The meeting game

What game are we playing? Maybe we need some ground rules.

This evening, I was reflecting on a meeting I participated in recently. It was reasonably productive, as meetings go, but I perceived a lack of focus, and thought we could have accomplished more if we'd had some ground rules. I started thinking about ground rules, and how to introduce them. Why does that notion seem so foreign? It's as if we assume that just because we all speak English, we assume we know how to hold a meeting and get something done. Individually, we each know how to get something done. But our instinctive or habitual approach may not work for everyone in our group.

What if we all decided to play our favorite game at the same time? That's how I felt at this meeting:

One person mentions a topic or raises a question: A basketball is in play. Someone answers, kicking the ball. Oops, are we playing soccer? Someone else lobs in a football. Next, a tennis ball. Another, a baseball. Now - what's that - it's a whiffleball! Oh, now there's a shuttlecock in the air! Wait, a bocci ball! A bowling ball! Juggling pins! Oranges! Apples! Knives! Flaming batons! Wow, this is exciting! Oh - were we supposed to be having a meeting?!?!? Hmmm....

Head or heart?

A few months ago, a friend of a friend had to make a very difficult decision, and afterward was publicly questioning it in her blog, in a post titled "Head Versus Heart". (Her name is Roz Savage, and she had been rowing, solo, from California to Hawaii.) This motivated me to compile a summary of the various decision making models that I had been studying over the past few years, to share with her.

Some of my letter to her:

...In my opinion, the simple answer is, for complex decisions like you faced recently, use both the head and the heart. Use a structured approach that helps you look at all the important factors from multiple perspectives.

The attached mind map shows the broad steps of a number of decision making models. (To read a mind map, start from the upper right main branch and go clockwise.) You will notice many similarities among them. They typically start by gathering objective data, then subjective data, then developing both obvious and creative solutions, and filtering them through your goal and value systems. It is my hope that grouping these all together in the mind map makes it easy to compare, and to identify similarities and differences...

I've sometimes felt that I've made decisions haphazardly, and that I may have had better outcomes if I'd taken a more organized approach. I am hoping that by comparing these models, I may gain some wisdom to guide my future decision making processes .

I will be writing a series of posts, each focusing on a different aspect of decision making, or a different model.

Wandering

It's only through wandering that any of us ever get a solid sense of where we want to go.

(Scott McCloud, Making Comics, p. 238)

Seems like I wander a lot. It's nice to have this validation!

Exciting conference!

I am really excited about the VizThink conference coming up in January in San Francisco. Several of my visual thinking heroes will be there as invited "facilitators" (they're not "presenting"!), and I suspect I'll find some new heroes among the other facilitators.

Here are just a few of the facilitators:
Robert Horn, author of Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century
Dave Gray, founder of Xplane
David Sibbet, founder of Grove Consultants
Nigel Holmes, former graphics director of Time magazine
Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics

This conference is sure to be visually and intellectually stimulating! Early registration discounts end October 24. For more detail, see the VizThink conference website.

Graphic facilitation workshop

I just received an announcement that may be of interest. "Deconstructing Graphic Facilitation" is a two-day workshop being offered in Sausalito at the end of September, with a half-day follow-on session in January.

Great news for visual communicators!

Robert Horn's Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century has just been republished, by Xplane, "the visual thinking company"! It's been out of print for at least 4 years. The best way to get a feel for it is to look at some of the sample pages, and read about it on Horn's site. It's written in visual language (which Horn defines as "the tight integration of words and visual elements") and arranged in two-page spreads.

I could write a description and review, but that's really going against the spirit of visual communication! That idea is succinctly captured in this sample spread:
The reason I'm so excited about it is because I believe visual communication has enormous potential to solve problems through improving understanding between individuals, groups, even nations, because, compared to the serial nature of text or spoken words,

"Visual language opens wider the gates of communication. It lets more data through, with greater complexity, accuracy, and nuance."

(p. 242) If more people start to consciously use visual language, more people will adopt it as their "native" language, and we will all have an easier time understanding each other. This book is many books in one. It is practical, with a lot of examples, plus a lot of reference information, history, and research citations. It must have been a huge amount of work, so I'm glad it has been republished so more people can benefit from that investment.

If you want to read more about it, check out the announcement on Dave Gray's CommunicationNation blog. And for more background, see Horn's websites here and here.

If you want to buy it, you can order it here.

For a terrific example of crisp, clear, concise visual communication with a touch of whimsy, check out Xplane's website.

Color arrays

A basic concept in the Albers/Nelson color curriculum is the color array. An array is a "family" of colors, consisting of two "parent" colors and at least one "child" color.

Using arrays makes it easier to start thinking of color relationships.

Color classes

Over the past 6 months, I've been learning a lot about color. I've been taking classes from Dick Nelson, a watercolor painter and digital artist who studied with the famous colorist, Josef Albers, at Yale. Expanding on Albers' teachings, Dick has created a series of experiential lessons in which students discover for themselves just how relative our perception of color is.

Relative? Isn't red, red? No, how we perceive a color depends on what other colors are around it, how bright the light is, the color of the light, and individual characteristics. What we call red could look like orange, brown, or gray. I'll show some examples later.

Because my mission is to make ideas visible, I plan to summarize my learnings in a series of blog posts. This will also help cement the concepts for myself.

Simple but powerful

I've been working on a project this week to critique a number of websites, prior to planning a site redesign. To help ensure that I was thorough and consistent in evaluating each, I developed a form to use. This is a simple idea that can have a big payoff.
For each site, I pasted in a copy of the home page, then printed out the form so I could mark it up, noting the areas my eyes focus on first and other striking or unique features, and filling out the objective and subjective design critique.

My next steps will be to review all the critiques, noting ideas I want to try for this website, and developing some thumbnails or rough sketches based on these ideas.

What is your definition of success?

We chase it, usually unconsciously, all of our lives. If we stop to think about it, we may define it in terms of career achievements, or luxurious possessions, or talented children. Usually, one aspect will dominate at any one time, then some event will bring another area into focus, perhaps health or family. To me, it is multifaceted, with the whole adding up to an overall feeling of peace of mind, contentment or satisfaction. I once defined it for myself in nine elements, which I depicted in a circular, mandala arrangement, with colorful images and evocative fonts. Later, I came across other definitions with eight elements which map almost exactly to the nine I had defined. Last week, I created two sheets which can be printed out and filled in by anyone wanting to explore their own definition of success.

You can use the "Wheel of Life" to define your idea of success in eight areas of your life, and rate how your current situation compares to your ideal. This may provoke some ideas to change in some areas to better align your life with your goals. Sometimes it only takes a small change to make a big difference, and just being aware of the mismatch or desire provides all the motivation necessary to make the change.

The "Table of Life" uses the same eight areas as the Wheel of Life, and can be useful for evaluating a proposed major change, such as a career move or geographical move, to see how it might impact all areas of your life. This allows you to "try on" the change, and can give you a better feeling for whether it's a good idea for you in the long run. I used this approach once when I felt my life felt out of balance, and I was considering options for improving it. Enumerating the impact in each area supported my gut feeling about why the change made sense.

Using tools like these is effective because they involve your head and your heart, engaging both logic and intuition. The whimsical images encourage a light-hearted, fun approach, which is a productive state of mind for exploring options. The structure ensures that all areas are addressed, and provides space for exploring the answers in your heart.

The eight areas of life used in these tools are:

1. Career, life purpose
2. Money
3. Health
4. Family and friends
5. Romance and intimacy
6. Personal growth, spiritual alignment
7. Fun and recreation
8. Physical environment

(When I decided to write about this topic, I remembered a poetic definition of success attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson. When I investigated, to see if I wanted to tie it in here, I found that it was actually most likely written by a woman named Bessie Stanley for a magazine or newspaper contest. There are theories about how it became associated with Emerson, but no one knows for sure. There is an interesting investigation of the topic, with several versions and theories, here. There's a humorous take on the evolution of what defines success in various stages of life at the bottom of the page.)