Drawing Together offers a visual language with five purposefully abstract symbols. Participants can only use these five symbols to express thoughts, ideas, and challenges. This constraint still gives sufficient opportunities for creativity. It might actually boost creativity. I always encourage participants to use different colors for the symbols. Draw a symbol in red, green, or orange to give it an extra dimension. Draw symbols in different shapes and sizes. Merge symbols. Use the same symbols multiple times. There are so many different ways to use the 5 symbols. Give some examples, and trust the creativity of the group to make use of the potential. 6. Share drawings with “Conversation Cafe” min) Introduce the purpose of Drawing Together. Get participants comfortable with both drawing and the language by drawing the five symbols one by one. A triangle represents a goal. A rectangle represents support. A spiral represents change or transformation. A star person represents a relationship and the circle represents wholeness. With a virtual session, make sure to have these symbols available in a shared workspace. Figure C Microsoft Whiteboard provides a significant number of templates to support tasks such as project planning, brainstorming and learning.

What is made possible? You can help people access hidden knowledge such as feelings, attitudes, and patterns that are difficult to express with words. When people are tired, their brains are full, and they have reached the limits of logical thinking, you can help them evoke ideas that lie outside logical, step-by-step understanding of what is possible. Stories about individual or group transformations can be told with five easy-to-draw symbols that have universal meanings. The playful spirit of drawing together signals that more is possible and many new answers are expected. Drawing Together cuts through the culture of overreliance on what people say and write that constrains the emergence of novelty. It also provides a new avenue of expression for some people whose ideas would otherwise not surface. With Jamboard, collaboration isn’t limited to a single board. You may add additional frames, such as the frames shown along the top of Figure B. In fact, you may add up to a total of 20 frames within a single Jamboard file. This capability may make it easier to group or sort ideas, such as notes associated with different aspects of a project. On iPhone, you may draw lines with a finger, while on iPad you may use an Apple Pencil or other supported stylus. Freeform lets you select and insert shapes, which include not only geometric shapes, but also people, devices, symbols and more. First, invite participants to use Drawing Together to visualize their personal journey. Encourage them to include important moments, challenges, and struggles. Afterward, give them a minute to reflect on their journey, and to think about a challenge they still face today. Maybe they already visualized it, or otherwise, the visualization made them aware of a problem they struggle with.Computer tablets can be used instead of paper for participants to learn how to tell a story with the five symbols on their tablets Drawing Together is a Liberating Structure that is all about creativity and interpretation. It’s a structure that you can easily use online. Especially when you want to really draw ‘together’. Just create a large online whiteboard with Mural, Miro, or a similar tool, and go wild! Sometimes I do ask participants to first draw their journey on a physical piece of paper. The combination of using physical paper within an online setting proves to be a powerful combination. Closing Chalkboard and dry erase boards on a wall still retain one key advantage over these virtual alternatives: Persistence. In a room, anything scribbled on a board remains in view, whether you choose to engage with it or not. That sort of ambient display on a board can be quite useful if you use these boards to engage with ideas over time. Attribution: Liberating Structure developed by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless. Inspired by David Sibbet ( The Grove) and Angeles Arrien (see Signs of Life).

Figure A Apple Freeform can leverage distinctive features of devices. Here, the drawing tools in Freeform on an iPad Mini are used to create a sketch that will then be inserted into Freeform on a MacBook Air. Invite participants to combine the symbols to create the first draft of a story, working individually and without words, about “the journey” of working on a challenge or an innovation. 10 min. Introduce the idea of drawing together by drawing and describing the meaning of each symbol. 5 min. min) Invite everyone to draw the first version of the story of their personal journey. Encourage participants to include the challenges, special moments, and surprises they faced while moving forward. Emphasize that drawing should take place in silence and without words or other symbols. Participants can use the same symbols multiple times. Don’t explain the intention of this structure too much, trust the creativity of the participants. Ask participants to invite another individual or their small group to interpret their drawings. Remind them that the person who has done the drawing does not speak. 5 min.It took until late 2022, but now all three major platform makers offer collaborative drawing board apps — or, as I like to think of these, digital drawing alternatives to napkins, notebooks and chalkboards. People who use a macOS system alongside an iPhone or iPad may choose to take a photo, scan a document or add a sketch using one of those nearby devices from within Freeform on macOS. The nearby device auto-switches to the selected mode as long as you have Bluetooth enabled and are signed in to the same Apple ID on both systems. Best business software min) Form pairs, and interpret each other’s drawings. The person who has done the drawing does not speak at the start. First, have the other person interpret the drawing. Only once the other person has had the opportunity to share his/her interpretations, the original creator of the drawing can add more detail. After 5 minutes you switch roles.

Instead of focusing Drawing Together on visualizing a past experience, it’s also possible to use a forward-looking perspective. Have participants draw their professional journey for the upcoming 10 years, as they imagine it at this point in time. Other examples are: using Drawing together to visualize the product development life cycle, the future of a team or organization, or maybe even how they’ll handle conflict in the future. An advantage of a forward-looking perspective is that it allows the participants to truly draw together, instead of drawing alone and inspecting it together. 4. Use it as a recap structure Conversation Café encourages people to listen and understand each other’s perspectives on a profound, shared topic or challenge instead of trying to convince or persuade others to see it your way. Sitting in a circle with a simple set of agreements and a talking object, small groups engage in consecutive rounds of dialogue. Conversation Cafe invites people to listen to one another’s thoughts and reflect together on a shared challenge. As remote work becomes increasingly common, turn to these drawing tools when you need to scribble and show people something that may be difficult to describe with words. Each of these drawing systems pairs well with the respective platform’s video-conferencing system, too: Freeform with FaceTime, Jamboard with Google Meet, and Whiteboard with Microsoft Teams. When you’re done with a drawing, you may export your board, either as an image (Google Jamboard and Microsoft Whiteboard) or PDF (Apple Freeform and Google Jamboard) for long-term reference. Christiaan Verwijs already shared his thoughts on Drawing Together a couple of years ago in this article. In the meantime, I gained new ideas, learned important lessons, and discovered powerful connections with other structures. I’ll share them in this blog post. Invite participants to create a second draft, in which they refine their story by dramatizing the size, placement, and color of the symbols. 10 min.The purpose of Generative Relationships STAR is to help a group understand how they work together and identify changes that they can make to improve group performance. All members of the group diagnose current relationship patterns and decide how to follow up with action steps together. The STAR compass tool becomes even more powerful when you use it frequently. After a first diagnosis, you can evaluate the progress you make as a group and see if things are actually improving.

Remind participants that the drawing is not the object by saying, “Refined drawing skills are not required—get over your need for perfection! Childlike drawing looks playful and captures the imagination of others!”Invite participants to practice drawing the five symbols: circle, rectangle, triangle, spiral, star person. 5 min. Invite participants to tell a story about a challenge they face, or a common challenge, using only five symbols and no words The book Moominland Midwinter (Finnish Taikatalvi, Swedish Trollvinter) resonates with our project. Moomintroll awakens in the middle of his hibernation, and finds himself in a completely unknown, frozen environment. Moominland, usually full of life and colour, has suddenly become still, white and frozen. Together with his value creatures, most importantly Little My and Hemulen, Moomintroll learns to survive and enjoy the white winter-wonderland. They also find ways to help others in need, such as a frozen squirrel. As always, I’m eager to learn from your experiences as well. How have you used Drawing Together? What works best for you? What other strings of Liberating Structures have you tried? Let’s learn and grow, together! About Drawing Together