Collectively & Creatively Reinventing Expectations

Have you felt it?

During and as the pandemic has evolved, I’ve heard and felt the same thing you probably have.

“I’m so busy…”

“It’s crazy these days.”

“Parenting and working is just…a lot right now.” (Understatement)

The burnout is real. So is the creative reinvention.

What can we do to dial the intensity of expectations down together, collectively and creatively?

If you work with people, here are some suggestions I’ve see and heard lately:

• Establish communication norms. Is there a platform where instant replies are/aren’t expected? One group I recently graphic facilitated articulated that a Teams message could be sent any time, and the recipient would respond when they were able. More urgent matters were direct phone calls.

• Practice a monthly Deepening Day. This team also imagined a once-a-month day dedicated to any sort of personal or professional development the person felt would best serve them. Ideas ranged from attending events to making time for extended lunches with partners or colleagues to setting an away message from email to focus on deep work.

• Live the values: Whether you’re a leader or a co-worker, shifting culture starts with each person on the team. Demonstrating by not responding immediately to every email, or sharing insights from your Deepening Day, or taking those vacation days can all contribute to shifting the pace and expectations we hold each other to.

And really, take that time off to breathe.

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?

In the Studio: Working on video storyboards, synthesis illustrations, and preparing to facilitate a workshop here in Fort Collins next week. Here’s a close-up of one of 11 regional local food gatherings around the state of Colorado I’m visually distilling for display at a Summit happening this winter.

Back from the River: There’s nothing like six days completely offline to refresh and reset. Here’s a painting of the stunning canyon created from camp one evening.

How to Scale Your Work Up, Even When Once Size Doesn’t Fit All

Have you ever been wildly proud of something you or your team accomplished, but then wondered…Can this scale?

One of my favorite things about being a graphic recorder is that I get to work across sectors and pick up on patterns and shifts. For example, right now, three of my clients are all figuring out how to scale across the country in very different areas:

• Supporting children with medical complexity and their families in hospitals and clinics

• Helping communities become more resilient in the face of large-scale wildfires

• And creating a national community of practice around community-led conservation

While there is not one path forward, some real gems became clear last week with the team working with children with medical complexity. I thought these ideas deserved a little airtime, and maybe YOU are working on scaling too…perhaps there’s a keeper in here for you!

• Take an iterative approach - start small, test an idea, and learn and grow from there. Remember: It doesn’t have to be perfect!

• Scaling complex work takes time. In a world of instant gratification and grant-makers wanting results, this may be tricky…and also imperative.

• Relationships are key to building trust, which is key to being able to move quickly or be patient when needed.

• Facilitate communication across teams regularly, in-person if you can, to build those relationships and cross-pollinate ideas.

• Take what you’ve learned in each place and weave it together for solutions that are greater than the sum of the parts. You may already have a solution!

• Ask those you’re serving to be part of the process (and compensate them for their expertise and participation!).

• You already know enough. While it’s almost always tempting to want/NEED more data, you probably already know enough to take the first steps.

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?

Chicago, Illinois: After working together remotely in 2020-2021, it was an absolute joy to get to meet the convening team and state teams working together to improve the lives of children with medical complexity and their families. Closing this multi-year pilot in a flawless hybrid meeting, the teams shared their key insights, discussed what’s next, and how to sustain the work moving forward.

Albuquerque, New Mexico: Graphically facilitating for a leadership team at US Fish and Wildlife Service to craft a visual metaphor telling the story of equity, inclusion, and creating a welcoming organization for all employees.

Virtual with Adobe Creative Campuses: Sharing and learning with Creative Campuses across the globe, these quarterly gatherings are always lively, a lovely way to build community virtually, and thoughtfully curated to create welcoming and informative spaces! The sessions start today, so here’s a graphic from the spring!

Why Visuals in Meetings Are So Good

Many of you are folks I’ve had the pleasure of getting to collaborate with, and you’ve experienced the magic sparked by visuals directly.

Even if you get it, sometimes you need to persuade someone else why it’s an excellent idea to have a visual partner in the room. This is what I hear from clients time and again.

Graphic recording…

• Wraps your people in the beauty and richness of their ideas when the room is full of walls covered in colorful and content-full drawings

• Sparks creativity

• Brings joy and laughter

• Supports groups as they co-create the extraordinary

• Helps you get more done in less time

• Deepens shared understanding

• Can create a distinct brand and feel for events

Here’s what an absolutely phenomenal recent client said:

“Karina is a joy to work with. She was thoughtful about all parts of our meeting planning process, and extremely skilled at guiding our teams’ conversation. She was able to adapt on the fly when important conversations arose and seamlessly adjust to the needs of the group while keeping us on-task to accomplish our goals. With her help, our group made progress I didn’t think was possible! We have a strong sense of our mission and values, and tangible plans to realize them. The visuals that she sketches during the call helped ground our conversations and are really easy to work with as we move forward. Thanks, Karina!”

— Hazel Shapiro, IARPC Collaborations

And for some cool science behind visuals, check out this post.

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?

Las Vegas, NV: At the RES 2022 Economic Summit with the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe sharing strategies to write and win grant funding for social, environmental, and health goals.

Fresh Video: This video helps prospective undergraduate students understand what career paths they might pursue with a degree from CSU’s Environmental Public Health program. Major appreciation to the team at CSU and Bevin Luna for the narration and original music! Click here or the image above to view the digitally hand-drawn video. Note: I am not currently accepting new video projects.  

The Underrated Potential of Designing Time to Connect in a Retreat

Is your team is planning an off-site retreat soon? If you are, I cannot recommend one thing to your agenda design team enough.

If you want to…

• Make the most of the fact your team traveled to (most likely) an intentional location

• Help shift mindsets from “me” to “we”

• Build trust

• Leverage your time together in person…

Build in unstructured time for your group to get to know each other.

It can be so tempting to pack every last moment of an agenda with work to get done, especially after 2+ years of mostly remote collaboration. But here’s what happened when we didn’t do that with a group I got to graphically facilitate through a 2-day offsite in person last week.

This team is geographically dispersed, and some folks had been hired during the pandemic, so they had never met together as an entire group in person. Together, we designed an agenda that began with a day of hiking and an optional group dinner before we even began to talk strategic planning. Meeting them the next day, I never would have guessed they hadn’t met together before. The participants themselves remarked at how connected they felt even after just 3 days together.

If you don’t have time for a full day of hiking, fear not! We also created optional semi-structured opportunities for participants to get to know each other during lunch and infused each day with activities that provided a chance to share personal stories in large and small groups, like the one above.

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?

Boulder, Colorado: For the previously mentioned focused, fun, and collaborative off-site retreat for a team of arctic policy researchers. Thank you IARPC Collaborations for the work you’re doing for our planet!

Fort Matanzas Video is live! The final installment of the Drawing Connections to Climate Change illustrated video series is out in the world – find out how you can help protect habitats that support the beautiful and diverse wildlife of the Florida Coast! Note: I am not currently taking on new video projects.

Getting Ready for GCSE Global Conference - Will You Be There? The Global Council on Science and the Environment is hosting their annual virtual conference June 21-24, 2022. If you’re a Member Institution, an unlimited number of participants from your school can attend for free! To register or learn more about the event, click here. Here’s a graphic from last year’s conference!

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.

Here’s How to Channel That Inner Creative Kid

Do you ever feel like you can’t draw? I felt that way too. In fact, I dropped my art degree in college because I didn’t think I was “good enough”. 

On a recent graphic recording job, someone remarked “I wish I could draw like that!” and I replied, as I almost always do, “anyone can draw!”. You might roll your eyes at me, but roll with me for a sentence or two.

When you were a kid and someone gave you paper and markers and said “go for it”, that’s exactly what you’d do, right? Those papers would be covered in stories, made up worlds, families! Then…something changes along the way and you start to doubt. And draw less. And less. 

You (probably) wouldn’t run a marathon without training, right?

Why on earth would we expect ourselves to be excellent at something we don’t allow ourselves to practice?

The generous and talented late Howard Ikemoto put it better:

“When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college- that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, ‘You mean they forget?’”

— Howard Ikemoto

So give yourself a chance. A blank piece of paper can be intimidating. To get over that, you can cut straight to the chase and make a title in the center of the page, or start with making some marks in the corners, playfully, that loosen you up. Here’s a blog post where I show another fun way to get used to making marks on blank pieces of paper.

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?

I’m teaching a workshop…today! This morning (CO time) I’m sharing my insights and practices for email marketing with my colleagues for the International Forum of Visual Practitioners - here’s a snippet of the outline I’m going to be working through with participants.

Adobe Creative Campus: Not only did I get to illustrate the presentations and key ideas from the Creative Campus Collaboration, I also got to design some swag for the participants – check out this tote and tumbler! The team at Adobe also crushed it and had this page highlighting the graphics and sound bites put together by the end of the day.

Denver: An in-person job – hooray! Working on paper and with chalks to support higher education executives and CIOs discussing how to support students in a digital age.

In-Person, Remote, Hybrid…What to Center No Matter the Method for Meeting

Why do we create? Why do we meet? What drives much of our action as humans? Expressing our ideas and connecting with others in different ways is core to who we are. 

Stating the obvious here, this connection has been shaken up the past two years, and as we begin navigating in-person and hybrid situations professionally or personally, we’re rediscovering how to be with each other in meaningful ways. 

“Whether your team is in-person, remote, or hybrid, one thing is true in any form: Connection doesn't happen on its own. You need to design for it.”  – Priya Parker

As a graphic facilitator, I get to co-design for connection with clients. How do we do this, even…especially in the virtual environment?  A few of the seeds we can cultivate toward connection include:

• Building in time for participants to share experiences outside of the work goals of the meeting

• Creating opportunities for small and large group conversations

• Thoughtful questions that support vulnerability

• Creating visuals that highlight connections, shared ideas and values, or intentional visual metaphors deepen the opportunities to connect

If you’re curious to read more, here’s a post on why human connection is so important. 

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?

Invasive Species Video: Watch the fresh digitally hand-illustrated video here to learn about the difference between native, non-native, invasive species, and pests from the National Park Service!

In the Studio: I’m working on several projects from graphic facilitation design to more videos to a guide for children to explore our local river. Here’s a snapshot of what River Investigators might observe about their watershed! This booklet will be available this spring for visitors along the Cache La Poudre River.

How to Train Your Brain to Be Just Fine when Things go “Wrong”

Well…that water doesn’t look like I wanted it to…

Can you remember a time that something went “wrong”? Trying a new recipe turned out…meh. A difficult conversation with a loved one. A creative project didn’t turn out perfectly on the first try.

How did you react? 

The sheer volume of curated feeds can make it easy to fall into a thought pattern that if something didn’t go perfectly right the first time, it failed. 

This is crazy talk. How can we expect ourselves to instantly be experts without practicing, experimenting, failing, pushing, learning, expanding, playing, falling…and getting back up? 

We’re human. We’re going to do things “wrong”. It’s beautiful! And, with practice, we can shift how we feel when things go sideways. Here are a few of my tried-and-true favorites:

• Bring the humor. Try not to take yourself so seriously – it’s okay to laugh at how ridiculous mistakes can be.

• Check your expectations. It’s fantastic to push yourself, and to expect that it will probably take a few tries to improve consistently. 

• Practice kind self-talk. Imagine a friend is telling you about whatever it is that happened – what would you tell them? Now, bring that same compassion to yourself. 

• Be curious. What can you learn from the situation if you let go of feeling like you need to defend what happened?  

• Take five. Give yourself the space and time to take a break – do something you love to reset yourself.

Ahhhh, yes. That’s what I was going for. Why don’t things turn out perfectly the first time?

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?

An agenda slide designed for a remote graphic facilitation process.

Special Education System Improvement: Remote graphic facilitation with leaders of education systems to improve systems to better support students with differing abilities state-wide. 

A scene from a storyboard work in progress.

Videos: From invasive species to more (award winning!) Drawing Connections to vets and climate change, the ConverSketch studio is humming along in 2022. These videos are still in various stages but I’m excited to share them with you in the coming months!

You DID That – Visual New Year’s Reflection for 2021

If you’re like me, taking time to reflect on the year and set intentions for the next one can be a powerful practice. A few reasons I love it: 

• Revisiting and celebrating accomplishments – work and personal

• The opportunity to focus energy on what’s important for the future

• It creates space to acknowledge and mark the passing of time (especially needed when during covid it can often feel like a “Blursday”)

But taking the time to “do reflection” also feels like it takes some effort. Where to start? Do I really have time for this? Have I even done anything worth reflecting on? 

I recently learned the term productivity dysmorphia: the inability to see our own successes or to acknowledge the volume of our own output. It can be easy to constantly be looking to the next thing without properly taking time to acknowledge the energy, creativity, critical thinking, and genius that went into what you’ve already done. We don’t need stats to know that the past two years have been hard. Burnout is real, especially for working moms: I salute you. 

To balance the societal current that is pushing us to do more, right now…I’ve realized I want to offer an opportunity to celebrate your wins! Right click on that worksheet at the top to download and fill in your own reflections.

If you want to do some future-focused work, I updated a visioning worksheet for 2022 – right click the image below to download it. I’ll also be participating in this Intention Setting Workshop on January 6th, co-facilitated by my wildly talented friend Abby Van Muijen. 

More New Year, New Practices from the Archives:

A Gentle New Year’s Reflection - 2021

Reflect & Envision - 2017

Tips for creating a Vision Board - 2016

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, 

Peaceful Holiday Wishes for You

Happy Holidays!

From my heart to yours, sending warm wishes for a peaceful and joyful holiday season. 

Whether you’re feeling extra festive or extra stressed (or both), here are some links to thoughts for the holiday season I hope might provide some helpful tips – from drawing winter trees and presents to taking a moment to breathe and recenter: 

• Strategies to overcome feeling overwhelmed

• How to draw happy little winter trees

• Breathe deep to help feel calm 

• The most wonderful time of the year...to remember what matters most

• Give yourself this gift

• A powerful gift you can give for free, any time

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?

In the Studio: Working on wrapping up a whole flock of videos for Colorado State University. Here’s a snapshot of one I’m looking forward to sharing next year!

Strategic Facilitation: Hosting and guiding a process with a USFS Social Science Team as they reflect on the work so far and imagine the future with on-the-ground partners and leadership.