Best workshop exercises we know V

My favorite workshop exercise of all

Jose writes the Facili-station newsletter, and I write the Gamestorming newsletter. We thought you might enjoy reading a conversation between the two of us about our favourite workshop exercises. We will each write three letters, responding to each other’s thoughts.

Previous letters:

1. Letter 1 from me, about the exercises I comes back to over and over again every time I plans a workshop.

2. Letter 2 from Jose, about the 5 types of foundational exercises at the core of any workshop.

3. Letter 3 from me, about facilitating creative energy and flow.

4. Letter 4 from Jose, a deep dive into how he uses the sailboat metaphor

This is letter 5, where I share my favorite workshop exercise of all.

Dear Jose,

I’ve saved the best for last. For my final note in our letter exchange, I’d like to share my favorite workshop exercise of all. If I could teach only one thing, it would be this. The energy and imagination it unleashes is phenomenal, and no other workshop activity I’ve tried even comes close.

By far, my favorite thing to do in a workshop is to show people how to draw their ideas.

Visual thinking is the process of drawing in order to think.

Drawing is a powerful tool that can help you think differently about anything: a situation, challenge, an idea, a strategy, a plan.

Drawing not only helps you improve your thinking and creativity, it also helps you build shared understanding and common ground within a group.

I usually start with a couple of exercises to show people how easy it can be to draw their ideas (more on that at the end of this post). After a little warm-up, I like to use an exercise called poster session, where each person or group develops a flip-chart sized poster to explain their situation and/or their idea.

Some people have trouble getting started. A blank page can be very intimidating. To help them get started, I sometimes share a set of visual frameworks I have drawn out on index cards, and I invite them to sort through them to explore ideas and possibilities they can use to make their poster. Here are 25 of them. Over the years I have collected hundred of these.

Side note: A lot of people like the index cards and have asked my to publish them. In the near future I will be publishing my top 100 visual frameworks as a card deck that I’m calling Scanagrams. For updates on that project, sign up here.

Over the years, I have found that getting people to start drawing their ideas is the single most powerful thing I can do to help them unleash their creativity and expand their thinking. More than 50 percent of the brain is devoted to processing visual information, and while most people have a very sophisticated ability to read visual information, it’s a much smaller group that actively works to develop their ability to write visual information in the form of charts, maps, diagrams and sketches.

It is much less difficult than people imagine to pick up these skills and use them in your life or in the workplace. In a couple of hours I can teach pretty much anyone the basics of drawing their ideas.

I can’t count the number of people who have told me that visual thinking has changed their life. Many of the people I’ve taught are now teaching visual thinking to others, and some have even quit their day jobs and are now making a living with visual thinking.

If you’re interested in learning these skills for yourself, I’ve compiled my favorite drawing lessons and exercises into a 100% free online course to show you how to do it. You can complete the whole course in about 2 hours, or if you prefer, you can do 20 minutes a day for about a week.

I’m excited to share these skills with you. Take the online course. It’s free!

Thanks for taking the time to read this note.

Until next time,

,