Hope you’re having a good summer. I’m back in the studio after a couple of weeks holiday down in Devon. It’s great to back – but I wish I could nip down to the beach for a bit of bodyboarding! Tricky when I’m sitting in the middle of the UK about as far from the sea as it’s possible to be in this country!
However…
I had a great day yesterday working on whiteboard animation for Oxford Medical Illustration (OMI). I drew a number of different images directly onto the whiteboard and this was filmed in full 4K high-resolution. The studio had the lighting set up to minimise shadows and reflections. Here’s a picture of the studio set-up:
The outputs from the session will now be used as part of an internal communications campaign and be combined with a number ‘talking heads’ videos. We hope to be able to share elements of the whiteboard animation with you shortly.
To discuss how whiteboard animation can help you communicate ideas to your people, pleasecontact us.
We’ve just received the following feedback from Chris Henderson, Founder of One Third More about the work we’ve recently undertaken for him:
“I commissioned John Ashton of Crackerjack Visual Thinking to create a rich picture and hand-drawn animation of the key themes I explore in my book ‘Jump!: Deliver astonishing results by unleashing your leadership team’. John worked with me to understand the key messages I wanted to communicate and developed a metaphor and storyboard that visualised the story I wanted to tell. The rich picture and animation are excellent and give me two valuable resources that I can share with clients, use in presentations and display on my website. I found working with John to be both thought provoking and supportive and look forward to working with him again on future projects.”
Chris Henderson | Founder of One Third More
Here’s the rich picture we created for Chris. Click on the image to see the hand-drawn animation:
We’re very pleased to share that the Institute of Quarrying (IQ) have asked us to create two rich pictures to engage people in the world of quarrying. The rich pictures will visualise the life-cycle of a quarry and the processes and job roles involved in quarrying.
The rich pictures will used for a variety of purposes including induction, training, communications and awareness raining activity.
Last week, as part of an event I was supporting, I was lucky enough to graphic record in real-time the inspirational career journey of a champion of diversity and equity in the NHS, Yvonne Coghill OBE.
Her story was thought provoking and clearly highlighted how people can champion and enable diversity and equity for all. Clearly people were moved, challenged and energised by the story of her career journey.
Afterwards, Yvonne came and had a look at the graphic recording I had created of her journey. Her response was one of amazement as she was able to review her career journey visually for the first time. She said she found it very emotional to see her journey mapped out on paper and almost felt like crying (in a good way I hasten to add!). She was also kind enough to Tweet about it after the event.
She liked the graphic recording of her journey so much that she wants to use it in future presentations that she gives about her work and journey.
For me, this once again highlighted the power of visualising information and the effect this can have on individuals (and in turn teams and organisations). Engagement is the shared goal of virtually all organisations and therefore I would encourage everyone to think about how visualising information in a way that stimulates and connects with people can help them in this goal.
To explore how visual thinking can you engage the people in your organisation, please feel free to call 0775 282 6227 orcontact us.
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
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
