Thought you might like to have a sneak peak of a small bit of a rich picture I’m currently working on for a client. Very much work in progress!
The client wants to have a rich picture they can use in several different ways to promote their work including as a takeaway at events, as a basis for an animation and as imagery to use on their website.
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
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:
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.
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:
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.
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
