Categories
Leaning to People

The Power of Engaging with a Visual Narrative

Yesterday, I dropped by one of pearcemayfield’s courses to see Richard Rose, the CEO, and trainer on this event. The course was on AgilePM©. And I saw the diagram above drawn on a flipchart. I’ve seen this before and I’ve noted the way Richard does it. He tells a story as he draws what is a key diagram for AgilePM.

And he must have done this the day before. The Roles Diagram relates to so much of the AgilePM method that he deliberately does this early on in the course and leaves it on display for the delegates to muse on it as they consider later topics.

A Visual Narrative

I’ve discussed this with Richard and our other trainers. One of the most powerful ways of understanding complex content is through a visual narrative. It seems that people can recall far more of what is being said if they can see it drawn at the same time. And quirky hand-drawn cartoons appear to be even more memorable than if something is homogenized into a PowerPoint presentation. It’s the quirky-ness and the joking in class that sticks in people’s brains as hooks.

All I could do at school was paint and draw and that was the only time I ever passed any exam. It was the only thing I ever got right at school.

David Bailey, Artist

I’ve tried various online techniques, from recording my Prezi-based presentations and using Whiteboard animation software. (See my YouTube channel for examples of both.)

Yet nothing seems to stimulate people’s engagement, aid recall, and help integration with other aspects of a subject as seeing a live discussion drawn. Even more so, nothing seems to help me develop my understanding of a new subject better than if I can sketch it out as I explain it back to someone else.

What was the best live illustration you saw drawn that has stayed with you?

Categories
Self-Awareness

Who do you think you are? Be Unique

One of the key chapters in my forthcoming book, Leading Yourself: Succeeding from the Inside Out, is on Identity, the whole matter of how we see ourselves, our make-up and how we come to be unique. I believe this is pivotal because out of our own self-identity comes so much of what we do and how we do it. My self-identity is the “me” I think I bring to the world, to be unique not least to my work.

The book is about how we can do our best work in this VUCA world. When it comes to moving towards our best performance there is a real paradox: our identity is not in our performance.

Being unique is not about what I do. Who I am is not what I do nor is it how well I do it. This is crucial. If we cannot separate the two we become addicted to our work, and our self-worth suffers if events don’t go so well. Another manifestation of this confusion is the high mortality among people within a year of their retirement. No job, no identity. No, health comes through knowing who we are independent of our work.

We must find a way of discovering our true identity apart from our performance.

We must find a way of knowing our true selves independent of our performance. We must find a value in ourselves that transcends what we do.

I have come to realise that for each of us our identity is in at least two parts: the general and the unique.

For example, regarding my own general identity, I am British. I am growing a deeper appreciation of this as I travel around the world. I am a post-war baby boomer, which has meant I’ve carried around some generational baggage, such as a scarcity mentality. (I was born during rationing, and it informed the value system I was raised in.)

Also, being a post-war Englishman meant I was vulnerable to a post-imperial mentality, where we seemed to live in the shadow of America, marginal to much of what we used to lead. I have, to a degree, grown out of both of these limitations. I now appreciate a positive, abundance frame of reference as being a more real and healthy one. Also, over the last eighteen months, I have been privileged to work with the outcomes of a new kind of Britain, with such clients as the British Antarctic Survey, with various British research bodies and universities producing truly excellent science and learning. In the UK, we seem to have a knack of producing excellence on a shoestring. All this, at a general level, informs the identity I bring to clients all over the world.

The British seem to have a knack of producing excellence on a shoestring.

For our unique identity, we need to look elsewhere. The title of this post is taken from a BBC TV series of the same name. In each episode a particular media personality is shown discovering their family roots and ancestral lineage. This can be a powerful means of understanding part of our unique identity. But that is by no means the sum of where our uniqueness comes from.

Personality profiling also can help, particularly if the profiling tool is positive and non-judgemental. I will soon announce how subscribers can access one such tool, the AEM-Cube© to better understand themselves; even gain a better understanding of how they work with the team they are a part of. And there is Strengthfinder 2.0. This weekend I took my own assessment. I’m happy to share the results with you. My top five themes are:

  1. Connectedness
  2. Ideation
  3. Strategic
  4. Relator
  5. Learner

I’m pretty comfortable with that, but it’s real value to me is that it leads me to an awareness of aspects of my personality that I had hitherto taken for granted. More and more, I have the freedom to play to my strengths, rather than work on my weakness. Out of this comes true performance and fulfilment.

So, my conviction is that Solomon was right, Plato was right, Jesus was right.

Having a right understanding of who we are really, really matters.

What examples do you have of connecting with your unique self? What has helped you?

And how has a greater sense of your self-identity helped you?