• Create the next strategic plan
• Set priorities for the coming year and make them highly visible in a graphic form
• Produce a policy statement on community development
Examples of intangible harvest:
• Reawaken commitment to the organization’s mission
• Strengthen relationships and connections across functions, geography, and experience levels
• Give people the sense that their contributions are valued, respected, and instrumental to moving forward
• Offer a space for synergy, energy, and enthusiasm to be expressed
A “caller” is someone who is holding and naming an intention with a group of participants. Often a calling arrives in a compelling fashion—you cannot not do something. As a friend once said: “I thought somebody should do something about this until I realized my name is Somebody!” And it might be that as part of an organization you are tasked with creating an event. You have received this task from someone who is “the caller” and you would also be in the calling team
Using Perspectives to Build a Practice
Bryan Coffman
Fossils and facilitation
Next week I will facilitate 70 participants from a large organization through a process of discovering solutions to a thorny strategic challenge. Success will rely upon innovative thinking. I’ve done all the usual preparation—design, agenda building, logistics—but I’m also reading Donald Prothero’s book The Story of Life in 25 Fossils. In particular, Chapter Seven captivates me. It briefly covers the emergence of plants from the seas onto the land. Understanding how this happened may be the most important preparation I can do for my upcoming session.
Why?
Reflecting on an article from a completely different domain forces me to make connections and uncover insights that would otherwise be impossible. I ask myself, “How does the emergence of plants onto the land 1.2 billion years ago relate to solving a thorny strategic challenge?” It turns out that the first life to colonize the land was likely in the form of symbiotic associations between algae and fungi. According to Prothero, the products of this association “served to help bind and stabilize the land against erosion by wind and rain, even as they helped marine algae and cyanobacteria pump more and more oxygen into the atmosphere.” This is the kind of metaphor that I need to keep in mind for this session. Moving into new strategic territory may take a symbiotic association between unlikely groups, while in the meantime, the people and systems from the old strategy need to continue to pump more oxygen into the atmosphere because ultimately the oxygenation of the atmosphere enables all of the life that follows. I now have a principle—in metaphor—upon which to base my practice and thinking next week.
This kind of reflection and combination has informed my practice as an illustrator as well.
Before I was a facilitator I was a real-time illustrator, or scribe. I’d listen to people talk and build diagrams in real time that showed their ideas and the relationships between them. I also undertook more conventional illustration projects where I would work with a client over a period of days or weeks to build a visual model of their ideas to help them gain insight into, and communicate, complex or sensitive concepts. Later on I took up the practice of facilitating events where groups of people designed solutions to complex problems. I ran the three practices in parallel for many years. Today I’m mostly a facilitator, but illustration is still a significant part of my personal design process.
Using perspectives to build our practice
At the level of a lifetime of work, combinations of perspectives shape one’s entire practice. A new discovery often emerges by reflecting on the intersection of two themes, two disciplines, or two perspectives. Creativity and personal growth both rely on exploring such combinations. While drawing, one may experience this discovery by combining different colors or using different media together, like markers and pan pastels. Or the artist may combine a visual metaphor like a river, with a topic of discussion like the trajectory of a company’s history, to provide insights about how the company experienced dangerous competitive rapids or meandered through periods lazy market dominance.
Bryan Coffman • Using Perspectives to Build a Practice
The visual practitioner may also find inspiration to guide their work from other, completely unrelated domains. In my case these domains included geology, engineering, cartography, painting from the imagination, the 4,000-year-old strategy game of Go, the field of pattern recognition, the mathematical principle of recursion, and cybernetics, among others. I’ve summarized their influence here.
Perspective 1: Engineering and problem solving
I started this work in 1984. At that time, we visual practitioners called ourselves scribes. I was working for Matt and Gail Taylor at the Acacia Group in Washington, D.C. In the small Radiant Room that served as a plenary for our DesignShops, or collaborative events, there was a long expanse of marker boards at the front of the room and a shorter one set on the left side at right angles to it. The other scribe on our team templated the main wall with bridges, dragons, or other visual themes. The participants copied key ideas from their breakout group areas onto designated spaces on that wall. During the reports from each breakout group and the conversations that followed, I listened and drew a synthesis—a visual set of insights and conclusions—on the shorter wall.
Since the main board already held a visual representation of the content from the breakouts, I was freed from the need to capture what was said. Instead, I made sketches to help me understand the whole system that the participants were talking about. I had studied geological engineering and systems engineering in college. Engineers use diagrams to map out and solve problems. I was taught to clearly state what variable I was trying to solve for, list the givens and assumptions, and then to draw a diagram that showed the elements and their relationships to one another. The diagram would help me understand how the system worked—what forces were at play and where. Once I understood the system, I could solve the problem. I used this diagramming technique as a scribe to depict future visions, plans, the interplay of conflicting forces, the flow of information, and the relationships between departments.
Perspective 2: Recursion
In addition to scribing, I sometimes offered a walkthrough of my ideas to the participants following the reports and conversation. Great value may lie in affording scribes the opportunity to explain their work to the group live, either immediately after capture or at the end of a block of work. Most participants in a collaborative session appreciate the illustrations that scribes create, but if you ask participants to describe the content and meaning of the art, they often find it difficult. A brief description or guided tour helps.
Following the DesignShop I often authored an analysis of my illustrations for distribution to the participants. This forced me to review and iterate my work in more depth. Part of the review was technical, focusing on improving my drawing ability, and part was concerned with understanding the content and searching for deeper insights that might help the reader. This twin practice of describing the work to the participants and then generating a follow-up document provided the opportunity for valuable self-reflection and input from others—insights that I folded and hammered back into my practice and work over and over like the Japanese swordsmith folds and hammers steel while forging a sword.
Perspective 3: Requisite complexity
Around that same time, I spent a day with Jim Channon. Jim was a former Army officer, visionary, storyteller, and illustrator. He had an ability to clearly convey very complex ideas on paper, but not by simplifying them. His brand of illustration invited the viewer into exploring the complexity of an idea. One or more visual principles anchored each drawing and everything else was organized around those principles. The organizing principle might be a circle, or a 3D
arrow leading off into the future, or the inside wall of a vast cylinder etched with interacting elements of a new organizational structure. He used this approach to convey the relationships between elements that collectively formed a complex, multi-dimensional whole. Successive images in a storyboard allowed him to move the viewer laterally, deeper, or up to a higher vantage point within the same universe.
Much like an architect of the day would create a roll of blueprints illustrating all the many facets of a design, Jim could create and manage a complete set of blueprints for complex ideas. This was a mind-blowing metaphor for me. I had been drawing ideas as sets of relationships among visual actors (words, glyphs, or larger visual structures). Now I knew I could hunt for a visual organizing principle and then assemble all of its component elements within and around it without losing the viewer. Layering became part of my pattern language. By using the visual organizing principle, I could embrace more complexity on the marker board or page. Most of the problems clients face are incredibly complex. Finding a way to express the complexity requisite for insight often trumps simplification.
Bryan Coffman • Using Perspectives to Build a Practice
Perspective 4: Mapping
During a summer job as an intern geologist I had used well log data to map the sub-surface geology of a gas storage field in eastern Colorado. Gas was leaking out of the field somewhere under the surface. In order to solve the problem, I had to jump back 150 million years or so and create a map of the Mesozoic landscape as it appeared then. This allowed me to trace the meandering paths of the rivers that would later become the sandstone that held the gas my company was storing. I used this map to determine that our gas field was leaking where the ancient river had been breached by flood waters carrying sand, which then connected to a subsequent river system that cut into it millions of years later. The gas was therefore leaking into an adjacent field that our company did not own. Armed with a portfolio of maps drawn from many perspectives and time periods, I was able to see the problem and outline a solution.
Interlude: Synthesis and the organizing principle
I began to slowly build a synthesis for my practice. I combined my problem-solving and mapping experiences in engineering with a recursive approach to analyzing and improving my work. On top of this I added Jim Channon’s complexity-embracing style of idea mapping and visual storytelling. The map became the primary metaphor for my work. A map allows me to display complexity in two, three, and four dimensions (by adding change over time) without losing applicability. It also could be used as a problem-solving tool.
When I shared a few drawing tips with participants in sessions I sometimes tipped a marker board over on the ground, inviting them to think that they were uncovering a landscape of their ideas viewed from the sky, currently shrouded by clouds, but ready for exploration. This jolted them out of recollections of drawing on a marker board in a classroom at school or a conference room at work. Ideation became revelation instead of genesis, peeling back layers of obscurity to reveal what had been there all along.
In addition, I recognized the need to find and apply an organizing principle to my drawings. This principle could be visual, like a set of concentric circles, or it could be a theme crafted from words. It could be a metaphor, like that of a river, where each feature relates to one of the speaker’s ideas. Tributaries might show how several ideas joined to become one. Towns or villages along the river might represent major turning points. The organizing principle provides a vehicle for the arrangement and connection of most or all of the other elements of the drawing. Note that organizing principles don’t have to be patterns; they can also be key words, or the use of key colors. Whatever helps the viewer to make sense of the composition.
Perspective 5: Thumbnails from imagination
I took a painting workshop at Idyllwild Arts Summer Program from Max Grover, an accomplished author and illustrator of children’s books. He taught us to work creatively from our imagination and rapidly express these ideas with acrylics on paper. For each exercise, we selected a theme and drew several small thumbnail sketches in pencil. Each thumbnail suggested a different treatment of the theme. Then we transferred aspects of one or more thumbnails to the final painting using acrylics. The whole process might take an hour or two.
Up to this point, most art classes I had taken presented me with a physical subject to study and then asked me to capture what I saw using some medium (like watercolor paints) on some surface (like canvas or paper). This was a very different process from the scribing I was used to, where the subject consisted of a flow of words from one or more speakers. Scribing is an aural process more than it is a visual process. The speaker’s words in the moment inform an internal process of creating mental images that the scribe attempts to transcribe. I don’t scribe the speaker’s words. I scribe my thoughts about his or her words. Finding the time to study the flow of speech is not possible.
Bryan Coffman • Using Perspectives to Build a Practice
In Max’s class, where thought was the subject, I honed my skill of thinking in thumbnails. I began to see scribing as a multi-layered set of thumbnails captured through observation of a dynamic subject residing fleetingly in thought.
Perspective 6: Creative tension
I learned another valuable lesson from Max. He told our class that the first brush stroke on the paper creates a problem. Once all the problems are solved, the painting is finished. For me, the first stroke began the dance between hearing, insight, and expression. Sometimes these flowed together like currents in a river and other times they wrestled with each other in creative tension. Maybe my insight couldn’t find proper expression, or what I heard challenged my insight. Often the tension emerged as a feeling that something was missing. Or maybe a shadowy organizing principle that could connect many different elements of the composition eluded my grasp. This sense of tension may lead either to frustration or curiosity. Curiosity enables exploration that solves the problem. But it took me years to embrace this.
Perspective 7: Pattern
In the 1990s I learned to play the rudiments of the game of Go—Igo as it’s called in Japan, or Weiqi as it is known in China where it originated. It’s very easy to learn, but mastery requires superhuman dedication and talent. Western chess mimics warfare, but Go is a game of market share. Capturing the opponent’s pieces is not the primary goal. Instead, during the course of play, the black and white stones build patterns across the board. Where the relationship between the different colored stones is unstable or undetermined, ownership of the territory is in question and the pattern is fluid. Where the relationship is determined, the pattern settles. When all of the unstable relationships are resolved, the game concludes and the final pattern has emerged. Either black or white has won. Good players develop the ability to recognize and build winning patterns.
Scribing isn’t quite the zero sum game that Go is, but pattern recognition plays a role. Scribes use certain images or patterns over and over. They recognize patterns in the way that speakers work through a topic (one year the recurring theme might be innovation, and the next it might be customer centricity). They learn that certain images or visual structures communicate better than others. For instance, most scribes have used a light bulb as a stand-in for “ideas.” Or a causal loop motif to show the mutual influence that several forces have on one another. Or a tree structure to show the branching of ideas. Or a storyboard set up as a series of boxes. Many patterns are small in size or limited in scope, but patterns that dominate an entire drawing are a form of the organizing principle that I mentioned earlier.
Conclusion: Building a framework
I don’t stand in front of a group and actively call each of these perspectives to mind when I scribe. Like many other scribes, I tend to enter a state of flow while drawing. A landscape unfolds, influenced by the speaker’s words. However, once or twice while scribing I f
eel a thrill when I consciously uncover an organizing principle around which I can construct a map. Or I step back and try to consciously understand how a whole system works and then draw that. Once the insight is attained, though, I’m back in the flow.
In the late 1990s I was a partner with Jay Smethurst in Sente Corporation and we began to create a synthesis of our thinking. We viewed real-time illustration as a combination of actors, relationships, frames, and annotations. The actors and relationships formed the core of the work much like nouns and verbs in grammar. Actors were the ideas that emerged, expressed as pictures or words. Relationships connected actors with one another, represented directly by lines, proximity, color, visual interaction, or some other technique. Frames provided the visual sectioning or emphasis of larger sets of actors that shared a common theme. Framing could also be done using lines, color, or shading. Or it could simply emerge as a part of the composition without any specific delineation. Finally, annotations comprised the textual descriptions, labels, and comments required to clarify the diagram for the viewer.
This taxonomy was general enough to support application of the seven perspectives I described above. On top of them all lay the organizing principle—that word, theme, image, or shape that could knit everything together.
Bryan Coffman • Using Perspectives to Build a Practice
Synergy
The behavior of the whole is not predicted by the behavior of the parts. I’ve always liked that definition of synergy. The shorthand version that reads, “1 + 1 > 2” doesn’t quite capture the excitement or uncertainty experienced in the presence of synergy. Combining the seven perspectives led to an unpredicted expression of this work across my career. They became more valuable to me as a collection than they were individually. Mapmaking and creating thumbnails overlapped in interesting ways. Embracing complexity while looking for patterns kept the work clear without oversimplification. Acknowledging creative tension made problem-solving fun, even when performed in front of a live audience.
Drawn Together Through Visual Practice Page 11
