Schuman S. - The IAF Handbook of Group Facilitation (2005)(en)

After the meeting, everyone received a full-color set of chart reproductions and photos of the session, in elevenby seventeen-inch format, made possible by digital photography and some technical enhancement of the photos by the consulting team. Short captions and headlines were added to guide people through the photographs, creating a storybook that everyone could use to brief others about the meeting.

RESULTS BEGINNERS CAN EXPECT

There is a very predictable pattern in this graphic way of working:

•The built-in intention of “seeing things whole” implicitly honors everyone’s contribution and makes room for visionary and skeptic alike. This same intent can express itself in a process that is not graphically facilitated, but having ideas literally written next to each other on the same chart makes the point incontrovertibly. This becomes critical with participants who are chronically discounted.

•Participation and creativity soar as everyone is acknowledged immediately for contributing, sees their ideas supported with imagery, and has a chance to add and correct whatever they say. The audible sound of the pen on paper becomes a reinforcing drumbeat of sound at an unconscious level that I believe directly influences people’s sense of being heard.

•Big pictures support panoramic, system-level thinking at a group level—a near impossibility without this medium. Comparing and contrasting, linking and juxtaposing are all cognitive activities that imply display making of some sort. Making these pictures explicit has the added value of making them open to challenge and improvement, unlike the pictures we form in our imaginations without explicit displays.

•Groups can remember what they have done, both in the meeting and afterward when they see the charts reproduced or visible in a later meeting. Groups that watch a large display being created will find their memories triggered at much deeper levels when they see the same display photographically reproduced in a meeting report. Typing up or summarizing information after a meeting changes it and can lose the mnemonic power of the original displays.

These four results happen from the beginning of working with this visual medium and are inherent biases, as long as the facilitator’s intent is to truly listen

and mirror what is happening and not manipulate the charts to reflect his or her own purposes.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF GRAPHIC FACILITATION

Many influences are shaping this rapidly growing field of practice.

In the 1970s, several West Coast architects left the field of design and applied their visualization techniques to guide other kinds of planning and creative thinking efforts. Joe Brunon was using his generative graphics at SRI International in Palo Alto to support brainstorming. An early article shared his thinking (Brunon, 1971). Lawrence Halprin, a well-known landscape architect with offices in San Francisco, used his junior designers to support planning workshops that he conducted with his colleague Jim Burns (Halprin and Burns, 1963). Michael Doyle and David Straus, both trained architects, teamed up to make facilitation an accepted third-party intervention strategy through their firm, Interaction Associates. They subsequently published their work in How to Make Meetings Work (1976). Many of the current visual practitioners owe their start to Interaction Associates, which almost single-handedly created a market for graphic recorders, by teaming them with facilitators using their method.

Not all the influences were from the West Coast. In St. Louis, Nancy Margulies (2002) applied graphics to capturing the essence of people’s communication in much more illustrative drawings and trained a growing number of people who are active practitioners. Jim Channon applied his design background to graphic briefings in the U.S. Army and articulated what he called “advanced visual language” when he retired into full-time facilitation. He had reframed it as “Adventure Learning” by the time of the ROC history mapping. Robert Horn (1998), in the Boston area, was defining methodologies for “chunking” information, based on the work of psychologist George Miller (1956), and visually organizing information, using these methods as a basis for his firm Information Mapping.

In 1977, I created an organization development consulting practice devoted to exploring graphic facilitation, combining the roles of facilitator and recorder in the use of large blank or partly preformatted displays. In 1988, I created Graphic Guides, Inc., to begin publishing tools to support this way of working, and in 1994 renamed this company The Grove Consultants International, which continues to explore graphic solutions to all kinds of process consulting challenges.

The International Forum of Visual Practitioners, begun by Leslie Salmon Zhu, Susan Kelley, Jennifer Hammond Landau, and Karen Stratford, all full-time graphic recorders, formally incorporated as an association in 2002. The International Association of Facilitators began supporting graphic facilitation and recording tracks in its conferences in the late 1990s.

Although this field is in its infancy, it has been greatly stimulated by an information economy that is increasingly visual, computing tools that allow for graphic and multimedia authoring in every conceivable way, and cultures around the world that relate easily to image, metaphor, and storytelling.

TYPES OF PROCESSES BENEFITING FROM GRAPHIC FACILITATION

There are a range of meetings and processes where graphic facilitation is especially powerful and useful. Here are a few of the many applications:

•Visioning, planning, and design meetings of almost any kind, where many factors and forces need to be appreciated as a whole from past, present, and future perspectives.

•Process improvement and organizational change efforts, where seeing stated changes and mapping and analyzing processes almost always require a visual display.

•Diagnosing customer needs in critical sales situations and large projects of all kinds.

•Team start-up and problem-solving meetings, where pulling together everyone’s thinking is an asset.

•Information design, with overviews of complex information supported by graphic facilitation to generate the key ideas.

•Leadership strategy communications, where big pictures support big picture thinking and graphic facilitation can be used to solicit feedback and input.

•Café processes and multistakeholder dialogues. The World Café, a growing network of people using small group dialogue to support deep engagement of people, often uses table graphics to capture ideas and graphic facilitators to reflect larger group discussions.

•Teaching interactively. The use of text and image on blackboards should probably be considered the original source of this approach.

THE FOUR FLOWS OF FACILITATION

What began as an experience of having groups come alive with graphic facilitation has evolved into a broad practice. Meetings are a set of complex flows of activity that happen on multiple levels, only one of which is obviously graphic.

The Grove Facilitation Model (2002) illustrates the four flows of facilitation: attention, energy, information, and operations (Exhibit 10.1). The model is a framework that guides our approach to teaching graphic facilitation and applies to single meetings or a whole series of meetings and the work in between. Each of these flows can be managed in the service of groups as they work to reach their desired goals. They are like the different parts that make up a full musical composition. As in music, skill can be evaluated in terms of the breadth of the repertoire a person brings to each flow of activity.

We have identified four sets of strategies for directing a group through the four flows in the early stages of group process and three sets of strategies for empowering the group once it is running on its own. (For more information on this model, go to www.grove.com/about/model_facilitation.html) or Sibbet, 2002.)

Exhibit 10.1

Grove Facilitation Model Supporting Team Performance

Source: © 2001–2004 The Grove Consultants International.

Operations Flow

Exhibit 10.1, the operations flow of activity, is the foundation for the others. It represents the metaphorical ground on which a facilitator stands and the tools that a facilitator uses and provides a group. It includes the process mechanisms like agendas and procedural agreements that allow control over time, the number of people, and agreements about starting and stopping by which a facilitator establishes control. It also includes the physical tools needed for facilitation: the walls, the pens, tables, chairs, food, equipment, and so forth. Because these elements are the most objective aspects of group process, they allow control when mastered but challenge when not. A conscious graphic facilitator uses procedural and structural mechanisms to reflect and support the more dynamic elements of the process reflected in the upper flows. Handouts, food, props, and the arrangement of the room, for instance, are visual statements as well as tools.

Attention Flow

The attention flow is as open as the operational flow is constrained. It includes people’s expectations, purposes, intentions, imagined outcomes, and other invisible elements that are the fruits of our conscious awareness. In a literal sense, it is what each person is attending to—his or her point of view. In a more comprehensive sense, the attention flow includes the entire field of awareness in which the meeting or process is being held. Imagination, not mechanism, rules in this domain and has a very different character from operations. While invisible and imaginary, it is of equal, if not more, importance. Graphic facilitation makes one especially aware of the power of inner imagery—how metaphor and story suggest different orientations and how the images and intentions the facilitator holds directly influence the group.

Energy and Information Flows

Energy and information are the middle flows. Energy is placed above information because it is less objective. It includes all the movement and dynamics of a meeting or process; emotion and feelings, morale and momentum are all in this flow. These share the common property of being in motion and being constrained by the direction in which they are moving. Energy is felt directly. It is the dancing part of facilitation. It includes the pacing; the way in which the graphic facilitator uses line, color, and movement to mirror emotion; and the literal dance of response.

Body movement communicates directly to that sense in people that feels things directly. A skilled graphic facilitator reflects this emotion and movement with color and line quality and works to align visual expression with group energy. For instance, physical excitement translates directly into how a line is drawn on a chart with more intensity and boldness of color. Hesitation becomes thin, wavering, and less bold. The movement of the graphic facilitator’s own person is a form of mime that is itself a language.

Information, the content of what is being said and recorded, is more objective than energy and the most obvious part of what a graphic facilitator uses to help guide the group. The informational flow includes the symbols, words, and images that are shared in speech and recorded on the charts. This flow includes all the forms in which information is recorded—the templates, formats, frameworks, and models. The informational flow is the most conspicuously visible layer of group process when it is being graphically facilitated. Because the graphic facilitator is completely exposed in the way in which he or she listens and organizes information, most graphic facilitators become very attentive to underlying frameworks and archetypes with which people make sense out of things.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

Walking through the facilitation model step by step serves as a lens for understanding how to put graphic facilitation into practice, using the seven strategies illustrated in Exhibit 10.1. Although I treat the different aspects sequentially, in practice they integrate much like different voices in music blend together. It is best to start simply and then build a repertoire.

Step 1: Orienting to Purpose

At the very heart of graphic facilitation is the purpose of visual listening: helping other people literally see what they say. This is distinguished from public presentation, in which the intent is to have others understand what you are saying.

This shift in intention from “pushing out” to “drawing out” information is fundamental, and far more important than the icons and visual words used in the method. Drawing out immediately shifts the attention and intention of the whole group from intake to participatory exploration. This was the immediate message at the ROC council meeting inferred from the large, blank mural.

Because the attention and intention of a facilitator are so visible, from the moment a graphic facilitator picks up a pen, working this way becomes a practice in self-awareness for both the group and the practitioner. Since it is impossible to graphically record everything that is happening in a meeting, especially a highly interactive one (even the fastest graphic recorders can get only 15 to 20 percent of what is said in terms of words), everyone wonders about what is driving a graphic facilitator’s selection process.

Ideally, a facilitator’s selection process should be informed primarily by whatever purpose or outcomes have been set for the meeting. In reality, of course, it is a reflection of what the individual facilitator hears, which in turn is driven by what he or she is listening for and thinks is important. In the case of the ROC context map, the purpose of the display was explicit and reflected in the title. We were identifying elements in a sustainable food system and describing the relationship between those elements and the larger system.

Sometimes the purpose in a meeting is not clear. This will show up in the recording and provide an opportunity for everyone to move attention to this initial, fundamental aspect of group process. There is much that a graphic facilitator can do to align a team to its purposes simply by creating the title posters and theme charts that frame the meeting or engaging participants in identifying what to put on these kinds of charts.

Step 2: Connecting People

Soon after orienting, people in groups focus on how much they are going to trust the process, whom they know, whom they do not know, and the consequences of participating. At this point, the graphic facilitator helps to connect people with each other at an energetic level by creating a context of immediate acknowledgment for everyone who speaks. It helps to record participants’ names and introductory material on a seating chart, creating, in effect, a group portrait. People might be asked to add their names to a map or a history chart to show when they got involved. They also can be asked to create posters about themselves.

Immediate feedback feels good. An unrelenting acceptance of the worth of each person’s contribution, metered out in the steady beat of recording, is a drumbeat of acknowledgment that directly fuels group participation. When people begin to truly hear each other, they connect more deeply.

Step 3: Drawing Out Information

When people begin to open up and trust each other, the focus moves to what they need to learn and communicate. This process always begins somewhat slowly and can be confusing as people work to make connections and see patterns. Here is where recording comments on charts that are matched to the purpose of the meeting helps immensely. Graphic facilitation literally draws out people’s ideas. It works whether or not the drawing or recording is initially accurate. If it is, people feel heard. If it is not, they will move to correct the drawing or add more. Either way, more gets shared.

The informational flow is more visible and objective than the flows of attention and energy. Information can be wrong. Spelling can be right or wrong. The facilitator’s screen for listening might not be aligned correctly. The choice of graphic format or framework may be dissonant with the purpose of the meeting (as in trying to sort out roles and responsibilities with a free-form cluster diagram instead of a matrix).

In smaller groups, where the charts are integral parts of the process, such as a planning session with a management team, everyone can see immediately if the recording is working. In such cases, the process is self-correcting. This does not happen so much in a larger meeting, and not at all if the graphic record is created off to the side. Recording that is not directly observed while being created is not really graphic facilitation in the sense I am writing about it, and is usually called graphic recording. Such displays can be used facilitatively if the recording is reviewed and integrated into the process. If it is shared afterward only as documentation, a good deal of the power of the visual work is lost. Graphic recorders, teamed with nongraphic facilitators, can achieve the same effects as a graphic facilitator working alone if the facilitator uses the display as a tool for facilitation. In fact, in the case of larger groups, the team approach is preferable so that one party can stay facing the group and calling on people.

Knowing something about the content of a meeting helps to manage the informational flow, although preconceptions can get in the way of listening. In technical meetings, it is essential to know key terms, core concepts, and other background ideas.

In smaller groups, the ability of the graphic facilitator to learn very quickly is more important, using his or her natural curiosity as a driver to pull out more information. In fact, the facilitator’s ignorance of the subject can provide a stimulus for everyone explaining important ideas that the group may be taking for granted or leaving unreviewed.

It is especially important when working with imagery to have the group involved in tight feedback loops. Creating imagery from spoken language is an act of translation and is limited by the imagery and drawing ability of the graphic facilitator, which may or may not accurately correspond to the imagery in a speaker’s mind. This may be why using imagery is so stimulating: a very creative dissonance sets up between peoples’ internal imagery and the external image on the display. Struggling to get this right is part of what draws people out.

Step 4: Getting Closure on Commitments

The pinch point in group process comes when people need to make decisions and commitments. The constraints of other commitments, time, money, and other resources all become factors. Learning and mastering the various techniques for polling, ranking, sorting, and refining choices is more demanding than learning how to record expectations in a free flow of discussion. Yet mastering this level is the key to groups’ taking ownership themselves and moving to implementation and action, usually a more dynamic and flexible stage.

It is at the point of closure and commitment that the overall arrangement of charts becomes most important, and choices of frameworks and templates for organizing information become critical. If the various steps taken to get to that decision point are clearly titled and the displays arranged logically so they can be visually scanned and understood in a panoramic mirror of the larger meeting, then the way forward will often be discovered by the group. When the structure of the meeting is well designed to support the attention, energy, and information flows, groups can focus on finding the patterns of meaning and feeling, and not be tied up procedurally.

A good example is the Graphic Gameplan, shown in Exhibit 10.2, a strategic visioning template designed to help teams get their plans into one big picture. It reflects an archetypal metaphor people use to understand planning—that of the journey and destination—and graphically demonstrates the need for a sequence of activities to reach a particular target. It also introduces sequencing and timing, an essential element in taking action as a group. When it is introduced into a discussion that up to that point has not involved timing, it will precipitate action awareness. If the group cannot commit to a set of objectives, then it will be very difficult to do an action plan.

Exhibit 10.2

The Graphic Gameplan

Source: The Grove Consultants International.

Step 5: Supporting Action

As a group moves to action, the role of the graphic facilitator shifts from directing people toward closure and commitments toward supporting the agreements in action. Much of this is done by managing the informational flow, including clear schedules, progress review charts, and communications that graphically indicate the way forward. For this reason, the Graphic Gameplan works not only for closure but also for staying aligned. Some facilitators hand out a highlighted Graphic Gameplan every few weeks, marking off progress as a way of giving feedback to everyone.

Step 6: Monitoring Progress

The more high performing a group is, the more it begins to focus back on the energetic level, rising above objective plans to take advantage of breaking opportunities and flexibly adapting with new developments. A graphic facilitator at this stage mirrors this by using special murals and charts to commemorate the special