1. Sometimes it takes an outside set of eyes to see what you need to do. The press descended upon Vancouver like a pack of hungry wolves and while some of the reports were unfavorable (the Brits seemed particularly full of vitriol), much of the commentary allowed Vancouver to see itself through strangers’ eyes. Yes of course, they have the skyline to die for but there are also the social concerns in the Downtown East Side which bear careful consideration. On a day-to-day basis the average Vancouverite probably glosses over both good and bad, focusing on the daily minutiae of life, so the Olympics were a good shakeup. Organizations need to invite strangers to visit occasionally to get outside perspective on what they’re doing well and poorly.

2. Don’t let your competitors design your costume. This snarky little tidbit came from David Sale as he was commentating during the Pairs Figure Skating. One unfortunate couple sported bright blue one-piece suits that seriously begged the question: what were they THINKING? As it turns out, one of the other competing pairs had designed their outfits. Sometimes businesses and other organizations will let their competitors’ actions dictate theirs, from what products they develop to how they communicate with their customers. Stand firm: don’t just be a copycat. If your competitors are using social media, maybe it’s a good idea (all good ideas have to start somewhere) but you should evaluate a decision on its merits for your own business. How do you relate to customers and stakeholders? Can you pull off a head-to-toe neon-blue jumpsuit (or a daily-updated blog) or should you stick to your own knitting? (Ohhh the mixed metaphors!)

3. Consistency is king. In the bobsleigh competitions, it was the teams who were able to lay down consistently proficient runs who took home the hardware. If you’re doing something well, keep working on it – don’t relax, don’t get complacent. When you make your strategic plans, don’t get drawn to change for change’s sake. If you’re successful (especially when times are hard) it could be that what you need to do next year is more of the same. But if you’re in a rut, you’d better make like a vending machine, and change!

I hope these tips have been helpful. I’ll leave you with just one more thought from the Olympics: when all else fails, USE MORE COWBELL.

It shocked me that nobody has invented a tool that allows you to batch-edit your followers and following lists to assign them to lists etc. Wouldn’t you consider this a fairly basic utility?

Now that I can view my Twitter lists in Seesmic Desktop (my Twitter application of choice), I have this vague expectation that Twitter will become more useful to me. The jury is out on that. Maybe I’m missing something but there doesn’t seem to me much going on out there that’s very important to me.

On another social media note… has anyone figured out what to do with LinkedIn yet? Aside from getting connected with everyone you know (and apparently a bunch of people you don’t know, if the trickle of invitations from total strangers is any indication). I joined a few discussion groups and have plenty of connections but I’m still waiting for the A-HA! moment and the value to be realized. Please, if you’ve got some secret to making LinkedIn more than just a business-oriented, slightly less-annoying Facebook, please comment!

The TrainerMarkers were very fun to use, especially the light grey. It’s fantastic for adding shading and dimension to things. The yellow and orange were also nice for highlighting word clusters. I found that it took a little extra concentration to make a good strong line with the full nib width: I’m going to need to do some more practice work in the studio to get the hang of these tools. The royal blue one is actually a little on the purple side for my tastes, but the other colours are pretty true.

Having the icon library on hand was great. Especially important was having “iconized” versions of my client organizations’ logos so I could reproduce them around the edges of the chart for the introductory session. I was missing one logo out of the four – must remember next time to have ALL logos on hand for titles, etc. I’m glad I didn’t have the Bikablo with me, as it would have been a distraction. Having put advance thought into various icon concepts meant that when I went to the wall, I had a good visual vocabulary to draw from even without my cheat-sheets.

During the session there were three discussion segments. For the first one, I knew that the facilitator wanted to draw a particular model. He had given me a text document describing the type of model in advance so I had a plan for how to lay out my page. For the second and third discussion segments I had less of an idea about what the questions and desired outcomes were, so I think the graphics were less effective as a tool to “draw things together” for the group. Next time I work with this facilitator, we’ll both know more about what to discuss ahead of time so that the graphics can be more supportive of his outcomes.

All in all, the session was very enjoyable and the participants were lovely people. It reminded me how much I love this work! Woohoo!

BIKABLO!

Bikablo is a pocket-sized coil-bound book containing hundreds of icons for use on flip charts / murals, depicting soft concepts like “global connections” as well as symbolic icons like a turtle, horse, sheep, buildings etc. The purpose of the book is to give you ideas about ways to depict concepts and objects with quickly-drawn illustrations. There are three to five icons in each page with a variety of words that could be associated with the icons. There’s also an index in which you can look up concepts and find icons in the book. The trick is to study the book and then practice drawing the icons with your own hand, using their shading suggestions.

TrainerMarkers (basic and colourful sets)

These are monster-big refillable water-based markers for large titles or shading. I splurged and got myself 12 – the four basic colours for titles and outlines, as well as the assorted colours set because I just can’t be restrained to red, black, blue and green. These things are BIG! The nib is 12mm wide and 6mm thick so you can do a variety of thicknesses of lines. The barrel of the marker itself is also big and thick so they’re not good for small writing, but excellent for broad brush strokes.

I have a graphic recording engagement next week in Vancouver and I am SO looking forward to whipping out the BIG pens. *glee!*

Prepping for an Engagement

Right now, I have a long list of words that I’m preparing ideas for, based on the project. Here are some of the concepts I’m brainstorming: planning, mobilize, community, assessment, evaluate, gaps, model, barriers, relationships, collaboration, innovation, respect, capacity-building, access for all, strength-building, representation, impact, social network, sustainability, joy, funds, mentors, conversations, meetings, stewardship, inventory, goals, action plan, partners, implementing, needs, consensus, demographics.

I’ve taken a few pieces of letter-sized paper and folded it so there are 8 sections on each page. Right now I’m using pencil to put a different icon into each section. I’m not really labelling the sections, just collecting the icons. Then when I’m at the engagement I’ll have these pages tucked into my kit and if I hit a wall (recorder’s block?) I can whip out the pages and peruse for an image I like. The reason I’ve created my own pages is because I know that I can draw each one of these icons quickly. If I simply took my Bikablo or computerized graphics with me, I would be stalled while my brain communicated with my hand on how to reproduce the image.

When I’m done with these pages, I’ll scan and upload them in case you want to borrow!

Quick addition: One of the things I do when I’m trying to find an icon for something specific is I google the word, then go to “Google Images” and choose Clip Art only from the search options. This gives me a bunch of thumbnails of online images relating to the word. I find one or two simple ideas and then draw them out freehand in pencil a few times to get the “flow” of the lines. This is a great way to generate your own icons because you’re not actually copying anything, just re-interpreting!

I’ve had many discussions over the years with friends about how some people have “work self” and “home self” and tend to keep them separate. Some people have a work persona that they use to keep focused on tasks, be professional and protect their personal lives from privacy intrusions. Let’s face it, not every workplace is a happy sort of place. However, I think that the separation of work from home persona is damaging to the spirit (oh yes, it gets flakier). Allow me to rant…

During the Industrial Revolution, the nature of work changed dramatically. Instead of the days of cottage industries and guilds, when a person’s livelihood was inextricable from their life itself, the Industrial Revolution saw masses of people going to work in factories, completing repetitive and often mindless tasks, and then returning home with the day’s wages. Their work was foreign to their family – it was just something that sent home a father/husband/son who was worn-out and often resentful about “the system.” The design of workplaces became about mechanization, treating people as “human resources” – little more than cogs in wheels. As the 20th Century wore on, factory jobs became a way of life for the lower and middle classes. Even if you didn’t technically work IN a factory, your input during the day was viewed as part of an overall mechanized force for production. Then automation came along and hands-on tasks were taken away from people, replaced with a robot’s switches or a computer keyboard. “Work” became, for many people, a euphemism for sitting on your ass all day and trying to keep your supervisor happy.

Who would NOT want to put on a false persona, tuck away their quirky sense of humour to fit in, avoid notice, get promoted? As the human soul – which thrives on interaction – and the human body – which thrives on motion – became more and more disconnected from work, companies had to start paying people more and more to compensate them for the time they were spending at work. We started seeing factory jobs paying $20, $30 or more an hour for a mindless task – and then we started complaining that productivity was dropping. Our economy is full of inefficient, lazy workers! The Japanese are doing it so much better!* We need to analyze, incentivize, manage change! People started moving other people’s CHEESE! And again… the work-persona became a highly useful scheme for keeping oneself “in line” and shutter one’s true awareness of the utter mindlessness of the daily grind.

Okay… have I painted a nasty enough picture? A little over the top? Oh good. Now let me talk about what social media does to break down this nasty construct of WORK.

Social media allows people to find out about their co-workers (and colleagues, and clients) home lives. The integration of our communication with friends and our communication with work helps people to see the whole, integrated nature of others in their circles. A prospective client is no longer just a target to be wooed, seduced, or maybe bamboozled. He/she is now a parent with adorable children, who plays tennis as a passion. You can learn things that, especially as an independent worker, you might not have a chance to learn about the people around you in the business community.

Maybe it’s not going to change the mechanized, cog-in-a-wheel mentality of the workplace. Not all by itself, at least. There is enough of a hue and cry about work/life balance that I can see we’re heading into a whole new era… what comes after the Industrial Revolution? What is work going to look like when we each do something that uses our unique talents, appeals to our primary interests, gives us food for thought and helps us feel like a whole person? One could mention that not all jobs can be fulfilling like this: who wants to be a garbage truck driver? MY SON DOES actually. He’s two now, but if I can raise him to maintain a curiosity about the world and avoid developing biases towards white-collar work, maybe he’ll be the sanitation engineer of the year in 2037. And in fact, it does seem like a great job – you get to know a neighborhood, work with pretty darn nifty technology, and keep the world clean. In between stops he can post Twitter updates about the coolest recyclable thing he’s picked up all day.

I admit this is probably just a fantasy of mine, but if social media can break down some of those barriers we erect between who we are at work and who we are at home, I think we all stand a lot better chance of building a future that is interesting and humanistic instead of mechanized and drab.

Update: The ASTERISK! I forgot the asterisk! It was to remind myself about the topic of productivity, specifically whether/why the Japanese are so much more productive than North Americans. To sum up, because this is already a long post full of preposterous ranting, from what I have read the Japanese culture is much less oriented towards individualism than North American culture and more particularly, United States culture. When they go to work, they don’t need to be taught that “there’s no I in team” – unlike North/Americans they already believe in the strength of working in groups. Children in North America are raised to be “independent” and “think for themselves” and yet historically our workplaces have rewarded exactly the opposite behavior. People worry when young children are “too attached” to their parents or don’t have any personal ambition or drive, yet expect those children to grow up and become one of a thousand happy cubicle dwellers. And you wonder why movies like Waydowntown get made? Good movie, by the way.

The sales pipeline of an independent consultant isn’t like a typical B2B sales pipeline in some ways. Of course I have leads, prospects, proposals, closing, etc. One thing that differs is that I am very picky about what I consider to be a real sales prospect, and I typically do not invest in proposals or planning unless the client is very well qualified. Unlike bigger consulting firms, I don’t typically respond to Requests for Proposals unless I have been specifically invited to do so through a past client or close colleague. There have been the odd occasions when I knew I was being compared against other consultants for an engagement, but those instances do not generally require me to make a big investment until there is a clear match.

This is an excuse I sometimes use for not following a disciplined marketing program. Is it an excuse or a reason, though? Or maybe my rendition of a “disciplined marketing program” is just a lot more anal-retentive than it needs to be. Hmmm… no. I’m lucky right now that there is client work to be had and it seems to have drifted past my inbox at a time when I was paying attention, but I need to be more organized in the future if I’m going to expand my repertoire.

It’s written and said in lots of places that you need to fire your clients occasionally to prevent your consulting business from getting stale. I did that in a BIG way when I moved to Victoria from Vancouver. It takes a while to build things up again, but it’s worth reviewing clients once a year or so to make sure you’re both still growing and learning from the relationship. Am I still providing value to this client or that one? Am I challenging myself to learn and grow and provide better value all the time? Am I working too much to satisfy the whims of one or another big client who pays a lot? These questions are part of an annual client review. Sometimes this review tells me that I need to go outside my comfort zone in marketing so that I can attract clients who are unlike the ones currently in my calendar. It means more work, but the alternative is (as I see it) stagnation and DOOM. Okay maybe not DOOM but you get the idea. Oh and by the way, that kind of client review is really cool as the basis for a visual planning exercise!

Have a good weekend!

This is one of the drawbacks of being an independent: when you get so busy you can barely take a breath, you let the marketing slide. Yet when the projects end (as they inevitably do) you don’t have any new projects or clients in the pipeline. I’m lucky in that I tend to be naturally social and drawn towards networking events (less so now that I have a toddler at home), and social media like Twitter help me get connected with people even if I’m glued to my desk. If I weren’t making connections “online” with people like this, I would be treading in very dangerous waters right now.

Am I going to pull it out and stroke off some more of the tasks on that list before the end of the month? Quite possibly, yes. I’m not going to throw my hands up in the air and give up on the good ideas that lay behind that list… I’m just going to be more choosy, and do things that will build long-term results instead of focusing on activities that drive short-term business development. Perhaps I should have been more mindful of that in making the list the first time.

When our writing/drawing surface is bigger than our arms reach, we’re presented with a huge amount of potential. Yes it can be quite daunting to feel like you have to fill up that piece of paper or board, but at the same time that bit of discomfort can push us outside our comfort zone. Going outside the comfort zone is where you can discover all kinds of new ideas and fresh, fertile imaginative power. By moving the limits of your working surface outside of your arms’ reach, that loosening of the boundaries also works on your mind.

If you’ve been reading this blog and wondering if you could try some of the stuff I do, I urge you to give it a shot. Get yourself some pieces of flipchart paper and tape them together, or head on down to Island Blueprint (if you’re in Victoria) and request a roll of 42″-wide 20lb bond paper. 50 yards will cost you $20. Use masking tape to put it up on whatever available flat surface you have, get some non-bleeding markers (Mr. Sketch are easy, fun and cheap) and just start DOODLING BIG. Start with big circles and broad lines. It doesn’t have to mean anything. You can turn the paper over and use the other side if you feel guilty about killing trees. Just start pushing your own perceptions of your limits and see what comes out.

Visual Business Planning is a structured framework for the entrepreneur’s “time-out”. It supports an entrepreneur in thinking deeply about his or her business plan, marketing, life/work balance – whatever issues are uppermost, creating a need to step back and reflect. Here’s how it works:

1. An entrepreneur (or a two-person team) contacts me with an interest in doing a session. I ask a few questions to find out what is going on, both in the business and life, and provide information (like what’s in this blog post) about what to expect. We decide if the entrepreneur is able to set aside a full day for the session, or just a half day. So far I’ve found a half-day session is enough to give a client plenty to think about without overloading.
2. Before the Visual Business Planning session I send a list of questions to the client. These are customized to reflect the client’s situation and can focus on business direction, marketing, team-building, work/life balance… these are the most common areas.  If the session is going to deal with strategic planning or work/life balance issues, I also send a list of Values Words and invite the client to reflect on what things are most important to him/her.  The client’s response helps me structure a customized agenda for the session.
3. During the session, we use big paper (4′ x 8′) on my studio wall to literally draw out the problems facing the client. For a marketing-focused session like this one, the charts showed things like the client’s primary target markets, what he offered those customers, etc. For sessions that focus on business and life planning like this one, we may do a strengths-weaknesses analysis and some long-range visioning.
4. The real crux of the session is not the pictures: it’s the dialogue and reflection that takes place. My job as a facilitator is to help my clients make their own discoveries by asking perceptive questions. Having an objective, caring person ask you to explain your own decisions and ambitions helps you to clarify them in a way almost impossible to achieve on your own.
5. At the end of the session I reserve time to help the client make an achievable action list of things they will do to follow up on the session in the next month. These actions will push the client slightly outside their comfort zone, but not so much that the resistance will lead to inertia. It’s up to the client to follow through with these things but I don’t want anyone to set themselves up for failure.
6. After the session, if the client wishes, I’ll add color and graphics to the existing charts, and perhaps fine-tune some of the messages. I do this almost immediately after the client leaves so conversations are fresh in my mind. Then I digitally photograph the charts and send a JPG to the client. I also find a time to return the full-sized charts to the client.

That’s it! It’s a mini-retreat for an entrepreneur, supported by an objective, caring third party who just happens to be creating a visual record of the retreat as it occurs. Because it’s supported with an agenda and you have a concrete action plan in place for afterwards, it’s much more effective than just taking a morning to sit in a coffee shop with your journal. Oh yes – I also provide yummy coffee and baked treats for a mid-session snack.

Game to try it? Here’s a little gimmick to make you jump on the bandwagon before the year is out: everybody who does a Visual Business Planning session with me between now and January 31, 2010 will be entered in a draw for a Nikon Coolpix digital camera. Just in time for snapshots of the 2010 Olympics – or whatever you’re doing to avoid the Olympics!

Managing Facilitated Processes was delivered by Marian Pitters. The content was driven by the book (same name as workshop) which is available for purchase here. We were given a copy as part of our workshop registration. The workshop covered pretty much all of the organizational and practical details of putting on successful meetings, conferences, workshops etc. From initial contact to post-meeting followthrough, the workshop and book provided tools that I can use and customize for my own practice. Since I’m generally not a highly detail-oriented person, this book will be a very useful prompter to keep me safe from the “uh ohs” and “darn its” that inevitably happen when organizing events. One of my favorite sayings is, “if you’re going to fly by the seat of your pants, you’d better have a darn good tailor” — this book is the pattern by which I’ll be able to keep things on track.

Making Questions Work was delivered by Dorothy Strachan, based on this book (see bottom of the page). It opened with a very healthy and meaningful discussion about core facilitator values and what it means to be in a participant-observer role. We used a variety of small group exercises to explore the five process frameworks Dorothy provides in this book for opening and closing a session, enabling action, thinking critically and addressing issues. The book provides 1800 questions you can ask to groups to promote discussion that is on-topic and relevant to outcomes. I really appreciated the honest, open way that Dorothy shared her knowledge and experience from 35 years of facilitation, without being self-important. It inspired me to continue my journey and development as a professional facilitator.