Graphic Facilitation Retrospective
Charting What We Learned
David Sibbet and Joan McIntosh facilitated the following workshop that traced the history of graphic facilitation at the International Association of Facilitators Conference 2001 in Minneapolis, Minnesota:
Graphic Facilitation is an interactive style of leading groups using large-scale imagery and displays. It grew out of a network of west-coast consultants in the 1970's who were inspired by the approach of designers and architects while problem solving and collaborating on projects. It has come to embrace a wide range of principles and practices that use creative media to help people to "see what they mean." This essay traces some of the early influences and strategies that have shaped the field, and how it has evolved to include influences from more psychologically influenced facilitation, storytelling, large scale collaborative practice and other approaches to managing group process.First Practitioners
David Sibbet, an acknowledged pioneer in graphic facilitation, first encountered graphic recording of group process in 1972 when the training organization he was working with, the Coro Foundation, moved into a building south of Market Street in San Francisco next to a consulting firm called Interaction Associates. IA, led by two former architects, David Straus and Michael Doyle, was working on a special project called "Tools for Change" under a grant from the Carnegie Foundation. They were gathering examples of problem solving strategies that teachers could use with students, including ones used by designers and other creative professionals. Active group facilitation was one of the strategies they were very excited about.
The IA project attracted the attention of many innovators at the time, including people who were working with Doug Englebart at SRI on another project called the "Augmented Human Intellect" project. One of the SRI team was a facilitator named Geoff Ball, who had been researching the impact of group displays on productivity. His paper on "Explicit Group Memory" showed up at Interaction Associates, and contended that of all the interventions a person could make to support a group, having a working group display was the most important. The fact that it was shared, explicit, and graphic made it key in creating a lasting group memory. This idea influenced IA to call their flip chart records of meetings "group memories" and to promote facilitator/recorder teams as the preferred approach to group facilitation.
Co-incident with the IA and Ball work, another former architect named Joe Brunon was working with the Center for Social Change at SRI in support of Willis Harmon and Oliver Markley's work. Brunon used graphics in the expressive, designerly way architects sketch out ideas, supporting creativity sessions at SRI that were far afield from design. He branded his approach "Generative Graphics" and wrote some articles about his work that influenced those new to this idea. (He went on later to apply this approach to family therapy and the mapping of family stories).
Another person who showed up at IA was an art/philosophy student from Stanford named Fred Lakin. He had been inventing tools for what he envisioned as a new breed of information communicators. One was a pegboard that would hold cards in place with a small suction pump system. Another was a magic marker holder that looked like a pen pallet. A third was a "wall scroll" that held the roll ends of newsprint upright, and then supported up to 16 feet of paper pulled out under a bar with little weighted magnets that held the paper in place by friction. He very much wanted people to try his tools and left them at IA as a test.
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Group Graphics is Born
Coro's flagship program is a nine month long Fellowship in Public Affairs, which trained a select group of 12 fellows to learn from their own experiences in internships in city government and other organizations. Friday seminars encouraged the group to dig into their different explorations, and put together big pictures of how city government really worked. Being physically located next to IA, Coro staff were naturally influenced by their methods, and began to record some of their sessions on large sheets of paper.
One day Sibbet hung up two rows of newsprint in the conference room Coro and IA shared to diagram city government. Three hours and no breaks later the group had just experienced one of the most analytical and juicy seminars they had ever conducted, simply by recording boxes within boxes, drawing lines, and mapping what they knew on the diagram, with Sibbet facilitating. Something really important was going on with the graphics. The Fellows had discovered what many would call "systems thinking."
Some coincidences uniquely prepared Sibbet to take to this new medium. He had always been adept at drawing. During his hazing week at Occidental College, seniors set out to humble the freshman. Among their assets was Terry Gilliam, the subsequent animator -of Monte Python films. His large tempura paint posters were works of art, and made the senior
events they advertised seem glorious. Not to be intimidated, Sibbet and another freshman took up their class standard, bought paints, and challenged back with their own murals. Their first attempts weren't to Gilliam standards, but they were good enough that both students ended up doing quad posters all the way through college—always reaching for that early standard of excellence.Sibbet went on to became editor of Oxy's college paper and received a Masters in Journalism from Northwestern University and work at the Chicago Tribune. These experiences trained him in interviewing and listening for story.
Quad posters, plus journalism skills, plus the group memory idea combined into "Group Graphics". A short while later Sibbet asked to move Fred Lakin's wall scroll to the conference room. Later in 1972, Coro offered an initial workshop in Group Graphics™ for some of its alumni and a small group began digging into this new big picture methodology, a branch on the facilitation tree that seemed loaded with possibilities.
Graphic Facilitation Retrospective (1400-1980)[Enlarged view]
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Explorations of Visual Grammer and Epistemology
Ball, Lakin, and Sibbet would talk a lot during those days. There is some debate about who first coined the term "Group Graphics." All three used it informally, and the Grove Consultants International (Sibbet's company) subsequently trademarked the name. They began gathering all the known examples they could find of display frameworks that would be useful for group process. They collected examples of diagrams, matrices, lists, Venn diagrams, drawings, and mandalas. Coro experimented with collage, sociogramming, history mapping and many other processes. Lakin would bring in insights from Wittgenstein, the language philosopher, and leading edge technical ideas from Silicon Valley.
Ball wrote a Group Graphics primer in those early days. Sibbet wrote articles for Coro and guides for the Coro workshops. Lakin began trying to model graphic recording in software, convinced that graphics was the overarching language that would eventually include words, numbers, and digits. The ideas began to evolve rapidly, fueled by related theoretical materials.
Inspired by Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics ideas, Coro staff were encouraged to avoid lectures and design "discovery" experiences in order to engage the whole learner. This orientation made it clear to Sibbet that group graphics was more than graphics. It was also dance, and story telling, since the facilitator was constantly in physical motion, miming the group and its communication with movement, as well as commenting on the displays, suggesting processes and the like.
A theoretical breakthrough occurred in 1976 when a friend of Sibbet's named Jack Saloma told him about Arthur M. Young. Young was a mathematician/physicist/philosopher teaching in Berkeley who was using graphics to describe the integration between physics and metaphysics, and had formulated an integrated framework for thinking about evolution called "The Theory of Process." Jack strongly advised Sibbet to attend Arthur M. Young's Saturday seminars. Between 1976 and 1981, Sibbet began a focused investigation of visual thinking from a process perspective and developed a grammar for visual language called the Group Graphics™ Keyboard based on Young's process perspectives. To this day, process theory and the keyboard insights are among the foundational structures behind the current teaching of graphic facilitation.
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A Graphic "Keyboard" Emerges
Inspired by Young, Sibbet looked at graphics from a process perspective. Traditionally graphics have been appreciated as static artifacts and structures - such as a finished blueprints or drawings. Their elements are the lines, colors, spatial relationships, and patterns of connection.
One can, however, focus on a more fundamental quality - namely the process of how the graphic came to be, and the process one needs to go through to understand it. How do we look at things visually? What's the process by which people scan, focus, drill down, and zoom?
In looking at the process of drawing and creating visuals on charts, Sibbet realized that it is important to understand ALL the properties of the process, for these are the active ingredients that a graphic facilitator uses to help the group. It is very helpful to understand which patterns of movement are more fundamental than others, for the fundamental aspects repeat and nest into the more complex processes.
Young's theories suggested that the most fundamental process element is potential - the simple focusing of attention achieved by a simple dot, point, or icon on a blank sheet. Looking at the process of perception, the most fundamental cognitive act is focusing on something, getting snagged by a difference.
"What's the next thing that's fundamental?" Sibbet wondered. It's moving that spot and connecting two spots to produce a relationship called a line. Perceptually, when one looks at a line one's eye moves one way or another to see what it connects, or what it separates. From a perceptual standpoint, a viewer is also moving his or her psyche when linking one thing with another. Sibbet, Ball and others found that line quality and body movement expressed the emotional quality of a meeting. Colors also expressed feeling.
Sibbet knew from his own math study that three points make a plane. Three sticky notes- on a chart will compel a viewer's eye to go from one to the other to the other trying to make a pattern, to create "space". They called this kind of display that simply spaced
information with no connectors a cluster map. They found that leaving out connections and simply juxtaposing information on sticky notes would activate a group's thinking. It seems there's something in the human brain that tries to connect things that are next to one another.Grids were next. There were all kinds - calendars, models, matrixes. Sibbet saw- these were the formalization of the comparison activity begun in clustering. When brains start coming to conclusions,
they think in related categories. Ah, this goes with that. Ah, that goes with this. Crossing categories and seeing systematic relationships is the process supported by a grid.Young saw processes as building on one another in a nested way. The visual formats appreciated as different kinds of processes did the same thing! The simpler formats like points and lines become the basis for the more complicated clusters and grids. In addition, Young's theory explained that processes in nature often take on increasing constraints, up to a point, and then turn to regain some of the freedom lost in becoming more complex. Atoms become molecules and crystals, but regain freedom as they discover the organization pattern embraced by plants.
Sibbet saw in Young's theory a clue as to what is beyond grids. Plants were next in Young's scheme, and all plants have branching patterns. So do most diagrams! In fact, a met-hod popularized by Tony Buzan, from England, called Mind Mapping, was based heavily on the assumption that the human brain is
uniquely set up to organize things in branching patterns. Branching diagrams have different characteristics than a grid. They can be much more complicated to read; they pack more in; but they are freer in the actual process of making them. You can branch anywhere, not just in a cell.Animals in Young's scheme occupy the next evolutionary stage. Animation is one of the aspects of graphic facilitation that really- involves and moves people, because the facilitator is continuously unfolding the drawing. Several years after first formulating the keyboard, Sibbet realized that conceptual animation occurs when the graphics themselv
es symbolically point at something the viewer already knows and the viewer projects movement back into the graphic. This happens when he would add analogy and graphic metaphor to a graphic display and it turns into a drawing.Graphic facilitators now regularly transform large vision murals into "drawings" when they create landscapes of information in certain kinds of metaphorical settings, like a space voyage, a road race, or eco-system. Drawings turned out to be magical and complex worlds with the potential to catalyze amazing insights during group process. They became a bridge to storytelling and other holistic mental practices. In the 1980's and 1990's designers like Jim Channon, Nancy Margulies, and their trainees evolved highly interpretive approaches to graphic recording that involved the use of elaborate drawings and illustration.
From the start of his work, Sibbet knew there was a pattern of ultimate complexity and inclusiveness that would conclude the keyboard. This would be the
mandala or circular- drawing, a nearly universal symbol of wholeness and unity. But for the brain to figure out how everything relates to everything in a central way requires the most amount of insight. It was a powerful way, however, to illustrate the group as a seating chart to suggest their implicit unity, or to illustrate mental models and theories. In a macro way, mandalas took the progression back to the point of it all- to see the world in a whole way.The seven formats constituted an elegant "keyboard" of choices. "If the archetypal formats were a visual piano," Sibbet would say, " the live group recording is the composition, with all the possibilities that music provides."
Since its formulation, hundreds of practitioners have tested this scheme, and have yet to find the need to add another major archetype. It seems that all graphic patterns are one or combinations of these fundamental processes.
Over the years, it has also become clear that these graphic patterns, artifacts of fundamental processes of creation and perception, are in fact directly connected to how people think at archetypal levels about any kind of organization. In 1986, Gareth Morgan wrote a wonderful book called "Images of Organization', which explores how metaphors organize our thinking about organizations. When people say, "we are organized" they mean that they share a common conception how parts of the organization fit together in some integrated way. If you understand that this way of "seeing" is display making, then you can appreciate the enormous opportunities for organizational intervention and facilitation that the pioneers of graphic facilitation found when they began to work with a group's core imagery.
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Graphic Facilitation Matures
In the late 1970's, following Sibbet's formulation of the keyboard, Sandra Florstedt, an OD consultant with Kaiser Permanente invited him to the OD Network to present the methodology. Then in 1980 Sibbet, Florstedt, and Ball offered the first public workshop in Group Graphics at Fort Mason in San Francisco. It was accompanied by a book Sibbet wrote called "I See What You Mean: A Workbook Guide to Group Graphics" that outlined a formal method for graphic facilitation. The book has been reprinted innumerable times and is the basis for workshops now being offered by the Grove Consultants International, its international affiliates, and many other independent practitioners offering graphic training.
Interaction Associates has matured to be a premier facilitation training organization. The Grove focused on big picture graphics and training in graphic facilitation. The two companies referred students to each other and explicitly saw themselves as supporting the growth of a field.
Exemplary practitioners abounded and made the field real. One of the earliest was Jennifer Hammond Landau, a woman who came to the methodology herself through the Girl Scouts, and then discovered Group Graphics in Sibbet's workshops and became an early associate. She has been a leader in helping create the new Visual Practitioner's Association and has led the effort to have a Graphics track at the 2001 International Association of Facilitators conference.
Suzanne Bailey used graphics extensively, first through the education system in California building tech centers, then worked with the Group Graphics workshops for a while, helping formalize a hierarchy of skills related to the work. She went on in neurolinguistic programming and created her own consulting company, the Bailey Alliance, which has trained untold numbers in graphic facilitation methods.
Joan McIntosh encountered the method as a marketing manager of a software company, and sustained her interest while working at Interaction Associates in the 1980's. She eventually became the marketing manager at The Grove Consultants International in the early 1990's and a leader of their graphic facilitation trainings, among other contributions. She now has her own facilitation organization in Minneapolis.
Bob Horn, founder of Information Mapping, a company in Cambridge that first applied "information chunking" and other graphic strategies to text in the 1970's, attended the 1980 Group Graphics Workshop and has been tracking graphic facilitation and visual language since. He recently wrote a book called "Visual Language" that traces the larger history of text-graphic representation, with graphic facilitation as a subset. He believes that the tight integration of text and graphics is itself a new language, a visual language. In 1999 he was keynoter at the third annual Visual Practitioners Conference in California. More than 50 attended. All were making their living full time "working on the wall." The group speculated on how many practitioners there might be worldwide. Horn thought it was probably in the 10s of thousands by now, if you include all the variations.
Graphic Facilitation Retrospective (1980-2001)[Enlarged view]
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An Emerging Lexicon
Following is a brief list of some of the practices now associated with graphic facilitation:
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The Presenters
David Sibbet is an organizational consultant and information designer whose applications of interactive, graphic communications to organizational visioning, change management, and process facilitation are inspiring a new generation of process consultants around the world. Sibbet and his team at The Grove Consultants International design, develop, and distribute tools for collaboration drawn from their own experience with strategic visioning, team performance, and graphic facilitation. While a good part of Sibbet's practice is rooted in Silicon Valley, he has clients throughout Europe and North America in many different industries. In additional to organizational work, Sibbet is a long-term affiliate of the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park working to understand the impact of technology on organizations.
Over the years Sibbet has designed and authored a wide variety of professional publications and information graphics. In 1991, he wrote "GroupWare" and "Workplace Learning: The Transformation of Training and Education in the Knowledge Revolution", for the Institute for the Future. He co-authored "Leading Business Teams: How Teams Can Use Technology and Group Process Tools to Enhance Performance", in 1991 for Addison Wesley and contributed heavily to "Global Work" for Jossey Bass in 1994. Recently he designed a 75-year "Timeline of Management Practices" for the Harvard Business Review as a gift insert in its 75th Anniversary issue. He is author and designer of many of the extensive line of process management tools provided by the Grove.
Sibbet has a BA from Occidental College in Los Angeles and a M.S. Journalism degree from Northwestern. After working for the Chicago Tribune, he was Executive Director and Director of Training of Coro Foundation's northern California Center from 1969-1977. He founded his own company, The Grove Consultants International, in 1977, now located at the Thoreau Center for Sustainability in the Presidio of San Francisco.
Joan McIntosh is an organizational development consultant and trainer. Since 1988, she has built her consulting and training practice on a foundation of over twenty years of business management, marketing and operations experience in a variety of business settings. Joan works collaboratively with individuals and teams to help them clarify their vision and values, define direction and set goals, and reach for high performance. She is an expert in the application of advanced team performance tools, most notably the Drexler-Sibbet Team Performance Model and the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory.
Transferring knowledge and skills are a key part of each assignment. Joan has her own facilitation organization in Minneapolis and is a Senior Associate with The Grove Consultants International of San Francisco where she regularly teaches programs in strategic visioning, teamwork, facilitation skills and graphic language tools and systems. Joan is also Adjunct Faculty at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, teaching group dynamics.
Joan designs and facilitates conferences, meetings and retreats, to meet the specific needs of each leader, group and situation. She often brings "Council™" electronic meeting support technology to larger groups when productivity, inclusiveness and honesty are essentials for success. As a coach, she holds a deep faith in the power of individuals to be the architects of their own future. She has a deep reservoir of experience and the interpersonal and communication skills to help individuals clarify and express their unique contributions.
Joan has worked extensively in the private and not-for-profit sectors throughout the US and abroad. To each assignment, she brings "new eyes" to look at the situation without preconceptions, and shares a wealth of experience about "what works." Her personal commitment is to be a true ally to those who manage the complex business of change.
Telephone: (415) 561-2500 or (800) 49GROVE