CPSI Conference #4
CPSI Expert Forum Session: "Visual Thinking – Drawing Out the Best in Your Brain". Facilitated by Jon Pearson –
"See how to picture your thoughts and double your thinking. Go beyond words to the place from which words spring. Learn simple ways to tap the river of images flowing beneath verbal thought. Explore six levels of imagination. Discover rapid, “off-road” drawing techniques that mimic how your brain actually thinks. Learn how to draw “poorly” well and multiply the ideation power of any group."
If you can't draw, this process is for you! And the more conceptual you are, the better you can be at this creative process. Jon encouraged us to avoid drawing iconic characters (like a heart for "love") to represent how we feel. How we feel, rather than what we're thinking, was the focus of this workshop. We had to draw on paper – with squiggles, lines, circles, and other special shapes – that which we were feeling based on a scenario given to us by Jon. I expected to learn more how to put people's concepts into visuals through symbols, shapes, and very crude figures similar to Dan Roan's "Back of the Napkin" book. Instead we learned to express our hearts through our drawings. Doing so revealed very personal insights and opened discussions that carried into the rest of the evening in small groups at the mix-and-mingle (with a beer or wine libation to help the conversation along).
I surprised myself by volunteering to share my drawing with the class. Our facilitator told us to pick a word that means something to us and then draw how we visualized that word in our hearts. I picked the word "freedom". I drew arrows outward from a circle and shared that that meant I felt freedom in being in business for myself (as opposed to working for a corporate entity). While running a business for myself is not easy by any means and many times stressful, it is a freeing rather than a suffocating stress. My second drawing consisted of arrows inward into a circle. Jon interpreted the drawing as attacks on me but I interpreted it as the freedom to be "all about me". The beauty of drawing conceptually is that discussion ensued as to how this was freedom. I shared that throughout my life as an only offspring I felt a world view of "it's all about me" – not in a negative, entitled way but in a confident, empowering way. Yet people in my life view this as my being selfish because the world is not all about me. Freedom to me is the ability to feel that it's all about me inside, allowing me to be giving to and share with others. Seems contradictory but that's freedom to me. All of this in text doesn't come across the way the drawings did. And that's the beauty of visual thinking.
Applying this to ideas, having clients draw in abstract ways can open deeper conversations about why an idea is important to them to be implemented, and the more heart-centric aspects of their idea details they need to examine for implementation. I need to work on how to facilitate such a tool in order to be effective at using it. But that's the point of my being here at this conference…to gather more tools under my belt from which I can pick and choose as I work with people through individual coaching and group programs. Some tools and techniques I'll adopt; others perhaps not. Knowing they're at my disposal is my valued lesson.