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.