The Person Holding The Marker

Holding the Marker (all rights reserved)

I am interested in the politics of groupwork.  Long ago a mentor of mine pointed out the value of 'holding the marker' when a whiteboard is being used to capture a discussion or communicate a concept.  By holding the marker, you get to write your interpretation of what is being said.

Ways in which the person holding the marker can use this power include:

• Choosing what to write.
• Choosing what to not write.
• Choosing where to write each item.
• Choosing how large to write each item.
• Choosing when to use shorthand.
• Choosing to add a question mark indicating a question or that a point was controversial or divisive. 
• Choosing to add an exclamation mark, underline or other emphasis.

The 'power of the marker' is also bigger than just being about controlling the writing process.  Holding the marker also often means being the only person standing up, giving additional power through relative height, and making you an alternative focal point to the whiteboard.

This whole discussion has another dimension.  When you stand up and take the marker, you make yourself a potential target.  If you are unable to adequately capture the comments being made, this may diminish the esteem in which you are held by the rest of the group.  This can also happen if you do not show respect for thought leaders, elders and other important people.

My mentor also pointed out the value of being the first person to secure the marker.  This is an interesting factor.  If you want to have the marker, but did not get it first, you can ask for it.  In my experience, most people will hand over the marker at that point.  If they do, watch what they do next.  Do they sit down, thus relinquishing the marker?  Or do they stand beside you, awaiting the return of the marker?

If you ask for a marker, a denial can be embarrassing.  If you expect a denial, you could 'turn the tables'.  If the whiteboard is quite long and there are a few markers, grab another marker and start on your own section of the whiteboard.  At this point you could also invite others to take up a marker.

When you join the other person, if you want to combine your contributions, see if you can find the same colour the other person is using, mimic their style (eg, words and phrases or boxes and arrows), and line up your content with theirs horizontally.  The converse is also true - to distinguish your contribution, use a different colour, and vary your style and layout.

You might be interested to know that the mentor who introduced this concept to me was one of the first managers I came across with a whiteboard in his office, and he kept his markers in his desk!

...Geoff
www.performancepeople.com.au

Design Thinking & Facilitation

Message From andymangold, who says, "Design is much more than my job." 

If facilitation was design, how would you do it?

The 'design thinking' movement is infiltrating business and management.  Some examples include:

• The increasingly popular TED Talks put design alongside technology and entertainment when discussing 'Ideas Worth Spreading'.
• David Kelley of IDEO is an evangelist for design thinking; including in the magazine Fast Company (another forum bringing together design and business concepts) and in a video at the Design Thinging blog.
• Care of Edward Tufte, and more recently David McCandless, visualisations bring business data and often social data into the design realm.  For more on this, Cameron Chapman has posted a list of 50 Great Examples of Data Visualisation. 

My friend Simon Terry introduced me to Edward Tufte and his excellent book Visual Explanations many years ago, which incited the curiosity about visualisation and design that has led to this post.

Design thinking is about shaping people's experience.  It is a very user-centric approach.  It is about colour, movement, emotion and involvement.  It is also a process - from idea to implementation and beyond.  And it is hyper visual.

For the facilitator, there are some useful ideas here, including:

• Focusing on the user, or in your case, participant.  Shape the session around their wants and needs.  Or better yet, hand the reigns over to them.  (I have written about doing this with sticky notes and telling organisational stories.)
• Use colour.  Black markers on a white background may give a retro monochrome look, but is not particularly interesting, and you will struggle to distinguish between different pieces of information (such as pros and cons or headings and key points) in a single colour. 
• Use movement.  You don't want people to sit still too long, and don't stand or sit too long yourself.  Movement keeps your blood running, and creates dynamism.
• Emotions are tricky for the facilitator.  However, they can also be powerful in drawing people in, and in making an experience memorable.  Ignore the value of emotion at your peril.
• Involvement is about getting participants to participate - they are not an audience, so don't treat them as such for long.
• Many times when you facilitate you are seeking new ideas, or at least trying to lodge new ideas into the minds of others.  There are many processes for doing this, from brainstorming and flowcharting to experiential learning, such as imaginary and real simulations.  For some great ideas, see the Stanford Design School's Bootcamp Bootleg, a free online resource.  The Creative Whack Pack is also a great resource for identifying new ideas, transforming ideas, and evaluating and implementing ideas.
• By referring to 'implementation and beyond' above I mean that implementation is seldom an event, it is an ongoing process that can continue after the session is finished. 

There are a lot of links in this post.  If you only have limited time, I commend to you the article about David Kelley in FastCompany, in which he describes why IDEO started using the term 'design thinking', and the TED presentation by David McCandless which shows an amazing way to appreciate really big amounts of money.

...Geoff
www.performancepeople.com.au

Visual Facilitation - Conference Recording

Capturing Participant Input With Words (all rights reserved) 

I have a couple of degrees - one pre-digital, the other mid-digital.  Many changes happened in the intervening years.  The most prominent of these was probably the journal repository.  I spent weeks, maybe months, cumulatively in the dungeons (the basement journal stacks at the Baillieu Library at Melbourne University) in the late 1980's.  When I studied in the 2000's in Rockhampton, a small regional city, I did not crack open a single physical journal in 6 years of study.  But I referenced and quoted from hundreds of journals, all available online in password controlled databases.

When I studied the first time I could put the complete notes from a 2 hour lecture onto the front and back of an A4 sheet of paper.  I did not summarise.  Instead I shrank my writing to about 6 point, and scrawly.  I had a great group of study partners, and none of them ever asked to borrow my lecture notes more than once.  I seldom drew a picture, and I am pretty sure I did not link 'related ideas'.  I certainly did not use more than one colour - blue biro.

When I returned to Uni for my second degree, I hoped to use mind-maps to record lectures.  I found my spatial capabilities lacking.  After many years of computing, I was unable to write more than a short paragraph without my hand cramping up.  So I took to typing notes from the 'posted Powerpoint slides' (another new development) and the textbook.

Enough about my study methods...

I am not a practitioner of visual facilitation, conference-style, but I am fascinated by it.  You might be able to see why.  There is an obvious link between me and the visual facilitators who post their work on the Web.  We both use a rectangular white surface to record presentations.  In the past I did this for lectures, now I do it for facilitated sessions; and I have moved from paper to whiteboard and butcher's paper. And I aspire to use images in place of words especially to communicate the links between ideas and to make ideas more concrete.  I do this a bit, and am working on doing it more.

Better - A Long Red Arrow & a Light Bulb (all rights reserved)

There are others who do an awesome job of matching images and words to bring content alive.  If you are interested in their work try some of these sites:

• Sunni Brown's Tweeting on Weekends 'visual notes' from the recent SXSW conference in Austin Texas.
• The Grove describes their work as 'visual meetings', and include ideas and resources here.
• I love the work of Ninmah (Rachel Smith) who recently joined The Grove.  Here is an example of visual facilitation on the iPad (with a video). Rachel's photostream on Flickr is also worth browsing.
• Work samples of 'meeting graphics' from Whole Picture Thinking (Aftab Erfan)

There appears to be a lot of different terms for similar things.  When I talk about 'visual facilitation' in my own work, I mean that I am capturing input from the participants, and sharing my own ideas through (mainly) a whiteboard.  I think that most of the beautiful business art you can see at the links above is primarily people recording a presentation by someone else.  I love their work, and am sure I can be a better visual facilitator by emulating some of their practices.

...Geoff
www.performancepeople.com.au

Stakeholder Analysis

Difficulty:  Moderate.
Audience:  People needing to better understand and involve stakeholders (eg, project managers).
Suggested Time:  20-60 minutes.

The Stakeholder Analysis can be used in a number of situations, including strategic planning, business planning, contract preparation, mediation, merger negotiations, etc.

It involves listing the organisation's stakeholders; identifying which of these are most important; and then closely examining the relationship the organisation has with these key stakeholders.

The first step is to create a mindmap of the stakeholders.

Example Stakeholder Mindmap

The second step is performed if you do not have the time or the inclination to closely examine all stakeholders.  In this case, you identify the most influential stakeholders from the mindmap.

The third step is to complete the Stakeholder Analysis table.

Example Stakeholder Analysis Table

You can complete this process alone or with a small group of key project people; or, for maximum impact, involve the stakeholders in completing the table.  They generally know best what they want, and how they might be involved.  Be careful not to over promise if you are using this tool early in a larger process.

You can choose what to label the columns in the table, depending on what you need to achieve.  I find the headings in the example above useful in many circumstances.

...Geoff
www.performancepeople.com.au

Visual Facilitation - Project Planning

(This is a co-post with the one called "Choosing a Format - Project Planning".)

Project planning is a particular kind of process. (See the co-post on choosing a format for more on this.)

It is very important that people have a shared understanding of what a project is about.  A great way to achieve this is to 'paint a picture' of the project.  There are two kinds of project pictures.  (Sure, there are probably lots more, but these are the two I most often find myself working with.)  They are:

1. The project workplan or schedule - how the project will happen.
2. The project impact or 'end state' - what the project will accomplish. 

Both of these can benefit from visual presentation.

The Project Workplan or Schedule

Always start documenting the schedule by documenting the major activities or stages of the project.  This is often as far as you would go in a facilitated group session.  Individuals or pairs can then go away and determine the detailed steps, durations and resource requirements.

An example from a very small group is simply documented with pen and paper:

Rough High Level Picture

In a larger group, this may involve a whiteboard:

Rough High Level Picture on a Whiteboard

The Project Impact or 'End State'

This is a trickier process, and does not always immediately lend itself to being done graphically.  However, when I ask small groups to create a picture that shows what their project needs to achieve (and not how they will get there) some fantastic pictures are drawn.

Pictures have included flowers, buildings, people (lots of people), amoeba-like creatures, bridges.


As usual, how we got the picture is at least as important than what ended up in the picture.  This is not just about 'painting pictures of the project'.  It is about capturing people's ideas, understanding and hunches about the upcoming project, feeding them back to this audience, and documenting them for future audiences.

...Geoff
www.performancepeople.com.au