In a button-down New York board room in the early 2000’s, as I was hanging paper on the wall and pulling out my markers, one of the leaders pulled me aside and said in a hushed tone, “be careful you don’t become PWF.” Later I learned the acronym stood for “Perceived Weird Factor.” We did seem weird back in the early days of visual facilitation. It was radical to create a 4 by 8 foot mural with illustrating people’s words with pastel images. There were only a few of us, artists in suits. Our work was mostly word of mouth. We knew that once people experienced it, they would understand the power of seeing a group’s ideas pictured all one page.
Now of course visual facilitation is mainstream and there are tens of thousands of visual practitioners drawing on the walls during meetings and leaving participants with visual snapshots of their collective thinking. Visual facilitation solved the problem of boring face-to-face meeting. But now there’s a new problem: Online meetings.
Once again we are on the forefront of a visual revolution. Most people consider online meetings a necessary chore of modern life. Our surveys are helping define why they are a chore instead of a joy. Rules of engagement are unclear. A few people dominate. People often check out and multi-task, waiting for a relevant moment to chime in. People often hold back, believing it’s polite to let others speak. Even if people get the information they need during online meetings, the experience is not personally satisfying. So some of our clients who’ve experienced visual facilitation in face-to-face meetings asked if we could help them with online meetings. The answer is a resounding YES.
We figured out how to facilitate online meetings so every voice is heard. And their own words generate an automated infographic during the online meeting. Our technology is TTenTT, and once again, the diffusion is word of mouth. It’s surprisingly difficult to explain to people the impact on a group’s effectiveness when they really listen, exchange ideas, and see how their ideas fit together. So we’re having a bit of a deja vu. As our online meeting innovation is diffusing, we’re answering questions surprisingly similar to those we answered almost 20 years ago when we started bringing live visuals into meetings. Today we have more robust answers because of our deep experience working with great organizations over the years, and my two-year Master’s program in Jungian psychology with a focus on the power of symbols to engage hearts and minds.
Over the years we’ve learned what makes a great meeting and why. Each of these will be the subject of blog posts coming up.
- When a group’s ideas are mirrored in a one-page visual, people focus on a shared vision of what connects them rather than on their individual parts.
- Diverse voices are represented~and innovation happens~when facilitation provides a structure for everyone to speak, listen, and reflect together.
- Images engage people emotionally as well as intellectually, so they are more likely to assimilate and remember ideas presented visually.
- Trust develops when people are authentic and open with one another; an environment of vulnerability and transparency is enhanced by four key questions.
- Collaboration is unleashed when individual ideas are fully expressed before they are fitted together; visuals enhance this kind of co-creativity.
- People will embrace change and new directions if they can see how to fit their own work fits into the larger picture.
- Design thinking helps everyone keep their edge, which is often lost today as people are fast-forwarding through the essential foundations of design.
So we have a grand challenge ahead bringing together all of our research about how work groups become great when these factors are activated during meetings. We are absolutely devoted to making this happen online because of our passion and our experience. People ask why we are so fiercely motivated with TTenTT. My protoge and partner El Lovelidge and I experienced an amazing success with visual facilitation creating systematic change in a key government collaboration but then watched it fall apart due to ineffective online meetings. We knew we could help by bringing Visual Insight facilitation online. Our vision was supported by two deeply experienced people with dozens of patents and successful track records with innovations–one is the world pioneer in interaction design, Joy Mountford. The other, Dan Esebensen, created some of the largest systematic technology solutions of our time, used by international governments, Dan Esbensen. Together, the four of us created the visual innovation for online meetings.
This is an exciting time as new online meeting companies such as Zoom are creating supportive technology for facilitation, such as breakout rooms and shared spaces for creating artifacts. Our job at TTenTT is to bring nuanced human interactions and visualization into those rooms. The best human interaction occurs as a result of the co-evolution of technology and culture, weaving cognitive science and psychology into tools that augment human intelligence. For us, this is not only a technology innovation, but also a philosophical passion we’ve pursued as a result of our work with Dr. Douglas Engelbart. We showed his theory of the co-evolution of human and tool systems in this 4 by 28 foot mural. We think we may be riding the second wave now!
