Graphic Faciliation
By Peter LloydIn a productive brainstorming session, ideas can flow faster than anyone can transcribe them. In contrast, an online brainstorming session like brainline captures every idea, but you forfeit some of the advantages of a live session.
Some live-session facilitators do their best to encourage everyone to write every one of their ideas on an index card. Others bring along a technographer to transcribe every idea that flies across the room. You can give everyone an input device and hope they will enter every idea into a database. You can record the audio and video of your session. But all of these methods fall short of the goal of capturing every idea.
What if we forget about capturing every idea and focus on going away with the big picture? There's a bid idea! If you can live with it, then here's a way to capture perhaps something better than the text of every idea and move up to a more conceptual, looser and less literal idea inventory. Consider graphic facilitation.
I haven't been able to find a definition for the technique, sometimes called "graphic recording," so let's just go with "a method of recording ideas of a meeting, brainstorming session, or other event involving group participation in drawn images rather than with words."
What am I doing giving you a verbal definition, anyway? On ImageThink you can see a graphic definition by one of the method's practitioners, plus time-lapse video of her in action.
Graphic facilitation not only eliminates the need to capture every word, it does a better job of giving you the (dare I say "gestalt"?) the whole that cannot be described merely as a sum of its parts. In plain English, I guess we could say "the big picture" that not only gives you back what you put into the session but continues to suggest, lead, or draw you to more ideas.
The associative nature of images, like music, leads you outward. Rather than anchoring you to the verbal descriptions, visual representations of ideas tend to open themselves to a range of interpretations.
If go with graphic facilitation at a session or meeting, expect to captivate your group as they watch the graphic artist make their ideas come alive as images. And rather than finding yourself limited to the list of verbal ideas you've collected, your graphic record with tell you at least as much but also remain open-ended and suggestive of alternative interpretations. So even though you can't count the ideas, you'll actually have more.
Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.