Harvesting Day 1

Berlin gave us a warm welcome – EuViz 2014 begins!

Discovering Patterns

Agenda, Day 1
10:00   Welcome to Euviz! Plenary
10:40   Beginning to Connect the Dots: World Café
12:30   Coming into Deeper Dialogue:  Introducing the Tracks & Track Hosts
12:45   Lunch
2:30     EuViz Tracks (Part One)

• Track 1: MENTAL MODELS for ADVANCED VISUAL FACILITATION
• Track 2: BUSINESS – COLLABORATION & LEADERSHIP
• Track 3: EDUCATION – LEARNING & TRAINING
• Track 4: VISUAL METHODOLOGIES
• Track 5: Appreciative Inquiry & POSITIVE VISUALIZATION

5:00    Connecting the dots of the day:  Harvesting highlights, group insights & community news

We are 240 people from 35 different countries, gathering around the fire of visual thinking and practice to connect the dots of the field for the world.  The room was full of energy and good spirit as our hosts opened the conference. Guido Neuland talked about the dream of hosting the conference in Europe and the intention to connect and deepen the field.  It was a leap of faith and a bunch of determination, but he and Holger Scholz announced the invitation in New York last year.  In September a core team gathered and now here we are.  A big THANK YOU to all the people behind the scenes, especially the sponsors.  Lynn Carruthers, president of IFVP, told us there are 146 IFVP members present, and of course, everyone else is welcome! This is the 19th IFVP conference, but only the first in Europe.

Together we are creating a learning village over these three days.  There are four parts to our agenda – community learning together in plenary sessions with methods like World Café and Open Space, deeper inquiry through the Tracks, storytelling – both from our elders and from each of us – and hands-on practice through workshop sessions.  While the overall theme of the conference is Connecting the Dots, each day has a focus. Day 1 focus is Discovering Patterns.

Our community conversation began in World Café with these questions:

Round 1

What is it in your work or life that made it important for you to be at EuViz?  What question are you bringing to this conference?

Round 2

What time is it for visual thinking and practice?  What is the fire we’re gathering around?

Round 3

What is the learning field we want to co-create together?  How can we connect the dots to lift our work to the next level?

We heard voices from the group about the conversations they’d been in.  Some of us are intrigued and stimulated by the variety of styles, approaches and ways of working in the room.  We’re wondering if there’s a standard for our work and whether we have the courage to give and receive critical feedback. Others are thinking about the future of the field – how do we help drawing and visual skills to come into the education system and how could visual language become a world language (maybe the question is “how do we remind people that drawing is something everyone can do – and it helps!”).

Someone said it’s important to remember that we’re all a little drop of the ocean and returning our drop – coming back to the stimulation of “the tribe” – is important.  And another commented on how often he’s felt alone – and that our society reinforces this – but its good to come together and remember that you can also be part of community, sharing and learning.

Our community conversation has begun!

Getting our conversations on track

The impulse behind the two part Tracks is to offer an exploratory conversation in topics that are stretching our perspectives in the visual practice arena.  We asked our hosts to come with questions plus an idea of where to begin and then to offer an invitation to participants to really step in and be in inquiry together.

Tracks are an emergent affair – some participants will stay in the same track for both days and some won’t.  One of the tracks sent its participants out as “event anthropologists” to question other participants.  One of the tracks includes a workshop as part of its flow.

Here’s some harvest from Day 1.

Track 1: MENTAL MODELS for ADVANCED VISUAL FACILITATION

David Sibbet, Meryem Saget and Rachel Smith

When we designed this track, we hoped to create an experience for participants that would first introduce the idea that mental models and metaphors are all around us, in spoken, written, and visual language, and they can lead us to insights about a group’s thinking if we are able to pick up on them and work with them. Then, we wanted to give people some practice working with metaphors, and finally send them out into the conference as ‘anthropologists’ looking for metaphors and the underlying mental models that people might be operating with. We really wanted to explore the question of how to recognize when someone is using a deep-structure model versus using a metaphor as a figure of speech, and what that might mean for us as visual facilitators working with groups.

In the session itself, we started by exploring seven types of mental models: static (frameworks), mechanical (clockworks), self-regulating (cybernetic systems), self-reproducing (cells), self-expanding (plants), self-moving (animals), self-reflexive (humans). We went on to discuss why mental models and metaphors are important. We also talked about what to watch out for — what can go wrong — when a model is misunderstood, or an inappropriate model is used, for example. Participants talked about metaphors they commonly hear or use, asking questions to draw out a fuller picture of each other’s metaphors. We explored how to identify metaphors by key language signals, and classified metaphors into the seven types of mental models. Finally, we released the new metaphor-anthropologists into the wild and asked them to listen and bring back what they found on Day 3!

One of my personal take-aways from the first day came about when I was listening to participants try to ask questions of each other based on the ‘clean language’ approach that Meryem described in her presentation. In this approach, the questioner needs to ask very neutral questions, without putting his or her own ideas forward in the question. For instance, if someone says to you, “My childhood was a nightmare,” a clean-language question might be, “What kind of nightmare would describe your childhood?” It’s tempting to ask questions like, “Oh, so you mean it was frightening? How was it frightening?” — but that’s not a clean-language question, because ‘frightening’ is an idea that comes from the questioner, not from the initial speaker. It sounds like a neutral question, but it really isn’t. I was fascinated by how hard it is to frame completely neutral, non-leading questions, and also by how much you can learn from the person if you are successful in asking neutral questions.

Rachel

We had feedback from participants, they were very grateful because metaphors and mental models are a key subject in graphic facilitation and our track helped them re-discover the power of those images and how limited we all are by our own metaphors. Metaphors are perceptions, then they become our underlying assumptions and convictions and then we act on them. Mental models and metaphors are embedded in our brain and they limit us, it’s like a cultural conditioning. As graphic facilitators, how limited are we? The greater the capacity to explore other people’s metaphors without imposing one’s own meaning, the greater the facilitator.

I learned through the discussions that it’s certainly easier for a facilitator to look for clarification when someone uses a metaphor, when the graphic recorder is generally not in a position to ask direct question to participants to explore what they meant. Regarding the Clean Language approach for example, if the facilitator is not trained to ask neutral questions, like Rachel mentioned : “Your childhood was a nightmare…What kind of nightmare ?”, then the graphic recorder does not get enough details to draw on. When the graphic recorder works with a facilitator, the advice would be to prepare closely with the facilitator so he/she knows how to help the group dig deeper into their own mental models and metaphors and simultaneously bring valuable info to the graphic recorder.

Meryam Le Saget

See a short clip about this track.

Track 2: BUSINESS, COLLABORATION & LEADERSHIP

Sabine Soeder, Christine Chopyak, Ulric Rudebeck

See a short clip (commentary) about this track.

See some participant feedback here.

Track 3: EDUCATION, LEARNING & TRAINING

Ole Qvist-Sørensen and Loa Baastrup

See a short clip about this track.

Track 4: VISUAL METHODOLOGIES

Karina Antons and Martin Haussmann
On this first day in our track, we opened the arena for the participants’ experience about “mapping”:

• What visual methodologies and techniques of mapping would you like to share?
• How do you use it and in which context or process? 

After a small warm up, we used the room floor as a matrix with the two parameters “Group size: small to large groups” and “Level of interaction: little to huge group interaction”. In this “playground” we positioned different visual practises (proposed both by the hosts and the group).  Participants then moved to their individual field of passion (practises they wanted to share or to learn about, regardless of being an expert, practitioner or newby) creating dialogue campfires.

We offered them some guiding questions for their explorations:

• Who and what?  Who is in the group, where and how do we map?
• How?  Success factors and common patterns — what makes it work?

These are the campfire documentations:

• Graphic Recording
• Visual Group Work
• Video Scribing
• Visual Meeting Facilitation (1)
• Visual Meeting Facilitation (2)
• Visual Templates
• Visual Training

After this extensive deep dive we asked the campfire participants to fan out and form interdisciplinary groups and look for common patterns and success factors of visual practise … and then present key statements to the whole group.

Insights of the hosts:

We were happy and grateful for the high level of interest and engagement of the group. It seems crucial for the community of visual practitioners to share their methodologies and success factors. Nevertheless, it looks like we are just in the beginning of finding common patterns so we can develop definitions and quality criteria for our different fields of work:“We don’t have a common pattern – we need a definition of Visual Facilitation!”  A general description of visual practise could be:“Giving Form to thoughts – emotions – actions”

General success factors for everybody that works with groups and visualization:

• “Listen to metaphor”
• “Don’t summarize prematurely for group – respect the process!”
• “keep a neutral position”
• “be real and authentic”
• “Consider the aim (what is it for?)”
• “Balance the structure and the white space for interaction”
  

Visual practitioners are very conscious about their roles and responsibility within the facilitation context:

• “Do not isolate Visual Facilitation from Facilitation”
• “See the big picture (vs on-off-process)”
• “It’s not my drawing, it’s ours!”
• “Which perspective to take – -“theirs”? or “ours”?”
  

– Karina & Martin

See a short clip about this track.

Track 5: APPRECIATIVE INQUIRY & POSITIVE VISUALIZATION

Andreas Gärtner and Ralph Weickel
The track provided participants an opportunity to change their mental maps around conversations based on the questions they ask.  Participants learned to look for the visual they will not forget.  The Positive Lexicon session gave participants a process to use with their clients to bring a visual to commonly used terms in an organization.  They learned the Appreciative Inquiry 4-D Cycle to engage clients in new conversations and co-collaborate for new results.  And participants were sent into the conference as “anthropologists” to test their questions in the field.

See a short clip about this track.

Is it the end of the day already???

We came back together to hear from our track hosts – What happened?  Did anything shift? Yes! Every one of them had new insights and new questions as a result of their sessions.  Then we took a moment in silence for everyone to reflect on their own key insight of the day.  The room immediately became a buzzing learning zone as these were shared in groups. The feedback on insights was punctuated by one of our Chinese participants, who speaks no English.  Through an interpreter he told us how challenging it is to take part in a session you don’t understand at all.  But he did understand!  He took in all the images, the symbols, the energy of the group and understood very well.  Now he plans to work on cross cultural sessions back home.

Our day ended with Karolina Iwa, our Embrace Berlin woman, presenting a wonderful selections of restaurants for us to choose from, each of them tied to an aspect of the conference.  This is how hospitality should be!  And so we were off to dinner – some of to the IFVP AGM and others on the town. Have a good evening!