POP It!

Having a clear purpose in a meeting is something you’ve heard from me before – whether it’s a 15-minute check in or a 2-day off-site, when the organizers and the participants are extremely clear on the purpose of why they’re being asked to be there, engagement and the ability to measure if the outcomes were successful follow.

And, thanks to this excellent blog from Drawing Change, I just learned about a super handy, straightforward tool to make the meeting planning even better. It’s called POP, which stands for: 

Purpose, Outcome, Process

Developed by the Rockwood Institute, beyond defining the Purpose, or your why for convening the meeting, you add two more simple ideas. Your Outcome “speaks to what – the vision of what success will look and feel like when you “arrive.” And finally, your Process outlines the “how – the specific steps involved in getting there.”

It’s easy to jump straight to the process design, but if you’re clear on why you’re there and what it will look and feel like to be successful, that enormous investment of time, energy, resources, thinking, good food, and space together will be easier to measure and follow through on. 

So, here’s a graphic facilitator style worksheet you can use to help your group work through your POP for your next meeting – I hope you enjoy it!

Once again, thank you from my heart and soul for your support, great senses of humor, brilliant minds, collaboration and what you're each doing to make the world a better place.

Cheers, 

Where in the Virtual World is ConverSketch?

River Investigators Action Guide is Out in the World! I’ve had the joy of collaborating with watershed researchers at Colorado State University to illustrate an activity guide for children to explore our local river, the Cache la Poudre. Here’s a snapshot, and you can see a video of me flipping through pages on Instagram.

ShapingEDU Mini-Summit: Emerging Credentials Standards: Convening educators, industry professionals, and folks in K-12 education to discuss the future, power, and challenges of badges and credentials in addition to or in place of a traditional 4-year college degree. 

Learner Perspectives on Career-Connected Education Symposium: In another event focused on students, this symposium centered learners as speakers and panelists to guide the conversation and offer suggestions to make it easier to navigate the higher education system for successful career paths.

The Other AI

You know when you’re having a conversation with someone you admire, and pretty much every other sentence they say blows your mind?

Last fall I had the joy of getting to sit down with one of those people in my life, Heather Martinez, and something she casually dropped has been bouncing around inside me for months as I figure out how to chew on it and what it means for my graphic facilitation practice.

We were talking about process design for facilitating meaningful conversations, and I was gushing about Design Thinking and how complementary visual thinking is to that process.

Then Heather says something to the effect of “Yeah, but you can’t prototype humanity or emotions. That’s why I love Appreciative Inquiry!”

That brought me up short. I’ve dabbled with Appreciative Inquiry (or AI– not artificial intelligence AI), but with that statement, I immediately felt like it was a tool I needed to learn more about.

And this past week, the amazing and talented Christine Whitney-Sanchez facilitated over 700 IT professionals from across Arizona State University using Appreciative Inquiry and Open Space to build community, understand what’s most important to these people, and where to prioritize resources for the next year.

I think Appreciative Inquiry is a rad tool because it focuses on positivity, storytelling, human connection, discovery, and designing a path toward action. Unlike a lot of process design, it doesn’t assume to know the answers.

Here are the 5 D’s of Appreciative Inquiry, and you can learn more at this link.

Interested in applying Appreciative Inquiry to a question in your organization?

Once again, thank you from my heart and soul for your support, great senses of humor, brilliant minds, collaboration and what you're each doing to make the world a better place.

Cheers,

Where in the World is ConverSketch?

Provincetown, Massachusetts: Graphic recording for the second annual Broto Conference on Art and Climate Change where artists of all mediums and walks discussed how art could be used to scale climate action globally for good.

Photo: Michael & Suz Karchmer

Las Vegas, Nevada: With a group of engineers discussing the future of tech, trends, and big questions they’re thinking about. I can’t share much, but here’s one small illustration from my digital graphic recordings:

Tempe, Arizona: Back with the amazing Arizona State University Technology Office (UTO) who convened IT professionals from across the University to have conversations about what matters most to them and how the UTO can support a more cohesive IT network across the entire campus. This image was created from responses from an app in real-time during 21 simultaneous sessions!

Denver, Colorado: Supporting the work of Future Earth and H3Uni as they guided an esteemed group of individuals discussing the future of sustainability scholarship and how to address systems-level challenges to doing effective transdisciplinary sustainability research.

Yeah, it was a busy eight days!

Here's What Your Design Thinking Process is Missing

Have you ever been invited to participate in or heard about a Design Sprint? Design thinking, design sprints, agile, human-centered design thinking, all of these terms have been popping into my world more often.

As tools used to innovate and spark creativity, if you’re using design thinking but haven’t partnered with a graphic recorder, you’re missing out on huge potential to support your team through visual thinking.

But wait, aren’t design thinking and visual thinking pretty much the same thing? Well, no. But I love this excellent post and illustration from Xplane to see the difference, and where some opportunities exist to infuse visual thinking into design thinking:

Have you used any of these tools or strategies? How did it go? What other visual thinking tools are in the top drawer of your toolbox?

Once again, thank you from my heart and soul for your support, great senses of humor, brilliant minds, collaboration and what you're each doing to make the world a better place.

Cheers, Karina

Where in the World is ConverSketch?

Albuquerque, New Mexico: Returning to support the New Mexico Breastfeeding Task Force for their Hospitals and Clinics Summit. These practitioners work hard every day to help educate and support new mothers so they can make the healthiest decisions for themselves and their babies.

Painting in the Studio: Not only am I working on filming another Drawing Connections video for the National Park Service, I’ve had some time in the past couple of weeks to do some painting for fun. This one of the Nokhu Crags went to the Samburu Youth Education Fund Harambe to raise money for education and leadership development for young people in Kenya. Here’s a post about why I care so much!

Please contact me for inquiries on commissions.