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!
Listeners Wanted!
Has the Live Creative Now podcast made a difference in your life? Would you like to be featured on the podcast?
I want to start sharing listener stories, so if you have a story of how listening to the podcast has changed your life for the better in some way — big or small — I want to feature you in a Listener Spotlight.
Here’s how it works:
1. Just log into iTunes and leave a rating and review. (If you don’t know how to do that, you’ll find step-by-step instructions at livecreativenow.com/itunes-review).
2. Then copy and paste what you wrote in your review into an email, and send it to me, along with why you want to be featured in a Listener Spotlight, and how the podcast has made a difference in your life. You can email me at livecreativenow.com/contact.
That’s it!
If I pick you for a Listener Spotlight, we’ll have a relaxed, fun conversation, and the recording of our conversation will be part of a future episode! How cool is that?
Want a creative kick start?
Check out my book!
What would change for you if you could totally revel in the joy of creating? You CAN, with The Creative Sandbox Way!
You’ll learn:
- Melissa’s 10 fool-proof guideposts that have helped thousands get joyfully creating.
- 5 reasons why creative play is good for you, AND for the world (it’s neuroscience, baby!)
- Why “I’m not creative” is always a lie, and how to bust it.
- How to turn creative blocks into friends.
AND you’ll get creating right in the book itself.
“It’s one part field guide, one part creative practice—and I loved it. The Creative Sandbox Way is an adventure packaged as a book.”
~Chris Guillebeau
NYT best-selling author of The Happiness of Pursuit and The $100 Startup
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!
PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!
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