Drawing is no longer confined to the margins (so to speak) of business, but is gaining traction as a crucial element of melding functional creativity with business savvy. Alongside this trend, you may have heard the term graphic recording, also know called live scribing, or sketchnoting and often associated with graphic facilitation.
Graphic recording gives you the benefit of an artist drawing in real time, at or alongside your event, to create a visual language and a lasting artifact of what’s happening. So how do you know if graphic recording is right for you?
Here are some common challenges that can be addressed with graphic recording.
Challenge: Building consensus
When it comes to change management, and even managing the day-to-day, many businesses struggle with finding common ground, determining universal goals, and then achieving buy-in.
Bring in an artist (or several) to a series of stakeholder meetings or breakout groups where each team’s ideas and aims are discussed. Capturing these ideas visually and then unifying them as a guiding map of the conversation can help everyone SEE the big picture and ultimately start working in the same direction.
Once goals and alignment are agreed upon, an artist can create follow-up content like posters, infographics, or even videos, to serve as tactile reminders and keep your team unified for the long haul.
Challenge: Innovation
Icebreaker 2018 at the Kohl Center in Madison, Wisconsin, Thursday, April 12, 2018.
New ideas can be hard to come by, and even harder to flesh out into actual business drivers. Innovation relies heavily on creativity, so bring a creative element into your innovation meetings to help guide and document brainstorm sessions, pick up on themes, and even sketch out nascent concepts for new products or lines of business.
These meetings are also a great time to practice another hot topic– doodling- with an artist as your guide. Get your team’s creative thoughts percolating and spark inspiration by example. You may even end up with a draft framework, or at least a shareable illustration of this product that doesn’t even exist yet, ready for build-out, workflow, or expansion.
Challenge: Visibility & Retention
Large conferences are a great way to get a lot of brilliant minds in the same room, looking at the same stage. However, how many of us have attended a conference and been wowed by a speaker, only to scratch our heads a week or a month post-event, unable to remember what, exactly, we learned from that speaker?
Graphic recording onstage during an event is the solution to this widespread issue. Not only does having a live artist capturing pertinent details during a speaker’s address keep your audience engaged and focused on the stage, the visual language, standout text, and iconography showcased in tandem with a speaker amplify the story, ultimately creating a more memorable message.
These visuals can live on after the session – in the lobby as a photo op ripe for social sharing to bring attention to your message – as handouts in a swag bag – as posters or brochures throughout the even t- and later, they can promote retention by circulating in email campaigns weeks or months down the road.
These three main challenges cover some of the most popular use-case scenarios for graphic recording. But as a practice, it’s really just getting started.
Be on the cutting edge at your next ideation session, retreat, board meeting, or company update by bringing graphic recording into the mix. You may be surprised at where the conversation goes- and you’ll definitely be impressed by how much you learn and remember, simply by augmenting your traditional setting with creativity.