VisualsSpeak Blog

This is the second post for looking at the visual details that effect how we read a blog. Part 1: What to do with a visually noisy blog focused on the design of the template that was modified for the School of Thought blog.

Part 2: Ideas for visually simplifying a blog

First I want to acknowledge the blog we are talking about in this post is chock full of great information and resources. So the goal here is to make that come front and center in a way that isn’t quite so visually overwhelming.

When I started blogging there were so many cool widgets and things to stick in my sidebar that I wanted to try them all. Even being conscious of the visual impact, I still did it. Then I read Skellie’s 50 Ways to Unclutter Your Blog. It really helped me to think more in terms of the readers perspective and about what I was trying to do. I pulled a lot of stuff off my blog that day.

What are readers looking for when they come to your blog?

I think this may be really different from blog to blog, and perhaps from reader to reader. When I come to a blog, the first thing I look at is the tagline for an overall sense of what it is about. I want to see who the author is and something about them. I look for categories or tags so I get a general overview of the topics the person is writing about. Therefore, when I look at the visuals on a blog, my opinions are influenced by what I want to see. Ultimately what works for a particular blog is a balance between what the owner is trying to convey and their readers’ needs.

Customizing a template

The School of Thought blog uses a customized version of Stardust, which I talked about in part 1. The most obvious difference is that the two column design from the original template has been converted to three columns. In the last post we talked about how people read in an F pattern on the web. When there are three columns, the reading pattern is slightly different. The eye can go on several paths, which may become confusing.

Sue Waters wondered:

Based on how you have explained people read online I now wondering how whether a left and right sidebar change this reading pattern and are they competing for attention with the post?

And Sue Wyatt saw it like this:

I never thought about the way my template might be read - choices of colour, number of columns, left to right in F pattern. I went into Fred’s blog and immediately the black writing got my eye, but further down the page the red on the left drew my eye first. I don’t think I even looked at the right hand side.

The second thing is the decorative flourish that separated the post from the right sidebar, in the original template, has been removed. The flourish provided a visual diverter to keep the eye going back to the posts. Without it, the visual path leads the eye almost off the right side.

What else is affecting how the eye moves?

The picture of Fred helps lead the eye into the post. The description below the photo appears as a grey rectangle. There is nothing to break up the block. Therefore, even though the words are situated in a place which normally would get a lot of attention, they melt into the background. I wouldn’t normally read something in a block like this. The content is great; warm, welcoming, engaging. But you have to get people to read it to know that. Sue Waters noticed:

Fred’s image plus information on the left is dominating the blog dragging my eyes to the left. I don’t think that is a bad thing but feel that the wording needs to be shortened and broken up to make it more concise.

How might you do this? Break it up into shorter parts. Use some bold? Maybe a bullet? Use a shorter excerpt and lead people to a longer version on the About page? Lots of choices.

As you scroll down, there are long lists of red links in small type. To my eye, when I try to focus on reading the post, it feels like the red links are trying to pull my eyes in two directions. Since it is a flexible width blog, I can reduce this on my 23″ Cinema Display, but there isn’t enough room on the 17″ monitor on my Windows machine at home. It gets even more dramatic on my 12″ laptop.

Manish Mohan saw it this way:

On Fred’s blog I basically read through the middle column. The text was easy to read in the middle. The side bars (left and right) have very small font text. So even though the color is red, and like you say pulls the eye, I ignored it completely. Perhaps it is because unconsciously I know that the main content on the page is in the middle column, perhaps because the middle column is significantly easier to read with bigger font. Only after I had scanned through the posts content did I review the page again for snippets on the sidebars to see if there was anything interesting.

Prime Blog Real Estate

For any blog, the things that are most important to our readers should be in the most prominent places on the blog. This may vary from blog to blog, but I suspect for a large percentage of people the most crucial elements are:

• Name of the blog
• The tagline (what it is about)
• Something about the author
• Where to subscribe
• Categories or most popular posts
• Ads if you are blogging for income

The prime real estate on a blog are the header, the top of the sidebars and anything that is above the fold (meaning things that show without having to scroll).

Right now on Fred’s blog we have the name, tagline, how to search and a way to subscribe labeled RSS in the header. At the top of the sidebar on the left is a picture of Fred. On the right where the eye is being most strongly lead, there is a link that brings you to another site. Underneath it is the login area for the author.

Suggestions?

There are lots of possibilities and a variety of reasons you might go one way or another. If there are statistics available, I would look at what people are clicking on. That would help me see what is important to my readers.

Here is one idea. It’s a sketch I created by taking screenshots and rearranging them, so it’s just to get an idea of how this might look.

I would select the most important links on the site to go in the left column. I usually put my categories here. Fred has a lot of link lists, and it’s not clear to me which ones he thinks are most important for his readers. I would identify what they are and put them here. Right now, categories are in a drop down menu, and there are lot of them. I’d think about shortening the number of categories and listing them out to make them more accessible. I would also place them as high up as possible on the template.

I moved Fred’s picture to the right since that is where this particular template naturally leads the eye. This has the added benefit of deflecting the eye back toward the posts. He could also enhance the visual path back to the post by breaking up the text underneath using bold letters, bullets, and/or paragraphs.

I’d add a Feedburner subscribe link, or some other one that uses natural language. Yes, there is an RSS link above, but I suspect many of Fred’s readers do not know what RSS is. Might also consider a subscribe by email. I have placed the subscribe link where most people expect to find it.

As you scroll down the current blog page, there are multiple link lists. I would move some of them to static pages. This way the offerings you most want readers to see would show up in the horizontal navigation where they can see them when they arrive on your site. There is a lot of great information for readers on this site, but I don’t know how many people are discovering all that is available to them since it requires so much scrolling. There is also the problem with red links on both sides of the page. By removing a lot of the links and placing them on a static Resource page, this would help reduce how much scrolling people have to do in order to get to what they’re after.

I’d move the meta section to the bottom of the blog. Something like this is only for the author, and we know where to find it. It’s just confusing to readers who aren’t WordPress bloggers.

What else might Fred consider?

What do you notice about Fred’s blog? He’s looking for suggestions, so I’m sure he’d appreciate hearing from you. Especially if you are a first time reader, those fresh eyes can often be the most helpful.

Part 1: Your template as your visual foundation

Fred Deutsch emailed me with a Help, help, help me subject line:

Hi, I really enjoy your site and am learning a lot. I’m wondering if you
might provide me some feedback or suggestions? I started my blog for two purposes — first to communicate with constituents and educational people, and second as a sort of reference area for me to list all my favorite sites (the side bars). But now that I’ve been blogging a few months, the blog page seems congested to me — or at least not as visually inviting as I would like it to be. Do you have any suggestions?

When I started looking at Fred’s site, I noticed a couple of things. But in order to really explain it, I need a couple of posts to do it. So I hope Fred can hang on while I talk about some of the visual basics under what is going on in his blog. When we select a template, we are choosing the foundation visuals of our blogs. I’m going to talk about the template Fred has chosen in this post, and write another post on the choices he has made that affect it.

How do people read on the web?

Eye tracking studies have shown people tend to read in an F shaped pattern online. These are heatmaps, where the areas that are most looked at are red, then yellow, then blue, with the grey areas being places that the eye skips over.

Looking at these charts you can see there is a general overall pattern (the F pattern) but you can also see how there are visual elements that also pull the eye. For example, in the middle heatmap, there are arrows that point to a box on the right side.

So when design elements fall into this F pattern, it’s pretty easy for the eye to follow. If you want the eye to go in another pattern, you have to do something to get its attention.

The template underneath Fred’s blog

Fred uses a customized version of Stardust. It’s a black and white template with red accents. Red against the black and white provides a lot of contrast and the red strongly attracts the eye. There is a decorative spray of leaves that also acts to deflect the eye back toward the post.

You can see, if you remove the spray (see template below), there is nothing to stop the eye from being pulled off the right side. The links create tracks for our eyes to follow that lead our attention off the blog to the right. Now if you have a short post so there is another red calendar or a strong image inserted on the left, you may be able to pull the eye back. But how often do you write your posts to satisfy the visual need of your blog? (OK, so I might.)

What can you do to change the way the eye moves?

In this case, you can darken the color of the links on the right. That will help the brighter reds move the eye back to the post.

In order to do this you need to get into the code and change a color number on the stylesheet. It isn’t terribly difficult, but you do have to pay attention and not modify the code in any other ways. There are several steps:

1. Determine the color number of the current links so you can find it in the code
2. Determine the color number you want to change them to
3. Find the place in the CSS on the stylesheet that controls those links
4. Change the color number

Finding colors

There are many ways to do this depending on the software you have access to. I’m showing the color picker in Photoshop, since that is the image program I use. First I took the screen shot of the template I show above, then open the image in Photoshop. I used the eyedropper tool to find the red used in the template, then selected a darker version of that color. The hexidecimal color number I need for the code is in the box at the bottom of the color picker.

Changing the Stylesheet in a Wordpress blog

I installed this template on a testblog that has been updated to version 2.5.1. If you are using another version, the admin interface may look different, but the basic process is the same. Open the admin, go to the Design (used to be called Presentation) tab. Select Theme Editor, then Stylesheet. Scroll down until you find the code for the links (click on the image to see it larger and clearer type). Make the change and click update.

Doing things in unconventional ways

Now, I am certainly one to break rules, especially in design. However, I do think about when it serves me and when it doesn’t. In a blog, we have many elements competing for attention. If we can use some elements that are familiar to the general user, those elements basically stop competing. We see them, recognize them, and move on.

This blog template chooses not to use the orange RSS symbol to subscribe to the feed. Instead it uses a link labeled RSS.

Usability expert Jacob Nielson has this to say:

The first, and strongest, guideline about news feeds is to stop calling them RSS. In our study, 82% of users had no idea what this term meant. Using implementation-oriented terminology is generally a bad idea, because most users don’t understand (or care about) the underlying technology. It’s better to use terms that indicate what the concept does for users. In this case, “news feed” does this far better than “RSS.”

How do you deal with a visually noisy blog?

OK, I’ve given you my perspective, now tell me yours. What do you think about this template and the visual flow? What do you do to increase the readability of your blog from a visual perspective?

Next up: suggestions for Fred’s blog

I’ll be putting up a second post on how to de-noize (I’m going to copyright this word, so don’t steal it) a blog, using Fred’s as an example. Some of the things we’ll be looking at are the unintentional consequences of changing the template and what are people looking for when they come to your blog.

I’m not leaving my usual focus on all things visual, just adding a weekly report on an online blogging project I am participating in.

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A group of bloggers from around the world have accepted the challenge to do something every day in May to become a better commenter on other blogs. Since I did another challenge last year with two of the organizers, I decided to join them. First, there are over a hundred blogs participating. The group in the last challenge was 14, so we got to know each other. It’s much harder to keep track of who is who this time. There are also networks of bloggers who have joined, and I’m noticing that it is harder to comment when it seems like all the other people in the comment string already know each other. Something to be aware of when I engage with my readers, or on blogs where I know others. What can I do to create a welcoming environment?

• Day 1- Commenting self-audit

Commenting has always been somewhat sporadic for me. In phases. I read over 150 blogs, most of which I read the majority of the posts, so that alone is a major time commitment. I find when I am short on time, I skip the commenting. I’m also noticing I gather insights across the blogs I read, often making connections between tidbits that mash up with pieces offline. So the responses I find emerging don’t make sense attached to one place.If I knew ahead of time which tidbits were going to align, I might be able to write the type of posts rich with links that Sue Waters, Michele Martin, and Beth Kanter are so brilliant at doing. I seem to have a more retroactive thought alignment process rather than the anticipatory ones others seem to have that know what they might need and bookmark it for later.

• Day 2- Comment on a new blog

This was easy. The comment challenge is full of blogs that are new to me. Since I train adults, I don’t follow K-12 blogs as a general rule, and the group has a lot of them. It’s been fun to explore them, they certainly have a different flavor. Not quite sure how to add value to the conversations on them yet. Instead I find myself telling those who are expressing anxiety about being behind that it’s OK. I guess I’m trying to find a common ground to share.

• Day 3- Set up comment tracking

Like so many other things I discover on these challenges, the tracking software is a matter of strategizing how I am going to change the patterns of how I engage with daily practices. I center my online life around Google Reader and Mail, so things that integrate easily are the ones that I can adopt quickly. I have installed both co.mment and cocomment, but certainly have not fully adapted to them. And so far, I have found the RSS feeds from these tools to be confusing. Especially with so many similar conversations occurring across multiple blogs.

• Day 4- ask a question in a comment

This is something I do with some regularity. What is interesting to me is how often bloggers ignore the questions I ask. Now I can understand if I ask another commenter a question that they may not see it. But as bloggers, we often get multiple notifications of comments. And I’m not talking just about the blogs with a huge amount of traffic. Leaves me wondering if it is the type of questions I ask, or the type of bloggers I’m asking.

• Day 5- comment on a post I don’t agree with

By far the hardest task for me. This is totally contrary to my online behavior, and has sparked some of the deepest reflection. Offline, I certainly have no problem disagreeing with others. I suspect there are people around me who would say I voice my disagreement too much. So why is it so different for me online? I still haven’t figured it out, and I still haven’t disagreed.

• Day 6 - engage with other commenters

It’s been nice to see the engagement with other commenters on the challenge. I have found it difficult to do this in the past. I read all/most of the comments on a post before I comment, and often try to engage with others. It’s almost like there are unspoken norms that develop on certain blogs. My favorites are the ones where the blogger and the readers talk freely and back and forth. I wonder what it takes to foster that norm?

• Day 7 - 3 Learnings

The three things that jump out to me from the first week:

1. Dedicated commenting takes an organized system to stay manageable
2. I really don’t like the idea of disagreeing online
3. There is a gap between what I like and what I am (not) creating on my own blog

Jabiz Raisdana left a comment on Does my header make my blog look fat?,

I would love a quick run-down on what story you think my images tell.

He has three blogs, and I think all of Jabiz’s headers are effective for a number of reasons.

Titles

Jabiz uses Intrepid in all his titles. From the Visual Thesaurus, we see words related to intrepid on the left. I would expect his headers to evoke these types of feelings.

He has three blogs.

• Intrepid Teacher
• Intrepid Flame
• Intrepid Classroom

Looking at the the lines in his headers

Here are the headers from his blogs. I have used red to identify what I see as the dominant lines in each image. Notice how these lines direct the eye to the two important areas, the posts and his sidebar. I’ve also made specific comments about the images below each example.

On Intrepid Teacher, the use of a larger boy and a smaller one walking down an alley evokes fearlessness. You don’t know what is at the end around the corner. The larger boy looks like he is being supportive to the smaller one, much like a teacher would be to a student.

On Intrepid Flame, the challis or bowl evokes a feeling of the unknown.

On Intrepid Classroom, the figures are going somewhere, but you don’t know where. They are all going together though. Much like we do in a classroom.

Interpretation of images can be very individual. Certainly affected by each of our experiences and cultural lenses. These are some of my impressions. What about you? And Jabiz, what were your intentions?

What makes these headers work?

It’s the combination of the visual and the verbal.

1. There is something about each of the images that relates to the title. So, something that evokes the quality of intrepid.
2. The dominant lines in the image guide the eye to the most important parts of the blog, the posts and the sidebar.

What else?

What do you see that you think makes a blog header effective? Any examples of headers you can point us to that are really great?

Sue Waters has been cleaning up her blog again. She wasn’t happy with her former header image.

I assume this is the skyline of the Australian city she lives in? I don’t know for sure, and many of her other international readers may not know either. Is that a problem? Maybe, maybe not. But let’s look to see what she might be trying to convey for her blog.

What’s the blog about?

The title is Mobile Technology in TAFE. From her About page, we learn TAFE stands for Tertiary and Further Education. She is an aquaculture lecturer. But it doesn’t take reading very far to learn she is passionate about all kinds of technology. Not just a little, she lives and breathes it. And it’s not just using it, it’s about helping people all over the world learn how to use it.

The old image is busy. Lots of buildings, and the image is cropped so there is no space above the buildings. When she first started using this header, the busy visual quality reflected the posting frequency and how the blog was chock full of information.

The blog went on a diet

Now Sue didn’t stop her constant output of information, rather she added other outlets. She found Twitter early on, and it was a perfect medium for her. I still don’t get twitter, but I know everytime I log in, Sue will have posted something interesting to look at.

She also started writing for The Edublogger to help people using the Edublogs system. What I know is when any new thing comes out, if Sue hasn’t already written not only about how it works, but how to actually apply it in educational practice, she will very soon.

So if you follow Sue in various places, you know she has increased her output. If you only look at her personal blog, the quantity of information is lower. Not in quality, just quantity. So, I think her instinct to reduce the clutter in the visuals better reflects the new overall feel of her blog.

A new header image

Sue put up this new image.

And she got this comment from Christy Tucker

Does it seem like the header image leads your image off the right side of the page though? Look at the line of the rocks and the direction the person is facing–it seems to all be pointing off to the right. I wonder if you flipped the image horizontally if it would work better. You’d have to move the text somewhere else, perhaps, but with the image flipped it would draw your eye right down to the content.

Just a thought–you might want to check with Christine Martell or someone else more visually inclined. It’s possible I’m simply imagining things!

Well, Christy, you are not imaging things. The header does lead the eye to the right. But lets’ look at why.

At first glance, you might think it’s just the direction the boy is facing. This certainly contributes, but it’s aggravated by the type which is anchored visually by being right up against the left edge and visually pushes into the back of the boy.

Now, there aren’t any right answers for how to deal with this. Just some options to consider. First, you can move the type over so it leads the eye to circle back around the rocks.

If you have more image software skills, there are some other things you can do. You could shorten the tag line so it fits in the rocks, and flip the boy so he is looking back the other way. This shifts the eye to lead strongly down along the back of the boy. In order to really see if this works, you would need to look at it in the template to see how this lines up with the rest of the template.

You could also remove the boy entirely, and allow the header to lead the eye down the space between the rocks, but in a softer way.

Moving the type to the top balances the image standing along better, but once again, you would want to test it in the actual template to see how it works with the rest of the elements around it.

The same would be true for darker type. You would want to look at it in context, and pay particular attention to how it related to the title of the blog.

What do you want to say with your image?

We’ve made the isolated header work better visually, but does it say what Sue is trying to convey? She said:

the idea was the lonely person staring out into the vastness of the ocean wondering what to do and where to get help.

To make this work, we probably need to bring the boy back. However, when we face him toward the pile of rocks, he isn’t really looking out into the vastness. So, I moved him to the right and adjusted the type to visually relate the the framing of the rocks on the left and the boy on the right.

This leads the eye to circle back and focus on the tagline.

The type feels a bit crowded still, so I also try the shorter tag line and change the type color to relate to the lichen on the rocks below it. The water where I removed the boy also needed a bit more touch-up, and I could spend even more time improving it.

But what’s the right answer?

In design there isn’t a right answer. It’s a balance between what you are wanting to convey and the limitations of what you have to work with combined with the opinions and desires of the person who gets to decide. For a blog header, you are also affected by the template you are using and all of the other elements that surround the header.

Any of these headers can work. Let’s send it back to Sue and see what she thinks. And have her try some of them in her template to see how they work in context.

Design is a process of trial and error for many of us. It might look like we can just pull these things out of the air, but I think for most of us it is iterative. Some people can visualize exactly what they want in their heads then just create it, but I think there are many more of us that try lots of variations to see what will work.

I facilitated a session at the International Association of Facilitators conference in Atlanta, Seeing Differences: Using Photographs to Facilitate Diverse Groups. Like many of the breakout sessions at this conference the session was three hours long, which provided an opportunity to delve deeply into the material.

We covered a lot of material in the session.

• things to consider when setting up the room
• who is your audience?
• what outcome are you looking for?
• creating a question to bridge the audience and the outcome
• what we see in the visual language
• how the visual language gives us clues about the person creating the image
• what changes when people make images in a group
• adjusting questions, images, and process for different audiences

An interesting challenge arose

A VisualsSpeak user dropped by and presented an interesting challenge. How do you convey the results of a VisualsSpeak process to people who weren’t part of it? For those of you who have never been part of a VS session, a tremendous amount of information, ideas, strategies, etc are generated in a very short period of time. The challenge is not getting the input you want but what do you do with the data you get. This is an area that we have been working on and have a few ideas for you to try.

But first, let’s take a look at the kind of raw data that you get from doing a typical VisualsSpeak process. This is a condensed version.

Group images

We created group images exploring the question:

What makes facilitating diverse groups successful?

Here is what the groups came up with.

From the top left, we enter the concept through windows with many panes. Some we can see through more clearly than others. There are different colors of fabrics, different money, doesn’t matter, there is a variety of people who are different than Western culture. The woman is proud of her fuchsia hair. There is a yin/yang in the arms with interesting bandages where the colors are reversed. Different hands hold objects. There is a man doing yoga, children marching. There are multiple different colors, diversity in images. In some you can tell the ethnicity and culture and some you can’t, just a feel. Really builds us together in the natural world, salad, different bird feathers. Function in the farm metaphor of team working together to provide food. When all is said and done, all people looking all different, all the same, yin and yang parts together. The child in the water is looking to young people for inspiration for the need to take risks. The money shows the governments of the world meeting to build coins, far away, but similar. It is more attractive with all the colors, one would be boring.

In the center there is an underlying spark, creativity with new things coming from it. The salad bowl diversity, bounty coming together. The chocolates are all different, but all chocolates are neatly organized. Overall people, metaphors all together, but different. Windows of opportunity. We see some commonality in diversity like the celebration of family ties. Building bridges isn’t easy, fraught with challenges, so this bridge has different bushes and thorns. Different faces, not necessarily ethnicity, but different ideas in some communities. Overall perspective is the giraffe. All different kinds of beads, different but strung together. When it does work, and comes together, there is underlying conflict that can’t be ignored. At the same time you have to leap and hope to survive. Find a team with common things to bind. Doors of opportunity. Diverse looks. Beautiful by coming together with one objective. Bring down the fences, together sign universal cultures, commonalities like currency. Several windows, doors, labyrinths facilitators are aware of when working with diverse groups. A maze of confusion and challenging with pitfalls we can fall into especially if we aren’t partnering with partners in other cultures to help us find the pathways around them. The spider web of connecting. Eggs are the nurturing process, hope for new life bringing diversity together. The balloon has different colors but blended together which makes it interesting and able to take off.

Now the challenge

Here is where one of our VisualsSpeak customers dropped by and asked about sharing the results of a session she had done at her company. She has been using the VisualsSpeak ImageSet for strategic visioning and the team participating had to help others in their organization understand what had happened. She had tried a number of things to convey the outcomes of the session such as making poster prints of the images and having people tell the stories that emerged. It was OK, but didn’t really convey the power of what happened in the room.

The reports from the groups above have the same challenge. Magic happens in the room. People connect deeply. The process of offering your ideas and working through the negotiation to come up with the result is where much of the value lies.

The results seem like they should be more finished than they are. If instead of using photographs we used sketches to record these initial ideas, it would be clear that the sketches needed more work to become conveyable ideas by the very nature of them being sketches. Since the photographs look good, and many of the assembled images are attractive, they seem like they ’should’ convey a message. And to the people who were there they do. Because to them, the images are like notes, they remind the participants of the experience they had. For someone who was not part of the process, this is more like raw assessment data.

How to communicate the results of a VisualsSpeak process

There are a couple of options. Using the example above, we have two groups who have created images and stories.

You might ask the group participants to create a summary;

• What are the common themes?
• What are the images both groups used?
• How can you arrange the images and concepts to make them easier to understand?

The other alternative is to create a summary yourself to help convey the messages more clearly. In this example, I did not participate in the group discussions since I was facilitating the whole session. If I was facilitating for a business or organization and knew I was going to have to create a report, I would be listening to the process as it unfolded and taking notes. I would also ask questions in the debrief to get input from the group about what they thought the most important points were to include. Remember the wisdom of the group.

Don’t strip out the creative juice

One thing to watch in this summarization process is not to lose the minority input. Part of what VisualsSpeak is all about is giving voice to everyone. Sometimes the most important idea will be spoken by one person. Creative sparks and insights that can open up whole new possibilities most often are not the common themes. Often it is the combination of popular ideas with a minority spark that reveals new possibilities.

For more on using the VisualsSpeak process

You can subscribe to our upcoming posts by RSS feed, or by email.

You can also get more ideas and tips about using VisualsSpeak by signing up for our e-newsletter.

I got a lot out of all the sessions I attended at the International Association of Facilitators (IAF) conference, but this session is the one I have continued to think deeply about. The one that continues to intrigue me. There were a number of factors that intertwined to make it successful.

The method

Lisa Heft facilitated a plenary session at the conference on Facilitative Leadership. The attendees of the conference gathered together in one room in small groups at round tables. Lisa has the presence of an experienced facilitator, you can tell within moments that you can trust her to lead you into a process.

Lisa selected a dialogue technique originated by Leilani Rashida Henry, based on inquiry circles, that she describes as a Question Circle. The process starts with an open ended question, passing from person to person. No discussion, just deep listening. Each person ends with another question, which isn’t necessarily to be answered, but adds to the fuel of the dialogue process.

The design of the panel

Not only were the panel members very accomplished at what they did, their areas of expertise were widely divergent from each other. They were each leaders in very different contexts. This provided a foundation of rich input to start the process on stage, before each audience table group began the same process. The panel were seated in comfortable chairs with a low table in front of them on the stage. It created an accessible feel, like they were ready for a conversation.

The dialogue that developed about Facilitative Leadership

Each panel member started with reflecting on what facilitative leadership means to them. The ending question was what they were left wondering after sharing. This is an excerpt of their individual bios and some of what I heard from them.

Lisa Heft specializes in interactive, participant-driven processes for engaging dialogue, reflection, learning and interchange.

• Believe in the wisdom of the group
• Create nutrient rich environments
• Assist the emergent leaders
• Use mistakes for reflection and learning
• Don’t be afraid of the unknown, or if you are stay in the moment and walk forward into the unknown
• Gather collective wisdom, together we can figure it out
• Is it nature or nuture? Are people just like this, or can they learn to be facilitative leaders?

Deborah Dunagan is the Global Leader, IBM Intellectual Property Services, Corporate Technology and Intellectual Property.

• How can you reconcile with employee expectations?
• Starts with inquiry, who are you and what do you want?
• Many people prefer fear and control, they are motivated by it
• Facilitative leadership can be threatening to people who want to be controlled and stay where they are
• How do we enable people to not identify with their pain and instead enable expression?

Eriel Tchekwie Deranger belongs to the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation of Northern Alberta, Canada. She is the National Aboriginal Youth Engagement Coordinator for TalkingITGlobal.

• People don’t want to listen to high risk youth, they can’t get beyond their image of homeless, gangs and drugs
• Youth have a lot to say if only someone will listen
• Encourage people to take the responsibility to use their voice
• How do we take the risk to listen to those we don’t think will listen?

Phil Sharpe is currently SVP Sports Technology and Operations for Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.

• Expect something new, but not something specific
• Look for people who can achieve goals, but don’t often get to pick
• What do I do with people who are aggressive? Develop them or let them go?
• It seems to be command & control versus free-market
• Are there folks who don’t respond to facilitative leadership, and what do you do with them?

Dr. Meenaskshi Chakraverti is Senior Associate and Deputy Director, International Science Programs at the Public Conversations Project.

• What is the language around how people speak about their realities?
• Does your question make sense in the particular environment?
• Can I understand what an appropriate question is?
• Realms of possibility are very different when you grow up in scarcity leading to differences in discourse
• Do we see the world differently?

The panelists told stories, here I just list what I concluded from their stories. Not the same richness, but I hope I’ve been able to at least share enough to demonstrate the range of input that emerged from their reflections.

Martha McGinnis graphic recorded the session. Perhaps a bit more of the flavor of the panel shows here?

Passing the process to the audience

After Dr. Chakravati’s gave her perspectives, the process moved to the individual tables in the audience. The sharing at the tables was just as rich. I won’t share the details of what I heard since I do not have permission to do so. The sharing was deep. People had been moved by the process to reflect on many aspects of their own lives.

I particularly noticed how people who had been in circumstances where they were not asked their opinions really struggled with how to regain their voices. Coming from organizations or being in roles where silence is the norm is contrary to the values we discussed in facilitative leadership. Listening to the sharing strengthened my resolve to continue working to offer voice to all through the work I do.

Ending with a question

Lisa brought the conversation back to the big group, and debriefed the process by asking for reflections. There were a number of people who spoke about struggling with the desire to offer solutions. There aren’t many places where we are offered the opportunity to just listen to the questions and then make a choice about answering or just letting them be.

Each of us was then offered the opportunity to write questions we were left with on index cards. We left these on the tables, and they were collected. The questions were sent to another session, which I will write about later.

How does this apply to VisualsSpeak?

VisualsSpeak facilitates significant conversations and begins with a framing question, similar to the question circle. We ask people to select photographs in response to the question, then ask them to tell the story of the photos. It offers people voice, gives everyone a chance to be heard. I’m thinking I can apply the question circle idea to the VisualsSpeak sessions by adding a request to end individual sharing with the question one is left with.

I’m intrigued by how stating what people knew and what they didn’t shifted the quality of the conversation. There is something about sharing your clarity and your confusion in sequence that created a richer medium for reflection.

I’m thinking adding questions to the individual sharing will be particularly helpful when doing group images. I’ve found it works better to start with individual sharing before trying to work together, to make sure every voice is heard first. This process would be a way to generate even more material to work with.

The IAF conference was held in Atlanta last week. This is the second time I have attended an IAF conference and the first time I presented at one. At the closing session, we were asked to reflect on a key take away. Mine was, this is where I belong.

Yes, I have multiple roles. I am also a trainer, entrepreneur, business owner, coach, artist. Underneath it all, I am a facilitator. It’s so easy to forget when I sit in the office operating my business on a daily basis. I remember when I get around other facilitators and recognize the ease with which I can converse with them.

What makes a facilitator different?

While I hesitate to make any sweeping generalizations, something I notice in my facilitator colleagues is an inherent faith in the wisdom of the group. We focus on the process of the interaction more than trying to control the content.

On Whitespace, Daniel Rose noticed:

When designing large collaborative sessions with complex topics it is almost always the case that there is a big variance between the few people who know a lot about the topic and a few who have little to no context and everyone else falls somewhere in between. Sponsors are generally very anxious to do a lot of “education” around the project so that everyone gets up to speed. Usually this results in a desire to do a 3 hour PowerPoint presentation.

He goes on to talk about the difference between instructional learning versus constructional learning, and how part of our role is to help our sponsors have faith in the group. When I talk with someone who has been facilitating for any length of time there is an almost automatic assumption that the group is wise. Just help the members surface what they know.

Done well, facilitation looks so easy

Not that facilitation actually is easy. There are so many factors that effect the success of the meeting, from the flow to the environment, to the way people are invited and prepared. However, the better the execution, the more seamless and effortless it appears. Do a good job, and the details go unnoticed. The focus shifts to the content, and getting the work of the session done.

Some of the things I appreciate about the IAF conferences

• the opportunity to participate in large group processes
• seeing how various methods work
• three hour breakout sessions, so you can really get deep into the material
• advanced level tracks
• reflection built into the design
• half hour breaks so you don’t have to run from one place to another
• colleagues who do amazing things around the world
• people with passion to make a difference

In the days ahead, I’ll be writing about some of the session I attended and the one I facilitated. I always think this is going to happen faster than it does, forgetting about all the things to catch up on from being out of town. I continue to be amazed by the people who can live blog, and work toward accepting that I’m more reflective and need more time. More soon.

That was an unexpected blogging vacation. I was sick for two weeks, and I’m still recovering slowly.

Just back from the International Association of Facilitators conference in Atlanta. I’ll be writing about the conference, and about the session I facilitated in the days to come. Stay tuned.

I’ve written about Beth Kanter’s use of images before, actually made a screencast about it which was selected as screencast of the week over at Techsmith.

This time I attended a webinar where Beth was a presenter. Usually when I am on a webinar, I am doing several other things. Email, reading blogs, perhaps on chat. Seldom does something compel me to give it full attention.

Beth did something very interesting, which kept me focused. Cute puppies. She has noticed that a lot of her audience of non-profit techies post pictures of themselves with their dogs online. So she came up with the idea that pictures of dogs would capture their attention.

Now I don’t even think of myself as a non-profit techie, and I have three cats not dogs. She was talking about the use of technology and social networking. Yet, my focus was captured by wanting to see what creative dog picture she would use next. Even more interesting to me was I had actually already seen the slide deck, and still I wanted to see how she would weave together the social media story with the dogs.