…mean richer words
Yesterday I had a meeting with a man who describes himself as a ‘graphic facilitator and rich picture artist’. Puzzled? So was I. As a wordsmith I was nonplussed by this visual language. However, as David himself explains:
The production of a Rich Picture involves visual listening, where conversations and ideas are drawn and fed back to the client. A Rich Picture aims to provide a single image of key messages and concepts which help in stimulating further conversations and engagement.
The example below arose from a long consultative process with a primary health care trust. As well as presenting an overall picture of direction and aspiration, it gives a visual voice to smaller concerns and details expressed by people along the way.
Image:davidgifford.co.uk
There are many things which fascinate me about this process. The first is the way in which it sweeps up the smaller concerns into the big picture allowing individual concerns whilst transcending them with the wider perspective. The second is the verbal-linguistic-verbal journey on which the ideas have traveled.
In conceptual conversations we use words to describe ideas by rendering them physical. Thus we may talk about a bridge to be crossed or a puzzle to assemble even when no actual bridges or puzzles are involved.. When an artist then turns those metaphors into visual images we return to the original idea which made us select the visual words in the first place. As you can ‘see’, this is an iterative process where understanding grows over time.
Preachers and church leaders often eschew the iterative in favour of the didactic. Is this because we like to control the conversation, I wonder?
