Crossing the Divide – How to Find Common Ground Among Diverse Perspectives

Whether it’s national politics or internal to your organization, we all hear stories about polarized viewpoints, and the challenge of working across silos.

At the same time, we know that diversity is not only healthy, but also builds resilience when things don’t go as planned.

So how do you harness the inherent tension that bringing diverse perspectives, and potentially combative ones, together to build a strong, shared path forward?

Here are four suggestions for finding common ground from my experience as a graphic facilitator:

-          Create space for context setting and relationship building. Often overlooked or dismissed as “wasting time”, building in time at the beginning of the event, as well as throughout, to clearly outline the “why” of the meeting and for participants to get to know one another allows for more ease when conversations get difficult.

-          Put more time than you think into developing questions to surface shared values, such as “What is important about the work we do?” can provide a window into the group. Having a few open-ended questions like “What should we do about __________?” provide space for participants to surface concerns or solutions the planning team might have missed, but are integral to moving forward successfully.

-          Build in less structured time. This is another piece that often feels like a “waste” of time, but is vitally important to cultivating trust and creativity. This is especially true if much of the agenda will be presentations or panels – you’ve invested in bringing all these important people together to work toward a goal, now give them the freedom to use those brains and hearts to do the work!

-          Draw it out with the intent of surfacing shared ground. Graphic facilitation or recording is a tool to leverage to literally show the group where they’re in agreement. Partnering with a graphic facilitator who can work with you to listen and capture through a particular “lens” to help surface shared values or tensions helps the group keep track of complex, moving parts to build a shared picture of what’s important.

Have you been looking for common ground on an issue? Click that button to explore how we can leverage visual tools for lasting success.

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?

The Colorado Front Range: Working with a public health team and their partners as they evaluate an assessment to use the data to support the community, and hospital managers to think more deeply about building trust in their teams.

In the Studio: Painting up another explainer video for the US Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station (RMRS). This video will be available in October, but for now, here’s another look at a video created for the RMRS last year.

Want Everyone in Your Org to Understand Your Strategic Plan? Try This!

Your Strategic Plan. Can you remember it off the top of your head? What is your vision, and what are the goals that will get you there? What makes up your organizational culture? When was the last time you read your strategic plan?

Helping groups navigate strategic planning makes up a big chunk of the work I do as a graphic facilitator, and I want to help you avoid one of the most common mistakes I see: putting heaps of money, time, and effort into bringing your best minds together to come up with a strategy which gets written up and then sits on a shelf because that’s what you’re supposed to do, right?

Which results in:

• Confusion around priorities (which priority is the real priority?)

• Lackluster engagement because people don’t see how they fit into the bigger picture

• Reinforcement of silos because of the temptation to focus on what’s right in front of us, rather than the high-level strategic goals

It doesn’t have to be this way!

And it doesn’t need to be a huge deal to shift from status quo to status: whoa!

Whether you’re working on a new strategic plan or you already have one, engaging a graphic facilitator to support process design or synthesizing your current plan into a strategic illustration can help alleviate frustrating patterns and support a healthy organization.

Here’s what making it visual can do for you:

• Clearly shows vision, mission, values, and priorities in one page

• Imagery can be used that employees see themselves in, which build buy-in

• It can easily be referenced to make sure day-to-day activities are in support of the larger strategic direction

• Create interest and something people will want to take time to look at, often, and remember

• Nuance can be shown in visuals you can’t easily communicate with words

• Provide a shared story outline leadership can easily share with their teams so the message is clear across the organization

If you have a plan you’d like brought to life or are in the midst of a strategic planning process, let’s talk about how visuals can add long-term value with a ripple effect!

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?

Washington, DC: I just got back from the Funding Science for Sustainability forum, a gathering of entities that fund sustainability research around the world. Participants discussed the potential for strategic partnerships to better address gaps and challenges of supporting research around the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Video Release! I often share that I’m in the studio working on videos and other projects. This week, I’m delighted to share a video for the Drawing Connections series for the National Park Service. Check out Yosemite National Park: