The Center for Graphic Facilitation

Book: All You Need is a Good Idea

Jay Heyman is an idea guy. His book on the topic, All You Need is a Good Idea!: How to Create Marketing Messages that Actually Get Results, pulls back the curtain on the idea creation process to reveal why a "good" idea is so much more valuable than a "great" idea. (Hint: Perfection kills!)

As part of Paul Williams' Idea Sandbox virtual book tour, I had the opportunity to read about Jay Heyman's experiences and playful opinions on the world of ideas.

That experience comes in the form of the New York advertising and marketing world. As principal of a creative marketing firm, Heyman's daily work involves the very raw, emotional, and oft times maddening process of developing ideas. He describes what life is like working through those chaotic, collaborative relationships that underpin the ideation process itself.

Client case studies are pulled from his direct experience with people who struggled to distill the essence of what they offer to the world (what Jay codenames your "Phufkel") and the resulting creative journey for which Jay and his team served as happy guides. He also bravely shares those instances in which the idea went down in flames!

Jay's writing is extremely engaging and personable, capturing the voice of a warm, avuncular personality with real world experience. (This ain't HBO's Mad Men series!)

For any business or practitioner, Jay has solid, understandable advice with scores of simple questions to ask yourself or your clients. He shows us how to cut through the clutter of the strategic planning and branding process to form lasting relationships with customers.

Like many of you, I am usually reading anywhere from two to 10 books simultaneously. 

Consequently, many of my questions for Jay were inspired by other authors writing in this field of idea generation and marketing, especially those writers exploring the disruptive innovations of social networking and fragmentation of media markets: Clay Shirky, Chip and Dan Heath, Valdis Krebs, Guy Kawasaki and Seth Godin. 

Read on for Jay's insightful responses.

SXSW Visually Speaking

 

FULL DISCLOSURE: I was, indeed, in Texas during South by Southwest.  However, I was nowhere near Austin, and played with lots of fun nieces and nephews (all under the age of six) doing fun things like wrasslin', fishin', watching bronco ridin' and mutton bustin' at the Houston Rodeo. I didn't Tweet or Bleep all week. It was awesome.

Fortunately, there were enough Bloggers and Twitters and Visual Facilinators @sxsw to capture every angle. Check out these moleskin sketches by Austin Kleon (above) and Mike Rohde (video of live sketchnoting below).

20x2 Live Sketchnoting from Mike Rohde on Vimeo.

Lots of Twitter action, of course; of special interest--the panel titled Shift Happens: Moving from Words to Pictures with some of our favorite peeps as panelists:  Lee LeFever, Sunni Brown, Dave Gray, and Tom Crawford. See panelist Dan Roam's thoughts on his blog (oh, such a woefully passé and antiquated form of communication). 

Or, if you think it more hip to be square, then find <140 word reactions on Twitter: #shift

Facilitator U.: Are You Too Smart for Your Own Good?

PHOTO COLLAGE by Matt Andrews Photography. © All rights reserved.

Ever feel like you are speaking to a room full of warm bodies, but no one is home? 

Feel like you poured your life experience into your presentation, crafted every bullet point for maximum impact, practiced your speech to perfection, suited up, showed up, but no one is even listening up?

Steve Davis of FacilitatorU.com reminds us: "Speakers and seminar leaders don't need to know everything." 

Below, Davis shares insights on how to engage participants as an authentic facilitator (rather than facilitating through speechifying).

NPR: Bored? Try Doodling To Keep The Brain On Task

From NPR:

ABOVE: President Obama's doodle, sketched as part of a "National Doodle Day"

Bill Gates is a doodler, and he's not alone. Lyndon Johnson doodled. Ralph Waldo Emerson doodled. Ronald Reagan drew pictures of cowboys, horses and hearts crossed with arrows. Most of us doodle at one point or another. But why?

To understand where the compulsion to doodle comes from, the first thing you need to do is look more closely at what happens to the brain when it becomes bored. According to Jackie Andrade, a professor of psychology at the University of Plymouth, though many people assume that the brain is inactive when they're bored, the reverse is actually true.

"If you look at people's brain function when they're bored, we find that they are using a lot of energy — their brains are very active," Andrade says.

The reason, she explains, is that the brain is designed to constantly process information. But when the brain finds an environment barren of stimulating information, it's a problem.

FULL ARTICLE >>

Video: Art (I Want You)

For all of your artists or artistic types wondering if what you make, makes a difference. You are not alone.

Music video for Tanya Davis' song Art by Andrea Dorfman.

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being. --Carl G. Jung

(PS. Thanks to Nellie Durand for the link. Nellie makes LOTS of art. Check it out: http://nelliedurand.blogspot.com/)