Thanks for the local love ShoutOut!!

Answering one of the questions on how I got into this work: I took a workshop to learn this skill, and found that it brilliantly brought all my past experience together– as a creative visionary, a political strategist, an artist, a process consultant, a systems thinker, a journalist, and an experiential facilitator–under one umbrella. I’ve been doing this work ever since going on almost two decades. My work continues to evolve as I evolve. I’ve since added another aspect which is embodiment (body-based) practices as a somatic movement teacher of the 5Rhythms.

To read the whole interview, go here.

Julie Stuart, Atlanta-based graphic facilitator, gets interviewed about her career as a visionary and strategist

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The post Getting a little hometown love in Atlanta first appeared on Making Ideas Visible.

What’s the big difference between these models? Active vs. passive. It’s up to you to decide what kind of experience you want to create for your attendees.

By giving people time and space to make real connections through unhurried conversations instead of overwhelming their brains with content, you’re letting them digest important information and explore their thoughts at a comfortable human pace.

And by getting them to engage together in Open Space, you’re modeling what a community of practice can look like. Very often the ideas and solutions that happen in a highly engaging conference/meeting become realities in the world. Isn’t this ultimately the outcome you want for your convening?

The post Creating an engaging conference isn’t hard unless you’re using the old model. first appeared on Making Ideas Visible.

And I’d love to tell you what I’ve been up to.

“We cannot discover new oceans unless we have the courage to lose sight of the shore.” – André Gide

In the summer of 2021, I became a sailing captain, not fulltime—yet, but I followed my love of the ocean and lifelong soulmate relationship with water and got a bunch of sailing certificates. Now I’m an instructor and sail often on the large lake that’s 30 minutes north of me and I get down to the ocean when I can. And what I know about captaining a boat is directly related to the work I do when you or your organization/team/group needs to go from where you are now to where you want to be.

Because when you are grappling with something that needs deeper exploration, when you are headed somewhere that you’ve never been before and you are not quite sure how to get there, you need a WAYFINDER (it’s me!) with skills of navigation which include an ability to discern where you currently are, intuitively assess the conditions you are in, and design a journey to bring you into to the more brilliant future you are creating.

When you may need wayfinding

Clients often come to me with open ended questions like this:

“We are in conversations around how to engage a broader group of stakeholders in this effort, with a very tentative plan laid out that has gaps in facilitation and forward-path. After some reflection and external benchmarking, it is my position that you could be a good match to help us wrangle a big, hairy vision and many unknowns. Hopefully this short paragraph intrigues you?”

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Imagining, strategizing and planning at an offsite on where to be a year from now, teams leave the meeting aligned and ready to move forward together.

In the last couple of years the offsite meeting has come back because we are humans and when we get in a room with each other there’s more opportunity for honest dialogue, deeper conversations, less distractions, and more trust is built as we relate to each other human to human.

I design meetings based on where the client wants to arrive at the end of the gathering and work backward from there with different kinds of creative processes from visioning, drawing, dialogues and even when they are game, embodiment practices (using body movement to gain insights). This allows for fresh perspectives to emerge as we journey though a multi-layered experiential process.

And there is always strategy underlying all of it because they are spending money to get results. So we emerge with priorities and actions to take. The group feels a strong sense of alignment, a deeper level of trust with each other, more cohesion in what they are working toward together and more enthusiasm. Some of these outcomes are hard to replicate in an online meeting format which is why I’m thankful folks have been getting in the room again.

We do a lot of these meetings each year but still have some room for yours. Get in touch if you feel like you’re in need of an injection of inspiration, strategy and alignment. We’re happy to help.

The post Offsites: gain alignment and move forward together first appeared on Making Ideas Visible.

The post what’s lighting you up? first appeared on Making Ideas Visible.

Or more to the point…how engaging are your engagements? With your clients? Team? Company? Conference attendees?

As someone who’s hired to be at meetings and conferences, I’ve experienced just about everything, and I still see people with the best of intentions struggling to do engagement well. To actually deliver meetings, gatherings and conferences that engage participants meaningfully, leaving them with a sense of time well spent.

In another newsletter I’ll call out the bad/awful/let-me-outta-here stuff I’ve seen (without naming names) but for now let me give you a few ideas to incorporate into your next meeting that may invigorate the experience of your participants so that they can be more engaged, activate better thinking and leave inspired rather than fatigued.

Delivering a visioning session for a small business to identify their culture in words which we then translated into an office graffiti wall. 

Make it welcoming

Use home teams or buddy’s:
At a big meeting or conference give people a “home team,” either a buddy or a small group of three, to check in with and debrief their experience and learnings. This was used very effectively by a large stakeholder group assembling after the election who found their terrain had suddenly changed, and attendees were grappling both personally and professionally make sense of it.

As new insights occurred and information was absorbed, they were able to digest it with their home team instead of becoming overwhelmed, which happens quickly especially at longer meetings.

If you consciously design for this you can assist your participants to better process their experience and leave feeling invigorated rather than overwhelmed.

Make it personal

Use Firestarters:
At a recent conference with participants from many organizations, foundations and businesses working in social entrepreneurship, before each speaker or panel we had a “Firestarter” talk–someone who told a 5-10 minute personal story about how they got into the work or where they felt they had made the biggest impact with their work. These stories were inspiring and heartwarming as the telling of it felt real and relatable, and provided personal connection to the larger mission everyone was committed to.  

Have a biography book or website with in-depth bio’s:
Assembling a large group who may not know each other? Create a handbook ahead of time with relevant information about your participants. Ask a couple of personal questions that allow them to share more than just their work personality. Use questions that can start conversations like:

 

• What keeps you up at night?
• With unlimited resources, what one thing would you do/change today?
• Whose shoulders do you stand on?

Working with a group of stakeholders in art & place-making to find their direction forward as a movement.

Make it mindful

Lots of meetings are incorporating various mindfulness practices like meditation, stretching and movement. Pausing for a moment to connect to the body helps to move energy from the brain back down into the body so the mind can keep learning. 

Do a mindfulness practice as a warm-up:
At a conference recently the conveners pre-arranged for several of their participants to contribute a “mindfulness practice” throughout the day.  One of the movements was from a tai chi practitioner of many years. He silently led 200 people through a two-minute tai chi sequence that was so profound and deep you could feel the room connecting in an unspoken way.

Make it flow

The brain can only take in about 90 minutes worth of information before it needs time to process what’s being heard. For some people it’s more like 20 minutes depending on their attention span.

So you need to move people into different situations to keep their thinking fresh. This can be from plenary to small group to one-on-one to individual reflection, or any combination of that.

It can be from one room to another. From inside to outside. Or from a large circle of chairs to small groups gathered at tables.

When I design sessions I’m always thinking about how to move people around so that we keep their minds fresh to do their best thinking.

Facilitating a meeting for many organizations across the Southeast working on the social equity part of the Clean Power Plant Plan.

Make it participatory

Design a World Cafe or Open Space process:
The best meetings have lots of time for participation. Instead of the “sage on the stage” approach where people are talked at all day long, give them sessions where they get to talk and contribute like a World Cafe (I design and facilitate a lot of these). Or a session where they get and give feedback on best practices or projects. Or be bold and use Open Space (similar to an unconference) where the participants get to suggest and hold meetings about what they are most hungry for. This is really powerful engagement and can surface new solutions and leadership from your participants that may surprise you.

Try a Chalk Talk:
A process that gets everyone involved quickly and silently. Goes like this: write the question that needs answering on a whiteboard (you can do 1-3 questions at a time). Everyone has a marker and silently they start writing or drawing their thoughts or follow up questions on the wall at the same time. Others will comment on those thoughts and questions. Let it happen for about 10-15 minutes until everyone stops writing. Then debrief.

And of course, Make it Visual 

Visually mapping a multi-day meeting for social entrepreneurs grappling with a changing political landscape.

That’s my jam, as you know.

Give it a try or call us if you need help

If you try one of these the next time you convene a meeting, let me know how it goes. I’d love to hear about it.

And if you’re having a meeting or conference and need help with it, my favorite thing to do is design experiences for when people get together to do the work they are supported by a process that lets their creativity flow, a process that guides them into new territory in a way that feels easy and natural where their best ideas can come to life.

I recently had a client hire me because they felt I was more invested in the experience of their participants than other facilitators they talked to, and that’s high praise. For more examples of how we can help you be more engaging, swing by our Client Stories page and click on the photos to learn how we engage.

Let’s do meetings better!

The post How engaging are you? first appeared on Making Ideas Visible.

I loved this project because it brought together several components that make it especially fun and rewarding: a really juicy policy issue facing our country, an amazingly dedicated and caring staff, and a fabulous facilitator who I’ve always wanted to work with.

Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS), an organization that works on immigrant and refugee issues, held a series of meetings around the country to assess what kind of impact they are having in the communities where they work. I finally got a chance to team with Chris Corrigan, a wonderful facilitator from the Art of Hosting practice, who ran the World Café process for the day.

A tapestry of visual maps.

LIRS had held two meetings beforehand in Philadelphia and North Dakota using colleagues of mine as the graphic facilitators. Their visual maps were hung in the room serving as a rich tapestry of the conversations that had occurred in other communities.

Chris asked me if I was intimidated by my colleagues’ work. No, I said, I can only bring what I bring and trust that it’s good enough.

Ah, gorgeous tables.

The LIRS team/staff was over-the-top impressive. If you ever need pointers on how to prep a room for a World Café, they have the definitive manual and have set the standard. A lot of effort goes into prepping the space for a World Café so that participants feel comfortable, relaxed and invited into the conversation. Imagine a café in Paris with a lovely table cloth, flowers, and a wonderful flowing conversation that enriches your life.

Their set-up included:

• Handmade tablecloths from bolts of beautiful fabric
• Gorgeous flowers on each table
• Candy
• Loads of markers
• A take-away branded puzzle for each participant (kind of like a Rubik’s Cube)

Hello in 25 languages.

The day-long process began with finding out how many languages we could say “Hello” in. I lost track but I think there were about 25 in the room.

The day was rich in storytelling as people from Venezuela, Italy, Thailand and about 25 other countries shared their experiences about their home country and their new county, America.

What amazed and surprised me was how proud they were to be US citizens. The love the schools and the opportunities even while missing parts of the culture they left behind which struck me as such a contrast to how I’m always hearing about how our schools are failing and the lack of opportunities that exist.

• What does it mean to belong?
• The conversation focused on questions like:
• What is belonging?
• What does it mean to belong?
• When do you know that you belong?

Participants clearly differentiated the difference between “Welcome” which happens first and is more superficial and “Belong” which someone explained as being able to put their feet up on the coffee table.

Exploding with color.

I don’t know if it was the blue of Tampa Bay seen thru the windows or the infectious excitement in the room, but I used more vibrant colors in a single map than I have in a long time. It’s positively exploding with color and accurately reflects the gorgeous blend of diverse backgrounds and cultures we strung together that day.

Wow. What a take-away.  

At the end of the Café, the LIRS team did something that was so over-the-top impressive my jaw dropped open for a full 20 seconds. After the first round of the harvest (World Café’s usually have three rounds of questions and conversations) I gave them a digital image of the visual map so far. They ran off to Kinko’s to make copies for everyone, which they inserted into a folio along with a certificate of participation. They wanted folks to walk out with a little reminder of the day and something to show their family and friends. Impressive!!

The post Visualizing a World Cafe on belonging. first appeared on Making Ideas Visible.

Scientists, policy makers and academics never fail to respond positively to seeing their information presented in a creative visual way. One person in particular said, “You’ve made a whole lot of people happy, I hope you know.”

Click the graphic to view enlarged version. 

This is a HUGE problem.

Currently 36% of adults and 17% of children are obese. Obesity-related health issues consume 9% of the health care budget, a whopping $190 billion in costs a year. The reasons why are vast:

• Lack of fresh foods available typically in low-income neighborhoods, which has created food deserts.
• Physical education being replaced in schools for more time for math and science. More screen time in front of televisions and computers.
• A built environment in many places that relies heavily on cars for transportation rather than walking or biking.
• Marketing of unhealthy food choices targeted to very young children to influence their food choices throughout their life.
• National subsidies that go toward corn, sugar and soy beans which creates an unhealthy food production cycle.

Eat less, move more.

The good news is there’s a lot happening already to confront this national challenge and we’re already seeing success. The rise of obesity is starting to slow as people get the message and get active. Examples:

• The Mayor of Nashville has a program called “Walk 100 miles with the Mayor” that encouraged thousands of people to take up walking on a daily basis.
• Nashville also created 130 miles of bike trails.
• Mayor Nutter of Philadelphia brought in fresh farmers markets to low-income areas that had never had access to fresh produce.
• Parks are being created in Los Angeles neighborhoods that previously only had parking lots.
• Colorado is requiring 600 minutes a month of physical activity in schools.
• The military is completely updating all of their menu services to offer healthier choices of food.
• Cities across the country are converting abandoned sites to community food gardens.

Michelle Obama gets the nation moving.

Click the graphic to view enlarged version.

One of the brightest programs making a difference is the First Lady’s “Let’s Move” project which has encouraged millions of kids to be more active and to eat healthier. Michelle Obama has visited countless schools, done push-ups with Ellen Degeneres on the Ellen show, planted a vegetable garden on the White House lawn and inspired so many around the country to focus on reducing childhood obesity.

Drawing the Cookie Monster.

Click the graphic to view enlarged version.

 Sesame Street showed up to talk about what the show is doing to influence kids toward making healthy food choices. The song “Just try it” sung by the Muppets encourages kids to try new vegetables.

Cookie Monster sings about the dilemma of eating a cookie or an apple and decides that cookies are a “sometime” food. And Lily, a new character, was created to highlight the issue of food insecurity—lack of food on a daily basis—which faces millions of children every day.

An HBO Premier.

HBO premiered the documentary The Weight of the Nation and the Institute of Medicine released a new report which received a ton of press coverage including the front page of USA Today and a mention from Bill Maher.

The bottom line is there is so much work to be done obesity needs a national focus and mobilization of resources. It’s costing us as a nation in lost productivity, rising health care costs and early death. Plus a lot of people are unable to have the happy and healthy lives that they truly want. Let’s get busy.

To see more visual maps from the conference, head over to my Portfolio page.

The post Visually mapping obesity for the CDC. first appeared on Making Ideas Visible.

The arc of justice bends because people are tugging at it.

A couple of weeks ago, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed and several other leaders from the Atlanta community gathered at The Friends School for An Inter-generational Dialogue on Human Rights as part of the school’s 25th anniversary. I had the pleasure of visually mapping the candid conversation.

Click the image to view an enlarged version.

The big question of the evening was how do you build a culture and a community that works for everyone? Mayor Reed made some powerful points when he spoke about the people who are being left behind—many of who grew up in poverty and didn’t receive a good education.

Poor people are needed to do well because we are facing external forces we haven’t had to deal with before, namely the growing nations of China and India. The US business model is no longer working because we can’t afford to carry that much wasted human potential.

Jerry Gonzalez, director of GALEO, an organization focused on Latino rights, made the point that half of the labor force in agriculture are undocumented workers. Our agricultural economy would collapse if we decided we didn’t want these workers.

Toward the end, they focused on the children and how we can help prepare them to deal with diversity by:

• Taking them to vote
• Learning a foreign language
• Understanding our place in the world
• Knowing that it’s okay to be different
• Being an ally for those in need
• And most importantly…be kind.

The post Bending the arc of justice. first appeared on Making Ideas Visible.

Julie, we saw the final cut of the video today and it is absolutely beautiful. We have a pretty large crew (for us) at the sr4 offices this week getting ready for the meetings next week, and people kept hearing about the video and coming into the conference room to see it. Each time we showed it for someone new, everyone who had already seen it watched it again. I’m thinking we’re going to want to do this again somewhere down the line, and I can’t imagine doing it without you. If you have already decided that you NEVER want to do that again, please let me know so I can let myself down easily.
–Bill Seyle, founding partner at sr4 Partners in Chicago

They love me in Chicago.

A couple of weeks ago I was in Chicago. In a chilly room. In an old brick building converted into a loft studio used for filming.

With me were 4-5 guys who were part of a film crew including Paul Kotkovich, cameraman and Bill Seyle, creative director.

We had come together to film a 7-minute video similar to the RSA Animate videos that are all the rage right now.

How it all started.

Back in November I was contacted about this project. It was for a client I had done some large-scale, live visual content capture for a month earlier.

Sometime in mid-December I received the script… well, parts 1 and 2 of a 3-part script. I spent a day concepting the illustrations that would best show the storyline and drawing them in sequence while taking photos of each segment so my client would have some idea of how the video would go.

Revisions were made to the script. Revisions were made to the drawings. The last part of the script arrived the week between Christmas and New Years. I charged “double holiday overtime” for having to work during that week.

Finally it seemed we were all happy. The producer/videographer and I had a very short time frame in January in which our schedules overlapped for the filming. Two days in fact.

Eleven snowplows for a whole city.

Then the snow/ice storm hit Atlanta. I knew I’d be grounded for a week and wouldn’t be able to make it to Chicago. We have 11 snow plows total here. The last time I was at O’Hare, I counted at least 30 standing by just to plow the runways. I had a fun time explaining to my Chicago crew that yes, indeed, five inches of snow can shut a Southern city down.

When I finally got to Chicago a week later, Patrick, the producer/videographer who I had been working with solely for three months, was in Buenos Aires where “the weather doesn’t suck. Nor the steak or the wine” working with another client.

He left me in good hands with his colleague Paul. Neither one of us had done this kind of work before so we would learn together.

We were going to do several takes, the whole way through all of the illustrations and accompanying text and take the best one.

I had thought that we would do several takes and they could splice a good part from Take 1 with a good part from Take 3 and another part from Take 2 like they do in the movies. But no, we had to do it clean all the way through from start to finish. Um, no pressure.

The best leaves ever.

We did a test run of a few of the initial images. The video started with an oak tree and two falling leaves.

Because they would be laying an audio over it later we were able to talk while I was doing my thing.

We figured out it was helpful for me to give cues about what I was going to do next so Paul would know where to focus and zoom and move the shot. I could also slow down when I needed to think about the next thing or when we had to move the camera because that could be edited out.

After a few minutes we had the process down and decided to go for the real thing.

The first time all the way through which we called our Take 2 was perfect. It took about 30 minutes as best I could tell.

Feeling like we had a good one in the bag, we stopped for lunch.

At the start of Take 3 I felt a little out of sorts. While drawing the leaves I said, I think I forgot how to draw leaves. Two of the crew responded right away, “Those are the best leaves I’ve ever seen. Those are Oak Park quality leaves.” Ah, managing the talent are we?

We got three quarters of the way through Take 3–including this incredibly long, excruciating-to-write segment of text that Bill reads to me while I write after which he exhales because he’s nervous for me–and realized we had skipped a sequence.

Crap. Can’t use Take 3.

Well at least we had Take 2. That is until Bill pointed out one word was wrong in the vision statement. I wrote “transform” instead of “improve.” A big difference to this client’s mission.

Realizing we didn’t have a single clean take, I push back my plane. Patrick texts from Buenos Aires: “How’d it go?”

We’re still here I text back. “You’re going to miss your plane,” he texts, managing the situation from South America.

One more take for all the marbles.

We took our time. Everyone was focused. We talked through each segment. Finally, I got to the logo at the end and left out the little sideways triangle that was supposed to fit between two words as part of the logo for this whole project. Not just any triangle. The logo triangle.

#$%@. I forgot the triangle. I can go back and squeeze it in, I tell them. And I did. It was a little smushed but it looked fine and we were all happy and relieved.

I had a large ginger mojito at O’Hare that evening before catching my flight home.

Things I learned:

• This is a long process start to finish. At least the video I was involved with.
• This is an expensive process. Again, at least the one I was involved with (think mid-five figures).
• Like some of my colleagues who have been sharing their first time experiences of doing this kind of work—it’s tedious and not nearly as fun for me as working live.
• When I told Bill how I usually work—live and in real-time—he said, “That must be so hard.” No, it’s way easier than this.
• I’m tempermentally unsuited for the kind of work that requires lots of revisions. This would include acting, screenwriting, illustrating. I’m more of a one-take kind of girl.
• I would do it again with the right people and for the right price. The right price is probably not less than $5000.

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