Visual Scribing and Facilitation : Navigating Change
Visual scribing and facilitation is a potent form of storytelling that enables large groups to process ideas and work toward common goals. By distilling dialogue and insights from workshops, conferences, and strategy meetings in real-time through hand-drawn images and words, the shared visual artefact lasts long after the event. This method brings clarity to concepts and illustrates how they fit into the broader system, process, or strategy. Through the use of symbols and metaphors, it enhances recall and understanding of concepts.
In Geoff Ball's early paper in the field of graphic facilitation 'Explicit Group Memory', the shared visual representation supports group learning and fosters lasting memories. By making dialogue visible, it serves as a mirror, reflecting the group process through visual means that aid in digesting complex ideas and navigating change.
Pioneer in the field of visual organisational consulting and author of ‘The Visual Leader’, Dave Sibbert, describes this approach as an effective tool for visioning, motivating, and aligning teams across organizations. It promotes systems thinking and facilitates organizational change, allowing individuals to grasp complexities and encourage co-creativity.
In the realm of societal transformation, visual scribing has been instrumental in summarizing intricate systemic concepts, as seen in the work of Otto Scharmer’s Theory U. Its global applicability allows it to bridge cultural, disciplinary boundaries and organizational divides. Gail Taylor, co-founder of MG Taylor highlights ‘the more diversity in the room, the more powerful visual images become’. Sometimes called visual harvesting, the book ‘Drawn Together through Visual Practice’ compiles experience-based methods and insights from twenty-seven practitioners into visual practice.
Emergent by nature, it requires attentive listening and improvisation. Its true power lies in providing new perspectives on our thoughts and seeing through complexity. Through the sharing of visual stories and interpretations, we uncover insights that resonate deeply with us.
Visual facilitation was utilised for the following workshops and purposes:
Inner Development and Sustainability event:
This live hybrid event was the launch of the IDG (Inner Development Goals) Australia Hub. Live visual scribing captured the essence of the dialogue and conversation in the room, enabling different ways to sense, understand the information from different perspectives. Feelings, patterns, systems, larger perspectives can be captured and reflect the collective energy in the room. The event brought in the wisdom and insight from Thomas Hubl on the natural intelligence of trauma for healing and integration, in dialogue with Daniel Hires. Four panels formed one long scroll.
Coralus Venture Announcement and Unsummit
Viv captured the stories of impact, the deep conversations, reflections and collective energy through visual storytelling of the Coralus Venture Announcement and Unsummit, a full day event bringing together a community to celebrate five funded female First Nations Ventures.
Johanna De Ruyter and Caresse Cranwell craftfully facilitated stories of impact and connection within the community of the amazing women in the room. The day culminated in a co-creation of the emerging living story and vision of the path to the future with First Nations and non-indigenous voices in the room. This was a deeply humbling experience to listen to what wanted and needed to be voiced to reconcile our path forward walking together. This is a deeper story and layer beneath all of the actvities we are engaged in.
Massive Action Sydney:with UNSW, Bruce Mau and Bisi Wiliams
The MAS partnership brought together innovators, thought leaders, visionary artists and change makers from the ADA staff and student community in a month-long design sprint to address today’s most pressing issues. Participants pitched to solve vital problems through their work, identifying barriers to change on a massive scale and at pace. Prior to the month long sprint, the teams coalesced in a preparatory online phase to meet and set the context of Massive Action and the 3 challenge areas : Climate, Health and Power. Viv captured these online gatherings through visual scribing. The large size posters were distributed digitally and also were placed in the team spaces during the month-long sprint.
Culturally Nourishing Schools: (University of NSW, Indigenous-led research project led by Associate Professor Kevin Lowe, 2023-24)
Viv captured progress on the Culturally Nourishing Schools project, a collaborative community and school-focused research study investigating new ways to provide equitable, quality schooling for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. Seven school journeys were captured live with multiple stakeholders and representatives from the schools sharing their journeys. Additionally, community meeting dialogues were visualised to capture the voices and concerns of communities.
Conscious Leadership for a Thriving Future: (Conscious Capitalism with Digital Storytellers, 2023)
Viv Sung draws to think and delivers visual scribing and visualisations during workshops. Conscious Capitalism believes in business for good. Partnering with Digital Storytellers, they utlised storytelling as a strategy to assist in communicating and spreading conscious business ideas aligned with higher purpose to a greater audience. To communicate these stories, Viv was engaged to capture visualisations of the inspirational real-life stories shared by guest speakers at the live event that were easily sharable and accessible.
UNSW Big Trauma Big Change Conferencee’
Viv visually captured emergent knowledge at the Big Trauma, Big Change Conference. The focus of day 2 was decolonising and reconfiguring ‘mental heath’ and ‘trauma’ in cultural spaces, termed ‘prefigurative practice’. This is considered as anarchist and socio-political practices developed within community or survivor-led outside of the medicalised system. She captured the intiatives from Uti Kulintjaku, the traditional healers and artists from NPY women’s Council, Jeffrey Ansloos, Marianne Wobcke and Indigo Daya.
UTS Transdisciplinary School ‘Leading Innovation Winter Intensive’
A 10-metre long scroll captured and reflected back the exploration of concepts, talks and conversations over the 2 week journey through the Bachelor of Creative Intelligence ‘Leading Innovation’ Winter school at UTS Transdisciplinary School (2024)
UNSW ADA Innovation Hub: UNSW Health Translation Hub Project Brief Workshop (2021). The newly formed UNSW Art, Design and Architecture Faculty comprises of four schools: Arts and Media, Education, Humanities and Languages, and Social Sciences. The faculty established a new ADA Innovation Hub in early 2021 during the Covid pandemic. The hub is a virtual space which brings creative and diverse collaboration projects from the four schools. The UNSW Health Translation Hub Project Brief Workshop was the first project opened to the faculty for collaboration. The Outcome: The visualisations aided in communicating ADA Innovation Hub’s objectives and project value proposition, making intangible concepts tangible to Faculty staff and students in a virtual Town Hall Meeting by the Dean Claire Annesley. Read more about the UNSW Health Translation hub initiative.
UNSW Health Precincts: (2021) The Wagga Wagga Health & Knowledge Precinct Visioning workshop involved key partner organisations and stakeholders within the precinct including hospitals, local health districts, Transport NSW, independent member representatives and university medical education experts to come together to collaboratively bring the vision of the project to fruition. The Outcome: Synthesis of key points in response to goals and priorities contributed to by multiple stakeholders.
UNSW Art & Design Transitions Wall Mural (2018): A visual wall mural located in the Art & Design Paddington Campus’ kitchen visible to both staff and students passing by, was utilised to aid the faculty in a change management initiative to navigate through organisational changes in both pedagogic course development and transitions from a 2 to 3 study term year. Outcome: Communication and capture of the purpose and road ahead in the transition.
UNSW Art & Design, Faculty Strategy Planning Day: (2018) The visual facilitation aided in creating an interactive and cohesive way to participate in a shared strategic roadmap and to help the faculty move forward into the future with a new 2025 strategy. . Key dialogue was captured and synthesised throughout the day and then reflected back to the group on the wall. The visual canvases captured the shared direction and actions, and the faculty were invited to add their thoughts and reflections to the wall. These were then integrated into the canvases, and later hung in the faculty's communal offices as well as shared through digital media. Various staff members from the executive team, professional staff, academics, researchers, sessional staff to Phd students were able to view the day’s events, a number of whom were not present on the day. Outcome: Greater transparency and improved communication.
‘I pondered the posters for quite a while and I was able to see the multiple layers of discussion that had gone on in that faculty day. For someone like me who’s a student, to see the direction of where the faculty is moving and the sorts of things that are being considered is really important, because it gives me direction as an upcoming academic. I found it really interesting to see it in a visual format, notions were connected and explained, the idea of exploring things visually through text and word. Making those connections visually in a summative way made it easy to understand in brief, rather than having to read a paper about it. I did spend quite a long time reading them.’ – Meg Lomm, Phd Student
