Tag Archives: network

New calendar entry for Friday afternoons

New calendar entry for Friday afternoons, and in all seriousness, ‘Creative Playtime’ 🥰

On a Friday afternoon for two years I have had in my diary to protect time for Creative downtime and I have rarely achieved this. However, this year I intend to give this a whole new priority as I believe it is an essential part of keeping that balance and being able to provide the energy in the work. Whilst I recognise it wont always be possible, this year, it will be a priority. And to kick it off a little playful look around the desk I spend so many hours at 🙂 I hope you enjoy it. PS the idea inspired by others and namely of recent Raquel Benmergui

From Live graphic recording to a short film. Children’s Rights in Education

From the EERA Edu YouTube Channel; “These are animated notes from our #ReconnectingEERA​ session. Network 25 (Children’s Rights in Education Network) have been holding a virtual event focused on, “Wicked Problems in Children’s Rights in Education” on Tuesday, 25 August as part of a Network development project supported by EERA.

The aim was to bring together education researchers interested in children’s rights from across the world to meet to share, discuss, and draw attention to the ‘wicked’ problems in children’s rights in education. We were excited to have children and young people participating at this event, via various modes, who have also been focusing on the ‘wicked problems’ they face regarding children’s rights and education.”

Purposes of a Graphic Record – Health Education North West (HENW) NHS

Graphic Recording (Visual Notes) are increasingly being used across different sectors and different organisations large and small. This in no accident. In an age of complexity of information, there has never been a greater need for ensuring strong and focused conversations. There are many needs for these conversations including; sharing information, developing innovation, building time to think, time to analyse solutions and much more. Graphic recording in a meeting or event has a number of purposes and roles in supporting these conversations and offer a range of benefits.

Health Ed North West for EVwebsite

150317 HENW Ed Transform.RoomView.SMALL JPEG

graphic facilitation. Graphic recording

Recently Health Education North West (HENW) brought together people involved in developing and training some core roles within the NHS workforce. HENW were keen to maximise the potential of the day and commissioned a live graphic record, the record below, it was created live during the event and follows the flow of the content and conversations of the day. This graphic record is a great example of some of the purposes and benefits they can add to meetings or events.The focus of the event was to look at how learning environments were needing to transform to reflect the real and changing world and how services and the networks of practitioners need to collaborate creatively to face these challenges and changes. The first intention or purpose for this graphic record was to bring the stream of conversations together from throughout the day to support people to literally see connections across the day; to help create a visual record and summary of the day that was visible to everyone.

Equally the graphic record acted to create a great focal point during the day where many conversations ensued in the breaks instigated when colleagues came together to browse the emerging record. When the event was over the graphic record was then available in a second life to remind people of what was covered and to keep the learning and conversations alive.

The reach of the graphic record was then extended to many people who weren’t at the event. The graphic record is a condensed and accessible way to communicate a synopsis of the day to those not there. In this way, the graphic record now acts as a conversation starter and encourages a wider inclusion of people to continue and enter the dialogues started at the event.

Whilst a graphic record is intended to be eye catching the absolute focus and intention is to create a visual record that can reach these purposes (and others). So eye catching yes, but always with this clarity of purposes; to convey and distil content, to enable sharing of the content and to encourage people to take the content and take it further… to the next conversations, the next events and maybe to the next graphic record.

Graphic Facilitation & Graphic Recording supporting the 5 Core Skills of innovation

5 core skills of innovators

We are increasingly finding many uses for Graphic Facilitation and Graphic Recording in supporting people and organisations to problem-solve, innovate, create and find solutions. The following article sheds some gems of insight around key components/characteristics that foster these mindsets and was found through the website link below;

http://stanfordbusiness.tumblr.com/post/51889767187/5-core-skills-of-disruptive-visual-thinking-innovators

“Visual thinking is the foundation for being creative and solving some of the most complex problems,” explained author and founder of Innovation Studio Lisa Kay Solomon. Solomon and Emily Shepard of The Graphic Distillery discussed the key role of visual thinking in innovation at a recent Stanford GSB Mastery in Communication Initiative talk. Below, they share five visual-thinking based skills that disruptive innovators must master:

1) Observe
Set your phone down and actually pay attention to what’s going on around you. You can’t come up with new ideas unless you observe the world with fresh, empathetic eyes. Keep a design journal and document what you observe at least once a week.

2) Question
Once you have a look around, review your design journal and ask: “What’s going on here?” Questions allow for space in the brain. If you’re not curious about something, then there’s nowhere for your observations to go. As an innovator, you should ask questions to nail down the problem you’re trying to solve.

3) Associate
Combining ideas lead to new insights. In the book Where Good Ideas Come From, author Steven Johnson proposes that innovation comes from places where half-baked ideas can bump up against other half-baked ideas and together create something even better. Doodling is a way to cultivate these seeds of ideas.

4) Experiment
Visualization makes your ideas tangible and concrete. “If you can’t draw your ideas in stick figures, you don’t know what you’re saying,” says Solomon. Drawing by hand is a method of prototyping that allows you to test out the core essence of your idea in a low-res way before you spend more time on it.

5) Network
Get access to people in diverse universes to expand your opportunities and areas of expertise. What are some big areas missing from your knowledge bank? We often end up just having a deep network of people like us instead of a diverse network.

For more insights on visual thinking, follow #GSBVT on Twitter: http://stnfd.biz/liMyC