Collaborative Consumption: RSA / Nominet Film Trust Competition entry.

In collaboration with Throughline and KILN, Mindful Maps has been having a lot of fun co-creating a short movie for the RSA/Nominet Trust Film Competition. The movie animates an RSA talk given by social innovator Rachel Botsman, co-author with Roo Rogers of the popular book, What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption.

The movie was animated by Brendan at Blunt Films, and features original music by Tom Verney and Jonathan Impett.

Sharing our Vision: The Role of Visual Facilitation in the Collaborative Process

Over a coffee in the Wellcome Collection cafe, Mindful Maps had a chat with Alison Coward from Bracket about visual facilitation and creative collaboration.  We realised that our disciplines had a lot to contribute to the other and decided to pull our thoughts together.

Visual facilitation is one of the most the most interactive ways of working visually. It essentially combines facilitation with graphic harvesting (sometimes known as graphic recording or graphic facilitation) The two roles of facilitator and harvester can be played by a team or two or more people, or by one person playing both roles. In our experience, it works best when the graphic harvester is co-facilitating or interacting with another facilitator. This emergent mode of practice is used in various settings; meetings, conferences, vision-building activities, one-to-one, in groups and in communities.

Effective collaboration makes the most of the ideas and skills of all of those that are involved,  and good communication is integral to this.  Visual facilitation can be seen as a process to support collaborative and co-creative working. This post explores the relationship between the two.

At the beginning of a collaborative project or during creative brainstorming, great discussions come from diverse, unformed ideas.  Although a text document is a good record of what was said, it doesn’t capture the links, tangents or organic development that the conversation takes, as well as the energy and excitement in the group. Cue visual facilitation…

A group working next to a visualisation of their conversation; they can use the image to illustrate their points.

• The act of visualising something in a live setting improves the group memory. 80% of what we learn, we process visually – seeing something articulated and expressed as it happens gives a more lasting memory and learning of the event. Whereas a text document provides a record of the conversation after it has taken place, visual facilitation creates good reference points during the conversation.  Allowing people to see the discussion as it develops helps to create an instant memory and deepens its quality.

• When we visualise something as it’s happening, we enable people to have their voices heard. Documenting what someone says means it is taken more seriously, and visual facilitation can certainly be used as a tool to give people a voice regardless of their position, age, race or gender within the group.  A visual facilitator can pick on the quieter but equally valuable points and include them in the conversation.  Seeing something you’ve said being written or drawn in front of a group is empowering, giving you the confidence to contribute even more.

• Visual facilitation can help a new group to find a shared language. Sometimes when discussing new ideas and concepts, it can be difficult to articulate what we’re thinking.  Visual expression can often help us to move forward by communicating things in images when we don’t quite have the words.

• Working collaboratively can enhance the visual facilitator’s role. Although the graphic harvesting process is valuable to collaborative working in itself, when a visual practitioner works collaboratively to make images they can help people visualise things themselves. If people can make images themselves the process is more powerful. Working in this interactive way, the visual facilitator can give the gift of making art to others. By sharing these skills we can enable others to make images and think visually.

5 top tips for making the most of visual facilitation in your collaborative process:

1. Ensure that the meeting is well-organised in the first place. Ask the right questions, have the right people there, keep on track, and ensure everyone gets a say.

2. Don’t leave the visual at the meeting or stick it in a cupboard. Transfer it to a shared online space to remind everyone throughout the project, of where it started. Take good quality photographs and share them.

3. Keep the physical object up for a few days – to further enhance memory and spark new thoughts about the process.

4. Use the visuals as tools to do further work from – bring them out in meetings and workgroups and to help write documents.

5. There is still a place for linear, text-based documents. They provide a good record of the discussion and can be used to clarify points.  Use both visualisation and text documents alongside each other to enhance the process.

Thanks to Alison Coward for co-writing this post!