A Graphic Facilitation Retrospective

By David Sibbet

Adapted from a presentation at the International

Association of Facilitators
The Art and Mastery of Facilitation – Navigating the
Future
IAF Conference 2001 Minnesota, May 16-20, 2001

Abstract
Graphic Facilitation is an interactive style of leading groups using large-scale imagery
and displays. It grew out of a network of west-coast consultants in the 1970’s who were
inspired by the approach of designers and architects while problem solving and
collaborating on projects. It has come to embrace a wide range of principles and
practices that use creative media to help people to “see what they mean.” This essay
traces some of the early influences and strategies that have shaped the field, and how it
has evolved to include influences from more psychologically influenced facilitation,
storytelling, large scale collaborative practice and other approaches to managing group
process.

First Practitioners
I first encountered graphic recording of group process in 1972 when the training
organization I was working with, the Coro Foundation, moved into a building south of
Market Street in San Francisco next to a consulting firm called Interaction Associates
(IA). Led by two former architects, David Straus and Michael Doyle, IA was working on a
special project called “Tools for Change” under a grant from the Carnegie Foundation.
They were gathering examples of problem solving strategies that teachers could use
with students, including ones used by designers and other creative professionals. Active
group facilitation was one of the strategies they were very excited about.

The IA project attracted the attention of many innovators at the time, including people
who were working with Doug Englebart at SRI on another project called the “Augmented
Human Intellect” project. One of the SRI team was a facilitator named Geoff Ball, who
had been researching the impact of group displays on productivity. His paper on “Explicit
Group Memory” showed up at Interaction Associates, and contended that of all the
interventions a person could make to support a group, having a working group display
was the most important. The fact that it was shared, explicit, and graphic made it key in
creating a lasting group memory. This idea influenced IA to call their flip chart records of
meetings “group memories” and to promote facilitator/recorder teams as the preferred
approach to group facilitation.

Co-incident with the IA and Ball work, another former architect named Joe Brunon was
working with the Center for Social Change at SRI in support of Willis Harmon and Oliver
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Markley’s work. Brunon used graphics in the expressive, designerly way architects
sketch out ideas, supporting creativity sessions at SRI that were far afield from design.
He branded his approach “Generative Graphics” and wrote some articles about his work
that influenced those new to this idea. (He went on later to apply this approach to family
therapy and the mapping of family stories).

Another person who showed up at IA was an art/philosophy student from Stanford

named Fred Lakin. He had been inventing tools for what he envisioned as a new breed
of information communicators. One was a pegboard that would hold cards in place with
a small suction pump system. Another was a magic marker holder that looked like a pen
pallet. A third was a “wall scroll” that held the roll ends of newsprint upright, and then
supported up to 16 feet of paper pulled out under a bar with little weighted magnets that
held the paper in place by friction. He very much wanted people to try his tools and left
them at IA as a test.

GROUP GRAPHICS IS BORN

In this context I was leading Coro’s flagship program, a nine month long Fellowship in
Public Affairs, which trained a select group of 12 fellows to learn from their own
experiences in internships in city government and other organizations. Friday seminars
encouraged the group to dig into their different explorations, and put together big
pictures of how city government really worked. Being physically located next to IA, I and
the other Coro staff were naturally influenced by their methods, and began to record
some of their sessions on large sheets of paper.

One day I hung up two rows of newsprint in the conference room that we shared with IA,
and began to diagram city government. Three hours and no breaks later the group had
just experienced one of the most analytical and juicy seminars they had ever conducted,
simply by recording boxes within boxes, drawing lines, and mapping what they knew on
the diagram, with me facilitating. Something really important was going on with the
graphics. The Fellows had discovered what many call “systems thinking.”

Some coincidences uniquely prepared me to take to this new medium. I had always
been adept at drawing. During my hazing week at Occidental College, seniors set out to
humble the freshman. Among their assets was Terry Gilliam, the subsequent animator of
Monte Python films. His large tempra paint posters were works of art, and made the
senior events they advertised seem glorious. Not be intimidated, I and another freshman
took up our class standard, bought paints, and challenged back with our own murals.
Our first attempts weren’t to Gilliam standards, but they were good enough that both of
us ended up doing quad posters all the way through college—always reaching for that
early standard of excellence.

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I went on to became editor of Oxy’s college paper and get a Masters in Journalism from
Northwestern University and work at the Chicago Tribune. These experiences trained
me in interviewing and listening for story.

Quad posters, plus journalism skills, plus the group memory idea quickly combined into
“GROUP GRAPHICS”. A short while later I asked to move Fred Lakin’s wall scroll to the
conference room. Later in 1972 Coro offered an initial workshop in Group Graphics for
some of its alumni and a small group began digging into this new big picture
methodology, a branch on the facilitation tree that seemed loaded with possibilities.

EXPLORATIONS OF VISUAL GRAMMAR AND EPISTEMOLOGY

Ball, Lakin, and I would talk a lot during those days. There is some debate about who
first coined the term “Group Graphics®.” All three of us used it informally, but I, through
the Grove Consultants International (my company) subsequently trademarked the name.
We began gathering all the known examples we could find of display frameworks that
would be useful for group process. We collected examples of diagrams, matrices, lists,
Venn diagrams, drawings, and mandalas. Coro experimented with collage,
sociogramming, history mapping and many other processes. Lakin would bring in
insights from Wittgenstein, the language philosopher, and leading edge technical ideas
from Silicon Valley.

Ball wrote a Group Graphics primer in those early days. I wrote articles for Coro and
guides for the Coro workshops. Lakin began trying to model graphic recording in
software, convinced that graphics was the overarching language that would eventually
include words, numbers, and digits. The ideas began to evolve rapidly, fueled by related
theoretical materials.

Inspired by Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics ideas, those of us on the Coro staff
were encouraged to avoid lectures and design “discovery” experiences in order to
engage the whole learner. This orientation made it clear to me that group graphics was
more than graphics. It was also dance, and story telling, since the facilitator was
constantly in physical motion, miming the group and its communication with movement,
as well as commenting on the displays, suggesting processes and the like.

A theoretical breakthrough occurred in 1976 when a friend of mine named Jack Saloma
told me about Arthur M. Young. Young was a mathematician/physicist/philosopher
teaching in Berkeley who was using graphics to describe the integration between
physics and metaphysics, and had formulated an integrated framework for thinking
about evolution called “The Theory of Process.” Jack strongly advised I attend Arthur M.
Young’s Saturday seminars. Between 1976 and 1981, I began a focused investigation of
visual thinking from a process perspective and developed a grammar for visual language
called the Group Graphics Keyboard based on Young’s process perspectives. To this

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day process theory and the keyboard insights are among the foundational structures
behind the current teaching of graphic facilitation.

A GRAPHIC “KEYBOARD” EMERGES

Inspired by Young, I looked at graphics from a process perspective. Traditionally
graphics have been appreciated as static artifacts and structures—such as a finished
blueprints or drawings. Their elements are the lines, colors, spatial relationships, and
patterns of connection.

One can, however, focus on a more fundamental quality— namely the process of how
the graphic came to be, and the process one needs to go through to understand it. How
do we look at things visually? What’s the process by which people scan, focus, drill
down, and zoom?

In looking at the process of drawing and creating visuals on charts, I realized that it is
important to understand ALL the properties of the process, for these are the active
ingredients that a graphic facilitator uses to help the group. It is very helpful to
understand which patterns of movement are more fundamental than others, for the
fundamental aspects repeat and nest into the more complex processes. Out of this
thinking the Group Graphics Keyboard emerged, shown here in its 12th version.

Let’s zoom in on the process and understanding how the simplest processes you can
use to create or understand a visual image, and carry it through to the most complex.

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Young’s theories suggested that the most fundamental

element in any process is potential—represented in
graphics by the simple focusing of attention achieved by
a simple dot, or “point,” often called a bullet point. It
doesn’t say much at its simplest manifestation, but
attracts the eye. As I worked with my Group Graphic
formats I realized that a “POSTER” format is also
essentially about getting viewer attention, usually with
one central, eye-catching image. It can embed other
formats at secondary levels, but the overall design is
governed by needing to differentiate from its context and
focus attention. An icon on a blank sheet achieves this
same effect. From the perspective of perceiving what a
visual image means, the most fundamental cognitive act
is focusing on something, getting snagged by a
difference. Cognitive scientists have strong evidence that
even our most basic visualization processes are driven by
task orientation, or “intention” as Young might say.

“What’s the next simplest fundamental process?” I

wondered. It’s moving that point and connecting two points
to produce a relationship called a “line.” Perceptually, when
one looks at a line one’s eye moves one way or another to
see what it connects, or what it separates. From a
perceptual standpoint, a viewer is also moving his or her
psyche when linking one thing with another. In our
experimentation we found that line quality and body
movement express the emotional quality
of a meeting. Colors also express feeling.
At a macro level the line archetype is
mirrored in the “LIST” a format that flows
in a linear fashion. It is such a simple
format most don’t even think of it as being
graphic.

I knew from my own math study that three

points make a plane. Three lines connecting them make a triangle.
And three sticky notes on a chart will compel a viewer’s eye to go from
one to the other to the other trying to make a pattern, to get an “angle”
on things and understand the relationships as a spatial pattern.
Designers call this kind of display that simply spaces information with

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no connectors a “CLUSTER” map. We found that leaving out connections and simply
juxtaposing information on sticky notes would activate a group’s thinking. It seems
there’s something in the human brain that automatically tries to connect things that are
next to one another. Understanding this format deepened my belief that
seeing graphics as a process was a fundamental shift in thinking, for the
meaningful aspect of this format is not just in the display, but in the
interaction of the display with the viewer!

“GRIDS” were clearly next. There were all kinds that use this ubiquitous
pattern—calendars, models, matrixes, data charts, spread sheets,
budgets, maps, and criteria grids. I saw these were the formalization of
the comparison activity begun in clustering. When brains start coming to
conclusions, they think in related categories. Ah, this goes with that, ah,
that goes with this. Crossing categories and seeing systematic
relationships is the process supported by a grid. From a Group Graphics
point of view, it is also the most constraining format. Unless the
distinctions in the categories are clear, it’s very difficult to fill in the
spaces.

Young saw process through nature as building on one itself in a nested

way. He asked us to assume this was true in our areas of expertise. So I
looked for this pattern in graphic communication, and found it! The visual formats
appreciated as different kinds of processes did the same thing! The simpler formats like
posters and lists become the basis for the more complicated cluster and grid charts. It’s
possible to have lists in clusters, and list and clusters in grids. In
addition, Young’s theory explained that processes in nature often
take on increasing constraints, up to a point, and then turn to
regain some of the freedom lost in becoming more complex. Atoms
become molecules and crystals, but regain freedom as they
discover the organization pattern embraced by plants. This held
true for graphics.

I saw in Young’s theory a clue as to what is more complex than

grids, yet freer to work with. Plants were next in Young’s scheme,
and all plants have branching patterns. So do most “DIAGRAMS”!
In fact, a method popularized by Tony Buzan, from England, called
Mind Mapping, was based heavily on the assumption that the
human brain is uniquely set up to organize things in branching
patterns. Branching diagrams have different characteristics than a
grid. They can be much more complicated to read; they pack more
in; but they are freer in the actual process of making them. You can
branch anywhere, not just in a cell.

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Animals in Young’s scheme occupy the next evolutionary stage. And animation is one of
the aspects of graphic facilitation that really involves and moves people, because the
facilitator is continuously unfolding the drawing! Several years after first formulating the
keyboard, I realized that conceptual animation occurs when the graphics themselves
symbolically point at something the viewer already knows and the viewer projects
movement back into the graphic. This happens when a graphic facilitator adds analogy
and graphic metaphor to a graphic display and it turns into a drawing.

I now regularly transform large vision murals into “DRAWINGS”

when I create landscapes of information in certain kinds of
metaphorical settings, like a space voyage, a road race, or eco-
system. Drawings turned out to be magical and complex worlds
with the potential to catalyze amazing insights during group
process. They became a bridge to story telling and other holistic
mental practices. In the 1980’s and 1990’s designers like Jim
Channon, Nancy Margulies, and their trainees evolved highly
interpretive approaches to graphic recording that involved the use
of elaborate drawings and illustration, and the groups they work
with come alive within those visual constructs.

From the start of his work, I knew there was

a pattern of ultimate complexity and
inclusiveness that would conclude the
keyboard. This would be the “MANDALA” or
circular drawing, a nearly universal symbol of
wholeness and unity. But for the brain to
figure out how everything relates to everything in a central way
requires the most amount of insight. It was a powerful way,
however, to illustrate the group as a seating chart to suggest their
implicit unity, or to illustrate mental models and theories. In a
macro way, mandalas took the progression back to the point of it
all—to see the world holistically.

The seven formats constituted an elegant “keyboard” of choices. “If

the archetypal formats were a visual piano,” I’m now fond of
saying, “ the live group recording is the composition, with all the
possibilities that music provides.”

Since its formulation, hundreds of practitioners have tested this scheme, and have yet
to find the need to add another major archetype. It seems that all graphic patterns are
one or combinations of these fundamental processes.

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Over the years, it has also become clear that these graphic patterns, artifacts of
fundamental processes of creation and perception, are in fact directly connected to how
people think at archetypal levels about any kind of organization. In 1986 Gareth Morgan
wrote a wonderful book called Images of Organization, which explores how metaphors
organize our thinking about organizations. When people say, “we are organized” they
mean that they share a common conception how parts of the organization fit together in
some integrated way. If you understand that this way of “seeing” is display making, then
you can appreciate the enormous opportunities for organizational intervention and
facilitation that the pioneers of graphic facilitation found when they began to work with a
group’s core imagery.

GRAPHIC FACILITATION MATURES

In the late 1970’s, following my formulation of the keyboard, Sandra Florstedt, an OD
consultant with Kaiser Permanente invited me to the OD Network to present the
methodology in the late 1970’s. Then in 1980 Florstedt, Ball and I offered the first public
workshop in Group Graphics at Fort Mason in San Francisco. It was accompanied by a
book I wrote called “I See What You Mean: A Workbook Guide to Group Graphics” that
outlined a formal method for graphic facilitation. The book has been reprinted
innumerable times and is the basis for workshops now being offered by the Grove
Consultants International, its international affiliates, and many other independent
practitioners offering graphic training. I re-wrote it in the early 2000’s as “Graphic
Facilitation” Tapping the Power of Groups with Visual Listening.”

IA has matured to be a premier facilitation training organization. The Grove focused on

big picture graphics and training in graphic facilitation and has emerged as a leader in
graphic facilitation. The two companies referred students to each other and explicitly saw
themselves as supporting the growth of a field.

Exemplary practitioners abounded and made the field real. One of the earliest was
Jennifer Hammond Landau, a woman who came to the methodology herself through the
Girl Scouts, and then discovered Group Graphics in Sibbet’s workshops and became an
early associate. She has been a leader in helping create the new International Forum of
Visual Practitioners (begun my Leslie Salmon Zhu and Susan Kelly). Jennifer led the
effort to have a Graphics track at IAF conferences.

In the 1980s Suzanne Bailey used graphics extensively through the education system’s
Tech Centers in California, then worked with the Group Graphics workshops for a while,
helping formalize a hierarchy of skills related to the work. She went on in neurolinguistic
programming and created her own consulting company the Bailey Alliance which has
trained untold numbers in graphic facilitation methods.

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Joan McIntosh encountered the method as a marketing manager of a software

company, and sustained her interest while working at IA in the 1980’s. She eventually
became the marketing manager at The Grove Consultants International in the early
1990’s and a leader of their graphic facilitation trainings, among other contributions.

Bob Horn, founder of Information Mapping, a company in Cambridge that first applied
“information chunking” and other graphic strategies to text in the 1970’s, attended the
1980 Group Graphics Workshop and has been tracking graphic facilitation and visual
language since. He recently wrote a book called Visual Language that traces the larger
history of text-graphic representation, with graphic facilitation as a subset. He believes
that the tight integration of text and graphics is itself a new language, a visual language.
In 1999 he was keynoter at the third annual Visual Practitioners Conference in
California. More than 50 attended. All were making their living full time “working on the
wall.” The group speculated on how many practitioners there might be worldwide. Horn
thought it was probably in the 10s of thousands by now, if you include all the variations.

An Emerging Lexicon
Following is a brief list of some of the practices now associated with graphic facilitation.

• Graphic Recording: refers to the act of transcribing a meeting using large display
graphics and words without a lot of interaction with the group.

• Graphic Facilitation: refers to process combining graphic work with facilitation,

sometimes in a team with a recorder, and often alone.

• Graphic Process Consulting: focuses on helping people design processes that

integrate a lot of media in interactive ways.

• Information Design: involves the creation and integration of complex information in

a visual format, usually on murals and posters. Many information designers work in
traditional ways, but a growing number use graphic facilitation during the initial
design stages to develop ideas collaboratively with clients.

The Author

David Sibbet is an organizational consultant and information designer whose

applications of interactive, graphic communications to organizational visioning, change
management, and process facilitation are inspiring a new generation of process
consultants around the world. Sibbet and his team at The Grove Consultants
International design, develop, and distribute tools for collaboration drawn from their own
experience with strategic visioning, team performance, and graphic facilitation. Sibbet
has clients throughout Europe and North America in many different sectors. In additional

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to organizational work, Sibbet is long-term affiliate of the Institute for the Future in Menlo
Park working to understand the impact of technology on organizations.

Over the years Sibbet has designed and authored a wide variety of professional
publications and information graphics. In 1991 he wrote GroupWare and Workplace
Learning: The Transformation of Training and Education in the Knowledge Revolution,
for the Institute for the Future. He co-authored Leading Business Teams; How Teams
Can Use Technology and Group Process Tools to Enhance Performance, in 1991 for
Addison Wesley and contributed heavily to Global Work for Jossey Bass in 1994.
Recently he designed a 75-year Timeline of Management Practices for the Harvard
Business Review as a gift insert in its 75th Anniversary issue. He is author and designer
of many of the extensive line of process management tools provided by the Grove.

Sibbet has a BA from Occidental College in Los Angeles and a M.S.Journalism degree
from Northwestern. After working for the Chicago Tribune, he was Executive Director
and Director of Training of Coro Foundation’s northern California Center from 1969-
1977. He founded his own company, The Grove Consultants International, in 1977, now
located at the Thoreau Center for Sustainability in the Presidio of San Francisco.

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Joan McIntosh is an organizational development consultant and trainer. Since 1988,

she has built her consulting and training practice on a foundation of over twenty years of
business management, marketing and operations experience in a variety of business
settings. Joan works collaboratively with individuals and teams to help them clarify their
vision and values, define direction and set goals, and reach for high performance. She is
an expert in the application of advanced team performance tools, most notably the
Drexler-Sibbet Team Performance Model and the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory.

Transferring knowledge and skills are a key part of each assignment. She is a Senior
Associate with The Grove Consultants International of San Francisco and regularly
teaches programs in strategic visioning, teamwork, facilitation skills and graphic
language tools and systems. Joan is also Adjunct Faculty at the University of St.
Thomas in Minneapolis, teaching group dynamics.

Joan designs and facilitates conferences, meetings and retreats, to meet the specific
needs of each leader, group and situation. She often brings Council” electronic meeting
support technology to larger groups when productivity, inclusiveness and honesty are
essentials for success. As a coach, she holds a deep faith in the power of individuals to
be the architects of their own future. She has a deep reservoir of experience and the
interpersonal and communication skills to help individuals clarify and express their
unique contributions.

Joan has worked extensively in the private and not-for-profit sectors throughout the US
and abroad. To each assignment, she brings "new eyes" to look at the situation without
preconceptions, and shares a wealth of experience about "what works." Her personal
commitment is to be a true ally to those who manage the complex business of change.

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