112 - Demystifying Visual Collaboration with Ole Qvist-Sørensen

I have always said that words make worlds, but language is just one lens through which we can see and decipher our experiences.

What of drawings? Colours? Icons?

Expanding our vocabulary and incorporating visual collaboration into our lexicon can only be a good, productive thing.

So, in an effort to better understand the application and impact of visual collaboration, I wanted to learn from one of the most experienced and clearest-thinking practitioners - Ole Qvist-Sørensen, author of Visual Collaboration and founder of Bigger Picture Aps.

So listen in, enjoy, and explore a new way of communicating and collaborating.

Find out about:

• Why communicating complexity requires more tools than just language
• Separating graphic recording, visual facilitation, and visual collaboration
• How to manage the risk of miscommunicating when using visuals
• How visuals can complement language, not replace them
• Exercises and ideas for implementing visual collaboration in workshops
• How we can address bias in our visual communication
•  Whether we should consider updating our cultural iconography for the digital world

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Questions and Answers

[01:15] When did you start calling yourself a facilitator?

[04:09] Has your definition of facilitation changed over the last 20+ years?

[08:42] What’s the difference between visual collaboration and visual facilitation?

[12:39] How do you deal with things getting ‘lost in translation’ when we communicate visually?

[25:17] How can we prepare a group for visual collaboration and avoid having a long ‘training’-focused introduction?

[32:01] To what extent can visual communication be biased and how can we challenge this?

[37:37] What makes a workshop fail?

[40:07] What did you learn from your ‘failed’ experience?

[42:59] What would have been the best moment to introduce visual collaboration in this instance?

[49:14] Have you ever had a client that found visual collaboration to be ‘too alien’?

[51:09] What is the one thing you would like listeners to take away from this episode?

Links

Ole’s dedicated ‘podcast supplement’ webpage with exercise examples and guides

Bigger Picture, Ole’s company website

Visual Collaboration, Ole’s book

Connect to Ole:

On LinkedIn

On Twitter 

Any thoughts? Share them with us!

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