Wow!

Wow!

This is a spring person – good for illustrating energy, fun and youthfulness!

That is how I felt after doing two graphic facilitation workshops back to back.  It’s been about two weeks but I’m still feeling all the positive vibes that the workshops brought on.  I’m not sure exactly what it is but whenever we (my co-facilitator Nancy) and I bring a group together (often people who don’t know each other), and put markers in their hands – the energy explodes and people seem to be on fire (in a good way).

We worked with over forty people from around B.C., Alberta, and the U.S.A. between the venues of Rossland (aka Rosviz) and Vancouver (UBC viz).

At UBCviz, we were asked how does the planning process work, so we drew it out at the workshop.  Unfortunately the image is a little blurry (possibly a metaphor for our planning process?).

In a nutshell, we put our brains together, use online platforms to help us communicate face-to-face and with our notes, take the information back to our offices and process it individually and then come together again (and again and again) until we come up with a flow that works.  In the moment, we check in, adapt and usually improvise!

So, once the planning is done, what actually happens?  Well, thanks to Joseph Topo from UBCviz I can offer you this visual summary he created after the workshop.

That covers the first 1.5 days.  The last half of day two isn’t drawn yet so in the meantime, a quick summary is that we spend most of the afternoon doing collective visual harvests of what we learned.  These are artefacts that help document what people remember from the workshop and want to recall in the future.  In small groups, people rotate between three harvest stations (the type of stations change year to year).  This year we had  “create a book”, “large visual harvest wall”, and “create a template” stations.  We finish with a visual evaluation.

Here are some photos of the harvest walls (1 from Rosviz and 2 from UBCviz):

And some additional photos that capture the essence of the workshops:

For the full set of photos you can search rosviz on Flickr or follow this link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/rosviz/

So, two weeks later, how am I feeling?  Inspired!

These workshops were the first face-to-face  meetings I had since giving birth to my son 10 months ago.  I was a little nervous going in however the people were kind, my co-facilitator was generous and my husband took great care of Ira which provided me the freedom to do what I love.

Thank you to those who participated and I invite anyone who hasn’t experienced this workshop yet to join us in 2014.  Date and location are not fixed, so drop a line and let me know what you would like to see!