Crackerjack Visual Thinking

Category: Learning and Development

  • #Engage people, increase #understanding and improve #communication by embedding #visualthinking into the way your #organisation works

    If a picture speaks a thousand words, just imagine how enabling your people to think visually can help improve communication and creativity in your organisation!

    Helping your people to communicate more effectively and share ideas more easily can be a key method of increasing creativity and productivity in your organisation. Put simply, the quicker your people can generate great ideas and share them with others, the quicker these ideas can be turned into (profitable) reality.

    Developing your people’s visual thinking skills…

    Providing your people with the skills to enable them to share their thinking visually using drawings and sketches can supercharge this ability in your organisation. A single picture could replace a multi-page report or a bullet-pointed multi-page slide show. 10 minutes around a whiteboard could develop a new product idea or find a way to save time in your production process.

    Interflora 9th Nov 17

    Our Scribble Labs provide you with options for developing these visual thinking skills. We offer a range of workshops ranging from simply developing drawings skills through to helping people facilitate meetings using visual approaches.

    Visual thinking support when your organisation needs it…

    In addition to developing the visual thinking skills of your people, it can be helpful to call in additional visual thinking support to facilitate creative collaboration and visualisation of more complex ideas. This leaves your people free to get involved in the ideation and productive discussions that visually facilitated meetings can generate.

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    Crackerjack offers visual collaboration support for meetings along with a number of approaches to visualising ideas.

    Embedding visual thinking into your organisation…

    Developing the visual thinking skills of your people alongside calling in visual thinking support when you need it will allow visual thinking approaches to begin to permeate your organisation. The more people experience the visual way of working, the more they will engage with it and begin to see it as ‘the way we share ideas around here’.

    Crackerjack can work with you to embed visual thinking into your organisation. In addition to the approaches detailed above, we can also help to embed visual approaches into areas such as learning and development interventions and induction programmes.

    To find our more about how Crackerjack can help you embed visual thinking into your organisation, please CONTACT US.

    In addition, please take a look at our 1 minute guide below to find the right visual thinking approach for your needs and use the menu above to explore the different visual thinking approaches available from Crackerjack.

  • 1 minute animated guide to finding the right #visualthinking approach for your organisations #learning, #engagement, #collaboration and #communication needs

    1 minute animated guide to finding the right #visualthinking approach for your organisations #learning, #engagement, #collaboration and #communication needs

    Crackerjack Visual Thinking helps people think, learn and collaborate more effectively using a range of visual thinking approaches that engage people, increase understanding and improve communication.

    Take a look at our 1 minute guide below to find the right visual thinking approach for your needs and then contact us and visit www.crackerjackvisualthinking.com to discuss your specific requirements in more detail.

  • Crackerjack Visual Thinking’s new ‘menu’ helps you find the best way to #engage and #communicate with your people in 2017. #visualthinking

    Happy New Year!

    To help you get 2017 off to a flying start, we’ve created a new Crackerjack Visual Thinking ‘Menu’ that provides you with a quick reference guide to our services and how they can meet your organisations needs. So if you are looking to engage and communicate with your people in new and different ways during the coming year, click below to view the menu:

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    If you would like to explore how Crackerjack’s services could help you in your work, please contact us for an initial discussion.

  • Helping the NHS transform using visual thinking #engage #communicate #NHS

    In the news the NHS is never far from the headlines. ‘7 Day Working’, ‘Improving Quality’, ‘Focussing on Prevention’ and ‘Better Use of Technology’ are often mentioned and form key parts of the NHS 5 Year Forward View. This builds upon 15 years of improvement in the NHS and provides a broad consensus on what a better future for the NHS should be.

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    Over the last couple of years Crackerjack has been working with a number of NHS Foundation Trusts (Oxford Health Foundation Trust, Solent NHS Foundation Trust and Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust) as they work on finding ways to implement the ideas and initiatives contained in the 5 Year Forward View. It’s pleasing to see that visual thinking approaches are playing a part in helping NHS Foundation Trusts in this important work. We’ve been involved in the following work to date:

    • Designing and developing an interactive on-line ‘Improvement Guide’ for Oxford Health Foundation Trust.
    • Creating a rich picture showing Solent NHS Foundation Trusts new vision.
    • Designing and creating an interactive on-line ‘7 Day Services Guide’ for Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
    • Graphic recording a number of strategy and engagement events for both Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust and Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
    • Designing a graphically facilitated ‘Making Every Contact Count’ engagement session for Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust.
    • Running a graphic skills workshop for the Oxford Health Improvement and Innovation Team.
    • Designing and creating an interactive on-line ‘Oxford Quality Improvement Toolkit’ for Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

    The tools and approaches we’ve created all have a single goal: to engage people and provide them with the information they need in the most accessible, informative and relevant way possible. Using visual thinking principles in all of our work enables Crackerjack to achieve this goal.

    To find out more about how Crackerjack could help you engage and communicate with you people more effectively (whether you work in the NHS or in another sector), please contact us, call +44 (0)775 282 6227 or visit www.crackerjackvisualthinking.com

  • House of Fraser L&D team develop their scribbling skills! #visualthinking

    House of Fraser L&D team develop their scribbling skills! #visualthinking

    I spent half a day yesterday running a bespoke version of Scribble Lab 1™ with 12 members of the House of Fraser learning and development (L&D) team.

    HoF 25th May 2016 Scribble Lab Pic 1 SMALL

    The team is keen to incorporate visual thinking approaches into their work and the workshop helped them begin to develop the core drawing skills needed to do this.

    Developing these core drawing skills will enable them to feel confident in creating images to communicate information and drive conversation during the design and delivery phases of their work across multiple learning channels.

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    At the end of the session, the session participants were all able to identify immediate ways in which they could incorporate the skills learnt during the Scribble Lab™ into their current and future work.

    To find out more about Scribble Labs™ and how they could benefit your organisation and teams, please contact us.

  • House of Fraser chooses Crackerjack Visual Thinking’s Scribble Lab™ 1 to help develop its #visualthinking skills!

    Crackerjack Visual Thinking is very pleased to have been asked to deliver a bespoke version of our Scribble Lab™ 1 visual thinking training workshop to House of Fraser’s learning and development team later this month.

    Scribble Lab™ 1 enables participants to draw great graphics and use simple visual tools in the meetings and events they lead (ideal for learning and development teams).

    To find out more about Scribble Labs™ click here or visit www.crackerjackvisualthinking.com

    Include Visual Thinking

  • NEW Scribble Lab™ Visual Thinking Skills Workshops

    Crackerjack’s Scribble Labs™ are designed to help you explore and develop the skills you need to use the power of Visual Thinking in your work.

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    We currently offer three different Scribble Labs™ and all are facilitated by John Ashton (owner of Crackerjack Visual Thinking). Available as both open and in-house workshops, we ensure that:

    • All of our workshops are run using best practise visual thinking and graphic facilitation principles.
    • No more than 8 people attend each workshop, so you can be sure you will receive plenty of direct coaching and support from John during your chosen Scribble Lab™.

    To find about each of our Scribble Labs™ and decide which one is right for your needs, please read the overview of each workshop below and then click on the heading for more information:

    Scribble Lab™ 1: Get Scribbling!

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    Enabling you to draw great graphics and simple visual tools that you can use in the meetings and events you lead.

    Scribble Lab™ 2: Listen, Think, Scribble!

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    Introducing you to the art of creating real-time visual records of meetings and events (often referred to as Live Scribing or Graphic Recording) as they happen.

    Scribble Lab™ 3: Including Scribbling In Your Event Design!

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    Helping you unleash the power of Visual Thinking in your meeting, workshop and event designs!

     

    If you have any questions about our Scribble Labs™ then please do contact us or visit www.crackerjackvisualthinking.com

  • Visual thinking: a key element of the people engagement and change process

    It’s been a busy few months for Crackerjack Visual Thinking since the start of 2016!

    Crackerjack’s work has included:

    • Designing and developing hand-drawn animations
    • Designing rich pictures for clients including Westmill Foods
    • Live scribing (graphic recording) for the NHS and Google UK
    • Creating an interactive PDF improvement guide for one of Crackerjack’s key clients

    The common theme amongst all this work has been that clients are wanting to really engage people (whether it’s their own team members, their own client’s or their customer’s) and see visualising all or some elements of what they are trying to communicate as key to this engagement.

    I see visual thinking as way to enhance people engagement and change initiatives by shortcutting the time it takes people to take in and process important and sometimes complex information. Looking at the ‘Resistance to Change Model’ below, it can been seen that ‘understanding the change’ is a vital part of people being able to move towards ‘new beginnings’:

    Resistance to Change.png

    So, if you are wanting to engage people or introduce a change in your organisation, think about how you can visualise the important information you need your people to understand. And don’t forget, you can also encourage your people to visualise how they feel and what they do and don’t understand about the change.

    Things you could do include:

    • Creating a one page image of what the future will look like…
    • Create an ideas and thoughts wall where people can draw or write their feedback, thinking and ideas about the change…
    • Create a board game that helps people understand the journey they will be going on…
    • Capture the conversations as they happen in meetings about the change as visual notes and encourage people to photograph them with their smartphones as an immediate easy to understand record of the event…

    For more ideas and support with using visual thinking approaches in your organisation, feel free to contact us, call us on 0775 282 6227 or visit our website at www.crackerjackvisualthinking.com.

    John Ashton
    Crackerjack Visual Thinking

  • Great client #feedback from #Google UK

    Really pleased to be able to share feedback received following an event I recently scribed/graphic recorded for Google UK:

    “John [of Crackerjack Visual Thinking] did a fantastic job of capturing our day-long event’s key points and learnings – the final graphic has been shared far and wide within our organisation, with employees praising this creative takeaway, which clearly showcases the outcome of the day.”

    Steph Fastré – Learning and Development Google UK

    To find out how we can help you create a visual memory of your meeting or event visit www.crackerjackvisualthinking.com