Visual facilitation
Graphic facilitation is the process of facilitating a meeting through graphic recording. You could have the same person facilitating and recording at the same time, or you can separate the roles.
Graphic facilitation involves making the participants co-creators in your work. Techniques for doing this include:
- Validating ideas and language expressed in the map with the participants
- Having the participants get up and interact with the map directly
Dialogue Mapping is a form of graphic facilitation that uses Issue Mapping as the recording process. Similarly, system mapping can be a powerful technique for doing graphic facilitation. All of these different capturing processes have one thing in common: The process of capturing conversation is as important as the capture itself. Simon Buckingham Shum wrote a wonderful blog post articulating these issues.
Best Practices
Validate what's on the shared display.
Slow down the conversation.
It's live continual synthesis. In that sense, the goal is not simply a transcriptive artifact, but an interpretive one. (See shared artifacts for an explanation of these different dimensions.) Let the conversation go, listen for the synthesis, then reflect back. Don't interrupt and validate every single time.
