Marcel van Hove shares story with us about his move back to Germany from Australia, and the birth of Visual Friends Germany. We discuss how as an entrepreneur and small business owner he has grown his Australasian business to a global business, Younito the new visual collaboration training created this year, and also how he’s found niche opportunities during the global pandemic such as creating new training content to upskill German teachers to successfully use visualisation and technology to work remotely.
Over a decade ago Charity watched a team of consultants at an offsite event create awe-inspiring visual content. She dreamed that one day she too could communicate with simple visuals from words but had no idea how to get there. Flash forward 10 years to discovering Visual Friends and her journey has begun.
During the VizConf 2019 OpenSpace planning, when participants advertised their sessions and everyone voted for the ones they were interested in, collaboratively creating the daily agenda, a petite woman in her 50s came to the front. She smiled and said she wanted to lead a session on “How to be a newbie”. My heart sunk. I thought that after ‘serious’ topics like “Lettering for Lefties”, “Visualisation in Education”, and “Digital Scribing”, that we already had on the board, no one would want to hear her speak.
How wrong was I. Nearly every hand in the room shot up? “Being a newbie” was one of our most popular sessions that day. We talked about how hard it is to start something new and what resources, tools and tricks one can employ to help visualisation progress.
Plato said, “The beginning is the most important part of the work”. It is also often the hardest.
With the first month of 2020 over, have you begun taking steps towards being a more confident visual practitioner? Whether you are a professional or a complete amateur, becoming better at any aspect of visualisation begins with the single first step.
So, here are just a few “newbie” suggestions to help you start building your
visualisation muscles this year.
And the best bit? You can start making plans for 2020 visually. Grab a piece of paper, a marker and draw your visualisation journey for 2020.
If you need help – join our free video training here or ask for a visual career coaching session with Marcel here.
All you need to do is simply begin, and before you know it, you’ll no longer be a newbie.
The article was written by Natalia Tsygankova. Natalia has always loved words and talking to people. She has put that passion to good use and has been sharing people’s stories in the community radio, TV and print media for the last 10 years. Natalia is also a big fan of true storytelling events and regularly volunteers at the most famous one – The Moth, interviewing the winner. You can hear her own story of moving to Australia from Russia in 1999 here. Natalia believes that everyone has a story – So what’s yours? Contact her today to share your story.
Trainer & Partner at Visual Friends
Let me introduce to you Danny Low. Danny is not only a bikablo® trainer and partner at the Visual Friends. He is also a very good friend of mine and in many ways, we are very similar. We talk a bit about that but we forgot to talk about one great story. So in the early days when I met Danny, he told me that he will take time off and travel with his family around the world.
He told me that he would like to pass on some of the experiences he and his wife Anna had and to show the kids the world. With that, we pretty much hit the core DNA of Danny. He likes to pass on his life experience to others – not only to his kids but also to his students at the Visual Friends. He likes to help others and is a great mate that everyone would like to have as a friend. We follow his personal journey, learn how to visualise legal contracts, hear about project management, agile coaching and how he became part of the Visual Friends. For me, Danny’s story is another great example of what can happen in life when you follow your passion and make a couple of choices at the right time. Please welcome our lawyer and Kung-Fu master Danny Low from Brisbane.
Marcel combines agile team coaching with visual thinking. Marcel believes that a group of people drawing together on a whiteboard can change the world. He loves high-performing teams and therefore coaches teams every day.
Presenting, Documenting and Exploring Visually
At the start of every bikablo® basics class, we talk about what bikablo is and how it is different. Most people who attend our classes have ‘no drawing skills’ and are worried about their lack of drawing ability. At the end of two days, they are consistently surprised with the dramatic change in their ability to visualise. The reason for these results is that bikablo is a systematic approach to visualisation. In bikablo, we say that ‘visualisation is not about art, it’s about language’. And just like any language, the goal is about communicating meaning. All languages do this because they have systematic grammar, syntax and cultural nuances that allow people to have shared understanding of what is being communicated. Just like the languages we speak in, bikablo is a systematic visual language. It has letters, words, grammar and syntax that can be combined and recombined in different ways in order to communicate content in a way that is meaningful to its audience and their surrounding context.
In his book, ‘UZMO’, bikablo co-founder Martin Haussmann provides a simple but very powerful framework for understanding, and using, visualisation as a language. It has three basic elements, that I like to represent as a Venn Diagram:
When I communicate this idea at the beginning of a class, it’s always greeted with a few nods and a few puzzled expressions. But as we gradually build in each layer of the technique and apply it in practice, I return to this framework as a way to plan and then execute our visualisations. Through this journey of theory and practical experience, the penny drops on what this framework means and how it can be used in practice. Let me give you a simple example of how I used this recently.
I was designing a 2-hr class on how to design and facilitate collaborative meetings and workshops. There would be 32 students who were coming after work and would be seated in a ‘cosy’ classroom for 2-hours. My presentation was largely based on a slide deck I had created but was organised around two frameworks that would gradually be revealed. The students would need to hold the frameworks in their mind as we progressed through the slide deck. I would need to be able to refer back to the frameworks throughout the class. I needed to create ‘signposts’ for each part of my content that would help the group remember the frameworks as I talked to them. I also needed people to be able to see the signposts from the back of the room.
Finally, this was a class that I planned to offer multiple times, so I needed re-usable content.
The 5 key jobs of a facilitator
The 5 key design elements of any collaboration session
Overall there were are two frameworks each with elements, so 10 content elements overall.
As you can see from the images, I created 10 physical signposts which we call ‘mobile elements’ in bikablo®. I used bold, visible lettering with an icon or container around each to anchor the meaning of each piece of content. I also used two different colours to delineate the two different frameworks. I used foam board (or foam core) for two reasons. Firstly because its smooth white surface really takes well to markers without bleeding. Secondly it is a light, stiff and relatively durable material which would last longer with repeated use.
This is a simple example, but the framework is scalable to larger, more complicated visualisations, and indeed, to any form of design work more generally that involves content that must be communicated in a way that can be interpreted in a way that fits a particular context.
Join us at one of our upcoming 2-day classes to learn more about this framework and how to use it in practice.
The article was written by Natalia Tsygankova. Natalia has always loved words and talking to people. She has put that passion to good use and has been sharing people’s stories in the community radio, TV and print media for the last 10 years. Natalia is also a big fan of true storytelling events and regularly volunteers at the most famous one – The Moth, interviewing the winner. You can hear her own story of moving to Australia from Russia in 1999 here. Natalia believes that everyone has a story – So what’s yours? Contact her today to share your story.
Facilitator, Educator, Designer, Coach / Co-author, Collaboration by Design
I think I have to confess something to you guys. April this year I recorded an amazing podcast with John Hibble about his venture, The Facilitation Starter. John Hibble is an experienced facilitator with more than 10 years in the field.
After I recorded this podcast in April my life became quite busy as I started building a house in May and had a newborn baby in July. That is the reason why this podcast stayed on my hard drive for quite a while. Now it’s time to unveil this great conversation about workshop preparation from the session designed over delivering a workshop to how you capture insights.
Over the last month, things have changed slightly. I’m very happy to announce that John is also now a certified bikablo® trainer like Martin and me, and together we run as the Visual Friends bikablo® training in Australia and New Zealand.
Now let’s do the time travel and go back to April and listen to John Hibble from the Visual Friends Team.
Marcel combines agile team coaching with visual thinking. Marcel believes that a group of people drawing together on a whiteboard can change the world. He loves high-performing teams and therefore coaches teams every day.
Business Analyst at MYOB
In this episode Nicole Brand shares her story how she became a visual leader: I had the fortune to work with Nicole Brand for the last 18 month on a daily bases. I saw her progressing from not feeling confident enough to participate in meetings to the point where people follow Nicole’s lead into any meeting room and come along on her visual journeys. I have never seen a steeper learning curve in terms of visual leadership than Nicoles before – I hope the podcast inspires you as much as Nicole inspired me!
Nicole: For me, the biggest tip is, don’t be afraid to not know everything and pass the pen on to someone else who knows more.
Marcel: Welcome everybody to the bikablo® radio, the Visual Facilitation Podcast. With me here today in Melbourne is Nicole Brand. Welcome, Nicole.
Nicole: Hi, everyone. Thank you, Marcel.
Marcel: Nicole is working as a product owner in a company called MYOB. Tell us a bit about who you are, where you come from, what you do?
Nicole: Yes, sure. I’ve been living in Melbourne for the last 20 years. Absolutely love it. It is my new home. I live with a couple of cats. I could be a crazy cat lady in the making.
Marcel: Great.
Nicole: When I’m not at home with my cats then I’m out practising yoga and learning how to be a yoga teacher which is also really exciting and if you can’t tell I do like trying to keep myself busy and doing 101 different things. I also work at MYOB as a product owner. I have been with the MYOB for the last 13 years. So I’ve actually been able to work in a number of different roles over the last six or seven years.
Marcel: You came to bikablo® visual facilitation drawing class 11 months ago.
Nicole: Yes.
Marcel: When you look before that time, how was your way of working differently?
Nicole: Yeah, sure. Really, really different. Within MYOB I’ve had a number of different roles, but at all times I’ve always had to collaborate and work with people. Interestingly, I never really felt equipped or I had the tools or the resources to really facilitate a good meeting and drive to the outcomes. Back then it was quite common to have meetings that didn’t really end with a solution or a resolution or with the outcome that we’re looking for which is perpetuating itself into more meetings.
I also didn’t necessarily have the confidence as well to actually facilitate and to drive things to the right outcomes because I didn’t really feel like I necessarily have the tools. I actually had just a life of meetings.
Marcel: A life of meetings, yes. They don’t always come to an outcome and you felt like you don’t have the right tools to drive those meetings.
Nicole: Yeah, absolutely. Sometimes we would actually have people in the room who would be able to drive things to the right outcomes, but it was not something that I necessarily felt empowered to do or that I felt confident in doing. I mean, to grab a pen and walk up to a whiteboard. No, thank you. That was definitely not my mode of operation. Especially not with the sort of other stakeholders and management there. Yeah, definitely not.
Marcel: Then you came then to the training last October and you went to quite a journey with me, you’ll agree. We started the fundamentals class in October and then you came to the practitioner class. Then you actually gave me a hand another day with co-facilitating right and so you have done all the classes and so how has this played out for you? How’s the last journey of the last year?
Nicole: First of all, my confidence has increased dramatically over the last year. So much so that I’ve actually had colleagues walk up to me and tell me how they see me as being a completely different person to what they saw a couple of years ago.
Marcel: What is different about you?
Nicole: It’s being confident and being able to distil conversations down to an essence and being able to visualize that on a whiteboard and being able to take everyone on that journey. There’s nothing more powerful than actually taking a pen to a whiteboard engaging everyone in the room so that they’re all looking at you. Well, actually that’s the best part. They are not looking at you. They’re looking at the whiteboard which is also really nice. You don’t necessarily have all of the eyes on you.
Marcel: It’s not so confronting anymore.
Nicole: Yes.
Marcel: You now have the tool to break through and get the people on to a collaborative whiteboard drawing situation which is much more your playground.
Nicole: Exactly. Yes.
Marcel: Great. Give us an insight into how the day looks like now in your role. If I’m right, you work as a product owner now at MYOB for a team and how does a day look like for you now?
Nicole: Now I will have meetings, but definitely nowhere near as many. I mean ideally, everyone wants zero meetings but, yeah, that’s a perfect world, ideal thing. Now my meetings are actually reduced to half an hour. I do not book meetings longer than 30 minutes which is really quite exciting. Everyone walks in with a clear understanding after I’m able to basically take them through what it is they’re looking or we’re looking to talk about.
By the end, we’ve got clear action points, a clear understanding of who’s actually going to walk away with different pieces of work and it’s all done before people get an email. It’s all done in a way where people get buy-in into what it is that they are supposed to be doing. Probably one of the things that I’ve never really liked is walking into a meeting and then you have a conversation and you walk out, and an hour later the meeting notes come through and you’ve got things against your name and either (a) they don’t look like what you originally discussed or (b) you didn’t even know your name was there.
It’s just really nice to be able to walk away with that so that everyone has that clear understanding of what needs to happen next.
Marcel: That means in half an hour you fill a small piece of paper or you fill a wall or what?
Nicole: Thankfully, in the office in most of the meeting rooms we actually have two whiteboards. So more often then not I’ll usually have one or both whiteboards full.
Marcel: After half an hour, right. This is like two and a half square meters of space.
Nicole: Yeah. Two whiteboards might be if it goes longer than half an hour.
Marcel: Do you replace meeting minutes?
Nicole: The pictures are the meeting minutes.
Marcel: All right.
Nicole: Yeah.
Marcel: Okay. Cool.
Nicole: It’s really nice because I usually have someone who’s part of the meeting take a picture of it so that they can also take ownership of it and pass it around to everyone who attended in the meeting. We can then put that up on different wiki pages that we have as well so we can use that for future reference. It’s really quite useful and it’s quite easy to put yourself back into that conversation when you look back at it.
Marcel: Nicole, what was the first role at MYOB?
Nicole: Helpdesk.
Marcel: Helpdesk?
Nicole: Yes.
Marcel: Then you move to be a business analyst, senior business analyst and then now a product owner in MYOB. There are folks out there who are on a similar journey. What is the one tip you would like to share with the world when people facilitate meetings or bring people together to collaborate?
Nicole: Yes, sure. Probably one of the key things is you don’t need to have all the answers. You don’t need to know all of the answers when you’re facilitating. You don’t need to know where you’re going on the journey. You don’t even need to know how to communicate things visually on a whiteboard. Because at the end of the day you’re the person standing up there in front of the whiteboard. You’ve got the pen in your head and whoever has that pen has the attention of people and there’s nothing more powerful than to actually empower someone else to be able to share the message and to communicate and be part of that collaboration picture. For me, the biggest tip is, don’t be afraid to not know everything and pass the pen on to someone else who knows more.
Marcel: I like that. Pass the pen on.
Nicole: Yeah.
Marcel: Great. All right. If you’re interested, guys out there, to learn more about check out the bikablo® academy website. It will be in the show note. There are training coming in Sydney and Melbourne. Find them in to show note and thank you for listening. Thank you, Nicole, for attending. Do you have anything you want to share before we wrap up?
Nicole: Have fun.
Marcel: Yay!
Nicole: Visualising is so much fun. I used to absolutely visualise everything that I do more often than not because it’s so much easier to do and it’s so much fun. There’s no boundaries to it, absolutely no boundaries. So put any on there and just enjoy it for what it is.
Marcel: Cool. Thank you very much and have a great weekend, Nicole.
Nicole: Thank you, Marcel.
Marcel: All right.
Nicole: Thank you, everyone.
Marcel combines agile team coaching with visual thinking. Marcel believes that a group of people drawing together on a whiteboard can change the world. He loves high-performing teams and therefore coaches teams every day.
Director of the bikablo® company for visual storytelling, graphic recording, visual facilitation and visual consulting
This episode looks beyond the horizon: We start with a comprehensive introduction into the world of visualisation and go down the rabbit hole into group facilitation and conflict solving through drawing together. When we come out again, we go 12 years back in history and talk about the early days of visualisation when bikablo® wasn’t known at all. How the systematic bikablo® technique appeared and what the three pillars of bikablo® are about. We then look into the future and explore areas that bikablo® could explore in the future.
We look into different cultures and how other cultures use visuals in different ways. Over the last 12 years we have just started to learn about visual thinking and there is much more to explore.
Marcel combines agile team coaching with visual thinking. Marcel believes that a group of people drawing together on a whiteboard can change the world. He loves high-performing teams and therefore coaches teams every day.
Trainer and Agile Coach
In everyday life, our brain processes picture all the time, for example when we see a car on the street. The brain will immediately connect it to all the information about how fast it is, which direction it is going and if it will be a threat or not. This is happening in pictures, not words and our brain processes visual information very effectively.
Drawing for yourself is a great way to create ideas and improve your memory. Most of us learn quicker if we visualise the content to be learnt. When recalling the information a picture comes up in your memory more easily than words.
Drawing also helps us to be creative. As my daughter said when asked why she would draw: “My brain creates new ideas”. That is absolutely right, drawing helps us to focus our mind and create new ideas. Or why do you doodle on the phone?
Drawing for your team is the next step. Brain science shows that about 25% of humans work mainly verbally. Another 30% work mainly visually and about 45% work best with both, words and pictures. So if you are addressing an audience you will only be able to reach 100% with a combination of words and pictures.
It is not about impressing the team with artistic masterpieces. Everyone can learn to communicate by drawing, there is no artistic talent required. It is about simple drawings that you use to explain what you mean.
Having to solve a problem? Drawing in meetings will start a conversation quicker. In the same way, as if you draw for yourself, you will create new ideas easily and you will identify more and more solutions. Having conflicts in a group? Draw the attention to the whiteboard and away from each other.
You become a leader of the conversation with a whiteboard marker. It brings a lot of focus and clarity into the discussion and helps to understand different points of view. The number of Aha! moments rises, people are much more engaged and it makes meetings much shorter and more effective.
If you have a complex problem to solve, I say you can probably save half of your meeting time just by drawing together. Take a photo of the whiteboard and every participant will be able to recall the meeting at one glance afterwards.
Think you can’t draw or a meeting on a whiteboard yet? We would like to invite you to come to our next bikablo® visual facilitation training and learn the simple drawing technique that so far more than 1000 people worldwide have learnt.
Marcel combines agile team coaching with visual thinking. Marcel believes that a group of people drawing together on a whiteboard can change the world. He loves high-performing teams and therefore coaches teams every day.
Co-founder of Visual Friends
Visual notes help us to remember and to structure our thinking. A visual facilitation fishbowl combines the strength of visuals with the facilitation format of a fishbowl.
Facilitating big group discussions can be challenging. Especially when you want to discuss one specific topic in the middle. You need to be an experienced facilitator to keep the conversation running and everyone engaged. It gets even harder if the topic has many side tracks and you as the facilitator have to decide which side track is important for the discussion and which one needs to be shortened. To make this a group decision and keep the discussion flowing the fishbowl format is worth a try.
The fishbowl works with two concentric circles of chairs in the room. One small inner circle (4-6 chairs) where the speakers sit and drive the conversation and an outer circle (many people) where the audience sits, listens and thinks about new ideas .
The rule of the fishbowl is that only the people in the inner circle are allowed to talk. If you are sitting in the outer circle and would like to add something to the conversation you need to stand up and walk from your seat in the outer circle towards the inner circle. If all chairs are occupied in the inner-circle you line up and wait until someone stands up and offers you his chair. Normally that doesn’t take long. As soon as you sit you can add your point to the conversation.
It may sound a bit difficult to do but with a bit of practising the group moves its way into collaborative visual thinking!
So what is a visual facilitation fishbowl? The visual facilitation fishbowl is very similar to the normal fishbowl and all the rules apply. However, two things are different:
If you think you can’t draw – you are welcome to join my bikablo® visual facilitation fundamentals training (Level 1.1). No drawing skills required!
Discover how much Visual Facilitation can help to do discussions and achieving goals. If you are having any questions, please feel free to contact me via Mail or Phone.
Marcel combines agile team coaching with visual thinking. Marcel believes that a group of people drawing together on a whiteboard can change the world. He loves high-performing teams and therefore coaches teams every day.
In almost every meeting or workshop I hear the same sentence: “I CAN’T DRAW!” In the early ages of our life we start to draw naturally. As soon as the kids can talk they explain their ideas in drawings. They present their ideas to their parents. Maybe you know sentences like “Daddy that’s YOU”. These first awesome drawings are very similar to the drawings that we need today in our business life to explain and solve complex problems. This article explains why and how to reactivate your drawing skills.
Something went terribly wrong! How could it happen that we were once able to explain our thoughts in pictures and over the years we lost this skill? In my school education a couple of teachers told me that I couldn’t draw but what they really meant was that I am not an artist. But somehow I took away that statement, as I CAN’T EXPLAIN IDEAS BY DRAWING and that is where I was terribly wrong for almost 20 years of my life! I don’t have to be an artist to explain something in pictures and you neither! Our children are maybe not the next Picasso. However they do three great things when they draw for us:
Now you know that you don’t have to be an artist to explain your ideas but I wouldn’t recommend that you go into your meeting and draw in front of people without some kind of technique and preparation. This could go wrong because even symbolic drawing takes time! What you need are a hand full of key symbols and step-by-step drawing technique that you can rely on in your next meeting.
At this point we step into the land of Bikablo: Bikablo® is an easy to learn visual facilitation technique created by the kommunikationslotsen in Germany. Over the last 10 years thousands of people in Europe have learnt this technique. Bikablo is based on 10 easy principles and guides you to have a quick start into visual facilitation. You will be able to draw simple, fast and good looking drawings to convey your idea, engage and be yourself.
If you are interested, you are welcome at the Visual Facilitation User Group in Melbourne or book in your next bikablo training (Melbourne / Sydney) .
Marcel combines agile team coaching with visual thinking. Marcel believes that a group of people drawing together on a whiteboard can change the world. He loves high-performing teams and therefore coaches teams every day.