148: Panel of Visual Communicators

I’m doing something really different today. I’ve got a panel of three creatives who incorporate visual communication in their work.

Kelly Kingman, Julie Gieseke, and Steph Brown each work with people, groups, and organizations using creative engagement methods, and one of those methods that they have in common is visual facilitation, or graphic recording, or some variation of that.

Kelly Kingman is a professional graphic recorder and visual literacy educator. Kelly has worked with Fortune 500 companies, supporting everything from ideation sessions to executive leadership retreats. She has live-drawn the ideas of great thinkers as Dan Pink, Seth Godin and Malcolm Gladwell and taught visual thinking skills at MIT Sloan School of Management’s annual Innovation Week.

Kelly is passionate about empowering others to use drawing as a tool for thinking and leading. She has taught many workshops, and is a repeat instructor at MIT Sloan School’s annual Innovation Period. She creates custom training for teams interested in tapping the power of visual communication for collaboration and creativity.

Julie Gieseke works with organizations bringing the tools of Visual Facilitation and Creative Engagement to bring strategy and tactics into clear focus. Julie coaches individuals to hone their leadership vision and purpose through deep engagement with their core values, strengths and inherent creativity. She uses a range of tools and methods that tap into the client’s natural, creative resources.

In addition she incorporates change methodologies such as Appreciative Inquiry, Positive Psychology, StrengthsFinder and Neuro-Linguistics. She works with clients from the initial stages of concept and challenge, to design processes that facilitate change and sustain growth. Her clients include corporate, non-profit, higher education and one-on-one consultation.

Steph Brown has worked for 15 years in the performance improvement sector introducing graphic facilitation and collaboration design to government executives and teams from the White House to the grassroots of change. Both visual artist and facilitator, Steph supports organizations by designing experiences that optimize the power of people in conversation together. This can range from live hand-drawn murals to document collective memories, to facilitating and hosting conversation cafés to build organizational understanding, to leading design innovation sprints that transform ideas into action.

Have a listen to our conversation as this talented trio shares their expertise and experience, including:

• How they got started with visual communication
• How they incorporate visual communication into their work
• Getting over “I don’t know how to draw” anxiety and developing a healthy relationship with one’s drawing
• The power of events and graphic facilitation for creating collective memories
• Graphic facilitation as a conflict management tool
• Being “the expert” in the room has the unfortunate effect of stripping the other people in the room of their own sense of creative power, as if the graphic facilitator/graphic recorder is the only one responsible for being creative.
• The importance of drawing practice and building your visual library
• Don’t overvalue that initial mark — ask, “What can I turn this into?” (Remind you of anything? Creative Sandbox Way™ Guidepost #7 is “Take the riskier path”!)
• The picture is just a platform for the conversation being carried forward
• Letting go of perfectionism
• “Practice is no joke! It’s really, really true! If you’ve been drawing simple figures and shapes for as long as you’ve been drawing your alphabet, you’d be good at it.” -Kelly Kingman
• Practice is good in terms of developing a skillset, but is an entirely different thing from being creative.
• Mike Rohde’s Sketchnote Handbook (affiliate link)
• The power of doodling/sketchnoting (even if it’s chicken scratch + stick figures, like mine!)

Something Cool

From Steph: Angel Cards (aff) non-affiliate link

From Julie: Lynda Barry

From Kelly: Dixit (aff)

From Melissa: The Book of Mistakes, by Corinna Luyken (aff)

Enjoy!

 

Hear ye, hear ye! This is to serve as official notice that all links to anything for sale, be it books or courses, are likely to be affiliate links. What this means is that if you click through said links and make a purchase, although it won’t affect the price that you pay, a few coins will jangle into my coffers, enabling me to buy a packet of hard gluten-free biscuits to feed myself and my husband for another day, or perhaps a pen with which to create some artwork. Or perhaps they will contribute toward paying a fraction of my web hosting bill, so that this blog and podcast can continue to exist. Thank you kindly for your attention.

Thanks for Listening!

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Now go get creating!

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