Visual Friends Radio - The Visual Facilitation Podcast Show

Marcel van Hove shares story with us about his move back to Germany from Australia, and the birth of Visual Friends Germany. We discuss how as an entrepreneur and small business owner he has grown his Australasian business to a global business, Younito the new visual collaboration training created this year, and also how he's found niche opportunities during the global pandemic such as creating new training content to upskill German teachers to successfully use visualisation and technology to work remotely.

Visual Friends proudly announce their latest visualisation and collaboration training offering and visual dictionary app, Younito. We talk with Marcel van Hove and Danny Low of Visual Friends about where the idea for Younito came from, how it was developed, through to how it is implemented in class today. A visual dictionary app, aptly named Younito, has also been developed to compliment not only the training, but to share these unique sets of icons and templates with the wider visual community. Younito is available through the Android and Apple app stores for anyone to download and access a free subset of the Younito icons and templates to start.

Our conversation with two amazing generous visual practioners Angelique McAlpine and Heather Martinez about their initiative #ScribeForward. This is a unique and important project, born during the pandemic, to amplify and promote the work of visual practioners all over the world who currently volunteer their time and professional skill at events benefiting humanity.

A time of change is upon us, like none we have seen for generations. A time of vulnerability, but also opportunity too. In this episode of Visual Friends Radio we're joined by Marcel van Hove and Danny Low of the Visual Friends team to talk about how they're focusing on adaptability, innovation and channeling their creative power during the current pandemic.

What could be better than an Icon Jam? A Global Icon Jam! We talk with Brisbane based Bikablo trainer Danny Low, Auckland based Visual Coach Yuliya Schamrel, and Visual Facilitator and Bikablo trainer Gill Cromhout from Breaking Ground Learning and Development in Cape Town about this exciting collaborative intercontinental event held in January 2020.

Interview with our Brisbane trainer Danny Low about Visual Friends' new training - Bikablo Advanced. What you will learn, who it is useful for and how this traninig has come about.

In this episode we are talking to a talented graphic scribe, an illustrator and visual facilitator Alice Edy about courage. Alice dared greatly and ended up scribing for Brene Brown herself. She tells us how overcoming fear has helped her create important career opportunities for herself, shares her advice about preparing emotionally for a scribing session and gives us her tips about failing publicly and how you can't grow creatively without making mistakes. We loved talking to Alice about how stepping outside of the comfort zone allows you to direct and shape your career in an exciting and unique way. Podcast notes: during our interview conversation Alice mentions Brene Brown, Heather Martinez, Kelvy Bird and Jessamy Gee.

In the latest episode of Visual Friends podcast we interview talented and fabulous Kate Baxter – a recognised expert in the global community of visual practitioners and an amazing graphic facilitator with passion for all things digital. Learn about how Kate, a reluctant and shy scribe with background in fine art, went from thinking she can’t do it to successfully scribing for big clients all around the world. Find out what helped her transition from scribing on a white board to nailing it as a digital graphic facilitator. Kate shares advice on how to develop your own style and deal with difficult topics, talks about the challenges of this profession and what you need to succeed in this job. We hope you’ll find it as interesting as we did. Enjoy!

I met Sarah Firth when I moved to Australia the second time in 2013 and she was for me THE graphic recorder and I admired and still admire the great art she produces. Sarah is an award-winning comic artist, graphic recorder, writer and animator based in Melbourne. We learn how she grew up in Canberra and later travelled the world. We hear about sketchnoting and how it helped her to focus in school. How she started to have a career as an artist and how she got into graphic recording around 2010. She shares amazing stories about a major accident she had and how she got back into daily life using sketchnoting again while she was in the hospital. Today she uses her skills to in very challenging environments, she likes to work for non-for profit organisations, for example, to work with people to overcome trauma. Sarah shares some tips about how you can improve your drawing skills over the years to become a rockstar in the field of graphic recording. With that please enjoy the episode and we look forward to welcoming you in person at VizConf on the 19th of October 2019.

An interview with Visual Friends co-founder, Marcel van Hove and one of our visual coaches, Yuliya Schamrel about a new and exciting program for our students - The 60 Days of Coaching. If you ever wanted to take visualisation skills to the next level, refresh your bikablo technique or develop a work related visualisation project, this is for you. Hosted by Natalia Tsygankova.

Melaine D'Cruze has been a visual thinker all her life. Through her school years and her career, she always took visual notes and doodled to focus and to remember ideas. She didn't know that there was actually a professional field for visual thinking until one day when she discovered the TED Talk from Sunni Brown, Doodlers, unite! Melaine read the book, subscribed to an online course from the Doodle Institute, read several books and through that became a very good sketch note taker. She even got invited by the Harvard Business School to publish a blog post after visualizing one of their online courses. However, her main application for visualization and visual thinking is not at work. Her main application is in the field of educating her kids. Melaine has two amazing boys, who are much faster understanding and accessing information when seeing them visually. She started to visualize ideas together with the boys and through that, they could memorize the content easily. The other boy stammered from time to time and with visual cue cards she could remind her boy to slow down whenever they stumbled. Today both boys are doing fine, and we'll talk more about ideas on how we can educate kids visually. In summary, this episode is a statement to believe in yourself, follow your passion and let no one take you down. I hope you enjoy this episode with Melaine D'Cruze from Karachi, Pakistan.

A couple of words about Heather Martinez. Heather likes to live in the countryside and currently lives in Durango, Colorado in the USA. Heather is a visual practitioner and graphic recorder but is also an Agile guy like me or Danny. She spends a lot of her time running virtual lettering classes for visual practitioners on LetsLetterTogether.com where you can improve your lettering skills on a 1:1 based via Zoom. Additionally, she will be offering 2 online courses associated with her new book and a Level Up Your Lettering starting in the spring. In parallel, she runs her coaching practice where she offers life and art life coaching to artists. Here Heather believes that everyone can become an artist! We talk about her whole life from the beginning where she grew up, where she chose to live and how she got into graphic facilitation. We learn how it feels being graphically recorded for the first time herself and what we as graphic recorders might need to consider when recording someone talk. Last but not least, we talk about her new book which will have the title the ‘Lettering Journey’. Here she has a great plan for how she creates this book: She travels Europe and teaches lettering across Europe over the next month. As part of the training, she will take the participants out of the training room into the environment, walk the streets and look for the greatest street signs to practice together. Please have a look at her travel schedule here: London: Wednesday, February 20 (fully booked) Amsterdam: Saturday, March 2 (fully booked) New York: 1 Day Bikablo + 1 Day Lettering Workshops, April 12-13 San Francisco: Level Up Your Lettering with Heather Martinez, May 30-31 Other locations may include: Cologne, Braunschweig, and Frankfurt in Germany in early March. Locations to be announced, Please email Heather for details. Now you might think Europe is far away and I can’t travel right now!  - Here we are delighted that Heather has confirmed to be our keynote speaker for VizConf 2019. Additionally, she will also run a pre-conference course about lettering the day before VizConf and might even take everyone on a lettering tour through Melbourne. Stay tuned and make sure you get your Visual Friends newsletter updates so that you don’t miss the spot in her class.

Let me introduce to you Danny Low. Danny is not only a bikablo® trainer and partner at the Visual Friends. He is also a very good friend of mine and in many ways, we are very similar. We talk a bit about that but we forgot to talk about one great story. So in the early days when I met Danny, he told me that he will take time off and travel with his family around the world. He told me that he would like to pass on some of the experiences he and his wife Anna had and to show the kids the world. With that, we pretty much hit the core DNA of Danny. He likes to pass on his life experience to others - not only to his kids but also to his students at the Visual Friends. He likes to help others and is a great mate that everyone would like to have as a friend. We follow his personal journey, learn how to visualise legal contracts, hear about project management, agile coaching and how he became part of the Visual Friends. For me, Danny’s story is another great example of what can happen in life when you follow your passion and make a couple of choices at the right time. Please welcome our lawyer and Kung-Fu master Danny Low from Brisbane.

Do you remember the time when Apple was founded or maybe have seen the movie ‘Pirates of Silicon Valley’? Until I met Dean, I never had met a person who worked at Apple at that time when the first Macintosh and with that the first graphical user Interface (GUI) was released to the world. Dean knew that someone had to explain this new GUI-thing and therefore probably was one of the first trainers on the planet to teach how to use a GUI. What strikes me when talking to Dean is his wide range of professional skills. You might know that we all learn by using different modalities. Some people prefer to access new information by reading or learn better by writing it down. Others need to hear it or visualise ideas. Different people again like to touch things and have a quick understanding when doing something with their hands. Through the years we find our preferred way of learning and develop it as your core skill. Dean is different here. Until I met Dean, I hadn’t met a person who has such a high experience in all those different modalities. He is not only a visual problem solver, but he has also an educated as an opera singer and music composer. Additionally, he believes in the power of thinking with our hands and therefore is a facilitator for LEGO SERIOUS PLAY where you use LEGO bricks to coach people by building something with their hands. I am delighted to introduce to you Dean Meyer from New York.

This is the second part of the interview with Sunni Brown record on the 18th of September 2018: In the first part of this episode, you learnt a lot about Sunnis Brown's life and her early years as an entrepreneur from strangling to make a living to be one of the top speaker and best-selling author in the field. We followed her journey step by step, from working for the Grove, one of the first visual thinking consultancies on the planet before she moved to Austin, Texas where she started her own business. In the second episode, We find out more about her work as an author and why riding a dragon and writing a book is a similar challenge. We talk about the serendipity that she got invited to TED2011 and how she prepared 4 months for the 6 minutes that has inspired more than 1.4 million people. We compare the skill of graphic recording with sketch noting, do a “quickly ask round” and brainstorm together about the upcoming keynote at VizConf 2018. We hear about her experience at TED, her keynote at VizConf 2018 and her work on the upcoming book DEEP SELF DESIGN™ that helps you to reach your goals in life. Enjoy!

In this new episode, you will learn a lot about Sunnis Brown’s life and her early years as an entrepreneur from strangling to make a living to be one of the top speaker and best-selling author in the field. For example, when Sunni was quite young she wrote to her mum a letter and told her that she either wants to become a doctor or - if that doesn’t work the president of the united states. This might seem like a funny kids letter but this letter has guided Sunni through her life. Not growing up in a privileged family she had to believe in herself and work hard for her success. This guiding principle actually led her to her upcoming book called DEEP SELF DESIGN™ which is based on the idea that you are in control of your own life. In fact, we all are in control of our own lives and our mind is often the biggest obstacle why we don’t reach our full life potential. We follow her journey step by step, from working for the Grove, one of the first visual thinking consultancies on the planet before she moved to Austin, Texas where she started her own business. We find out more about her work as an author and why riding a dragon and writing a book is a similar challenge. We talk about the serendipity that she got invited to TED2011 and how she prepared 4 months for the 6 minutes that has inspired more than 1.4 million people. We compare the skill of graphic recording with sketch noting, do a “quickly ask round” and brainstorm together about the upcoming keynote at VizConf 2018. By the way it on the 13th of October and the tickets selling out quickly. We recorded more than 90 minutes and therefore cut this recording into two episodes. This one will start from her childhood through her first book “Gamestorming” and her second book “The Doodle Revolution” and is a great inspiration for any creator or entrepreneur. In the second episode, we hear about her experience at TED, her keynote at VizConf 2018 and her work on the upcoming book DEEP SELF DESIGN™ that helps you to reach your goals in life. Enjoy this episode with Sunni Brown record on the 18th of September 2018.

Imagine the following: In order to make the most of the opportunity to attend a visual practitioner conference for the first time - you write a book, bring it along and sell it there. This might sound a bit crazy but this is exactly what Jill Greenbaum did when she attended her first IFVP conference in Pittsburgh in 2012 and it has worked out quite well as Jill is selling her book “How to Major in You and Find the Right College” ever since. But of course, Jill didn’t write a book out of the blue. She looks back on a great career in the field of education. She has studied Psychology and Education at Clark University before she became a teacher, principal and administrator in various settings in New York City. She ran two non-for-profit programs before she started working for herself in 1996. We talk about her coaching practice and her work as a facilitator with POINTS OF YOU® from Israel who provides inspiring life coaching cards that you can use for live coaching games. Last but not least we look at her upcoming bikablo® trainings in the US that she hosts, her work on the IFVP board and learn that she even has been to Tasmania recently!

You probably agree with me when I say you can’t change people! Even if you have the best idea on the planet not everyone will stop working in the old way and jump onto the new idea immediately. If that would be the case all people in the Tech-Industry would be Lean-Agile-Design-Thinking-Visual Facilitators. So what can we do to inspire others and facilitate change? First, let’s talk about why not everyone follows you…  Every Person is Different I often experience that people might not listen to me but believe in the same idea explained by someone else. The reason here is that they find it hard to identify themselves with my person but can see themselves and understand the idea through another coach. So it is not about the idea it is about the person who presents the idea. By the way, that is a great reason why it is hard to change the world alone.  Repeating a Great Idea  Another important insight is that hearing a great idea through different channels makes it easier for our brain to believe that it is true. Sadly that is true for fake news as well as for helpful great ideas like bikablo®. If you hear them more often, through different channels - they become real in our brain.  First Follower  In every job as an agile coach I tried new things almost every day. I shared the idea quickly across the companies I worked hard to inspire others but not every idea went viral. You need a first follower to validate that the idea is great. The first follower shows that it is okay to follow and to join in. A great example of what I mean is this “Dancing Guy” who starts a party in the park. Here is what happens: One dude starts dancing and another person joins in - soon everyone is dancing but it needs the first follower to validate this behaviour. Watch the full video here. Prophet In Your Own Land Last but not least it often helps to add an outside perspective by inviting a external person speaking about your idea. In this way skeptical people might be more open to ask hard questions as they don’t have to work with him the next day. The fresh perspective of an outsider around your idea also helps to reingnite the fire and keeps the idea alive. Why I am telling you this? You have learnt to draw using the bikablo® technique and if not come to one of our next trainings. You know now that it is so much more powerful to convey your message with words and pictures and that it enables much higher level of collaboration because you use use all four modalities to communicate. Someone speaks and you listen. But you also visualise it and if you share the pen and draw together you actually have a kinaesthetic experience together. There is no better way as to communicate and collaborate with a pen on the whiteboard. However when you are back at your company you need to connect to others inside your company to start a visual revolution. For that we suggest three steps to spark the change.  Step #1 - Let's run a brown bag session at your company Step #2 - Through that you will be able to identify your visual friends inside your company  Step #3 - Host a Lunch & Learn to connect, learn and help each other working on a whiteboard.  I hope this episode helps you to find your visual friends inside your company and we would like to point out that the first three people who book a brown bag session will get this workshop for free. Just book your brown bag session at www.visualfriends.com/brownbag

I think I have to confess something to you guys. April this year I recorded an amazing podcast with John Hibble about his venture, The Facilitation Starter. John Hibble is an experienced facilitator with more than 10 years in the field. After I recorded this podcast in April my life became quite busy as I started building a house in May and had a newborn baby in July. That is the reason why this podcast stayed on my hard drive for quite a while. Now it's time to unveil this great conversation about workshop preparation from the session designed over delivering a workshop to how you capture insights. Over the last month things have changed slightly. I'm very happy to announce that John is also now a certified bikablo® trainer like Martin and I, and together we run as the Visual Friends bikablo® trainings in Australia and New Zealand. If you would like to say hello to John, please add him on LinkedIn or just come to one of the next trainings. We just finished the scheduling for the trainings in Q1 2018. We run the trainings as normal in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne. We are also back in Perth and Auckland and hope that we get a training running in Hobart at the beginning of the year. Now let's do the time travel and go back to April and listen to John Hibble from the Visual Friends.

This is the second part of the interview with Antonio Meza. In the first part we talk about Antonio’s life story and his career as an NLP (neurolinguistic programming) trainer and coach. We looked at the combination of NLP and graphic facilitation and how to record sessions using an iPad. In the second part Antonio gives you an introduction into symbolic thinking. Everyone uses symbolic thinking and we don’t have to learn it. For example a person with hanging shoulders and a sad face would be seen as not resourceful while a person on top of the mountain in superman posture would be seen as very energetic. Here it doesn’t matter whether it is a real person or a stick figure drawing. Symbolic thinking describes the process of creating an internal representation of a situation, scene or thought. We use all of our senses to imagine a situation and create our own internal representation. Every person is different so that everyone creates his own emotional reaction about the scene. Understanding the concepts of symbolic thinking makes you a better graphic recorder as you can use those metaphors to tell more engaging stories even about the most boring topics. Just ask what the topic means for the people in your story and find the right metaphor.

Antonio Meza is born in Mexico and have been drawing and sketching his whole live. He started his career as a cartoonist animating stick figures between 2 key frames across the screen. He moved to Paris where he studied communication science and became a trainer and coach for neurolingoistic programming (NLP). In the first part Antonio introduces you into NLP and the science behind language patterns, body language and our eye movements. We clarify misunderstandings about NLP and talk about coaching contracts and the right coaching setting in general. Antonio experience in coaching made him the perfect match to illustrate a book about success factor modelling which turned into the illustration of three books around the subject. We talk about graphic recording using digital tools like iPad and ask the million dollar question about his favourite iPad app for graphic recording on an iPad. From here we give an introduction into symbolic thinking which we have decided to split the podcast into an extra episode about symbolic thinking.

A couple of weeks ago I had the chance to speak to Jim Benson in Melbourne. We met in a hotel restaurant and talked about why visualisation of invisible knowledge work is so powerful and why it can increase the happiness of you and your co-workers: We start with giving you an introduction into Personal Kanban and help you to create your own Personal Kanban board. We explore why limiting the work in progress is so powerful and what might happen when you take on to much work at the same time. Jim shares his favourite stories about “visualisation of work” from places like a hospital in Kenya to a family who uses Personal Kanban to organise the treatment plan of their elderly father. We talk about why managing workload is so hard and what we can do about it to stay focused. We finish with a deep dive into the psychology of happiness and why visualisation in companies can help you to stay focused and become a happy team mate.

Carola and Frank are an amazing team. They met through the bikablo® Akademie in Cologne and became a couple. Carola always had the idea of travelling the US and maybe working there one day. So when she met Frank they put their energy together as a couple and made it possible. For me this is an amazing story where you can see what a couple can do when they combine their strength and make things happen. In the interview we talk about it in detail. How it all started with a vague idea. How the things then came together and have a look at their travel plan. After the IFVP conference in Decatur they travel from the east coast to the west coast and run 7 trainings in 10 weeks. It is an exciting trip from the east to the west and I can’t wait to introduce to you now Carola and Frank from the bikablo® Akademie in Cologne. Have a look at their travel plan: • Decatur, Georgia – June 20-23 – at IFVP conference • Atlanta, Georgia – June 26-27 – hosted by Jenny Trautman of samepagepeople.com • Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – July 11-12 – hosted by Amanda Lyons of visualsforchange.com • Washington D.C., – July 21-22 – hosted by Stephanie Brown (SOLD OUT!!) • New York City, New York – July 25-26 – hosted by Jill Greenbaum of ilistenidraw.com • Chicago, Illinois – Aug. 7-8 – hosted by Brandy Agerbeck of Loosetooth.com • Fort Collins, Colorado – Aug. 15-16 – hosted by Karina Mullen Branson of conversketch.com • San Francisco, California – Aug. 24-25 – hosted by The Grove Consultants International

Jaya Machet has seen the world: She grew up in Mumbai, India and moved with her family to Switzerland when she was a teenager. She studied German and French before she joined Nokia Treasury in Geneva. More than 10 years ago she decided to move back to Asia and picked Singapore as her new home. After all Jaya describes Singapore as the “the Switzerland of Asia”. Through her work at Nokia she got excited about executive coaching and graduated with a Masters of Counselling from the Monash University in 2010. She runs her own full time coaching business and recently discovered bikablo® and Neuland and added it to her portfolio. Today she is the local distributor for Neuland® facilitation gear in Singapore under the venture “All Lined Up.biz”. Jaya introduces you to the topic of executive coaching. She explains what coaching is and isn’t by comparing it to deeper interventions like counselling and therapy. We introduce different coaching approaches and how they might be a fit for you. Jaya offers deep insights into executive coaching: Starting with the coaching contract and defining the objectives before we move on to practical tips & tricks you can use as a coach. We have a look at how bikablo® helps you to become a better coach and look into the future what bikablo® in Singapore might bring to the world going forward. I have enjoyed the interview and the first bikablo® training in Singapore and look forward to be back for the next bikablo® training in September. Last but not least, if you live in USA, please check out our USA tour this summer.

Today's guest is Matthew Magain, founder and chief doodler of sketchvideos.com.au. A lot of my students ask: “How can I create my own sketch video” and I am very happy that Matthew opens his big draw of tricks and tips to share his insights with you. After Matthew gives us a bit of background about how he started with sketchnoting as a teacher in Japan we talk about sketch videos in detail. We talk about your first setup and what is essential for a high quality recording. What the pre-production looks like and what steps you can take in the post-production to spice it up. We give an overview about digital tools on an iPad and what outcome you can expect from those tools. After listening to the podcast you should have a good idea about how you can get started with your own sketch video. Please enjoy the interview with Matthew Magain from sketchvideos.com.au.

Today I talk to Nick Coster. Nick founded Brainmates together with his wife Adrienne Tan more then 12 year ago. Brainmates is one of those companies who are not very big but very professional. Their special field is product management. We talk about the evolution of product management. How the role of product management evolves when the organisation scales up and the CEO can’t be the product manager anymore. Nick describes the role of a product manager as the chief storyteller in a company. The product manager is the CEO for a product but normally doesn’t have the same authority as the CEO. He needs to take everyone on the journey and explain the challenges ahead of the product. Storytelling is the key to this way of leadership and visual storytelling is the lasting version of it as you can capture the visualisation of the story in photos and videos. Therefore I am very excited to announce that we will run the bikablo® Visual Storytelling class in Australia shortly before Christmas. Many of my bikablo® visual facilitation students are in a role around requirements gathering or are working in a business analyst role. In this interview I put myself in the role of a business analyst and ask myself how could I become a great product manager. What does it take to become that person and what do I have to learn on the way. Being on the product management journey alone can be quite challenging. It’s much better to go the way together and catch up with mates who are in a similar role as you. I would like to highlight the “Leading the Product Conference” run by Brainmates every year. The conference will be held this year on the 20th October in Melbourne and 25th in Sydney. Check it out and I hope to see you around in one of the next bikablo® visualisation trainings.

Today I have the honour to bring to you Natalie Nelson. Natalie is the principal at Ashburton primary school. Natalie tells her story of how she started on a journey to transform the school to a place of future education. Her approach is quite different to many others. She calls it design from the inside out. We talk about what it means to grow up in our complex world of today. What skills the kids need to learn which (by the way) are far beyond reading, writing and maths.

Today I have the honour to have Patrick Sharbaugh with me. Patrick works for the LUMA institute, a training provider that enables companies and individuals to be more creative. He teaches design thinking and in this interview he gives us an introduction into the world of design thinking. We talk about creative problem solving, visual languages and what it means to have the customer in the centre of your solution design. But first of all, let me introduce to you Patrick. Patrick grew up in Charlston, South Carolina. He worked in Japan for a while and moved on to Vietnam where he worked in Saigon. In Saigon he got in contact with the RMIT University and through that found his way to Australia. He works today in America as well as Australia as a trainer for Design Thinking, runs a Meet-up in the Melbourne CBD and is a great guy to meet everyday. We give you a step-by-step introduction into design thinking while we help Henry Ford to build a better car and explore why the Apple iPod 1 was important but not great. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Patrick Sharbaugh from the LUMA Institute!

A couple of weeks ago I was running the first visual facilitation garage. This advanced workshop has been around in Europe for a while and now we start this advanced class for people who have participated in the fundamentals class in Australia as well. When you start something new, you start something small and so Keith Greaves attended as the only attendee at the first visual facilitation garage in Melbourne in May. Keith and I had a great time together working in the garage. We had 4 hours of intensive learning together and we both learnt from each other. So I thought we share our conversation over those four hours in an interview with you. Let me introduce Keith Greaves in a couple of sentences. He grew up in Ireland and worked in several very interesting countries including Azerbaijan and Syria. Today Keith lives with this family in Melbourne running two companies: Chit Chat and Mosaic Lab. Mosaic Lab is a company that facilitates big groups and creates spaces for c0-creating and collaboration. He sets up workshops for 80-300 people to bring people together from all parts of the societies and brings people together to collaborate. Keith puts a lot of this energy into preparing those venues and you will learn in this podcast how he does it. What really hit me when listening to Keith was his passion for public participation following the core values of IAP2. He makes a difference in the world by improving our democracy. Our democracy is based on a the idea of a majority. A 50% majority is good but imagine you had a co-created law proposal for the prime minister that bases on a super majority of 80%. Now let me pass on the microphone to Keith Greaves from MosaicLab listening to this story!

In this episode I talk about the first day back at work where you need to find a way to apply the new skills in your day to day job. We talk about positive psychology and how you can motivate yourself to progress your visual journey every day in the office. Additional we introduce the visual facilitation garage. An advanced visual facilitation workshop where you can meet people who are on the same journey as you. This workshop will be help every month in Sydney and Melbourne and is hosted in Germany as well for many years. I hope you enjoy this short episode!

I don’t know about you but I see many companies who put a lot of whiteboards inside their offices and I am not sure yet that they know how to make best use of them.   Todays guest is Christiane Anderson, she works as an Agile Coach at AGL. AGL is one of the major energy providers in Australia. AGL was founded in 1837, lit the first gas lamp in 1841 in Sydney and has built Australia’s largest solar plant in 2015. Today AGL is listed as one of top 50 companies on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX).   This episode is about Christiane's journey from discovering the bikablo® drawing technique to how it contributes to AGL and the changes in her career to this day. We look at how she started small by showing the value of visual facilitation to AGL, before it took off and inspired others throughout the organisation.    Additionally we talk about visual facilitation in the context of an agile business transformation and what changes are needed in human behaviour when working in an agile environment. We explore how agile coaching and life coaching can help an individual to come along on an agile journey.    We provide you a couple of tips how you can light a fire of change and become a leader in your organisation. This episode is about how you can start small and become bold.    I hope you enjoy this conversation with Christiane from AGL.

Attending the bikablo® visual facilitation training is only 50% of the deal. You need to apply it and keep practising on your day-to-day job. One of the best ways to improve your visual facilitation skills is by learning from each other in a community of practise. In this short episode I talk about different communities of practise I have been part of in my career and would like to invite you to join the bikablo® graduates group on LinkedIn. 

Helping others is natural to us but asking for help is sometimes difficult to many. The reason behind lays in the way we grew up, how we were raised and not at last in a school system that was focused on competition and performance not on collaboration and creative thinking. However, todays challenges in business lay in the ability to solve complex problems together as a team and for me one of the most important steps to become a strong team is to overcome the fear of asking for help and embrace the fact that nobody is perfect. Through that asking for help becomes a personal strength. Remember todays problems are just too complex for one brain anyway. In this insight episode I walk you through a scenario how you can offer help as a visual leader. You don’t have to be the subject matter expert – just a good listener with a pen using a whiteboard. Often it is enough that the person who has the problem steps out of the problem space for a moment and explains the challenge to someone else. I explain you my 8-steps to help him/her to unblock any problem solving. By following the 8-steps you have a chance to engage even more people of your team in the solution design and through that improve your team and company culture on the long run. These steps are not always strictly followed, they shall be a guide to get started as a visual leader on a whiteboard. I hope you enjoy this episode! Please share it in your network if it is useful for you.

I would like to ask you a question! Can you image you walk into a company and tell everyone to change the way they work? Maybe even question their values? Or find a new vision for what this company would like to achieve? That is what an agile transformation often is about. Today I speak to David Landry. He works as a principle consultant at Elabor8 and he took a Melbourne University together with his college Andrew Thorpe on this agile journey. The way they have facilitated this agile transformation it is quite disruptive in itself. They have banned PowerPoint from the first day they arrived and introduced the bikablo® drawing technique using it instead of PowerPoint from the first meeting to all the team and project meetings. He shares his experience with drawing live in front of other people. I hope you enjoy this conversation with David Landry from Elabor8.

This episode is a great personal career story of Brandy Agerbeck from loosetooth.com. Brandy gives an insight into her career including how she started as a knowledge worker with the MG Taylor model and how she went on her own as a graphic facilitator a couple of years later. She gives insights into her work including the Brandyfesto, Draw Quad and the process of writing her new book "The Idea Shapers". We talk about her TEDx Talk in Windy City in 2013 and chat about the future and where visualisation will head to. If you would like to learn what a sneezy green person is then listen to this episode of the bikablo® Radio with Brandy Agerbeck from loosetooth.com

In this episode you will learn how to solve conflicts between two software development teams and bring people back on track to collaborate and be awesome. This episode is inspired by my experience working with teams everyday. In the following story I will learn: • How to prune out any negative emotions? • How to keep the positive attitude? • How to create a shared understanding of a problem? • Creating options to solve the challenge? • How to get the team back into the driver seat and pass the pen on? Things to read from here: • Stop the line principle!? • What visual facilitation is about? I hope you enjoy this episode and share it with your colleges, friends and family!

This episode takes you on a journey and looks beyond the horizon: We start with a comprehensive introduction into the world of visualisation and how different people get started with visual facilitation. We then go down the rabbit hole into group facilitation and conflict solving through drawing together. When we come out again, we take you more than 12 years back in history and talk about the early days of visualisation when bikablo® wasn't known at all. How the systematic bikablo® technique appeared and what the three pillars of bikablo® are today. We then look into the future and explore areas that bikablo® hasn't discovered yet. We talk about differences in cultures and how other cultures use visuals in different ways. Over the last 12 years we have started to learn about visual thinking but there is much more to explore.

In this episode Nicole Brand shares her story how she became a visual leader: I had the fortune to work with Nicole Brand for the last 18 month on a daily basis. I saw her progressing from not feeling confident enough participating in meetings to the point where people follow Nicole's lead into any meeting room and come along on her visual journeys. I have never seen a steeper learning curve in terms of visual leadership than Nicole's before - I hope the podcast inspires you as much as Nicole inspired me!