S.O.A.R. Meets Visual Explorer

I recently worked with an information technology services group in thinking through the changes emerging in their work. The design approach was framed around Appreciative Inquiry and S.O.A.R. The "A" is for Aspirations, and to work with that we used Visual Explorer.

The group had worked through an extensive Discovery phase over the summer, and prior to this session a few came together and synthesized their findings into Strengths and Opportunities. Working from those, we then articulated the group's Purpose. They were then asked to think for a few minutes and create a mental image about what life would be like if they were fluidly deploying those Strengths and Opportunities and serving that Purpose.

Around the room we had scattered the Visual Explorer cards, and we invited everyone to select one that best represented their mental image. They then worked in pairs to share their selections and thoughts, and subsequently the whole group worked with a cardstorming process to describe its shared aspirations.

Five Aspirations emerged. Once they were on the wall, they were asked if one of their selected Visual Explorer cards seemed to describe each one; some merited more than one image. They were then asked if there was a single image that seemed to represent the collection of aspirations, and they chose two: a picture of puzzle pieces as a description of where they are now, and a photo of Stonehenge to represent the firmness and completeness of their future.

Aspirations

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Quick'n'Dirty PowerPoint

Have you ever had a mildly complicated point that you wanted to get across to just a few people? Have you ever felt trapped and confined when someone turned on a projector? I recently confronted these puzzles and explored a low-tech approach: index cards. The logic I was presenting had 9 or so steps, so I wrote each in very simple phrasing on a folded index card. It took about a minute and a half to talk through them, standing each on the table as though dealing from a deck. At that point they were a lot more useful than a slide show because they were all on the table together, instead of one at a time. As the conversation continued we could refer to them, move them around and otherwise work from a complete picture.

I'm thinking a next step might be to find do-it-yourself business cards that are made with a fold, and try using more refined text and images.