Facilitating Diverse Groups & VisualsSpeak Data

I facilitated a session at the International Association of Facilitators conference in Atlanta, Seeing Differences: Using Photographs to Facilitate Diverse Groups. Like many of the breakout sessions at this conference the session was three hours long, which provided an opportunity to delve deeply into the material.

We covered a lot of material in the session.

• things to consider when setting up the room
• who is your audience?
• what outcome are you looking for?
• creating a question to bridge the audience and the outcome
• what we see in the visual language
• how the visual language gives us clues about the person creating the image
• what changes when people make images in a group
• adjusting questions, images, and process for different audiences

An interesting challenge arose

A VisualsSpeak user dropped by and presented an interesting challenge. How do you convey the results of a VisualsSpeak process to people who weren’t part of it? For those of you who have never been part of a VS session, a tremendous amount of information, ideas, strategies, etc are generated in a very short period of time. The challenge is not getting the input you want but what do you do with the data you get. This is an area that we have been working on and have a few ideas for you to try.

But first, let’s take a look at the kind of raw data that you get from doing a typical VisualsSpeak process. This is a condensed version.

Group images

We created group images exploring the question:

What makes facilitating diverse groups successful?

Here is what the groups came up with.

From the top left, we enter the concept through windows with many panes. Some we can see through more clearly than others. There are different colors of fabrics, different money, doesn’t matter, there is a variety of people who are different than Western culture. The woman is proud of her fuchsia hair. There is a yin/yang in the arms with interesting bandages where the colors are reversed. Different hands hold objects. There is a man doing yoga, children marching. There are multiple different colors, diversity in images. In some you can tell the ethnicity and culture and some you can’t, just a feel. Really builds us together in the natural world, salad, different bird feathers. Function in the farm metaphor of team working together to provide food. When all is said and done, all people looking all different, all the same, yin and yang parts together. The child in the water is looking to young people for inspiration for the need to take risks. The money shows the governments of the world meeting to build coins, far away, but similar. It is more attractive with all the colors, one would be boring.

In the center there is an underlying spark, creativity with new things coming from it. The salad bowl diversity, bounty coming together. The chocolates are all different, but all chocolates are neatly organized. Overall people, metaphors all together, but different. Windows of opportunity. We see some commonality in diversity like the celebration of family ties. Building bridges isn’t easy, fraught with challenges, so this bridge has different bushes and thorns. Different faces, not necessarily ethnicity, but different ideas in some communities. Overall perspective is the giraffe. All different kinds of beads, different but strung together. When it does work, and comes together, there is underlying conflict that can’t be ignored. At the same time you have to leap and hope to survive. Find a team with common things to bind. Doors of opportunity. Diverse looks. Beautiful by coming together with one objective. Bring down the fences, together sign universal cultures, commonalities like currency. Several windows, doors, labyrinths facilitators are aware of when working with diverse groups. A maze of confusion and challenging with pitfalls we can fall into especially if we aren’t partnering with partners in other cultures to help us find the pathways around them. The spider web of connecting. Eggs are the nurturing process, hope for new life bringing diversity together. The balloon has different colors but blended together which makes it interesting and able to take off.

Now the challenge

Here is where one of our VisualsSpeak customers dropped by and asked about sharing the results of a session she had done at her company. She has been using the VisualsSpeak ImageSet for strategic visioning and the team participating had to help others in their organization understand what had happened. She had tried a number of things to convey the outcomes of the session such as making poster prints of the images and having people tell the stories that emerged. It was OK, but didn’t really convey the power of what happened in the room.

The reports from the groups above have the same challenge. Magic happens in the room. People connect deeply. The process of offering your ideas and working through the negotiation to come up with the result is where much of the value lies.

The results seem like they should be more finished than they are. If instead of using photographs we used sketches to record these initial ideas, it would be clear that the sketches needed more work to become conveyable ideas by the very nature of them being sketches. Since the photographs look good, and many of the assembled images are attractive, they seem like they ‘should’ convey a message. And to the people who were there they do. Because to them, the images are like notes, they remind the participants of the experience they had. For someone who was not part of the process, this is more like raw assessment data.

How to communicate the results of a VisualsSpeak process

There are a couple of options. Using the example above, we have two groups who have created images and stories.

You might ask the group participants to create a summary;

• What are the common themes?
• What are the images both groups used?
• How can you arrange the images and concepts to make them easier to understand?

The other alternative is to create a summary yourself to help convey the messages more clearly. In this example, I did not participate in the group discussions since I was facilitating the whole session. If I was facilitating for a business or organization and knew I was going to have to create a report, I would be listening to the process as it unfolded and taking notes. I would also ask questions in the debrief to get input from the group about what they thought the most important points were to include. Remember the wisdom of the group.

Don’t strip out the creative juice

One thing to watch in this summarization process is not to lose the minority input. Part of what VisualsSpeak is all about is giving voice to everyone. Sometimes the most important idea will be spoken by one person. Creative sparks and insights that can open up whole new possibilities most often are not the common themes. Often it is the combination of popular ideas with a minority spark that reveals new possibilities.

For more on using the VisualsSpeak process

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