Book tip: Visual meetings
Many people consider meetings to be a necessary evil. And many meetings have earned their bad reputation. But there is another way: effective meetings with exceptional results are possible. There are simple and effective tools and techniques for this. In his book "Visual Meetings", David Sibbet introduces readers to various approaches that significantly improve meetings.
Visual working leads to better ideas, more effective decisions and more commitment and dedication from those involved. The book "Visual Meetings" is a modern guide to the latest techniques for visual thinking in groups and teams and offers a wealth of tools and tricks that promote creativity, collaboration and new ways of thinking.
Visualization makes groups smarter
Perspective and point of view play an important role in groups and meetings.- When participants share a common purpose, they work more effectively.
- When groups can recognize different patterns in their thinking, they become smarter.
- When they can remember the ideas they have, they become more productive.
The visual model on the cover of the book shows the process by which groups move from imagining the possible to taking action. It is a pattern of visual thinking in which each step is visualized. Let's look at these steps to see the possibilities.
Meetings start in our imagination
The first step in the group process is to clarify the purpose. When people attend a meeting, they try to imagine what it will be about. This process begins before the meeting and is supported by emails and other communication. Participants create a personal story of the potential of the meeting and imagine how much they want to invest in it.
It is helpful to provide a means for participants to have this conversation with themselves, and appropriate imagery encourages this. If participants cannot visualize anything productive, it is difficult to have a meeting. Envisioning the goal happens in the privacy of their imagination. There they are relatively free and can imagine anything, with images, words, feelings or combinations of these.
Visualize the meeting intention
Visualizing the meeting intention and objectives plays a huge part in the success of a meeting. It is even more effective if participants get involved early by talking about their expectations and the hoped-for outcomes. Since people can and do imagine all sorts of things, this investment is the first step towards group intelligence. You can't control thinking, but you can guide it.
That's why it's so important to bring in your own experiences from visual meetings and use true stories and images as catalysts for your own imagination. One of my colleagues prepares for meetings by drawing a very abstract pattern with chalk while thinking of the purpose of the upcoming meeting. She shows this pattern to the participants right at the start of the meeting and asks them what they see in it. In this way, amazing things come about right from the start.
Then we get involved and go on a journey of discovery
The tangible part of a meeting begins when participants start to engage with each other and commit to the purpose of the meeting. We can only make connections and recognize patterns when we have information to work with. That's why many meetings start with presentations and overviews, so that everyone is on the same page.
But the human mind is not passive! Creative and productive thinking requires more engagement than just information transfer. Movement and direct involvement are part of this phase. You can be sure that participation and engagement will increase as soon as you let the participants talk and express themselves and show that they are actually listening by writing and drawing what they say on paper posters. The quality of the drawings or notes doesn't matter, it's the fact that people are listening that counts.
Getting people to visually understand, share, engage and participate is the most important outcome you can achieve in the early stages of a group or team.
Thinking is visual pattern recognition
When participants have enough information, they try to recognize patterns that indicate the purpose of the meeting. In how many meetings have you heard, "Let's think outside the box" when setting expectations? The plate edges are the ruts we get into when we always look at information the same way.In visual meetings, making displays, maps, charts and graphical notes shifts what we see in different ways. Without these tools, however, groups can only think about complex things to a limited extent. A simple experiment shows how visual patterns influence our thinking.
- Place 4 or 5 beans on a plate and let your partner look at the plate for just a moment. The number of 4 to 5 beans will be recognized immediately.
- With 8 or 9 beans on the plate, the result is completely different. Some say 7, others 8 and so on. This is because our brain cannot process more than 6 or 7 individual pieces of information at the same time.
- Now arrange the beans in groups of 4. You can put 16 or 20 beans on the plate, your partner will recognize it at a glance. This property of our visual perception is behind the principle of limiting groupings and categories to 5 to 7 items.
Therefore, you should arrange information on displays to think about things that cover more than two to three individual aspects. In my experience, so-called "systems thinking" is not possible without visualization. If you want to understand something that cannot be grasped in a single moment, for example how a restaurant works or how you can optimize your business, you need to connect different pieces of information that you have experienced at different times.
When you think about connections and relationships between things, you need to make a representation. This can be completely in your imagination, but if you want to share your thoughts or communicate the same idea to a whole group, you will create this display visually. I involve people in creating a display where they find their own patterns in the information. This kind of learning sticks. And that's what visual thinking is all about. And that's why teachers work through ideas step by step on the board!
From vision to action
You need to actively involve the participants in order to achieve progress and results in the meetings! In this step, visualization shows the longer-term impact of actions. Roadmaps, strategies, dashboards, progress maps and case studies visualize actions over time and make us think about implementation. Acting through visualization is based on the power of simulation. I am always fascinated by how a simple shift in perspective from a linear to an elevation/depth progression provides insights into "conceptual prototypes".
The tools and techniques for this type of visualization do not require drawing skills, but are based on creating maps and diagrams. When you involve participants in developing action plans, accountability and implementation at the point of action are much more likely than if you assign them tasks.
When working with visual aids, you can track progress using diagrams. I remember an engineer from Bechtel Corporation in one of our workshops who used simple graphical action plans for a project. He enthusiastically went back to his company, photocopied his little drawing every week from then on and marked up what he had achieved with a marker. The drawing was very simple and unpolished and for this reason it stood out from all other means of communication.
Visual tools
- Task lists
- Process diagrams
- Graphical strategies
- Roadmaps
- Roadmap overview
- Dashboards
- Graphical KPIs
(Key Performance Indicators)
This text is an abridged extract from the book Visual Meetings by David Sibbet. We would like to thank the publisher mitp for the publication.
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