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Drawing as Thinking and Treasure Maps

This morning I sat down to go through my bookmarked tweets so that I could catch up with my reading and spent all of my time on the one tweet which was this one by @GiuliaForsythe…

 

The tweet showed the main concepts of a Learning Organisation drawing upon the main themes from Peter Senge from his book The Fifth Discipline with some added extras by @GiuliaForsythe.

These added extras were a list of additional references of journal articles which I perused and a couple stood out for me so I delved deeper. They were about visual thinking and using comic books for decision making.

Nick Sousanis (@NSousanis) wrote the paper on Grids and Gestures explaining a method of offering participants insight into how comic book creators compose their narrative using visual representations of marks, shapes, colours and the entire page to create the story.  I was fascinated by this because as a kid, my dad “forced/encouraged” us to read comic books and as an illustrator himself, he must have known that this would be a way to get us reading and have our brain activated with the artwork too.

I read Nick’s paper and quickly captured the main ideas in a mindmap which is a relatively new way that I make sense of what I read preferring to pick up a pen than tap anything out with a keyboard as you can read in this post on Experimenting with Mind Maps.

I decided to give the comic book drawing a go because I had explained something similar some years ago around how to use Snapchat Stories as a way to capture time and space and then be able to contextualise snaps to create a personalised narrative.

Contextualisation occurs through annotation of snaps through audio, video, photos, annotating tools, filters and lenses.

I’m mesmerised with the idea of using tools like this that allow people to individualise, contextualise and create their own meaning but also allows for creative expression that presents a way for someone to share their own thoughts and reflections in their own way – in a way that makes most sense to them.

Whether it’s through comic book or Snapchat, it’s irrelevant.  You just only need to commit to doing it.

I also thought about @KimMaston tweet that morning too where he highlighted a new map drawing challenge that was on Instagram called #MadMapMarch.  I checked out the drawings on Instagram and what struck me were how different the maps were – none were alike to each other.

Also in my head, I asked myself “what would my map look like?”

I thought about how I would draw the trees and the meandering rivers and place the intricate detail of shady rocks that would hide secret treasure and entrances into magnificent caves.

Instantly my mind went to filling things in, making sense of it all, making it real and lifelike but I didn’t need to be this way. When I looked at the Instagram photos, I saw that they DIDN’T have the detail!

The maps were drawn simply.  And for good reason.  Your mind filled in the rest.

“Of course!” I thought.  “How could I think of the detail?”

(Which is pretty obvious which is how I automatically think based on yesterday’s blog post on Changing My Modus Operandi).

So the beauty here is letting your mind fill in the details.  You do enough to get others to fill in the gaps. Let THEM do it.

You don’t have to force it down the throats – let them think for themselves! Let their own minds meander.

So I went back the list of the academic references and downloaded the paper from Nick Sousanis and read what he had to say.  In it, he confirmed that the whole idea was not to draw the real representations but to use the exercise as an opportunity to look at time and space and use the whole paper to identify a task, your day, or an experience and then draw it as if it was a comic book on a page.

This intrigued me so I sat down with my coloured markers and created how my day at Adopt & Embrace (where I work) would be like and this is what I came up with:

In the meantime, I was also snapping my reflections and sharing that on Snapchat and that’s where it hit me that the comic book exercise is very similar to using Snapchat.

In fact, this exercise can also be used to draw maps like the ones Kim is doing through #MadMapMarch and these can be used in the context of facilitating discussions with people around certain topics for example, organisational change.

So my mind meandered once again….

Some Random Thoughts

To some people, drawing and creative expression to create a story and to make it meaningful or contextualised so that they can understand it – and share the message to others – might be a frivolous activity.

“Oh I’m not creative!” they exclaim.  “There’s no place for art in business!” they add.

Already, we are seeing that some organisations are beginning to explore and use visual artists to capture information in this way.  Research such as Pfister, R., & Eppler, M. (2012). The benefits of sketching for knowledge management. Journal of Knowledge Management and Miller, L. A. (2017). On Knowledge Acquisition in Management Meetings, which were both references mentioned by the original tweeter @Giulia Forsythe 

With this in mind, with my current role as someone who assists organisations through change and digital transformation, I started to think how much of our focus of change efforts are still misguided in some way because we focus too much on the technology implementation and not the role people play in the organisation.  With my learning and development hat on with respect to organisational learning, we are also misguided.

Sure, we can look at business processes and use cases and then attempt to show – and tell – people how digital transformation happen.  We can buy Learning Management Systems to our hearts content and then scratch our heads why people aren’t flocking to them.   But what are we doing? We’re STILL providing the intricate details for our workers and not letting them think for themselves so they can decide what they need to do.

Whether it’s digital transformation or organisational learning  – change is being DONE to them but they’re not driving it themselves.

This is where we have it all wrong.

It’s akin to giving them a map and putting an X where the treasure is, handing over the shovel to them and physically walking them to where the treasure is without really asking them, is that what they really want?  Maybe they just want to build a raft and get off the island instead?

So this got me thinking about how we can use such creative activities such as the comic drawings along with some wonderful facilitation to get people involved in the decision making of an organisation.  That they feel that they have a voice and a say to what is being done to them and given opportunities for them to share their own knowledge in their own way.

I guess this is where “digital storytelling” plays a part – but please, please, please don’t let’s do this too for them.

Give people just enough for them to start asking questions about the important role they play and how they can create their own future together – and then, support them through this without fear or consequence.

The more I think and reflect on this, the more I realise that trying to do what we have always done in a structured, methodical and procedural way that comes from above and applying it for every problem or obstacle we face in the workplace is simply not the way to go.

We haven’t provided an opportunity for people to create their own maps. Instead, we get impatient with them because they don’t dig where we want them to dig for the treasure we thought they’d want when all along, they had another treasure in mind.

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