As Glen talks, he flips through Ollie’s original drawings, so that you see not only what’s so alive in each drawing, but how they work as animation. What a treat!

I’ll start by saying that I believe that drawings that are hand-made and loosely or roughly drawn engage us more, drawing us into the process of animating what we’re viewing. By “animating” I mean the way we bring a drawing to life in our mind. Here’s a cartoon from the New Yorker that I’ve shown to graphic facilitation classes I’ve taught over the years:

Reflect for a moment on what happens in our minds when we view this great Gahan Wilson cartoon. We understand the countryside at night. And we understand a school of swimming fish. Because we “know” each of these elements, we can pretend as we look at the cartoon that the scene is real, even though the two could never go together. When we pretend in this way, it’s as if the fish really are swimming through the sky and talking to each other. We animate the scene. In our minds, we bring it to life, imagining it in a way to be true. The absurd juxtaposition makes us laugh, but we only can laugh because, somehow, we can pretend that what we see is real.

So we can think about a drawing being “more effective”, as Stine was asking, when it enables or encourages us to bring it to life in our mind. This isn’t a passive process. It’s a participatory one, where we are deeply engaged. From a facilitator’s point of view, this is a valuable state for people to be in. A facilitator’s work is focused on supporting people to participate, helping them to think actively and collaboratively and tapping their feelings as well. Nothing important gets accomplished if it leaves people flat. Creating new futures begins with imagining them. So having ways to wake up people’s imaginations, even in the simple act of seeing drawings, is important.

Another thing that allows us to bring Wilson’s cartoon to life is its simplicity, which is to say its abstraction. Scott McCloud, in his amazing book, Understanding Comics, explains how simple, more abstract drawings of people allow us not just to imagine that a drawing is real, but that we are in it:

[This is just a teaser. For McCloud's full explanation, read his provocative book.] For a facilitator, who is working to build involvement and ownership, the benefits of this phenomenon are obvious.

But why hand-drawn? Pick up an pencil and draw something simple on a piece of paper. Now compare it with a computer-generated drawing or image. The computer’s vector drawing, where the program issues instructions for how and where to create lines and fill in shapes, is perfect. And dead. The lack of variation in a line whose width is always, everywhere exactly the same, leaves us cold. There is nothing there to discover, no variation in tone, width, intensity, shape. Nothing there to wake up our mind, nothing for us to complete or fill in. There’s very little for us to do. Your drawing, in contrast, probably isn’t perfect. Hopefully it’s not only asymmetrical, but varied in tone and line. Even better, it may be simple and incomplete. It will then require your mind to work in order to complete what you’re seeing. (Perhaps you’ll even see yourself there.) Here, then, is something our mind can work on. It has to, since your drawing is varied, moving, unfinished. It’s engaging.

Why rough? Look to the Disney animators of the 1930s. Think for a moment about what they did. They took, at Disney’s constant urging, the young and unformed young medium of animation, and discovered how to create characters that seemed to live, feel and breathe. A marvelous retelling and explanation of how they did this and what they discovered along the way is Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston’s The Illusion of Life:  Disney Animation. There were many discoveries that helped them achieve this effect, but one key starting point was this:

Here’s another example, about which Frank and Ollie wrote:  Rough drawings open the way to stronger action. As the animator feels the moves in his own body, he transfers that intensity to his character. This type of action could never be achieved with “clean” drawings, but once the roughs have been made refinements can follow.

Again, if it’s life that we want in working with a group, here’s a way to reach for it.

There’s one more thing about rough and hand-drawn that deserves a facilitator’s attention. We can see from the examples above that hand-drawn, lively images engage us as we look at them. I believe that they also send an implicit message that it’s ok to keep working on them. It’s ok to pick up a marker and add something, cross something out, highlight something else. Something hand-drawn and simple says, “This is just a rough sketch, anyway. There’s still room to perfect it. Join in.” A highly polished graphic, on the other hand, says, “This has been completely worked out and it’s ready for you to consider. Do you like it or not?” One is an invitation to participate, the other is a presentation.

So, why rough, simple, hand-drawn? It’s more alive, more engaging and more inviting. When you’re working with groups who are thinking, planning, imagining, creating, that’s just what you want.

There is no other practice or activity in my facilitation repertoire that is as consistently underestimated by clients and the groups that they lead or are planning for. A common reaction to my suggestion that exploring the group or organization’s history would be a helpful way to begin is, “Well, ok, we can do that. But I don’t think it needs to take a lot of time.” It’s typically the same person, as much as anyone else in the group, who then doesn’t want to stop or move on once we’re in the activity. And it’s not uncommon for the history to turn out to be one of the highlights of the meeting, remembered fondly or even in awe, by those who were there.

I think there are multiple reasons for this phenomena. The first is that most people don’t spend time talking about the past in an extended way. Anecdotes may be a common way of instructing a newcomer in the dos and don’ts of an organization, but telling the stories of what happened one after the other and then looking across them over time doesn’t seem to happen much, if at all. We’re taught to look forward. At the same time, people arrive in organizations at different times and in different roles. There are typically all kinds of events that have shaped their environment that they are completely unaware of. They may also be unaware that others see different parts of the history that they don’t and that what they see shapes their behavior.

I remember a story that David Sibbet told a few years ago. He had been working with a law firm and at a certain point in the meeting, felt that they were stuck. He decided to put aside the process they were in the middle of and asked instead for the participants to talk about what it was like when they went to law school:  what they had expected, what school was like, how they imagined the career they would have when they graduated. And he asked them to do this in a particular way. He began with the group that had gone to school in the 60s, then the group from the 70s and so on. What they discovered was that, depending on when they had been trained, they held very different perspectives and expectations, based on what the practice and training in law had been like at that time. Doing the exercise allowed them to see something they hadn’t before:  differences and patterns that were shaping – and complicating – their interactions without them knowing why.

Years ago I facilitated a history for a group that was facing a particularly tough time, a situation more severe than any of them had ever experienced. Yet they discovered as they told each other the story of their department that the department itself, years before any of them had joined, had survived an equally hard challenge. Only one member of the group had known the people who had been there and turned the situation around, but that was enough, once the story surfaced, for the group to realize that their department had a history of facing tough moments and succeeding. It was a legacy that they could carry forward, if they rose to the challenge. They continued the meeting with an entirely different attitude than the one with which they’d begun.

Perhaps the most intense, and certainly the longest, history I ever supported was at Alyeska, the company that runs the Alaskan pipeline. I was working with Frank Johnson, an internal consultant at Alyeska, and we decided that I would record the session while he facilitated. We had a large group and limited board space for the charts I would work on – more than eight feet, but not a lot more. The organization had complex and occasionally traumatic history (I remember drawing a large slick for the Exxon Valdez incident) and, once the ball was rolling, everyone had something to say. I kept thinking we would wrap up soon;  Frank kept feeling that they group needed to have the conversation they were having. I’m sure he was right, but I’ve never produced such a dense, nearly illegible chart in my life. I doubt that it mattered much. The real magic was in the conversation.

Having said this, seeing a history emerge is a strong support to the storytelling that brings the history to life. It also allows a group to go back over the history, once the story has been told and to look for patterns or insights. Years ago I worked with perhaps the only group I’ve had that wasn’t responsive to telling their history. The problem was that half the group had done a similar exercise a few weeks before. But the other half hadn’t, so I faced a dilemma. Keep half the group from being bored, but leave the other half in the dark? Not a good idea, since the history was in preparation for thinking strategically about the future. I pushed on, painfully aware of the participants who were checked out. Then something funny happened. As the group brought us up to the present, I asked a follow-on question:  given what you’ve told me, what insights do you have? That question changed everything. Suddenly the whole group was alive! Like (unfortunately) many groups, their recent history had been pretty painful. They wanted to avoid repeating it at all costs. Being able to see it in front of them made it easy to reflect on what they would need to change.

Histories allow groups to literally all get on the same page, bringing new members on board and giving the old hands a chance to share their experience. They allow people to celebrate the highs and acknowledge (and begin to let go of) the lows. Groups see accomplishments they may have overlooked in the heat of work and recognize forces that have been at play. Seeing these in front of them can be, in the words of a recent participation, “a revelation”. A well-told and recorded history lays the groundwork for wisdom, while strengthening old relationships and beginning new ones. And it’s – unexpectedly – fun. Though it may take longer than you’d imagined.