As our product offers have grown we thought it would be easier to break off our newest work and put it on a separate website. I post my artwork on my own blog.

The only way I can keep up with it is if nothing happens. No unexpected things that need attention. Those weeks are rare. So I end up working way too many hours trying to keep up.

What sucks up the time?

I need to redesign the way I relate to social media. While it might be ‘better’ to have separate parts of the business with it’s own special messages and branding, I am clear I can’t keep that up. We are too small a company to sustain it.

I enjoy searching out resources and pointing them out to my networks. It can be a slippery slope. I can justify aimless internet wandering as searching for content.

I think of myself as an artist, but in reality I spend most of my time writing. Is there a way I can get more balance between the visual and verbal?

Consolidating and Restructuring

I’m restructuring how our social media and communication happens. I’ve merged newsletter lists, so I am sending out one every two weeks to everybody. We are redesigning our webpages and consolidating our blogs.

We’re deep in the design cave, so you won’t see as many posts as usual.

I’ve found myself trying to follow advice of social media and marketing experts. Only thing is when I do there is no time to do all the other things I need to do to keep the whole business operating. I’m rethinking what sustainable practices look like for MY business. Looking at the metrics. What actually drives revenue? And what are things that might feel good, but don’t help move the business forward?

Hope we’ll uncover answers in the coming weeks……

Learning by participating

He was working with a group in his organization on planning a conference, and they needed to get a clear vision. The toolset was very useful, and the company’s Chief Operating Officer happened to be in the meeting.

So the next time an issue came up — in this case, a work team that wasn’t really a “team” at all — the COO decided VisualsSpeak was the answer. Now this COO had never done facilitation before, and had only used the toolset once before as a participant. But in she dove!

Results!

Our more experienced user (who was a participant in this team intervention) said that even though the COO made some newbie mistakes, the toolset worked beautifully. It yielded great bonding for the starting-to-be-a-team, and laid a strong foundation. Or, as he put it:

It’s amazing how robust a tool it is–you can’t mess it up even if you’re new at using it!

Using images in Africa

Mari reviewing the birth records

VizPeep Mari Alexander is a therapist, physician assistant, intercultural consultant and Mom to two teenage boys. She’s also the co-founder of a grassroots nonprofit, Safe Passages to Motherhood that has been working in a rural village in Kenya. They’ve been sharing Home Based Life Saving Skills with a group in the village, and that small group has reached out and shared the information with over fifteen thousand other people.The program teaches people to recognize the signs of childbirth emergencies and to get those women to help before it is too late. Since the program has started, none of the women in the village have died in childbirth. Pretty impressive in an area of the world where 1 in 16 women die having babies.

One of the challenges of working in the developing world is really knowing what is happening and if you are actually making a real difference. This program has assessment and information tracking built in, but Mari was interested in the impacts beyond just the number of births in the clinic or attendance at programs.

Mari knew how powerful using images was in her work as a therapist and consultant, but feared the photographic images would be difficult to relate to for the people in Africa. So we worked with her to develop a set of paintings she could use instead.

Stories of Empowerment

Bware woman sharing story about paintings with translator

The paintings worked exceedingly well. People easily found images to describe the impact the Safe Passage to Motherhood program had on their lives. The stories weren’t so much about saving the mothers lives as they were about how becoming a trainer and sharing this vital information was changing them. They were stories of discovering purpose, and becoming someone.

Increasing the feeling of empowerment

It was obvious this group had been changed by participating in the program. Now, to figure out how to make it sustainable after the five site visits of the Home Based Life Saving Skills program. Part of the training had been to get the community thinking about how to leverage the resources they had. The US group provided some limited funds, but wanted to make sure the group could carry on after the official part of the program ended.

The group was very motivated to find ways to keep the work going. They looked around the village for opportunities, and realized for most of the long gatherings, people sat on the ground and on benches that weren’t comfortable.

Mari with the SPM trainers in Kenya with their chairs

The group saved up money to buy chairs, which they rent out. From the money they made, they bought dishes. They knew they were great at feeding big groups because they did it every time they did a training. They were saving money to buy a tent to extend their new catering business into rainy season. The US based group made a donation to the tent fund, and it arrived the day after the US group left. They now have a way to support spreading their work to other villages.

They have requested their own set of images so they can use them in their training. Of course VisualsSpeak will provide them!

The last official visit

The Home Based Life Saving Skills program that Safe Passages to Motherhood uses has five visits to the community in the developing world. The last trip is focused on evaluation, and documenting the impact the program has had. We already know the group has reached over 15 thousand people, and women are being brought to the clinic in time for help to save their lives.

Safe Passages is a tiny grassroots organization. The health care workers and team who go to Africa take time off from work and volunteer their time. They are very resourceful and keep costs to a minimum. Still, it is very expensive to get them there. When they can, they purchase medical supplies to bring to the village. They have not raised all the money to fund the upcoming trip.

Can you help?

Make a donation

Any amount will help, it’s incredible how far our dollars can stretch in the developing world. Right now they are several thousand dollars away from just paying for transportation for the upcoming trip.

This program is powerful and effective. We’re seeing the impacts ripple out to make real differences.

If you find yourself in the unfortunate situation where people just aren’t opening up to each other, work at engaging their curiosity. When people get curious, they naturally lower some of their barriers and dynamics change.

Ask questions like, “Could you tell me more about that image?” Or ask them how they approached the process with questions like, “What caught your attention about these images that caused you to select them?”

The trick is to start with questions that aren’t personal, so participants don’t immediately shut down. From that point, often people will allow you to open the door to a deeper conversation.

Painters Tape!

When facilitating VisualsSpeak processes we recommend
you carry a couple of rolls of painter’s tape with you. These are the blue rolls of tape you can find in most hardware stores.

Painter’s tape – Its versatile and won’t ruin your images or the surfaces the images are being stuck to. It doesn’t leave a sticky residue like masking tape, and you won’t have tape welded to your photographs.

On the walls

One very successful technique we use is to have clients create a group collage on the wall. In advance, we tape a large piece of wide (white) paper on the wall. Then, as a team, people place their images on the paper by applying a piece of doubled-over tape on the back of the photos. Doing a group collage on the wall also shifts the client’s visual perspective of the work, opening up further possibilities of gaining insights.

On the ceiling or window?

I facilitated a leadership development retreat with a group of high level government executives. This is a very creative bunch. One breakout group taped their collage to the ceiling. Another created a frame out of tape on the window. And another framed their collage with tape on the wall.

Use multiple senses

Remember – One reason VisualsSpeak is such a powerful tool for group work is because it involves multiple senses: visual, verbal and kinesthetic. Using tape adds another level to the kinesthetic sense. It is tactile.

Rebellion = Fun – Don’t forget the rebellious nature of taping things to the walls. After all, didn’t your mother tell you not to stick things on the walls?

Image printed from ImageCenter used for journaling

Good interventions, whether training, coaching, facilitation, or something else, aren’t one-time events. To be most effective, they need to have an ongoing component that helps participants apply what they learned.

A great way to do this with the VisualsSpeak tools is through the creation of artifacts–pieces that the participant can take away with them for further reflection. There are a number of ways this can happen.

Take photographs of the images

For example when you are using the Visualsspeak ImageSet, taking pictures of each person’s assembled images and printing or sending it to them afterward is a good approach. When we first designed the ImageSet, people didn’t commonly have decent cameras on their phones, so we included tips about how to take good photos. Now we find people often take out their phones and take their own photos.

Professional prints of our photos are available for purchase in our online Gallery. Sometimes people fall in love with a particular photo and want to get a copy. Others people want to reproduce their entire image by purchasing prints to hang on the wall.

There are people who still have their VisualsSpeak images from five years ago hanging in their offices or in their desk drawers. We hear stories all the time about how they have continued to give them insights, and how much more sense they make over time.

Record the stories

Also effective is to have a notetaker write down how people describe their images and send those notes to the participants later. You can also audio or video record, but make sure you weigh the value since recording can make some people uneasy and less likely to share freely.

Suggest journaling

Insights often deepen by journaling about the images after the session. If you use our online ImageCenter, the images can be printed out for journaling pages. A particularly interesting way to journal is to start with the story that comes to mind first. Continue by asking yourself, what else could this be saying to me? Try it several times to see what emerges.

Give participants a set of their own

Of course, if you’re using the Building Great Teams or Developing Great Leaders tools, the follow-up is taken care of for you. Each Participant Set comes with an individual image set and a collection of follow-up activities the participant does after the team-building session is over. Easy as pie!
Whatever approach you choose, building in a follow-up strategy will help your effectiveness with participants and learners skyrocket!

What’s the purpose of an icebreaker?

Icebreakers serve a particular purpose. In their ideal form, they start getting people engaged with each other and the topic of the session. Too often, the focus is just to get people talking instead of being mindful about how the activity relates to why a person is in attendance. Many adults do not enjoy pointless activities. For many group facilitators, activities are fun. But to a lot of other types of people, they aren’t. So they need to have a reason beyond potential enjoyment to appeal to a wide range of people.

I also strongly believe icebreakers need to be designed so everyone can be successful. No right or wrong. I want my icebreakers to help people get comfortable, not to embarrass them or set off anxiety. Of course, it’s not possible to make this true for every single person because what is comfortable for one, isn’t for another. But overall, I want to the room to feel engaged and ready to embrace why we are gathered at the end of the icebreaker.

What does the group most need?

When designing the Visual Icebreaker Kit, I selected five focus areas that icebreakers serve when starting group interactions.

1. Introductions: Get a sense of who is in the room
2. Trust building: Help people feel comfortable talking with each other and participating
3. Mini Assessment: Discover where people are relative to the topic
4. Engagement: Spur on interaction with the topic
5. Alignment: Orient the group to move in the same direction.

Selecting an activity

Activity selection emerges from the intersection of your goal for the overall experience and what the group needs. Once you are clear about where the group is and where you hope they can go, select a prompt that starts the group on that path. The more closely your icebreaker matches the reason people came to the session the better.

Want more?

Included in our Visual Icebreaker Kit, the facilitator guide contains dozens of icebreakers covering a variety of outcomes — from building trust to conducting a mini-assessment.

Of course, these activities are designed to be used with the icebreaker images, but could be used reasonably well with the images in the Developing Great Leaders or Building Great Teams toolsets as well.

I recently came across the work of Raf Stevens, and he sent me an advance copy of his new book, No Story No Fans for review. I’ve been slowly reading a section, then thinking about it, and reading more. I’ve also been thinking about how it relates to the storytelling aspects of the VisualsSpeak tools.

The book incorporates a number of interesting new media approaches. He developed the material in conjunction with a network of people who he connected with online. I like crowdsourced approaches, probably because I’ve seen the value in developing my own products. Each interaction brings another piece of understanding. He also uses QR codes to link to video and websites. It deepened my experience by going to view the samples he referred to in the text.

Selling the use of story

The book does a particularly good job building a case for how story can be used in business. There are a range of examples, which show how this can work. If you need to convince someone of a storytelling approach, you will get material that will support you.

Even though my tools are about surfacing stories and I tell a lot of stories in my workshops, I can now see many opportunities to use more stories in my marketing and on my websites. I will return and re-read sections as I shift how I incorporate story, and how I become more intentional in that process.

Story Listening and Story Circles

I know this is where the magic happens when people use VisualsSpeak. Shifts happen in the space between the stories of different people. I recognized what Raf described but I wonder if people who haven’t witnessed that kind of process would?

So much of what goes on is beyond words. There is a synergy that emerges in the space that I always struggle to describe. Raf does a good job of starting to talk about it. He gives some ideas of how it happens and what you can do to begin to create it.

What are we looking for in business storytelling?

There is an example in the book I keep thinking about where Raf worked with a pharmaceutical company. They surfaced a story that really resonated with people inside and outside the company. This is the start of the story:

“Most people may know what we do. Sometimes people ask what we stand for. They want to know who we are.

First of all, we are like everybody else, ordinary people facing ups and downs in our moods and health, dealing with our little daily worries. Some of us are scientists, some are businessmen, and some are something in between. We have children we are concerned about and aging parents we love dearly. Just like everyone else, we have our hopes and fears and moments of happiness and joy. Like everyone else, we know about pain and distress.
Secondly, we are a group of people, very diverse in thought, nationality and character, who have come around a dream that was brought to us by the  founder of one of our earliest pharmaceutical companies. We want nothing less than to contribute to the progress of health, and we are willing and able to work hard for it.

Finally, we are a company. We develop pharmaceutical products to address medical needs that have not yet been met. Once developed, we distribute them around the globe.”

I keep wondering if the resonance is coming from a story of this company— or if it’s discovering the universality of this company? Couldn’t you substitute the details of almost any org and have it be true? I’m left wondering if I am looking to surface what is unique or what is universal?

Perhaps we need both kinds of stories.

Telling stories over time

One of my favorite part of the book was Raf’s reminding me to think about telling stories over time. It’s easy to get caught up in the thinking that you need to get the one perfect story (and produce it in some slick very professional format.) That was more true before we had the tools to easily create multimedia, but it’s not true now. Our business stories can be more of a net across many channels. This has me thinking more strategically about how that can happen. Instead of being all over the place as I am now.

You can download the first part of the book for free on No Story No Fans

Discovering Raf

Best part of reviewing this book has been discovering the larger body of Raf’s work. He takes a creative approach to everything he does, so follow his links. He’s done some particularly interesting work on Prezi. Here is one example:

Doug’s an experienced facilitator and developer, and after looking at the previous program, he decided to bring in the VisualsSpeak system. Now, one of the first things he does in the program is ask people to create images around “What is a leader?”

As the group discusses their images, they start thinking about everything that changes when you move from being an individual contributor to being a leader. Just tacking that on at the beginning was, well, just the beginning.

Now Doug has reported they used VisualsSpeak every session of the program, with great results. By incorporating these activities, people are understanding their new roles more quickly, and effectiveness has really grown. Well done, Doug!

But while the culture of personal attacks that is all over the airwaves is troubling, there’s a more fundamental issue at heart, I think: listening. Or the lack thereof, really.

If two people in a debate (even a yelling one) actually are listening to each other, then when one person unleashes a personal attack, they will hear when the other recoils. The rhetoric, instead of continually ratcheting higher, has a self-limiting mechanism. Whether or not there is a link between coarse talk and violent action, can’t we all agree that a little more civility is a good thing? That’s one place where listening can really help.

Of course, as a maker of tools to help people listen and relate to one another while working through big issues, we have a vested interest at VisualsSpeak. But I think it’s a sentiment shared by lots of people — perhaps the Silent Majority, to co-opt a political phrase of an earlier time.

It’s been almost 19 years since Rodney King plaintively asked if we could all get along. Our history since that time has shown, I think, that it may be possible, but it is also very difficult. But it also is a goal worth pursuing, whether the “we all” is our work team, our family, our community, or our country.

So whether you are using the VisualsSpeak tools to do so or not, please make an effort to listen just a little more. You might be surprised by what you hear.

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!

Toby Ziegler: It’s not the new millennium, but I’ll just let it drop.
Sam Seaborn: It is.
Toby Ziegler: It is not the new millennium. The year 2000 is the last year of the millennium, it’s not the first year of the next one.
Sam Seaborn: But the common sensibility, to quote Stephen Jay Gould…
Toby Ziegler: Stephen Jay Gould needs to look at a calendar.
Sam Seaborn: Gould says this is a largely unresolvable issue.
Toby Ziegler: Yes, it’s tough to resolve. You have to look at a calendar.
[... ]
Sam Seaborn: You’ve got to ask yourself which is more exciting – watching your car roll over from 99,999 to 100,000 or watching it go from one hundred to a hundred and one.
C.J. Cregg: So technically the millennium is still a year away.
Sam Seaborn: Yeah, but… we’ve made all these plans.

It really plays up the effect of a new year. Is January 1 really any different than, say, January 3 or July 31? We could pick any day to start a new resolution, or to evaluate our goals, or to engage in drunken revelry into the wee hours (or however you choose to celebrate) — why December 31/January 1?

It’s the odometer effect, of course. As Rob Lowe’s character, Sam Seaborn, says in the quote above, it’s much more exciting watching a ball drop when the digits flip on the year than when it’s just another box on the calendar. But is that a good way to structure our lives?

After all, fairly few of us have our birthdays coinciding with the new year. But given how many things change with age (being able to do new things, like drive, vote, enlist, drink, get government medical insurance, retire), maybe that’s a better date to commemorate with goals and reflections.

There’s also the “do it every day” school. These are the same people who don’t do anything for their significant others on Valentine’s Day because “every day is Valentine’s Day.” (Aside: I wonder if the divorce rate is higher with these people.) I confess to occasionally being in this camp. But when it comes to periodic goal-setting and reflection, I don’t.

Long-term reflection and goal-setting is impractical to do on a daily basis. You need perspective. You need time. You need quiet. Those aren’t always readily available on a day when you’ve got a dentist appointment, need to get the kids off to a recital, and are cooking dinner. And without developing a pattern, there’s a chance it won’t happen at all.

So in the end, I, too, succumb to the odometer effect — and maybe, to some degree, to societal peer pressure. It’s the season, after all. But I can’t help thinking there’s a better, more effective way to do it.

Maybe that will be my resolution for 2011.

Here’s an excerpt:

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…

Beyond some notable omissions (nothing from Harvard Business Review!?), it seemed fairly credible. So I started clicking. And looking. And that’s when the walls of my office started closing in on me and the vein in my neck began to pulsate wildly.

It was astounding to me how many of these blogs’ recent posts were short assemblages of platitudes or two-or-three-sentence “deep thoughts” that seemed like they should be in the vein of Jack Handey. One of the posts was five sentences in all, and one of them (the leading one) was “Team work makes the dream work.” Wow.

Now, I admire the sentiment, just as I also enjoy visualizing world peace — and whirled peas. Dog may be my co-pilot. I’ve been to Wall Drug. I don’t have a baby on board, nor do I have an honor student at the local middle school. You get the idea.

The problem is that I’m not sure where to direct my ire. To the bloggers who slap this stuff up, either cynically thinking people will adore it, or unfortunately thinking it’s profound? To the people who visit and bask in the faux-profundity? To a broader technology that displays information of high value and information of no value equally? Or am I just crazy, and should just be happy that, as in any marketplace of ideas, there are people who will “buy” the deeper ones and those who will “buy” the shallower ones?

I’m willing to entertain the idea that I’m crazy, but I’m sticking to my guns on this. Mostly because the more that a field is occupied by the bumper-sticker philosophers, the less it feels like a “real” discipline. If team-building becomes an area where everything is platitudes and anecdotes, then how is it different from astrology? It seems a great disservice to groups and organizations everywhere, as well as the many social scientists who are actively pursuing the field.

As with many such rants, I ultimately have little solution to offer. I have no interest in stifling speech, even speech which arguably adds nothing to the discussion. (I’m guilty of that, too, from time to time.) My hope is that smart speech crowds out the dumb, that insight crowds out the pablum. Given the relative volumes of each, though, I’m a bit pessimistic (for the moment).