Visualising Positive Change #1

Here are some reflections on September’s Visualising Positive Change workshops, part of a 3-day Human Interaction conference at Atlantic College in Wales (an event organised for first year students). Guest speakers and facilitators included Miles Harrison, Selena Sermerno, John White, Dan Anthony, Cheil Mooj, Jan Eichhorn and John White.

Mindful Maps also visualised Alex Fradera’s keynote session: Leadership in Networked and Fluid Times.

Atlantic College in St Donat’s, Wales, is The founding college of a global education movement. UWC Atlantic College is an international residential school. Each year, 350 students aged 16 – 18 from 80 different countries benefit from a world-class International Baccalaureate educational experience. UWC Atlantic College is committed to making education a force to unite people, nations and cultures for peace and a sustainable future.

Mindful Maps facilitated a mind-mapping workshop which I call Visualising Positive Change. This workshop is partly inspired by and similar to a collage technique designed by Hannah Lewis called Visualising Transition. Using simple drawing and mind mapping techniques, we can visualising and navigate the changes we would like to make, in our own lives and out in the world.

“Why might we want to visualise positive change” I hear you cry, and how does this link to the conference theme of Human Interaction? Here are some visual thoughts.

We all have the power to change things, change of any kind requires some kind of interaction whether that is with yourself, other people and/or the environment around you (it might require all three). Change can be big and exciting/scary or very small and subtle. Both can be equally powerful! To manifest it’s power, change needs a dialogue whether that is inner or outer (or both). However, verbal dialogue alone can be easily lost or forgotten, which is why Mindful Maps creates physical artifacts, as an aid to memory, a tangible statement of intent, a first step to change and to enhance learning (A massive 80% of what we learn is visual!).

The themes the students chose to visualise were diverse, for example: being less reliant of caffeine, the college running on renewable energy and dispelling racial stereotypes. Here are some examples from the students:

If this process works well with young people (16-18 in this case), I question how similar approaches might be used in educations for things like study planning, outlining coursework and working in groups?

This post is first in a series of Visualising Positive Change journal entries. Next up is Visualising Change #2: Organic, Systemic, or both?

Comments and your thoughts on visualising positive change are welcome, join the conversation!

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!

Dressing Up for a Good Week

Next week is going to be a Good Week. The 20-26 June sees good going global in A Good Week; a global celebration of the good that happens all over the world. Over seven days, A Very Good Company and friends will highlight people, communities and projects that are changing the world for the better.

Mindful Maps has been invited by the organisers and Amisha Ghadiali to the Good Fashion part of the week to help visualise, understand and document the meaning of Good Fashion. As well as capturing content from speakers, we will help those at the event to visualise their interpretation of Good Fashion.

A Good Week is an exciting opportunity to reflect and define what good means to all of us. It’s very hard to define good because in our culture, this term is loaded with moral and religious baggage. Next week gives us the chance to put this aside and re-language good. For Mindful Maps good is about positive change, living well and being healthy. It’s about being authentic; acknowledging the dark then being brave enough to make good changes anyway. It’s also about creativity; being able to nurture our creative selves enough so we can really apply ourselves to the things that we want and need to change.

What about Good Fashion? To Mindful Maps, Good Fashion means being comfortable in your own skin as well as your clothes; having the confidence to leave the house with no make-up one day, then wearing bright red lipstick the next. It means being comfortable enough with your body to go out and about in tracksuit bottoms sometimes, and confident enough in yourself and your abilities to not feel you have to wear a suit for work. It’s expressing your unique-ness; not following the crowd and finding your own style. It’s customising, creating and making things unique. It’s quality and things that last, not things that unravel at the seams a week after you buy them. It’s designing systems that don’t pollute the environment or exploit workers; Good Fashion shouldn’t be just skin deep, for the wearer or systemically.

We look forward to finding out and visualising what Good Fashion means to you next Thursday evening!