VisualsSpeak blog

Christine Martell, Principal of VisualsSpeak LLC, will be presenting at the 2007 NASAGA Conference (North American Simulation and Gaming Association) in Atlanta, Georgia. The Conference is being held October 10- 13, 2007 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel.

What makes simulations magic?

Margaret (Peggy) Pusch & Christine Martell

Come explore what makes simulations magic. We’ll start the process with photographs, bringing the visual and the verbal to the conversation. This session is about mining the wisdom in the room. What can we discover individually and collectively?

Be part of a new Professional Visual Thinking Community

For anyone interested in visual communication, there is an exciting development. VizThink, a new visual thinking community is kicking off a global community with a conference in San Francisco Jan 27-29, 2007. I am one of the people who will be facilitating a session at the conference. Dave Gray over at Communication Nation: VizThink takes off! has a whole list of ways people are getting involved.

Tom Crawford is the CEO of the new organization, and he posted this on their blog the other day:

Who are visual thinkers? Anybody who uses any of the visual arts for learning or communication. Easy said, hard to picture.

He also posted his first pass at creating an image of what the community might look like, seen below. Tom comes out of the gaming and computer programming worlds, so it is no great surprise that he conceived of this challenge in nice neat rows of boxes.

Ok, so it’s an understatement to say this didn’t work for me. I immediately felt my creative identity threatened by being put in a box. At the same time, I greatly appreciate Tom’s ability to break the pieces into segments and sort them. And I know someone who creates an image like this will be really good at organizing the conference. The details will be taken into account, which always makes it nicer for a facilitator.

It also got me thinking about other aspects of what it means to form a visual thinking community. After all, there isn’t a profession called ‘Visual Thinker’. For the purpose of thinking through this challenge, I decided to focus on the group of people who are facilitating at the VizThink conference as representatives of a visual thinking community. What is it that ties us together?

Do we all use visuals as a means to get to the story?

It’s not just about the visuals, it’s how the visuals spark or enhance the story. We live in the intersection between the visual and the verbal. But we each come at it from a different entry point.

I don’t have the answer any more than Tom does, but I do have some ideas to add to the mix. I’m confident the vision will emerge from the dialogue, in the spaces between us all, in the emerging visual thinking community.

Exercises in Visual Thinking

A graphic from Ralph E. Wileman’s book, Exercises in Visual Thinking, kept popping into my head. It’s about the relationship between the abstract verbal and the concrete visual. You can click on the image to see it large enough to read it.

In the original chart, the verbal to visual is depicted as a continuum with a top and bottom. What if we looked at it as a spiraling pathway? I then created a spiral of visual techniques, then one of methods.

Each person enters the story through their method, from a different place in relationship to the visuals. I have put the names of people on the spokes, since community is about the people. I admit that I know more about what some individuals do than others, so I may not have everyone placed quite right. And I selected the aspect of the work that I was familiar with.

So this raises another round of questions:

• Where do all the other related areas Tom identified fit? Or do they?
• This is words and lines, what are the other visual elements a depiction would need to truly represent the range of professions in the community?
• Is it about story for others? Or am I bringing too much of my own lens?
• What else am I missing?

I toss it back to you Tom, and the rest of the VizThink community.

The Brandon Hall conference (IIL07) used Leverage Software to create a people map to help us plan who we might meet at the conference. I am in the center, and the pink arrow is pointing to a person standing on my head. Janet Clarey from Brandon Hall Research Center describes the system like this:

People with similar interests are closer to you and you can just hover your mouse of the pin and it’ll show you their profile. From there you can set up meetings, chat, send email, etc.

I took a look at this profile, and it is a guy from the Oil Industry. Hmmm. A Visual Communication professional and someone from Big Oil? Where is the bonding potential in this combination? I did notice he said he liked to make learning engaging, so maybe there’s something to this software.

Fast forward to the opening night, and I meet Olavur Ellefson. He tells me he is from the Faroe Islands. Being a geographically challenged US American, I have to ask more. Seems it is near Iceland and Greenland. Part of the UK out in the middle of the ocean, an island with 50,000 people. Luckily, his credit card has a map on it and he can show me where it is. I ask him if he lives on an iceberg. He assures me it is in the gulf stream, and the weather is merely “fresh”.

We talk a bit about the fact that I am presenting the next day with photographs, and he will present the following using a live simulation. We plan to attend each other’s sessions. He was kind enough to attend mine as part of the 3-D Cycle of Learning and Innovation group.

Getting ready to be an oil explorer

I arrive at the OilSim session, and we form oil company teams around laptops. Olavar tells us we are going to learn about the oil and gas industry, specifically about exploration. We dive right in with 200 million dollars and three oil exploration licenses for each team. I quickly realize I know very little about this world. I am working on a laptop, with two other people. The OilSim program allows us to manipulate variables, then the computer calculates the result of our choices.

We have investors and they don’t want us risking all their money on our own licenses. Our first challenge is to convince the other oil companies in the room to invest in our licenses and we have to invest in theirs. We talk to them, we have to learn about how to read the ocean floor maps to see how likely our areas are to have oil or gas, them ask them to farm in. We have to spend money to do surveys to find out more about the potential we have. We learn to read seismic maps.

After we farm-in (buying a piece of the exploration license) and accept farm-ins and get our holdings down to 60% (We are only allowed to keep 60% of our original licenses to diversify risk), we are ready to start drilling.

Apparently there are only a couple of companies that own all the oil rigs, so you have to see if they are available. Just wanting them is not enough. Much more demand than supply. There are also different kinds of rigs, for different depths and purposes. Each one costs a lot of money per day. Do we need an expensive one? Do any of the names make any sense? Yikes, this is a whole new world.

After randomly picking an oil rig, we then need other service providers to help us. Who knew there were so many people involved in this? And they had strange names that made no sense. But we picked them anyway.

Finally we are ready to drill. But wait, not so easy. You have to look at your seismic map to see where you are most likely to find something. Then you drill. But wait, you have to test the well…. or was that after we hit something? Yea, we hit gas! Then it cost us more to get it out than we make. Boo! But we can drill again into the same field. More gas. We start making the big bucks.

OK, so our team had boatloads of oil. We only drilled two wells and make a 126% return. Not bad. I’m contemplating switching careers.

What did we learn?

A lot. I had no idea the oil industry was a combination of competition and collaboration. I knew there were city sized platforms in the ocean, but I didn’t know oil rigs moved. I was totally clueless about how any of the industry worked. Kind of like my knowledge of the Faroe islands.

We spent an hour. It has been a week and I was able to write this post. I think I got most of it right? So not only did I learn new things in the moment, but I actually remember them. Can’t say that about a lot of learning.

This was problem-based simulation learning with live facilitation. Very effective. Olavar helped us when we were stuck, but just gave us clues about where we might go next. It is usually played over several days and multiple times. I can see how you would learn very quickly. It was originally developed to teach high school students about the industry, but now it’s mostly for teaching oil industry employees about the various facets of the industry.

I was engaged. And I had no prior interest in learning about the oil industry.

Wow. If only all training could be so effective. I really look forward to seeing what Olavar and Simprentis come up with next.

Oh yea, the computer was right. Olavar and I did have a lot of similar interests around learning. Who would have guessed?

The key to getting the most out of the VisualsSpeak process is designing an effective question.

In the VisualsSpeak process, we create a framing question based on the desired outcome of the group or individual. Participants select photographs that have meaning for them in response to the framing question and assemble them on piece of background paper, which represents the question.

In VisualsSpeak sessions, a great deal of the planning is devoted to designing the question(s) which will create a bridge between the characteristics of the particular participants and their desired outcome. Know thy audience and their desired outcome!

We could write pages and pages about the importance of questions, but we would fall far short of a wonderful resource already available. While attending the 2007 International Facilitator’s Association conference, Christine had the pleasure and good fortune to meet Dorothy Strachan. Dorothy is an author and top level facilitator. She works with a wide variety of clients from elite athletes to non-profits.

Her book “Making Questions Work: A Guide to How and What to Ask for Facilitators, Consultants, Managers, Coaches and Educators” is a wonderful resource no matter what your profession. We highly recommend it.

It’s like a cookbook for questions. First you determine what part of a process you are trying to develop a question for, then go to that section and search through sample questions. With a little adaptation and customization, you can generate a whole session’s worth of questions very quickly.