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Spock Rides Again: Bringing to Life a Key Concept of “Switch” Through Archetypal Action Figures.

I’ve been having a lot of fun recently bringing physical props into my VizThink facilitation work. One technique I’ve been playing around with recently is the use of action figures, puppets and ventriloquist dummies in the Persona creation process. A key concept from Chip and Dan Heath’s new book, “Switch: How to Change When Change is Hard”, gave me a great opportunity to extend the idea where no man had gone before:

One of the key ideas in the book is viewing a change’s impact on “The Rider” (the rational mind) “The Elephant” (the emotions) and “The Path” (the environment). Since there is no better archetypal representation of The Thinker than Spock, I combined a 12” action figure together with a toy elephant to create this “Made to Stick” prop that brings the concept to quirky life.

13 April 2010 • vizthink change mangement made to stick switch chip and dan heath

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Words and Deeds.

9 November 2009 • venn humor vizthink

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Sketches From 2008 Bryon Katie Workshop

I went to a weekend Bryon Katie workshop last year with Nancy. I had recently been inspired to start using images in note-taking by a VizThink workshop. Here are a few examples of my first visual notes.

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Bryon Katie is

23 September 2009 • vizthink byron katie visual notetaking drawing

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The Personal Hell of Group Collaboration

“Committees don’t make art. They make artists kill themselves.” Jessica Hagy at VizThink Conference

Face-to-face collaboration in a group setting is one of the must painful aspects of my job. Although processes created by people like Dave Gray and Nancy Duarte have improved the experience, I still put such meetings in the “painful necessity” category of dental exams and 5:00 am flights. I would much rather collaborate by locking myself in my office and passing documents back and forth electronically. That’s usually what I get to do.

Nevertheless, sometimes a business requirement demands that I get together with people of various thinking styles, backgrounds (and maybe even agendas) and meet in the flesh to collaborate on a project. And although we almost always end up with something good, getting there sometimes feels like chewing on tin foil.

My difficulty with real-time in-person collaboration is that I’m an introvert. Not in the shy, retiring meaning of the term, but rather in the INTP sense of usually being “so deeply into thought as to seem detached, and often actually oblivious to the world around me.” The experience of having my attention pulled from its inner haven is kind of like the scene in The 40 Year Old Virgin when Steve Carrel gets his chest waxed.

So to my fellow INTP comrades I offer solidarity, and to all the rest of you, I beg gentle tolerance.

3 April 2009 • collaboration vizthink intp

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