For many blogs, it’s an annual tradition. For us, since we just re-launched the new blog last year, it’s the first of what we hope will become an annual tradition.

It’s the top ten most popular blog posts of 2010! Here they are, starting with the tenth-most popular and counting it down to the number one position. (You’ll have to imagine the Casey Kasem voice-overs as we do it…)

10. Debriefing the Conversation

In this post, one of our series on each of the VisualsSpeak facilitation process steps, we looked at how to debrief. Interestingly, we have done several series over the year, and each one only appears once in the top ten. Maybe debriefing really is the most popular part of the process after all? Nah.

9. Dealing with the Seven Dwarfs

Here, we looked at the seven dwarfs of Disney fame as analogies for participants that you often encounter in trainings. Sure, as a great trainer or facilitator, you may not run into Sleepy as often — but there’s always a Grumpy and usually a Doc! You can see what we mean in the post.

8. Defining Success

How do you define when something is successful? This hit home for us during the summer, as we were working with our teambuilding toolset. But it kept coming up again and again over the year. Looks like it did the same for readers as well!

7. Eliciting Meaning Through Visuals…and Pantyhose?

Maybe it’s the sorta-suggestive title or maybe it’s the topic, but this post cracked into the top ten talking about how VisualsSpeak uses images to elicit meaning. That’s a pretty different approach than using images to communicate or organize meaning (the normal uses, like in a PowerPoint presentation). And where does pantyhose “fit in” (so to speak)? You’ll have to click through and see!

6. VisualsSpeak to Manage Change, Part One

This is another of our series, this time dissecting a case study on change management and leadership. Here, we start looking at the Housing Authority of Portland, and how they used VisualsSpeak to roll out some big-time changes to their work.

5. VisualsSpeak for Strategic Visioning

Over the summer, we posted a series of articles looking at how to best use the VisualsSpeak toolset for a variety of applications. This one focuses on visioning, exploring what kinds of questions to ask, what to observe during the activity, and how best to follow-up.

4. How to Hold a Bad Retreat

In addition to a larger number of viewings, this piece also generated some discussion — most of it offline or in e-mail. We got lots of “amen” kinds of notes from folks, along with a few sheepish people who ‘fessed up to actually helping hold one of these bad retreats in the past. Maybe we should start Retreats Anonymous…

3. Tips for Facilitating with VisualsSpeak

One of our earlier posts after re-launching the blog, this article consolidates a handful of the most-often requested tips for working with the VisualsSpeak tools. It’s no surprise that it cracked into the top three posts of the year!

2. How Conferences Alienate Presenters

Here’s another post that generated comments and e-mails and tweets in addition to pageviews. Back in October, we vented our spleen a little bit about how bad some conferences are at working with their presenters. (We did a companion piece on how presenters alienate conferences, too, but that didn’t seem to make the top ten!)

…and the number one post of 2010 was…

1. Don’t Break the Ice!

In a stunning upset, this piece was number one. It’s another early post, from May, where we talk about the taxonomy of icebreakers. There are lots of different kinds of icebreakers with lots of different intended outcomes — and here, we try to break it down a bit. It just goes to show you that the experience of sitting through a really dumb icebreaker is universal!

Thanks to all of our blog readers during 2010 — we hope to keep bringing you strong content, along with the images of the day, into 2011!

Recently, we did an interview with Christine Martell as a part of our monthly, free Tuesday Topics series. This session focused on facilitation tips for strategic visioning. During the interview, Martell talked about how to help get everyone through the divergence stage and onto reflection — and about how to ensure that everyone is really diverging!

Here’s an excerpt:

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Int: So you’ve gone through these two divergent stages, the divergent stage about you and the divergent stage about the vision. You’re kinda at the peak of the curve, if you will, and now you’re in the reflection stage and you’ve got a participant who’s locked back in stage number two. They keep throwing stuff out. How do you get them moving on down the curve?

CM: Well, it may be that you actually have to help them understand that the stage where we’re getting those great ideas is back a little. Sometimes it is people that just take a little longer to reflect, and sometimes there is really value to their contribution.

So I don’t kinda make rules about it. But it actually usually happens in the reverse, honestly. It’s when you’re in the divergent stage, all the convergent questions get chucked in. You get people trying to narrow it down. “If you say this, it means that.” “If you say this, we’ll have to do this.”

So it’s actually usually that that’s happening. That’s a little bit easier to stall off because there is a stage coming for it. You know? It’s like, “You know, that’s a really good question. And in a few minutes, or an hour, or whatever, we’re going to be talking about exactly those kind of things, so would it be okay if we put that off until a little later?”

You do once in a while get somebody who is just a font of ideas. And sometimes, I’ve had to talk to those people outside during a break and say, “You know, you’re so creative and it’s so wonderful, and I really love your ideas and all that stuff, but you know, not everyone can keep absorbing all these different ideas. They need to chunk it down a little bit, so could you help me with that process?” and I kinda engage them to get them helping with the process that we’re actually doing.

Int: And that helps them monitor themselves as well?

CM: Exactly.

Int: So at the reflection stage, you’re doing these connections, you’re kinda looking for holes, you’re making the patchwork quilt fully patched. But at some point, you have to start riding the other side of the curve, and actually begin converging, I’d imagine.

CM: Right. People are better at converging. It’s the whole thing that we’re accustomed to getting stuff done, we’re accustomed to finding answers — all those things. There tends to be a lot of skill in that area in most organizations.

Employees in general are much more geared to convergence than divergence, so if you’re in an organization like a work environment, you’re going to have people who are really good at this. Now if you’re in a volunteer organization or a nonprofit…

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To hear the rest, head over to our audiocasts page and take a listen to the November Tuesday Topics call. You can also hear other sessions with other topics — all free. Also, you can sign up for our upcoming Tuesday Topics calls as well!

As part of our monthly Tuesday Topics series of free phone calls, we sat down with Christine Martell to talk about using visuals in strategic visioning. Before getting into that piece of the interview, though, she talked about the levels of strategic visioning, and how visions differ from missions and plans.

Here’s an excerpt:

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Int:What’s the outcome of a strategic visioning process?

CM: That’s a really good question because I think that one of the things that gets confusion about strategic visioning is that it gets executed, or you create these things in many different levels.

So, for example, you may be doing something with an executive team that is creating a vision for the whole future of an organization. Or you may be working with a smaller team within an organization that is really aligning with a vision/mission/values that are kinda being passed down from above.

And there’s a very different process involved when you are visioning something that doesn’t exist, versus where you’re visioning something that’s aligning with something that’s being handed to you.

Int:And tell me more about the distinction there. How would you expect something to look different in the two different kinds of categories?

CM: Well, when you’re working at creating something new, working on very big kinds of levels, the possibilities are limitless. You can create. You are usually working on a longer term, so it’s more like a 25-year vision, or if you’re doing future visioning, like the whole world or something, it could be a 200-year vision.

So I think of it as scale. It’s a scale question more than an “Are we executing it differently?” It’s the context that we’re working within, and getting very clear about what that is.

Int:I think one of the things you mentioned earlier was mission/values, and those areas in the context of vision, and identified those as very separate things. How do you distinguish a vision from those other pieces? What makes it different?

CM: Well, a vision is kind of a goal. I don’t like to use the word goal for a vision, because goal feels more limited. Vision is something that we’re striving for. It should be a stretch. A goal is usually pretty clear that you can attain it.

I think a vision has more of an ideal state. There’s almost like a struggle for perfection. Excellence is a huge part of vision. We’re trying to do something bigger, better. There’s kind of a … sort of magical…it could be magical; it can create that feeling, and often does when you’re doing a vision for a nonprofit that’s mission-driven. The vision really has a potential to get people aligned and excited.

Int:It also sounds like it tends to be a pretty strategic document, as opposed to a series of tactics or a more tactical document.

CM: Absolutely. It may have some of those tactical pieces attached to it, about how we’re going to get there or things like that. But you know, people are far more motivated toward a vision than they are toward an action plan.

Yeah, you like to kinda get your daily work done with an action plan, check it off, all those kinds of things. But as far as really driving your dedication, your engagement, your want to come to work, that kind of thing, or “I want to participate in this action” – it really needs to be juicier.

This [is a] quality that’s really hard to articulate in words, but when people start talking about it, the excitement level raises, the energy level in their voice raises, you can see these little sparks in their eye. They start having more deeper engagement. It’s like this “click” that happens. There’s a sense of energy in the room—that you know when the vision is getting clearer and when it’s really engaging people. There’s a feeling that happens.

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To hear the rest of the conversation, head to our audiocasts page. There, you can listen to other conversations as well, on a variety of leadership development, team-building, and other topics.

Different members of the VisualsSpeak community use the toolset for very different purposes. This time, we look at how the tools (especially the Image Set) can be used for strategic visioning.

What VisualsSpeak Can Achieve

VisualsSpeak enables organizations, groups and individuals to create a more compelling strategic vision than is possible by simply writing a vision statement. Using images enables groups to dig deeper into the psyche of its participants to reveal the group’s goals, and align the core values needed to inspire the group to action.

Framing The Question

The framework for a strategic visioning session can be quite complex. The question you pose depends on the desired outcome of the organization, group or individual. If the goal is to inspire participants, the question could be a single-frame questions about a vision or an ideal environment. On the other hand, if the goal is to create a roadmap to get from a present state to a future one, you will want to use a multiple-frame question asking about both the present image and a future image.

Sometimes, the framework can be more complex. Depending upon what the group wants to achieve, you may want to divide the paper into different segments or frames, allowing the group to define various aspects of the issue such as who they are, the challenges they face, the results they are seeking, and their overall organizational vision. You might consider placing a river horizontally across the paper to symbolize the challenges the team faces, allowing the team to lay images on top of the river that symbolize the challenge and what’s needed to cross the river.

It’s important to discuss the process with the group leader(s) in advance of the session to determine what role they want to play during the process. Some leaders will want to maintain their leadership position and play a large role in directing the process. Others will want to relinquish their leadership role, and allow participants a greater say in the overall vision that’s developed. Aside from briefing the group leader in advance, we recommend that you refrain from setting ground rules for the group, as there is much to be learned from how the group approaches the task.

What to Observe

During a strategic visioning exercise, it’s important to observe the patterns that are exhibited by the group:

• Do the participants approach the process independently, placing any images they choose on the wall, or do they work together, gaining consensus from all the participants before any image is placed on the wall?
• Do participants overlap with the images already placed on the wall by others, or do they leave a lot of space between other people’s images so they remain completely visible?
• Does the group focus solely on the challenges it faces, failing to identify ways to solve them?
• How does the group go about discussing the images? Does it engage everyone in the discussion, or is one person appointed to tell the whole story?
• What language does the team use to discuss the images? Do the participants describe the images literally or through the use of metaphors?

The Debrief Session

The debrief session should focus on your observations regarding how the team approached the process as well as patterns you’ve noticed regarding the content of the images and how the group placed the images on the wall. In addition to providing the team with a digital photo of the group images and the words they used to explain the images they used, you’ll also want to include a summary of the session. Meaningful patterns often emerge during the session. You will want to summarize these patterns into a document that can be useful in formulating an action plan as the group moves toward the next steps in strategic planning.