A few weeks ago, I was disheartened to learn that two extremely talented graphic facilitators I know just got laid off from a very productive unit within a big corporation. Was the American credit crisis to blame? Nope. What about the impending global recession? No again. Actually, their company was about to be purchased by a labour union—or, to be specific, the union’s pension fund. I don’t know why a bunch of pension-fund hacks think they can micromanage a giant corporation in the thoroughly discredited style of “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap. I’m referring to the bombastic egotist who prided himself on “enhancing shareholder value” by cutting companies down to, what he presumed, are their bare essentials. This destroyed enormous amounts of shareholder value. That’s because those people who seem tertiary to a myopic bean-counter or slash’n’burn barbarian are often the source of a company’s long-term competitive edge. The whole situation is wrong on so many levels.

I’m not worried about the facilitators’ plight. I’m not worried because the skill they demonstrate is superb. And the skill they have—a skill I covet—is in high demand. They translate the baffle-gab and vagaries of executives, managers, and technical professionals into something more tangible, doing so in real time. They illustrate conversation in a way that cuts through the ambiguity and adds clarity for those who either don’t have flexible minds, aren’t familiar with the subject, or can’t completely articulate their ideas. If there is a malady that undermines corporate vision and internal communication, it’s the inability to express things in cogent, vivid, and persuasive ways while the conversation is fresh in everyones minds.

Visual facilitation is both art and science at a time when neither seem to be taught at business schools. When presenting business models, most biz-folk rely on abstruse blocky or rounded diagrams on dense PowerPoint slides. This just adds another level of abstraction. A good visual facilitator is a listener, one who uses her talents of visualization and on-the-fly illustration to render fuzzy ideas into something that is fully fledged. It goes beyond the stock business-model diagrams because it makes the abstract tangible. Hurrah for that.

As coincidence would have it, I just got a great deal of chit-chat time with these facilitators’ kung-fu master, David Sibbet, the founder of The Grove. It was a great side-benefit of attending the VizThink Europe Conference in Berlin. I greatly admire Sibbet’s methods and have taken a workshop from him before. Over several decades, he’s built up a set of visual templates that help teams to picture what they do, the situation they’re in, and where they want to go (among other things). These sometimes become giant murals that show the entire state-of-play on a single sheet. I plan to return to San Francisco and take the full version of his visual facilitation course.

Why do I mention this besides the coincidence? Well, I spent a large amount of time, during group exercises, in the visual-facilitator hot-seat at VizThink Berlin. And when I wasn’t in that role, my pen was churning out lots of spot-illustrations to aid the conversation. Every information designer does this sort of thing (after much chin scratching) as a prelude to creating a polished information graphic. I wasn’t prepared to do it live, as in quickly. If there was one big benefit to VizThink Berlin for me, as a matter of skill development, then it was gaining some confidence in my ability to illustrate ideas on-the-spot in public. I credit Dave Gray (another conference facilitator) for much of this given that I’ve taken his “how to draw stick figure 2.0” exercise enough times, and have studied his illustrations enough times, that I’m starting to get the hang of spare-figure expression. Soon I’ll be the next Julian Opie.[1]

That brings us to the info-graphic I’d like to present here. I took Rodolfo Carpentier’s pre-conference workshop on business models and visualization. At one point during the session, I was tasked with being the info-graphic guy. That was embarrassing because there was some heavy artillery sitting around the conference table when it comes to illustration and information design. And this was nine o’clock on a Sunday morning in Berlin, which means that I was feeling a bit … um … “of diminished capacity.” (I stepped over comatose bodies and carpets of broken glass at my local U-Bahn station to get to the venue.) Anyway, I was put on the spot to create a visual for the business model that was under discussion in the session. I managed to do so in about 20 minutes and everyone agreed that I captured the essence of the discussion, or at least they had the social graces to say something polite about it.

Learning is better if it is accompanied by reflection afterwards. Learning is better still if it is applied in a practical way soon after that. In that spirit, I turned my 20-minute mock-up into a more formal info-graphic that I might actually present to a client or executive team. So, I sat down at a Prenzlauer Berg café for an afternoon of icon drawing. Given that this is Germany, I decided to do the information graphic in the Mutabor style developed by Heinrich Paravicini and Johannes Plass. Mutabor is a Hamburg-based information- and communication-design firm that has published some fantastic books on the subject. The books Lingua Grafica (2001) and Lingua Universalis (2004) are seminal works if you’re in this field. Their recent book of advertising work (I’m Going to Change, 2007) isn’t too shabby either. Their signature style relies heavily on one- and two-colour vector-icons drawn in either two or three dimensions. That’s the style I was aiming for, at any rate.

My original sketch appears below. I might have added a scribble or two after the session, but it’s pretty much the sketch I presented to the group. The business model depicts a women’s online underwear retailer. During the exercise, it was decided that this hypothetical firm should: (a.) draw knowledge and design ideas from professional communities; (b.) put product specifics in the hands of customers; and (c.) outsource to low-cost jurisdictions; among other things. I chose to depict the model as a series of cycles, each of which reinforces the value of the e-commerce site if executed successfully (or undermine it if done badly). Cycles are a good device because so much about modern business operates according to cycles of various timing … and yet, and yet … most executives are loath to articulate business models in this way. Curious.

The substance of this business model has some precedent. Many online t-shirt retailers, for example, draw heavily from communities of design freelancers and then offer massive customization to customers. Designers are put into competition against one another. If a design is accepted, the designer gets a cut of the revenue. Customers then get to choose size, style, colour, placement of the graphic, and so forth. Our model’s marketing style could be a bit more “guerilla” or “viral” or “AdWord” or “whatever-comes-out-of-Seth-Godin’s-anus-next.” But you get the gist of the sales and ordering system.

And here is my follow-up info-graphic (intended for legal-sized paper). I decided to change the women’s underwear to men’s Y-fronts. That change allowed me to add a bit of laddish humour to the graphic. Some of the icons were adjusted in accordance with the new gender. A few icons became more detailed. A side panel has been added to allow for titles and an explanation of the general logic of the graphic (the table at the bottom left). If I had more time, I would have better integrated the table into the actual graphic. I also moved various pieces around to get a cleaner look that guides the eye better (e.g., making everything flow clock-wise and making titles less of an obstruction).

On the technical side, I employed a few info-graphic conventions that makes the original sketch work better. Blocks of black emphasize things, which draws attention to the side bar and the anchor graphic in the centre (the monitor). (In cultures where people read from left to right, the top-left corner is the place where the eye starts to look at the graphic, unless there is an overwhelming anchor graphic in the centre.) Thus, I am trying to get people to look in these two places as the first stage of cognition, with the rest of the information flowing from these points. The size and weight of the text is the next sway that helps guide the eye: the aim is to create a typographical hierarchy that ranks the information. The chunky typeface (Eric Olson’s excellent Klavika Bold) is highly functional in this regard, although I chose it for mostly stylistic reasons. I also tried to create a graphic that can be easily read on a monitor and on a page, hence the thick lines of the icons and text (light-coloured lines on dark backgrounds need to be slightly thicker at any rate). That’s a hard thing to do and is a chronic bane of the visual designer.

Some things work better than others. A few of the icons are a bit too cryptic—a hazard of the style or a failing of my ability. The inclusion of the abbreviation “Dev.” in one sub-title is also a no-no, even though it’s explained in the graphic. Don’t use acronyms or abbreviations if it can be helped (which is to say: never). The anchor graphic could be larger or otherwise more prominent. The colour pallets were also chosen without my handy Pantone swatch-books, which shows how much of a crutch those things can be. And as Rodolfo Carpentier mentioned during the session, after further reflection the group would probably have found one or two other essential elements to the business model. Nonetheless, I think the graphic holds up as an early draft.

I’ll be writing more about VizThink Europe and related items in my other blog. As with all VizThink events, there are a lot of ideas to digest.

By Peter Stoyko

NOTES

[1] Julian Opie is the man who has raised spare-figures to the status of high-art, although I’m also being a tad sarcastic because his figures are fairly expressionless. If you know what’s good for you, you will rush out and read Horlock (2005) and the newly released book by Clarke et al. (2008).

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