Draw It Before You Say It

So I am what's called a graphic recorder, which means what I specialize in is translating complex messages into visual artifacts.

And when that's done in real time, we call that graphic recording, as in to create a graphic record of something.

So it's the live capture of content.

It uses a combination of words, shapes, and images.

So it's not just illustration, it's a combination of all those things, and it usually shows up at workshops, presentations, events, anywhere people are talking, which could be more of a sort of keynote presentation style thing, or it could be more of a, an emergent workshop with a bunch of different voices involved.

But so it's not just drawing, graphic recording, it's really the act of the art of active listening and rapid synthesis together.

So it's about distilling comli- complex concepts into visual elements that are both easy to understand and impossible to forget.

So that sort of comprehension and memory piece are a really key part of it.

It's the process of turning abstract ideas into tangible, shareable, actionable insights.

It's often thought of as a new industry.

It's still, I'm 16 years in now, and I'd say the majority of events that I work, it's a new thing for most people who are there.

So for most people, it feels like a very kind of new, shiny thing.

But the roots of visual facilitation go back to the sort of problem-solving methodologies of the 1970s, like mind mapping, those sorts of things.

And the International Forum of Visual Practitioners, which Georgina brought up a couple of times in her intro, which is our global membership body for this work, was launched in the States in 1995.

So it's over 30 years old, that it was professionalized to a point of having a membership association.

So it's been around for quite a while.

It's also being used in different sort of pockets around the world.

There's a particular facilitation process called MG Taylor, which is a rapid problem-solving methodology that was born in the States, and it's used by a lot of the major consulting firms globally, places like PwC, KPMG, EY, Capgemini, and they use these large facilitation teams that focus on different areas.

So they focus not just on the front of room facilitation, but the environmental facilitation, the facilitation of how the content moves throughout an event, and also graphic facilitation is one of those roles.

So that's where I cut my teeth with this work.

I started working with a place called The Difference, which was a business unit of PwC back in 2010.

And since then, as Georgina kindly said in the intro, I've worked with a really broad range of clients and industries all around Australia, Asia, the Pacific, Europe, United States.

Taught visual thinking skills in three continents, as you said.

And while the majority of the work that I do is this live graphic recording and live capture, it's also something that can be done in a more offline sense from the studio.

We're still doing that visual translation piece of taking complex ideas and content and translating them into visual artifacts.

So I am what's called a graphic recorder, which means what I specialize in is translating complex messages into visual artifacts.

And when that's done in real time, we call that graphic recording, as in to create a graphic record of something.

So it's the live capture of content.

It uses a combination of words, shapes, and images.

So it's not just illustration, it's a combination of all those things, and it usually shows up at workshops, presentations, events, anywhere people are talking, which could be more of a sort of keynote presentation style thing, or it could be more of a, an emergent workshop with a bunch of different voices involved.

But so it's not just drawing, graphic recording, it's really the act of the art of active listening and rapid synthesis together.

So it's about distilling comli- complex concepts into visual elements that are both easy to understand and impossible to forget.

So that sort of comprehension and memory piece are a really key part of it.

It's the process of turning abstract ideas into tangible, shareable, actionable insights.

It's often thought of as a new industry.

It's still, I'm 16 years in now, and I'd say the majority of events that I work, it's a new thing for most people who are there.

So for most people, it feels like a very kind of new, shiny thing.

But the roots of visual facilitation go back to the sort of problem-solving methodologies of the 1970s, like mind mapping, those sorts of things.

And the International Forum of Visual Practitioners, which Georgina brought up a couple of times in her intro, which is our global membership body for this work, was launched in the States in 1995.

So it's over 30 years old, that it was professionalized to a point of having a membership association.

So it's been around for quite a while.

It's also being used in different sort of pockets around the world.

There's a particular facilitation process called MG Taylor, which is a rapid problem-solving methodology that was born in the States, and it's used by a lot of the major consulting firms globally, places like PwC, KPMG, EY, Capgemini, and they use these large facilitation teams that focus on different areas.

So they focus not just on the front of room facilitation, but the environmental facilitation, the facilitation of how the content moves throughout an event, and also graphic facilitation is one of those roles.

So that's where I cut my teeth with this work.

I started working with a place called The Difference, which was a business unit of PwC back in 2010.

And since then, as Georgina kindly said in the intro, I've worked with a really broad range of clients and industries all around Australia, Asia, the Pacific, Europe, United States.

Taught visual thinking skills in three continents, as you said.

And while the majority of the work that I do is this live graphic recording and live capture, it's also something that can be done in a more offline sense from the studio.

We're still doing that visual translation piece of taking complex ideas and content and translating them into visual artifacts.