The Center for Graphic Facilitation

FacilitatorU: Feel the Fear and Facilitate Anyway

For the Halloween issue of FacilitatorU newsletter, the writers asked veteran facilitators to share with them their greatest fears (and those typically encountered by their groups) along with proposed coping strategies.

Common facilitation fears, include demonic voices in one's head, shouting:

• Careful not to inadvertently open a can of worms and stir up conflict!
• You do not understanding the culture!
• You will not know what to do!
• What if your mind goes blank from stage fright?
• You're ineffective in helping groups achieve their goals!
• You're not prepared!
• You might look silly, stupid, or worse… unprofessional!

Mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha!

These are common and 100% sources of fear, the trick is learning how to manage these issues and emotions when they jump out and surprise you!

Read on for some sage advice on how to ward off these emotional bloodsuckers:
http://facilitatoru.com/blog/facilitation/feel-the-fear-and-facilitate-anyway

Posted via email from The Center for Graphic Facilitation

CNN Ideas Series: Sunni Brown on what we learn from doodles

LINK: http://edition.cnn.com/2011/09/01/opinion/brown-creativity-doodles/

CNN interview with Sunni Brown, speaker and co-author of "GameStorming: A Playbook for Rule-breakers, Innovators and Changemakers." She was recently named on Fast Company's 100 Most Creative People in Business List and on the 10 Most Creative People on Twitter list. She spoke at the TED 2011 conference in Long Beach, California.

Posted via email from The Center for Graphic Facilitation

Major Sweet Hand: Typographic Inspiration from Carolyn Sewell

Take a look at these hand-drawn postcards by Carolyn Sewell. Colors, letters, lines and curls, I might just beg to be her peep.

via doodlersanonymous.com

As Graphic Recorders and Facilitators we are called to not just write neatly, but to render mind-seizing, heart-grasping images.

Sewell brings both together in her illustrative scriberdoodles.

Check out her sketchnotes to see how she employs this style of text-based graphic capture during lectures, presentation, and private journaling sessions: http://www.carolynsewell.com/#708078/Sketchnotes

Posted via email from The Center for Graphic Facilitation

Stellar Articles by Sunni Brown & Mike Rohde on A List Apart!

A List Apart : JANUARY 25, 2011

Respect the doodle. Use the power of visual thinking to create and share ideas.

The Miseducation of the Doodle by SUNNI BROWN

The teacher who chastised you for “mindless doodling” was wrong on both counts. Far from shutting down the mind, the act of doodling engages the brain in the kind of visual sense-making people have practiced for over 30,000 years. Doodling sharpens concentration, increases retention, and enhances access to the problem solving unconscious. It activates the portions of the visual cortex that allow us to see mental imagery and manipulate concepts, and unifies three major learning modalities—visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. Doodle Revolution leader Sunni Brown introduces strategic doodling and presents the ABCs of our shared visual alphabet.

Sketching: the Visual Thinking Power Tool by MIKE ROHDE

You don’t have to be a great singer to write a great song—just ask Bob Dylan. Likewise, you needn’t be a Leonardo to draw your way to more and better ideas. Sketching helps you generate concepts quickly, exploring alternatives rapidly and at no cost of resources. The looseness of a sketch removes inhibitions, granting clients and colleagues permission to consider and challenge the ideas it represents. Mike Rohde outlines the practice, surveys the tools, and shares ways to become confident with this method of brainstorming, regardless of your level of artistic ability.

The Neuroscience of Improvisation

I have always wanted to have my brain scanned while listening and scribing. One limitation is that I'd have to lay immobilized on my back in a giant beige magnet. On a vacation a few years ago, I described what I do for a living to family friend who is a neuropathologist.

When I asked him what happens in my brain while I listen and draw images to capture ideas on large surfaces, he replied: "Why, your whole brain is lit up like a Christmas tree!"

Charles Limb is a doctor and a musician who researches the way musical creativity works in the brain. He wondered how the brain works during musical improvisation -- so he put jazz musicians and rappers in an fMRI to find out. What he and his team found has deep implications for our understanding of creativity of all kinds.

Graphic Facilitation on NYTimes.com

From Jay Smethurst of Sente Corporation:

Caricaturing Economists

By JUSTIN WOLFERS

I was at the Legg Mason Thought Leader Forum last week, talking about my research over recent years on prediction markets.  It was good fun, but the real novelty was that as I was speaking — literally, in real time — there was a cartoonist next to the stage, cartooning my talk on a five-foot-wide poster.  I’ve never seen this before, but it was a real hit.

As a speaker, it can be hard to organize your own thoughts even when you know what is coming next.  And as an audience member, it can be harder still to sort out the key points a speaker makes from their conversational asides.  But the artist — Christopher Fuller who works for Sente Corporation— was just amazing.  He not only picked out the important analytic insights, but found an incredibly useful way to represent them, cartooning (or perhaps caricaturing) my message.

I think this is a great idea, and it will serve as a useful reminder to those who heard the talk.  And if you weren’t there, hopefully this cartoon gives you some sense of what I had to say.

Now if only I could get my MBA students to do the same thing, they would all have a wonderfully entertaining set of notes to study in advance of their exams.  I would love to see a study figuring out whether it helps them retain the material.  I bet it would.

via freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com

Learning from the Masters: Street Artists

photo © 2009 Josh Blair | more info(via: Wylio)

 

I am an unabashed fan of street art. Whether back alleys of small towns or flashy building-sized murals, these are the real masters of communicating ideas to the masses.

Sunni Brown’s Ignite Talk at FOO Camp: The Doodle Revolution | VizThink

via vizthink.com

At FOO Camp 2010, this radical sketchnotista leaves it all on the stage in this speed round of deconstructing the dynamics of doodles and how we learn and make stuff happen!

Sunni Brown, Sharpie's official resident doodler based in Austin, proclaims:

"Bring on the freakin' Doodle Revolution!"

Check out the impact that Sunni Brown, founder of Brightspot and co-author Dave Gray, founder of Xplane, are having with their new book, Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers .

Posted via email from The Center for Graphic Facilitation

Dan Roam's "Back of the Napkin" Conference Sept 16-17

 
Last chance to join Dan in NY Sept 16-17, 2010

Join Dan Roam, author of the best-selling The Back of the Napkin series, for his visual thinking conference in NYC! This is the complete two-day visual training that Dan has delivered at Microsoft, eBay, Boeing, Gap, Kraft, the US Navy, and the United States Senate.

Register Here.
https://www.regonline.com/the_back_of_the_napkin_training_conference_ny_sept

Affinia Manhattan Hotel, New York

Attendees receive:

• Two full days of hands-on visual problem solving
• The Back of the Napkin Expanded Edition
• Unfolding the Napkin Workbook
• Personal whiteboard and drawing tools

For full details, visit The Back of the Napkin.com.

See video of Dan Roam's Keynote Speech at the 15th International Forum of Visual Practitioners Conference.

IFVP 2010 Keynote: Dan Roam, The Visual Thinker Spectrum

IFVP 2010 Keynote: Dan Roam (part 2) from Alphachimp Studio Inc. on Vimeo.