As an entrepreneur, you often find yourself with a jumble of different business ideas floating around in your head at any given point in time. If you settle on pursuing one of those ideas and start shaping it into a solid vision for a business, the next step is articulating all of the fundamental concepts that support your idea (e.g., a business plan). This can be really difficult for a lot of entrepreneurs--we're so excited to jump right into something new that we forget that sometimes it's important to be methodical.
A few months back when GotVMail was engaging in an executive level strategy session and crystallizing our core values, I had lots of ideas floating around in my head--but this time it wasn't about which business idea I wanted to pursue, it was about the amazing things still in store for the company. Despite the fact that my company is past its infancy and well into its childhood, as a team we wanted to ensure our collective focus was aligned, and actually effective when executed. We also wanted to nurture our identity from the inside out, to lay the foundation for the future, but it was difficult with so many opinions on the table.
Two weeks earlier I attended a talk given by Cameron Herold for EO Boston during which Collective Next produced an amazing graphic representation of the ideas discussed at his presentation. The way the facilitator visually deconstructed the ideas about creating a world class "work culture" struck me as incredibly useful and very productive. The even more amazing part was that Cameron and the facilitator never met before the event, or prepared any graphics in advance; they didn't require any interaction during the process, they just produced an amazing visual on-the-spot. (It's unfortunate there's no video of this, since the process is fascinating.) Since I'm a visual learner, "seeing the ideas" as we discussed them really helped me retain the overarching principles of the topic at hand. At that point, I knew that in order to drive the executive level strategy session, we had to do a series of graphic facilitation exercises.
This is how it worked for us: a really talented graphic facilitator we obtained through Collective Next came to our strategy sessions. With very little coaching or knowledge of the topics, she was able to create--in real time--a visual representation of all our discussion points, in one easy-to-share visual. As a result of the graphic facilitation, we were able to come up with lively and informative visual notes for the sessions. Individuals were able to review the documents at their leisure outside of the sessions, too, since we had the representations disseminated to key players via email.
Planning, strategizing, and articulating your core ideologies and goals isn't the sexiest way to spend your time as an entrepreneur, but if you don't do that in the beginning of your business, trust me, in order to grow, you will need to do it at some point. Our graphic facilitation exercises really helped us take that next step in growing GotVMail, and it helped us formulate our core values as a company.
We're now considering using graphic facilitation in a number of different areas. I recently discovered The Grove, a company that offers pre-packaged solutions as well as training in the graphic facilitation skill set. If you feel like you need a little help getting to that next level, I highly recommend using a process such as this.
Update: Kristen Schaefer of Grove was nice enough to provide a great resource for finding a local graphic record, Visual Practitioners Association.
