Visual Facilitation
Propel your team
to breakthrough thinking with visual facilitation.
It isn’t rocket science. But it is brain science.
You want your gatherings to have lasting impact — to fuel inspiration long after the session has ended. To make that happen, the ideas generated during the event need to take root in people’s hearts and minds.
Visual Facilitation
Propel your team
to breakthrough thinking with visual facilitation.
It isn’t rocket science. But it is brain science.
You want your gatherings to have lasting impact — to fuel inspiration long after the session has ended. To make that happen, the ideas generated during the event need to take root in people’s hearts and minds.
The key to achieving this is to make ideas visible.
Study after study finds people learn – and remember – better when multiple senses are engaged.
Hear a piece of information and a few days later you’ll remember about 10%. Add a picture and you’ll remember 65% — even a year later!
People exposed to images and words together come up with more creative solutions than folks in a words-only environment.
Visual facilitation engages people at all levels, in ways that are both productive and fun.
It’s science. But it’s also art.
Creativity begets more creativity. Bringing my artist’s eye and mind to the work, I open space for your people to unleash their own inner artists (yes, everyone has one!) and play their way toward things they can’t think their way into.
And when people’s thoughts and words are given visual form, wonderful things happen. Abstract ideas become concrete. Fuzzy thinking becomes clear. And as people see their own words take shape they feel respected, valued and heard.
Draw out the best in everyone – literally!
Let’s talk about bringing clarity and creativity to your gatherings by making your ideas visible!
Real Life Stories
Teslin Tlingit Council/Village of Teslin
Mapping, planning and visioning
I’ve been creating graphics for the Teslin Tlingit Council and Village of Teslin (Yukon) since 2009 to support a wide range of projects including strategic planning, visioning, asset mapping, and the Official Community Plan.
My greatest joy has been recording the community consultations that are a hallmark of their inclusive processes, the knowledge that the visuals are seen as a vital and integral part of these processes, and getting to know the amazing members of this small but incredibly powerful community!
Community of Carcross
Community engagement in the Yukon
There are some years where I’ve felt like the Yukon was my second home. Carcross is another vibrant Yukon community I’ve worked with for several years.
Like Teslin, they are committed to engaging the whole community in their initiatives, and I’ve had the pleasure of mapping community conversations on land use planning, social enterprise, tourism, and other topics. The most wide-ranging project was the Carcross Comprehensive Community Plan, Awakening the Greatness Within, which included an open house, a 2-day Elders & Youth retreat, and a final Visioning and Action retreat. What I loved about graphically recording these events is that it was a truly collaborative process, with community members engaging deeply with the visuals and providing thoughtful input throughout.
Cordova School District
Strategic visioning process
When it was time to update Cordova School District’s strategic plan, Superintendent Alex Russin was determined not to commission another boring document that would be stuffed in a binder and gather dust on a shelf.
Instead, he decided to create a process that would engage the whole community and culminate in a visual and visible poster that would be displayed throughout the town. Chris Corrigan and I were hired to design, facilitate and capture a series of community consultations, and work with Alex and the Board to distill and refine the content. I then created a poster that visually represented the District’s Strategic Vision, benchmarks for success, and action items to achieve the vision.
Visual Gallery
What People Are Saying
Working with Avril was an experience I had always hoped for in a professional partner — a great listener who was attentive to understanding the dynamic needs of our schools, one who actively sought to learn about our local community in order to genuinely and accurately reflect the vision of our district. From the outset of our initial conversation, Avril – along with her colleague Chris Corrigan – helped to set a pathway for engaging our stakeholders not only in strategic conversations, but also in developing visible, tangible representations of our community. Avril’s ability to listen to conversations as they were unfolding and transform them into detailed visual graphics was an amazing process to watch take place. As a school district leader, I am fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with Avril on a truly meaningful project that will help to guide our decisions and operations for years to come.
I had the pleasure and privilege of working with Avril for over a decade, during my tenure with the BC General Employees Union (BCGEU). In addition to being an immensely talented artist, she consistently goes above and beyond as a visual facilitator. Often meetings, workshops, or conferences include sensitive or controversial content. Avril is gifted at extracting and depicting the substance of events and of individuals’ contributions, in real time and in a way that is profoundly validating and meaningful for participants. For this reason, she has always been my first choice when considering visual facilitation at events.
Over the past sixteen years I have had the pleasure of working with numerous talented visual facilitators. However, Avril’s capacity to capture not only the essence of the intelligence in the room, but the strategic nature of that intelligence toward the project we were working on, was beyond anything I’d experienced before. Her visual facilitation helped us at every turn of the project to see the emerging strategic thinking in our work together. It was like having a third active facilitator in the room.
Avril is the whole package: visual recorder extraordinaire; able to translate individual and group contributions into powerful visual maps, metaphors, concepts and creative illustrations that bring life to sessions long after they are over; committed to participants’ active engagement in using visuals in meetings; a truly deep listener; and the most approachable, insightful, talented and all around fun person you’d ever want to work with!
