Crackerjack Visual Thinking

Category: Organisational 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.

    Header Nov 2017 v2

    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.

  • High Performing Hospital rich picture created for Manchester University Hospitals #NHS Foundation Trust #visualthinking #MFTnhs

    Crackerjack Visual Thinking is pleased to be able to share a rich picture we created for Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (MUH) earlier this year. The image was created to drive discussion and understanding across the organisation of what a high-performing hospital (sometimes referred to as a model hospital) looks like.

    MUH High Performing Hospital 2017

    Helen Farrington, Associate Director of OD and Training at MUH, comments:

    “John from Crackerjack has the amazing ability to make sense of complex information and translate a concept into something that is creative, meaningful and has impact! Creating our ‘rich picture’ required incorporating a diverse range of views and opinions- never easy – but John was patient and flexible and as a result we have something that has wide appeal and application.”

    Crackerjack is currently developing a number of other rich pictures for MUH.

    To find out more about rich pictures and how they could help you engage and inform people in your organisation, please CONTACT US.

  • Interflora and Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust choose Crackerjack to help visualise their thinking #visualthinking

    Crackerjack Visual Thinking is really pleased to share that Interflora and Central Manchester University Hostpitals NHS Foundation Trust have both asked us to help them visualise their thinking.

    We’ll be providing the full range of visual thinking services including graphic facilitation and rich picture creation to these new clients.

    We’re really looking forward to working with both of these organisations and helping them use visual thinking to communicate important information and engage their people over the next few months.

    To find out how Crackerjack Visual Thinking can help you, please CONTACT US.

  • Give your people the power to draw (a.k.a. communicate more effectively)! #visualthinking #communicate #engage #teamdevelopment

    Getting people and teams to communicate effectively is one of the key challenges facing organisations of all shapes and sizes.

    We here at Crackerjack Visual Thinking believe that helping people to feel confident and empowered to use sketches, diagrams and drawings to communicate thoughts and ideas can create a significant cultural change in an organisation.

    yesdrawingsign

    We have witnessed people having numerous ‘lightbulb’ moments which were only possible because information and ideas were shared visually (rather than the more traditional formats for sharing information including reports, bullet-point presentations etc).

    That’s why we are passionate about helping people develop their drawing skills and offer a number of training workshops which we call ‘Scribble Labs™‘.

    Scribble Lab 1

    Scribble Lab™ 1: Get Scribbling! is ideal for those people wanting to develop their drawing skills. We can offer this as a standalone 1 day workshop or can tailor it to your teams specific needs. Ideal as part of a team development activity.

    We also offer a 1:1 coaching option if that better suits your needs.

    To find out more about how our Scribble Labs™ can help your people to communicate more effectively, please contact us. 

  • 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:

    crackerjack-menu-2017-small

     

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

  • Helping your people engage with your organisations plans for 2017 #engage #communicate #vision

    2017 seems to be just around the corner!

    Although many organisations financial and strategic planning years do not align with the calendar year, it’s important to remember that moving into 2017 will, for many of your people, represent a new start.

    Did you know that most life changing decisions (both personal and professional) are made during the Christmas and New Year periods? The mix of time away from work, seeing family and friends and the ‘out with old, in with the new’ feeling that a New Year brings plays a large part in this.

    For this reason, the Christmas and New Year period (and the run up to it) should be a time when engaging with your people and helping them understand the role they will play in delivering your organisations ambitions for 2017 is vital.

    So how do you achieve this?

    The ‘normal’ line management process including reviewing objectives and discussing how these can be achieved in 2017 can play an important role in helping people understand the tasks they personally need to achieve in the coming year. However, it’s important that these conversations are also framed in the context of the organisations vision and ambitions.

    People become more engaged with an organisation when their own values, beliefs and ambitions align with those of the organisation. Where this alignment is missing, the greater chance that good people will make the decision to leave an organisation.

    So, ensure that you bring the bigger themes of the organisations vision and ambitions for 2017 into the conversations that you have with your people as we head towards the fast approaching New Year. Discuss what this means to them and the role they see themselves playing in achieving these goals. Ask them what other information they would need to fully understand how they fit into the 2017 plan. Ask them what they like about the 2017 vision and what they may find more difficult to engage with.

    Above all, have an honest conversation about 2017 that isn’t simply task focussed and takes an individuals hopes, beliefs and aspirations into account.

    At Crackerjack, we have found that rich pictures (examples shown below) are a valuable way of sharing an organisations vision, values and plans with its people. A single engaging image of an organisations story that everyone can see, discuss and understand across an organisation could be a powerful tool to support engagement with your people as we head into 2017. To find out more please contact us, call 0775 282 6227 or visit www.crackerjackvisualthinking.com

  • Great feedback about our #Quality #Improvement Toolkit from Oxford University Hospitals #NHS #engage #communicate

    Earlier this year, Crackerjack was commissioned by Belinda Boulton (Director of Transformation for Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust) to design and produce an on-line interactive service improvement guide for her organisation.

    The ‘Oxford Quality Improvement Toolkit’ brings together numerous quality improvement tools, templates and techniques into one simple to use practical guide that is accessible across all platforms and devices including laptops, tablets and smartphones.

    oxford-quality-improvement-toolkit-blog-image-01

    The toolkit is designed to support anyone (from front-line staff to senior management) who wants to make an improvement in their part of the organisation, whether that’s making a change to a single patient process through to managing a major change programme across a team or department.

    We were extremely pleased to receive the following feedback from Belinda on completion of the work:

    “We knew what service improvement information we wanted to convey. However, we weren’t sure about how to present that information in such a way as to engage our colleagues and enthuse them in relation to our service improvement goals. John Ashton from Crackerjack Visual Thinking listened to our ideas and explored with us the nature of our audience and what would give them an affinity with the ‘Toolkit’. John helped us to bring our ideas to life in the form of an interactive ‘Oxford Quality Improvement Toolkit’, an on-line guide which brings service improvement tools to life. The work was delivered to time frames and exceeded our expectations.  We are looking forward to working with John in the future on other projects.”

    To discuss how Crackerjack could help you in your work, please contact us, call +44(0)775 282 6227 or visit www.crackerjackvisualthinking.com

  • Don’t take our word for it! Read about a clients experience of work with Crackerjack Visual Thinking #communicate #engage

    Don’t take our word for it! Read about a clients experience of work with Crackerjack Visual Thinking #communicate #engage

    Here’s a link to a blog article by Andrew Scott (of Andrew Scott Training) describing how Crackerjack worked with him to provide graphic recording support during an Open Space session for the University of Newcastle he was facilitating:

    Open Space and Graphic Recording

    Here’s the completed graphic recording capturing the rich detail of the day:

    university-of-newcastle-hass-open-space-22nd-sept-2016-web2

    If you would like to discuss how we can provide graphic recording support and other services to help you in your work, please contact us, call +44 (0)775 282 6227 or visit www.crackerjackvisualthinking.com