How can you enhance team facilitation with visual techniques?

1 Why use visual techniques?

Visual techniques can be highly beneficial to you and your team, depending on the purpose and context of your facilitation. They can capture and organize complex information in a clear and concise way, aiding the team in seeing the big picture, recognizing patterns, and making connections. Visual techniques can also stimulate imagination and innovation by inviting exploration of different perspectives, generating new ideas, and experimenting with possibilities. Furthermore, they can increase participation and interaction by creating a shared visual language, seeking feedback, and cultivating a sense of ownership and co-creation. Finally, they can enhance alignment and commitment by clarifying the team's vision, goals, roles, and action plans; plus they provide a visual record of the team's journey and accomplishments.

2 How to choose visual techniques?

When facilitating a team, you can use a variety of visual techniques to help them brainstorm, organize, and prioritize information. Mind maps are graphical representations of thoughts, ideas, or knowledge around a central topic. Flowcharts show the sequence of steps or actions involved in a process or project. SWOT analysis is a tool to analyze strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of a situation or goal. Venn diagrams illustrate the relationships between different sets of items or concepts, while matrix diagrams display the relationship between two or more variables or criteria. These techniques can help the team assess the current state, identify areas for improvement, plan for the future, compare and contrast different options, find common ground, explore synergies, evaluate and rank different alternatives, make decisions, or allocate resources.

3 How to prepare visual techniques?

Before you use any visual technique in your team facilitation, it's important to prepare some materials and resources to ensure effective use. You need to have a clear purpose and objective for the technique, as well as a suitable space and equipment. This includes enough space, light, and ventilation for the team to work comfortably, as well as the necessary tools such as paper, pens, markers, sticky notes, flip charts, or digital tools. Additionally, you should provide a clear explanation and instruction for using the visual technique. This includes introducing and explaining the technique to the team, guiding them through the steps and rules of using it, and handling any questions or issues that may arise.

4 How to facilitate visual techniques?

In order to maximize the potential and impact of the visual technique, you need to facilitate it in a specific way. It's important to set the context and expectations for using the visual technique, as well as demonstrate and model it. Additionally, you should monitor and support the team's use of the visual technique, intervening if necessary. Lastly, debrief and summarize the visual technique by asking the team to share their results and insights, then highlighting key points and themes before linking them to next steps or actions.

5 How to evaluate visual techniques?

After you have facilitated the visual technique, you should evaluate its effectiveness and usefulness for your team and your facilitation. Consider the team's feedback and satisfaction; how did they feel about using the visual technique? Also, assess the team's performance and outcomes; did they achieve the objective, solve the problem, or create the solution? Lastly, reflect on your own learning; what did you do well or what could you do better? What did you learn from using the visual technique? How can you apply it to other situations or contexts?

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?