SEO Werkt!

From SXSW Session: Shut Up and Draw

I have been interested in visualization techniques, visual facilitation, and visual thinking since 1991 when I read Tony Buzan’s book, “Using Both Sides of the Brain: Mind Mapping Techniques” that started me down a very slow and leisurely learning journey.      This year I’ve been focusing on data visualization and techniques for nonprofits – and working on my visual thinking skills without letting my basic drawing skills become a barrier.

I’ve been a fan of Dan Roam’s work since his book “The Back of the Napkin” in 2008.  He was the keynote speaker at the 2012 NTC this year talking about the ideas in his recent book, “Blah Blah Blah:  What To Do When Words Don’t Work.”   I’ve gone back to his workbook based on his first book to practice and improve visualization skills and thinking as well as drawing.

He has some terrific advice about how to apply visual thinking to your data visualization and to get insights.    But first, he simplifies what visual thinking is:  Look, See, Imagine, and Show.

Look:  What is out there?  What am I looking for?  What are the limits?
See:   What do I see?  Have I seen this before?  What patterns emerge?  What stands out?
Imagine:  How can I manipulate the patterns?   Can I fill in gaps?  Have I seen enough or do I need to look at more?
Show:  This is what I saw, this is what I think it means.   Is this what I expected or not?  When you look at this, do you see the same things?

These are a great set of questions to ask as you look over your data.  The steps are:

• Collect your data
• Lay it out where you can really look at it
• Establish the underlying coordinates
• Map the data
• Draw a conclusion

As a trainer,  I always do a participant assessment to understand their experience, knowledge, and attitudes related to the topic – for the most part social media and networked nonprofits.   I have a survey that allows me to understand the composition of the group in aggregate as well as the maturity of practice levels for each individual participant according to “Crawl, Walk, Run, Fly.” Understanding this, I can adjust and customize the curriculum level and content.

I use survey monkey and grab the visual chart for each question and dumping each chart into its own Powerpoint slide.   I thought was done!  But I realized that having the visuals for each question on a separate slide did not let me see patterns.    I also found the ready-made charts from survey monkey ugly and distracting … but lacking graphic design skills and drawing skills.   Then, I caught myself in the negative thinking trap and told myself, “shut up and draw!”

I gave myself 30 minutes, played Mozart on my Ipod and looked at all the data one page.   I followed Dan Roam’s steps  I did some rough drawings, but I wanted to create more insightful visuals. Then I discovered Chartwell Fonts.   This font lets you take simple strings of numbers and transform them into charts. The visualized data remains editable, allowing for hassle-free updates and styling.   You have to slow down to create the charts and you really how to think about the “show step.”    When you use automated excel or survey monkey charts, it encourages you to skip that important step.

Old Way – Not Visual Thinking – Automatically Create Visual for Every Survey Question on Separate Powerpoint Slide

Better Method:   Create Visualizations of Important Data and Pull Together On One Slide

This took some time, but the ability to stretch my visual thinking muscles was worth it.    I know understand the process and it took less time the second time it did, and even less the third.

What is your techniques or process visualizing data?

Note from Beth:    In March,  I had the pleasure of co-presenting at the GEO Conference (Grantmakers for Effective Organizations) with Kathy Reich, Director, Organizational Effectiveness Program at the Packard Foundation and Jared Raynor, Director of Evaluation at TCC Group, that helped OE analyze its “goldmine” of grantee data.  The learning in public (slides and resources here).  During the conference, “a small army of guest bloggers [and] grantmakers, who [attended GEO] posted their reflections on the session and LIP in general on my blog.  These are here:

• Bridge Building or Trust Busting: A Warts-and-All Reflection on “Learning in Public”?
• Learning in Public Challenges and Actions
• Learning in Public: To What End?
• Is a Culture of Learning Required To Learn in Public?
• The Outcome of Our Outcomes

Last month the OE Team at the Packard Foundation shared this guest post about the next steps in their public learning journey as part of program review.  This post shares the latest learning from their quest to revise and refresh the program strategy by learning in public.

Packard OE Strategy Session: Laying Everything Out on the Table – Guest Post by the Packard Foundation OE Program Team

Have you reorganized your filing cabinet lately? You have to take everything out, decide what to keep and what to throw away, and then organize the materials for easy retrieval later. There is always that moment when everything seems chaotic, before once again, the contents of your cabinet have some semblance of order and logic. *cue sighs of relief*

Packard OE did something similar during its strategic planning retreat, which was full of insightful exchanges between staff, consultants, and advisors.   The image above shows what we came up with.

We still have a long way to go in synthesizing the numerous inputs, including a large constellation of trends, grantee priorities, values, economic realities, and more. And while we would welcome any input on our strategic questions we wanted to continue highlighting a few questions for which we would like specific advice:

• How do you use intermediaries to help non-profit organizations build their organizational capacity? Have you evaluated your work with intermediaries, and if so, what lessons have you learned?
• Have you participated in a great peer learning community—either in person or online? What made it great? Are there particular topics or issues that lend themselves to peer learning? When you’re designing a peer learning experience, what pitfalls should you avoid?

Please visit the OE Strategy Refresh site and share your thoughts on these questions and, more importantly, your stories. Not too jazzed about sharing in a public forum? Then please feel free to contact us directly. Collaboration on this process will lead to a well-informed strategy, enabling us to better serve a variety of organizational needs all over the world.

P.S. Your input will help us draft a set of hypotheses—in the form of possible paths for Packard OE to take in coming years—to be tested among our grantees, colleagues, and all of you. Stay tuned!

We’re really excited about this process and we’d love your feedback!

OE Staff: (left-to-right) Gurpreet, Dora, Kathy, Cheryl, Brian

The OE Team:   Flowing from Packard Foundation’s Founders’ business philosophy of nurturing leaders and giving them the freedom to pursue promising approaches, the Packard Foundation assists in building the leadership skills and management capacity of their grantees.   The Organizational Effectiveness and Philanthropy program supports their current grantees to allow them to undertake projects that transform their organizations in a sustained and meaningful way. These grants address the many organizational and capacity challenges that may affect nonprofits—from strategic planning and board development needs to mergers and executive transitions.  To this end, they advance the organizational effectiveness of current Foundation grantees by supporting projects that improve their management, governance, and leadership by developing strategies, systems, structures, and skills. The Foundation also makes grants to help advance and support the field of private philanthropy.

Flickr Photo by Pink Sherbet Photography

Note From Beth: Last month I had the pleasure of co-presenting at the GEO Conference (Grantmakers for Effective Organizations) with Kathy Reich, Director, Organizational Effectiveness Program at the Packard Foundation and Jared Raynor, Director of Evaluation at TCC Group, that helped OE analyze its “goldmine” of grantee data.  The learning in public (slides and resources here).  During the conference, “a small army of guest bloggers [and] grantmakers, who [attended GEO] posted their reflections on the session and LIP in general on my blog.  These are here:

• Bridge Building or Trust Busting: A Warts-and-All Reflection on “Learning in Public”?
• Learning in Public Challenges and Actions
• Learning in Public: To What End?
• Is a Culture of Learning Required To Learn in Public?
• The Outcome of Our Outcomes

This post is from the OE Team at the Packard Foundation about the next steps in their public learning journey as part of program review.

Packard Foundation OE Launches Their Strategy Refresh – Guest Post by the Packard OE Team

We at the Packard Foundation’s Organizational Effectiveness Program (OE) spend a lot of time thinking about how organizations and programs work, and how to improve their impact and reach. Now we want to turn the tables and take a look at our own program through a strategy refresh. This is a periodic review every program at Packard undergoes to update their strategies.

In keeping true to our values of transparency and openness, we plan to share our efforts as they evolve. Many of you are already familiar with our OE wiki site, and now we’ve also created a new experimental strategic planning site using WordPress.  The whole process will be documented and coordinated through this site.

We’re also using this site to solicit input about some key areas we’re considering in our program design. In particular, we’re hoping to learn more about what others do around:

1) The use of intermediaries
2) Participation in peer learning communities
3) The use of consultants for capacity building
4) Building capacity building infrastructure in underserved areas abroad, such as South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa
5) The use of organizational assessments

Please follow any of these links to see our questions and to share your experiences, thoughts or advice on any of these areas. This feedback will help us as we consider any changes we might make to our grantmaking philosophy, requirements, and possible areas of exploration.

To help inform our process, over the next months we will:
1) Reach out to our colleagues within our Foundation for feedback on how the OE program can best work with their programs and grantees.
2) Highlight key questions about our program on our strategy refresh site, as noted above.
3) Interview other funders with similar programs to see how they conduct their OE work.
4) Engage grantees, consultants and other stakeholders, possibly through interviews, focus groups and webinars.
5) Continue to assess our grantmaking, including building on the Goldmine Research Project and Monitor’s Network Learning to look at case studies of making multiple grants to a single grantee.

We’re really excited about this process and we’d love your feedback!

OE Staff: (left-to-right) Gurpreet, Dora, Kathy, Cheryl, Brian

The OE Team:   Flowing from Packard Foundation’s Founders’ business philosophy of nurturing leaders and giving them the freedom to pursue promising approaches, the Packard Foundation assists in building the leadership skills and management capacity of their grantees.   The Organizational Effectiveness and Philanthropy program supports their current grantees to allow them to undertake projects that transform their organizations in a sustained and meaningful way. These grants address the many organizational and capacity challenges that may affect nonprofits—from strategic planning and board development needs to mergers and executive transitions.  To this end, they advance the organizational effectiveness of current Foundation grantees by supporting projects that improve their management, governance, and leadership by developing strategies, systems, structures, and skills. The Foundation also makes grants to help advance and support the field of private philanthropy.

Photo by Beth Kanter, Net Funders Conference, October, 2011

A few days ago I opened the door on a new learning journey.   I am very excited about upcoming peer learning projects that I’m working on in 2012, including several for Packard grantees in India, Pakistan, and Africa as well as the e-Mediat project in the Middle East.   It is a great opportunity to ponder the question:  How to design and deliver learning experiences for nonprofits that connect, inspire, and engage?     What are the best practices?

Content Delivery Is Not Learning

On New Year’s Day, I heard a story on NPR about some research on instructional techniques used by many college professors – the lecture and how it is less effective in an age information abundance.   Content delivery  is less important then the skill to making sense of it and that needs to be what “classroom time” is about.  The instructor’s role should be to facilitate this understanding  for their students, not dump content on them.

Illustration by Beth Kanter

I’ve known this for years, ever since I read Richard Mayer‘s educational research  in his book, The Handbook of Multi-Media Learning.    The study was of medical school lectures. They gave the students tests based on content and scored them. The questions were keyed to when the content was explained. And the resulting graph is the analysis of 1200 students.  It shows that attention is the sharpest during the first 10 minutes of the lectures, then plummets, and then gradually goes back up but not to the same level.    That means talking non-stop for more than 10 minutes, people start to tune out.  If your true goal is inspire people to learn, then  you need to incorporate techniques so people can process the information every ten minutes.   This is important for both online and offline instructional delivery.

The NPR story was part of a series called “Don’t Lecture Me“.  It follows a Professor Mazur, who teaches physics at Harvard and rather than telling his students, he teaches by questioning.    His technique is similar to what I’ve being doing for years, but I haven’t used real-time learning analytics:

Before he class, he assigns a pre-reading from the textbook.   He expects students to read the assignment before they come to class so that instructional time can be spent helping them make sense of it and apply to their work. Mazur uses technology,a web-based monitoring system where students submit answers to questions about the reading prior to coming to class.  The last question asks students to tell Mazur what confused them. He uses their answers to prepare a set of multiple-choice questions he uses during class.    Mazur starts the class with a brief explanation of a concept he wants students to understand. Then he asks one of the multiple-choice questions. Students get a minute to think about the question on their own and then answer it using a mobile device that sends their answers to Mazur’s laptop.   Next, he asks the students to turn to the person sitting next to them and talk about the question. The class typically erupts in a cacophony of voices, as it did that first time he told students to talk to each other because he couldn’t figure out what else to do.   Once the students have discussed the question for a few minutes, Mazur instructs them to answer the question

It is far less work to slap together a powerpoint presentation and prepare the content.  But doing that extra work to figure out how to engage your students improves learning outcomes or your results.

• Participants will retain what they learned, it sticks
• They will be more likely to apply what they learned or what we call the “challenge of transfer” because they’re inspired
• You, as the instructor, will learn along with them because you are not the one talking the whole time
• In a peer learning situation, people may make stronger connections with others and develop working relationships that may go beyond the learning experience
• It’s more fun to teach this way and more fun to learn this

That’s the theory at least.   I’ve been tasked with designing and facilitating a session for trainers during our two-day e-Mediat networked nonprofit and social media bootcamps in Jordan and Morocco.    The training for the NGOs that have completed the 5 workshops from the different countries over the past year.   The two-days will offer great content, but will also showcase techniques for engaging, connecting, and inspiring participants.    I’m doing a session with trainers in Jordan and Morocco in the evening, so I will debrief on the process of the techniques and have them design their own.

We don’t have a lot of time and it will come after a long day, so have been thinking of ways to do a train the trainers in an efficient way.   This gave me an excuse to look at different types of peer learning exercises and facilitation techniques.

Luckily, there is no shortage of techniques and resources and books.  Some long time favorites:   Nancy White is my go to guru on all things facilitation and has been for more than 10 years!     Michelle Martin who writes the Bamboo blog was one of the first bloggers I connected with that was interested in peer learning, reflecting, and training design.  She recently took a deep dive into reflective practice and techniques.   Allan Gunn from Aspiration and his legendary facilitation skills and knowledge.  Joitske Hulsebosch who writes the Lasgna and Chips blog and writes about peer learning in ICD context and use of social media and technology.    So, what from this delicious buffet should I put on the plate?

Techniques

This is far too much to cover in the session.   I will most likely create a brief handout that provides step-by-steps – a sort of recipe pamphlet.   We will use the time to debrief and experiment with a few of these techniques — some of which would have been modeled during  the conference.

1.   Begin Connections

During a training session, psychological safety is important and it takes a little more than having participants introduce themselves.    So, the minute participants enter the room, they should be engaged in meaningful, topic related activities that help create a learning community bond.    So, it is always important to think about how participants will enter the training, room layout,  and what they can do while getting settled.    Having devices that allow participants who don’t know each other to get acquainted informally before the session begins are important.

A few ideas:

• Assigned seating or “social engineering”
• Solo reflective activity related to the content.  I love using “walls with sticky notes” and ask folks to jot down their questions or what they’d like to share
• Facilitator greets everyone individually and makes them feel welcome and does real-time network weaving by introducing them to others
• If appropriate, an networking activity  that encourages people to interact with people they don’t know.    NTEN has used this at its conference, trading stickers with other attendees and once you get a complete set, you can enter your card in a raffle.

When the session formally begins, it usually kicks off with an icebreaker or two.   These are brief, introductory exercises that help participants to get know each other, get connected to the topic, and their own learning outcomes.   If one of the goals of the peer session is “networking,” the icebreakers can help facilitate that.  Also, if participants don’t know each other yet, it gives them a chance to informally introduce one another.   Icebreakers can be done as pairs, small groups, and full group – and you can use a combination.    The most important thing is that it has to relate to the content in some way.     The KSTool Kit has a list of icebreakers and I’ve used many of them, but in this session I will model one or two.

Share Pairs: Share pairs are when you ask folks to find someone in the room and discuss a question.     I use this for peer groups to get them to reflect their successes and challenges and to begin to offer peer advice.     Some facilitators start with easy questions like “What was it like to get here today.”    I created a variation on the shair pair squared.   It starts with 2 or three rotations of share pairs, asking folks to connect around their success stories related to the topic and challenges related to the topic.  Then ask the pairs to find another pair and share.

Spectra Gram: This is a full group exercise that you can use to bring out ideas or different views on the topic.  You can also use it get a better understanding of people’s experience in the room.   I learned this one from “Gunner” from Aspiration.   You get people to line up in the room as to whether they agree or disagree on a provocative statement related to the content – and then interview people.  This is useful if you anticipate some skepticism about your topic or want people to feel safe expressing their point of view.

Network Maps: When I’ve done trainings that are on the topic of networked nonprofit or networks, are longer-term projects, and the intent is to develop a network, I use this exercise.   It takes time and good to do with a smaller group.   There is the person to person networking and the exercise I created as “From Me To We Network” which is described here.  -Each participant introduces themselves with 3 keywords on a sticky note that explain what knowledge they can share and what they’re looking to learn about.   Then the group draws the connections.   I’ve also done this with groups of organizations who have collectively created their network maps on the wall.

2.     Balancing Content Delivery and Sense Making

This is the meat of your training and it is important to balance content delivery with opportunities to process and apply what is being taught.       A few techinques:

Interactive Lecture: I’ve been using this technique for years. The best practical resources is Thiagi’s Interactive Lectures.    You need to think about your content in 10 minute chunks and take pauses for participants to reflect on the content.    The task is about designing the right questions or reflective conversation starters.  Michele Martin has this terrific slide in her reflective practice deck:

These questions can be done as share pairs and table shares.    I like to mix it up and also include solo activities like “Think and Write,” a timed “60 seconds of silence” to reflect on the content without talking, or a self-assessment activity.    I’ve also experimented with giving people other ways to process content,  using sticky notes and drawings.

Living Case Study: The living case study is when you make participants part of the content.   A  “Living Case Study”  is less formal that your traditional case study because it covers a work in progress and shares lessons learned as well as successes.   Often, they’re messy, but vibrant and all about real time learning.     While the traditional case study is tidy, packaged, and finished – the living case study is open to input, questions, reflections and most of all empowerment of peers.       You can work with participants a head of time on a brief, ignite style presentation about a work in progress and have be a longer section.   I’ve also use this for keynotes, but it requires doing a survey before to gather up the stories.   Here’s an example from nonprofit tech day at Microsoft in Seattle last year.

3.  Working in Cohorts

Another way to get people to make sense of the content and apply to their situation is to have them work on it in a small group.   It is a good idea to break up a training day into small group and full group work – small groups give people more time go into more depth.   Small groups can be conversations,  peer assists or shares, or an exercise that can be done collaboratively or working alone together.

• Conversations: Sometimes just giving people the time to have a conversation around a specific topic related to the content helps them get a deeper understanding of how to apply.   One of my favorites is World Cafe, although you need a couple of hours to follow the specific methodology.  It is an effective technique to use to help participants process what they’ve learned and to harvest insights.I first met Juanita Brown who created the method through my blog in 2006.   I later became a member of the GIGI group (girl geeks of the World Cafe).
• Exercises: These can be collaborative exercises, having a group brainstorm ideas together, can be effective.  The “Gift Garden” is particularly useful method.    Or if the training is focused on a capacity building technique – for example – how to develop an integrated social media strategy – the exercise could be a checklist for participants to work individually but in a small group.       Finally, the exercise could be a simulation or game like the Social Media Game that used cards and helped organizations think through a strategy.
• Peer Assists/Shares: A peer assist when you put people into small groups and participants help each other by problem solving.   You can focus one participant or go round robin and each person gets a turn.    A Peer Share is where the participants become the presenters in small groups.  My favorite is Speed Geek that I learned from Gunner.   It generates rich insights if you combine it with other methods that help participants to process.    I’ve incorporated a  ”Gallery Walk” where presenters created a post and participants had an opportunity to give feedback via sticky notes.   Visual facilitation techniques can help with processing as well.

3.    Social Media Integration

I have been integrating social media into instruction for years and it feels weird to me not to have it.     Intentionally integrating the use of social media for knowledge capture and to extend the conversation to people outside the room can enhance the learning.     I prefer to be very intentional about social media integration, assigning roles and tasks at particular periods.   Since I’m often teaching social media,  I like to have participants using these skills during the training as much as possible – as long as it doesn’t become a distraction to their learning.  Some people actually learn this way, but others don’t.

4.  Great Endings

If you have designed your training well, you’ve created a community by the end.     So, you need to have a ceremonial closing of the learning experience that will inspire people to continue the connections to the other people and to applying the skills.    It’s about questions like this:

• What is clear?
• What is unclear?
• What resources do you need to move forward?
• What is one thing you can put into practice?

I have lots of different closers — gratitude circles,  Just Three Words,   3×5 cards to write down what they put into practice, etc.    I’ve just learned about a new one called River of Life from my colleague Nancy White and can’t wait to experiment.

If you design or deliver trainings, what are some of your favorite techniques and resources?   Did you ever participate in a peer learning group or training that engaged, connected, and inspired you?  Why did that happen?

Last Sunset of 2011

I spent a very quiet holiday with family at Half Moon Bay and taking a New Year’s hike on Ano Nuevo to see the elephant seals.     Nature hikes and down time with family are nourishing and replenishing.

As I watched the last sunset of 2011 fade over the Pacific Ocean,   I wanted to formally say farewell to Zoetica, the company I co-founded with Geoff Livingston and Kami Huyse that we announced in January, 2010 one day after my birthday, and one day before the Haiti Earthquake.     Geoff has moved on to working on exciting projects, including a book and Kami will continue the brand Zoetica working on strategy projects such as this important effort to keep .NGO domain in the hands of nonprofits.

Starting Zoetica came on the heels of  one of the most dramatic changes I made in my life in recent years.   In 2009,  I moved with my my family across country to California to become Visiting Scholar at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and wrote my first book, The Networked Project with Alison Fine.    In 2010,  I launched the Networked Nonprofit with a flurry of speaking and training gigs literally around the world, while also designing and facilitating many workshops, peer learning groups,  and coaching grantees as Visiting Scholar.

Here’s what is in store for me for 2012:

As Visiting Scholar to the David and Lucile Packard Foundation this past year (my 3rd),  one project I worked on was facilitating peer learning groups to test and develop case studies and frameworks for my next book,  Measuring the Networked Nonprofit” that I co-authored with KD Paine and editor, Bill Paarlberg.   The book will publish in the second half of 2012.    The book is a how-to guide for using measurement and learning to improve networked nonprofit practices.      Writing a book while testing frameworks in a peer group setting was a little like trying to change a tire on a moving car, but it is far more fun to create – and this participatory process – makes the material more customized for the readers.   I now look forward to further refining curriculum and workshops over the coming months.

I will also continue to follow my passion and calling as a trainer and capacity builder through my work as Visiting Scholar at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation working with grantees designing and facilitating capacity building programs that incorporate social media and networked approaches.   This year, 2012, will have a focus on designing and delivering capacity building projects with NGOs outside the US.  I will be working with a cluster of Packard grantees in Pakistan and India in collaboration with IIE.   I will also have the opportunity to be an instructor as part of a Women’s Leadership Program in Africa, in partnership with IIE.    And, will  complete my work on E-mediat project, a capacity building project in the Middle East.    Maybe my next book will be about something about Networked NGOs and capacity building methods …..

What are your plans for 2012?

Visual Meeting Workshop by David Sibbet and Rachel Smith – Based on Sibbet's book Visual Meetings

I’ve been a fan of visual thinking and graphic facilitation for many years – and have used the techniques to take notes for myself.    As a visual learner, mindmapping, drawing, and other techniques to think visually have helped me learn, synthesize lots of data, and see patterns.     I have also attended and facilitated meetings with a graphic recorder, most recently at the Nonprofit Technology Conference, and know the power of how “drawing on the wall” can help spark group insights and learning.

About a year ago,  I came across David Sibbet’s book, “Visual Meetings”  I have known of his work for years, but always thought graphic recording was for “real artists who can draw.’     The book was an inspiration and encouragement for those us whose inner critics have been keeping us away from using the technique in front of other people.     The book offers a wonderful road map for a learning journey to internalize these techniques and I’ve practicing a lot.   I haven’t made it to the top of the ladder where I can  ”draw on the wall”  while facilitating a group, and I have not been able to become fluent in using visual note taking in digital ways – like on a iPad.    That’s why I was probably the first person to register last January for the Visual Meetings Workshop with David Sibbet and Rachel Smith from Grove Consultants that took place this week in San Francisco.

My notes from the workshop follow below and I’ve created with Storify that includes the many resources I discovered that I will be exploring.    I’ve set a new professional goal to improve my graphic recording and visual facilitation skills which requires a discipline of daily practice, starting with small simple steps and working towards more complex ones.    I definitely walked away achieving all the outcomes for the meeting, most importantly being inspired to put this knowledge into practice.

One of the techniques that they used that I loved was to provide a graphic template for your personal learning journey to internalize these skills.   While a one-day workshop can be fantastic, once you go back to your day to day craziness, it is hard to make that leap.     The book offers a rubric of skills, starting with the most simple to the more complex.      The other thing I learned, is that like anything else, to get good at this technique you have to practice until it is second nature.    Rachel Smith, workshop co-facilitator,  drove home this point when she shared with the group that she felt she was not good at drawing people – so she practice drawing people 600 times before using it for an assignment.

The workshop started with a role play of David and Rachel planning the agenda for the workshop, but simulating how you might do this over the Internet and using graphic recording.   Rachel, a virtuoso technologist and artist, used a drawing tablet and Sketchbook pro.  (Here’s an interview with Rachel about the techniques and a blog post the tools. Later in the workshop, they did a duo of graphic recording – with Rachel using the digital tools and Sibbet drawing on paper with markers.

Next was an  icebreaker where we had to draw on a table tent – our names and the answer to this fill in the blank question:  ”I’m at my best when …”    Icebreakers should always reinforce the outcomes in some way or skills being taught – and provide a way for people to get to know each other.   This is especially important if there are small group exercises.

David Sibbet gave an overview of visual meetings and why it is so compelling now.   He used PREZI, a non-linear presentation program. It goes beyond the linearity of powerpoint, but it to use it to present with takes getting to know the program well – and thinking about your storyboard and visuals as three-dimensional tick-tac-toe board.  (I could not track down the PREZI, but in the TEDX video -you’ll hear the main points he made.)     This segment was followed by small group work where we did a peer assist brainstorm on incorporating visual techniques into their next meeting.  We used sticky notes and the mandala template.    David modeled a full group discussion to gather up all the ideas – using a template that used the basic flows of facilitation – attention, energy, information, and operations.

The afternoon was focused on the skill building – drawing – images and letters.   This is covered in the book in great depth, but it was great to have Rachel lead us through the drawing techniques, stroke by stroke.    We ended with a Q/A Session.    Rachel shared a number of techniques and tips on how to embrace digital graphic recording in the iPad.    A couple of insights that inspired me:

• Graphic facilitation is not about being a good at drawing, but better at listening
• Don’t worry if it isn’t perfect – be thinking about what’s next
• Accept corrections like Christmas presents
• Be the fool in front the audience’s queen and king – don’t be afraid of public mistakes
• Practice, practice, practice is the key
• Using technology will always feel a little unnatural – but don’t let that get in your way
• Graphic facilitating encourages engagement and acknowledge of people in the room – it validates them

I feel inspired to add visual meetings to the curated  list of skills and knowledge for trainers and capacity builders that I’m learning about.

There is a whole community of graphic facilitators and practitioners like Nancy White who are using these techniques with ngos.

Have you experimented or are you using graphic meeting facilitation for your nonprofit?  Share your story below.