Crackerjack Visual Thinking

Tag: communicate

  • Running a 2017 Kick-Off event in January? If so, read this! #engage #communicate #visualthinking

    Are you running a kick-off meeting in early 2017 to get you and your team ready for the year ahead?

    Being clear about what you want to achieve in 2017 and how you are going to do this is vital to the success of your organisation.

    60 page PowerPoint presentations and over-long speeches are not the best way to engage with your people and communicate key messages!

    Getting your people really thinking, talking and identifying the actions they need to take to achieve the organisations goals in 2017 will provide you with a much better chance of success.

    To do this effectively we recommend the following steps:

    • Think about when and where you get your people together. If it’s going to be a face to face event, remember that the venue and room play and important role in how energised people feel and how engaged they are with the event.
    • Identify three or four clear organisational aims for 2017. Any more than this and people won’t have the time to really think about the role they play in achieving each of these.
    • Don’t just tell people the information! Help them discover it themselves through activities and discussion. Learning information rather than being simply told it is proven to be the most effective way to really understand and retain information. A graphic facilitation approach which combines facilitation with visual thinking techniques can be ideal for this type of activity.Graphic facilitation involvement
    • Think visually! Wherever possible and practicable, use images and diagrams to complement the other materials you will be sharing with your people. Rich pictures provide a great way of sharing complex information and graphic recording can capture the key thoughts, ideas and comments that emerge during your kick-off meeting.
    • Follow-up after the meeting. Be sure to set up channels that enable people to continue the conversations started at the event. Also ensure that you find a way to visually show the organisations progress against the 2017 goals.
    • Plan ahead! Toward the end of 2017, arrange another event to celebrate success and gather learning’s from the work undertaken in 2017. These can then be used to inform your plans and kick-off meeting for 2018.

    We hope this advice is helpful to you. If you would like to discuss any of the above ideas, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

    John Ashton – Crackerjack Visual Thinking

  • A typical #exec team conversation when they try #drawing their new #strategic #vision out on paper! #visualthinking #engage #communicate

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  • 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.

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    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

  • The important ART of conversation #communication #engagement

    Have you ever had one of those conversations that doesn’t seem to go anywhere? You may have been talking for a long time with the other people involved in your conversation but feel like none of you are really understanding what the other is trying to say.

    Sound familiar?

    Whilst most of the time this lack of understanding is frustrating, it doesn’t necessarily have immediate serious consequences for organisations. Time wasted, frustration and inefficiency are often the product of these type of unresolved conversations – not desirable but often not enough on their own to cause fatal damage to an organisation.

    However, imagine if this lack of understanding related to the vision of the organisation. People not being able to understand, discuss and share the organisations vision (its DNA) accurately and understand what they need to do to make the vision a reality could ultimately be fatal.

    The result of not understanding the organisations vision could include:

    • The wrong critical decisions being made.
    • Confusing messages being communicated to the public/customers.
    • Lack of engagement amongst employees.
    • Internal conflicts caused by differing views of what the organisations vision actually means and how it should be implemented.

    So, how can people be helped to have the right conversations to enable them to fully understand an organisations vision (or indeed any other important information that needs to be communicated consistently and accurately)?

    A visual representation of an organisations vision in the form of a rich picture provides a single-page engaging view of what can often be a complex story.

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    A rich picture created to communicate the vision of Solent NHS Trust

    By showing the various elements of the vision and how they relate to each other in the form of a rich picture provides the following benefits:

    • Images (combined with the economical use of key words and phrases) enable your brain to process information more effectively and make linkages between ideas and concepts more easily.

    • Rich pictures by their nature are engaging. Initially people want to look at the picture and then they start wanting to read the detail. Not necessarily what happens when people are presented with a large PowerPoint deck or a lengthy report!

    • Rich pictures are accessible to all people at all levels in an organisation. They are designed to work for everyone regardless of role, length of service or seniority.

    • People can gather around a picture together (whether it’s in the form of a large poster, displayed on screen or used in a virtual meeting) and discuss what they are seeing. This process enables people to check and challenge their own perceptions of what the rich picture is communicating as well as beginning conversations about what the vision means in reality for them as an individual/team/organisation.

    • The rich picture creates a new common way of discussing the organisations vision (e.g. “You know the bit of the vision represented by the rocket ship…” etc). It is not uncommon for people to go into meetings with a copy of a rich picture for reference during meetings or events!

    Of course, the whole process of using a rich picture needs to be well-managed and time needs to be made to allow people to review the rich picture both individually and as a team.

    IAT Vision 2016 Small
    A rich picture created for the Institute of Asphalt Technology

    It’s also important to remember that a rich picture is not just a one-hit wonder. The rich picture will continue to provide a valuable method of discussing an organisations vision for the lifetime of the vision itself. And if required, rich pictures can be updated easily to reflect changes as they happen.

    In summary, art (in the form of a rich picture) can play a hugely important role in helping organisations enable their people to understand, discuss and engage with their vision. This understanding, discussion and engagement with the organisational vision is critical. A well-designed rich picture could therefore be the artistic key to success for many organisations.

    To find out more about rich pictures and visual thinking, please contact us, call +44 (0)775 282 6227 or visit www.crackerjackvisualthinking.com

  • We’ll soon be ‘revealing all’ about our busy summer here at Crackerjack! #visualthinking #communication #engagement

    We’ll soon be ‘revealing all’ about our busy summer here at Crackerjack! #visualthinking #communication #engagement

    Hope you all had a great summer!

    Whilst we’ve been able to fit a few holidays in over the summer, we’ve also been busy supporting clients  in a number of different ways. Whilst we can’t yet reveal everything we’ve been doing (client confidentiality, hence the blurred images below!), we can tell that we’ve doing lots including:

    • Creating a new interactive toolkit to help managers improve quality and care at Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust. The toolkit is due to be launched in the next few days.

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    • Graphic recording for number of clients including Northumbrian Water, National Trust and Oxford University Hospitals.

    • Delivering our first 1:1 Scribble Lab coaching programme for a client at EVHR Consulting.

    • Creating a rich picture detailing Solent NHS Trusts new strategic direction.

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    We’ll be revealing more details on this work over the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, why not visit www.crackerjackvisualthinking.com to find out more about our work. Alternatively, feel free to contact us to discuss your requirements in more detail.

     

  • Sneaky Peak! #visualthinking

    Sneaky Peak! #visualthinking

    Just thought I’d share a few small elements of a much larger rich picture I’m creating for a client to help them communicate their new vision and engage their target audience in their work.

    Sneaky Peak-01 copy

    The staring point for the rich picture was a powerpoint presentation containing outline bullet points for each element of the new vision. I then worked with the client to really understand and explore the vision and identify the real-life impact this would have on their target audience.

    From this exploration I’ve been able to create a rich picture that visually shows how their vision will enable their target audience to make a real impact to the lives of the general public.

    I’m hoping to be able to share the whole graphic with you in June once it’s been launched at the organisations annual conference (where I’m also creating a live graphic recording of the key themes, thoughts and ideas emerging from the event).

    To find out more about our work, please visit www.crackerjackvisualthinking.com or contact us.

  • Quick Poll: Have you shared an idea with colleagues by drawing it? #visualthinking

    It would be great if you had 30 seconds to complete the following poll to help us understand more about how people use drawing to share ideas in the workplace!

    Thanks for you help!

    John

    Crackerjack Visual Thinking
    www.crackerjackvisualthinking.com

  • Forming closer #strategic #partnerships using #visualthinking

    I’m currently designing a visual rich picture for a client to use with one of their own key customers. The rich picture is visualising my clients ideas about how their customer can increase sales in a specific category in their UK-wide store network.

    Here’s a quick work in progress peek at one very small section of the rich picture:

    Shopping 2

    What’s great from my perspective is that my client really wants to support their customer for both of their mutual benefits (i.e. increasing sales is good for both parties). They want to be a strategic partner and not just simply a ‘supplier’.

    And of course, investing in having a one page visual rich picture created to tell their story and share their ideas with their customer helps communicate their thinking so much more quickly and effectively than a report or multi-page powerpoint presentation.

    If you want to discuss how you can share your story with your customers, do contact us or visit www.crackerjackvisualthinking.com