Behind the Scenes - Visual facilitation for Diabetes UK
Visual facilitation - creating collective vision together
With live visualisation as a facilitation tool, I engage directly with the participants in settings like stakeholder consultations, project evaluations and strategic discernment processes. With an academic and professional background in process design and facilitation, and visualisation as a bonus skill set, I support groups into their own collective wisdom, and help ideas gain clarity and communicability.
To understand what this looks like, in this article I take you behind the scenes of a visual facilitation project with one of my clients, Diabetes UK. We’ll walk through not only the stages and outcomes of our work together, but also the thinking that went into them.
Refining the request
In June 2020 I was contacted by someone from Diabetes UK, who had been referred on to me by Kelvy Bird, with whom I’d trained the previous November.
Diabetes UK is the leading British charity for people living with diabetes. Their Improvement Team is tasked, among other things, with developing and delivering leadership programmes for healthcare professionals wanting to improve the system of diabetes care. Naturally, to be able to do that well, they wanted to share a clear understanding of what they meant by ‘leadership’ when advocating for it through their programmes, and the team had spent the previous six months developing a new leadership philosophy that underpinned their curriculum of training programmes.
They had produced a prodigious body of documents and powerpoint presentations with careful thought put into the words chosen to expound their understanding of leadership. Everybody working in strategy will recognise this; the power and importance of words, the challenge of distilling very complex issues down into concise and consensus-built language, and the risk of getting quagmired in words in looking for the ‘right’ ones.
Now, the team wished to take a step back from the world of words they had spent so much time in, and look at their vision for leadership through the lens of imagery, so as to check that they were actually aligned in their views. Initially they reached out to me for a visual thinking workshop, but after some scoping calls we decided to take a more involved approach, where I would help them take that step away from words and into imagery. A brave and thorough step to take, because words mean something different to everyone, and the risk of communicating in words alone is that you may not have the same thing in mind at all, even as you’re using the same language.
This imperfect fit of words onto reality always reminds me of a cartoon my philosophy teacher in secondary school showed me when teaching about Plato’s theory of Ideas. Visually paraphrased, it came down to this:
Image mining
So my job was to help the team to build a bridge from the 'world of words' into the ‘world of images’, and deliver a visual translation of their leadership philosophy that they could use (1) as a tool to describe their work and (2) as a standalone template for self-reflection exercises for the participants in their programmes.
I started by analysing their documents for visual cues (metaphors, analogies, symbols etc) already present in their leadership philosophy, as people already often think and speak in visual language without realising they are, and without being aware of the potency in that visual language to deepen shared understanding. I asked them to do the same, by reflecting on the language they used with each other and outsiders to describe their work, and unearth the visual cues embedded within. I provided them with guiding questions for that:
“Going through the distinct elements of the leadership philosophy, ask yourself 'What does this look like to me?' Take note of the immediate and secondary associations that come to you; those are visual prompts we can use in our workshop. There will probably be plenty such cues; I've already heard you mention 'visual' words like 'ecosystem' and 'journey'.”
and
“Spend some extra time on heavily represented but abstract words like 'trust' and 'system'; what does trust look like, what image (metaphor/analogy/symbol) comes up?”
We then came together (online) for a 3 hour workshop to continue the ‘image mining’ process. I wanted to have as many of the images that would inform the visual translation come directly from them, unfiltered and from their own hand, so that they would recognise their own visual thinking in the end result and would feel enough ownership over it to actually use it in their work. To that end, I included some time on basic drawing exercises, to bring everyone on an equal playing field before asking people to draw their ideas. The rough outline of the workshop looked like this:
Excerpt from the workshop handout - drawing 101
1st hour – Orientate ourselves to the what & why of visual thinking, as well as the how: some warming up exercises to get drawing ourselves (and take away any nerves around having to draw).
2nd hour – We’ll go ‘image mining’ for the elements of the leadership philosophy, mainly in solo visual journaling exercises to guiding questions.
3rd hour – We’ll work on surfacing the larger shape and/or metaphor for the overview image, in break out groups and all together.
This three hour session revealed similarities in the images the team carried in their own minds about the work they do in the world together, but also some tension in the differences, especially around using strong imagery like burning forests and barren landscapes as analogies for the environment they work in. It was an insightful session for them, and a delicate one for me to facilitate. As one of the team remarked, “our group has made progress in our thinking and recognition of our differences – I really appreciated your skill and patient energy.”
Some of the images drawn by the team during the workshop
Visual translation
From this workshop, I took their image ideas and assembled them into a visual landscape, using the overarching metaphor of a rainforest that had been identified collectively.
It was a challenge also for me - more accustomed to working with words and images in parity in the role as graphic recorder - to create a visual-only image, letting go of words altogether and relying on the colours and images to work as I knew they could, if I got it right. My challenge was to find the right tone through colour and contrast that would resonate with the feeling the team had about their work, to bring in enough texture and detail to do justice to the complexities of their work, whilst keeping it simple and accessible enough to serve its purpose as a communication tool.
The visual went through two rounds of feedback and edits to get these things right. The team requested more colour, more brightness, more detail, all the while ensuring that the image still ‘flowed’ as a whole; that a consistent narrative could be found in the visual metaphor that matched the language of their leadership philosophy.
Two rounds of feedback and edits, with the end result on the far right
Decoding the visual
The resulting visual translation looked nice, and it resonated with the team, but something was missing. We had layered a lot of meaning into this image that I and the team could see and extract, but in the process it had become esoteric: understood by a small number of people with special knowledge.
I realised that what was missing to make it accessible to a wider audience, was… words! In essence, we had encoded the vast body of words the team had dedicated to their leadership philosophy into this one image, to give them a single, dense, distilled version that you could take up in one glance, yet had all the complexity built into it. ‘Images say more than a thousand words’, goes the old adage, but we were now realising we needed some words to provide the context for interpreting the image. We needed to decode it if it was to serve its purpose of facilitating the team in explaining their leadership philosophy to others. Not by deconstructing it all the way back down into the dozens of pages of words that had gone in, but to a small companion text, like a legend to a map, or annotations to a complex text.
I researched some possible solutions and landed on the use of ‘tooltips’, the technical term for pop up textboxes that appear when you hover over or click on select areas of a digital image to make that image interactive.
With the tooltips added as annotations to the visual, we had now created little doorways into the thinking behind it. The tooltips showed quotes from the team they’d shared during our workshop, explanations for why some images had come to them, as well as highlighting some detailed excerpts from the visual that could serve particularly well as self-reflection prompts. This turned the visual translation from a flat ‘pretty picture’, to a three-dimensional information piece, a reflection tool, and a conversation starter. It became the single integrated metaphor co-created with the team as it was intended, weighted towards visual salience so as to accompany their leadership philosophy text documents, whilst not discarding the role of words completely. A co-created tool sent on its way to help the Diabetes UK team communicate their new vision on leadership.
“I loved it! I’m not too confident with drawing and the template for drawing basic images was really helpful, I’ll use these often I think! The format really worked for me, it gave me time to think and reflect in a way I don’t normally.”
“We could see using this at the beginning of programmes to illustrate what we are trying to do in the system and where healthcare providers come into this. I also think it would be valuable to revisit at the end and ask whether participants can see themselves reflected in it.”
A selection of other visual facilitation jobs
