization:
Graphic Facilitation
Graphic recorders facilitate meetings by interactively documenting a group’s conversation on flip charts, large poster paper, graphic templates, murals, and other media. This allows everyone in the room to see and understand the flow of dialog, decisions and agreements.
The result is a crisp summary of a lengthy meeting on a single page, as in this example from an architectural firm:
(Click to enlarge)
Visuals spark the imagination
Words and images connect in valuable ways. Having a picture on the wall engages the audience with a greater degree of participation. The human brain builds more meaning into a slightly “fuzzy” diagram vs. crisp clip art. Giving people enough to go on, without total clarity, encourages people to really pay attention. Using sticky notes and group drawings as part of a presentation or facilitated meeting enables the audience to see connections, find solutions, and understand the big picture.
Beyond the spoken word
Sibbet’s work challenges us, as speakers and speechwriters, to go beyond the written or spoken word and explore new frontiers in communication. A visual language integrates words, images and shapes into a single communication unit. Geniuses such as Leonardo da Vinci have used visual language as a basic tool. Why not unleash your genius and incorporate visualization into your next presentation?
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