Five Tips for drawing out ideas with your team

Drawing out ideas with your team can be one of the best things you ever do. It can also be the scariest thing to try, if you’ve never done it before. This question came up after I finished speaking at a recent national conference. The participants and I had just finished rolling up our sleeves, picking up the pens, and drawing out ideas with teams…when one of the participants mused:
 

Drawing out ideas with others is AMAZING! I had such a great experience with it during your session, and it generated some fascinating insights for me about the challenges we face in our organization. I totally want to use this drawing process during my next meeting, but how will my team react to me doing this sort of stuff when I go back to work? How will they respond to the idea of drawing during our next meeting?

 
It’s a great question. And here’s a spoiler alert: odds are good your team will respond to drawing out ideas much the same way you did during our conference session. So here are five tips (or reminders) from that experience for you to carry forward when drawing out ideas with your own team for the first time:
 

Five Tips for Drawing Out Ideas with Your Team

 
1. The First Mark is the Hardest. That awkward phase of “we’re supposed to draw something? Who’s going to draw it because I don’t think I want to ” lasts for just a moment. Then someone picks up the marker and draws SOMETHING. Anything. They may draw the first shape or icon, then pass the pen to another person to build on the image. Or they may pick up the pen and serve as the idea-drawer-outer (official term) for the entire group. Others may stand off to the side, observing the whole situation and guiding what other people draw. Still others may start off not wanting to draw, but then come up and grab their own pen and start contributing to the image as it unfolds with the conversation.
 

Try this: YOU can get the team past that initial awkward moment by being the person to pick up the pen and draw the first mark. Then pass that pen on to someone else to add to what you drew.

 
2. Once folks get started, you won’t be able to get them to stop! It’s almost like folks were testing the ground originally…waiting to see if they’d be struck by lightening for drawing out an idea on a flip chart, white board, even a piece of scratch paper. And once they realize that they can indeed draw out their ideas without the wrath of an angry business god knocking that marker clean out of their hands…well, then the momentum and the conversation gets a life of its own. People stand up and gather around the drawing. They interact with it and add to it. The conversation grows new legs and starts to go in new and interesting directions…leading to fascinating insights and shared experiences.
 

Try this: If you need to run a tight ship during your meeting, allocate a set amount of time for folks to draw out ideas, and then plan in some time for folks to share their drawings and ideas with the rest of the team. Be sure to communicate these time limits with your team so they know what to expect moving forward.

 
3. Folks actually do loosen up and have fun with the process! And that changes the quality of the conversation, as well as the nature and quality of the outputs from that conversation. During our conference session, we could see diverse groups realizing that everyone had their own views about a target user’s experience – for example. Drawing out the ideas made it okay and POSSIBLE for those diverse views to be seen and heard…literally! And rather than lead to arguments and impasses, the overarching sound we heard in the conference hall was LAUGHTER! People could explore different views in ways that were validating, safe, and accessible. Plus, folks KNEW that their views were seen and heard because they could see it in the drawing you were creating during the conversation. Even the energy of these challenging conversations changed from feeling heavy and stuck to feeling light and flowing. Our teams were being energized by the work, and it showed in their insights and outputs.
 

Try this: Pay attention to the energy of your meeting, and look for opportunities to reinforce positive energy and momentum throughout. When you notice that energy and momentum picking up, appreciate it with a delighted exclamation of “we’re cookin’ now!”

 
4. There’s no one “right” way to draw out ideas. Diversity and collaboration are the names of the game here. One of the things we did in our conference groups was draw forth insights about our target user by creating our own empathy maps. And some teams drew a face to represent that target user. Other folks drew stick figures. Still others drew icons to represent nursing or government. Some wrote words out to capture more abstract concepts, but laid them out with spatial meanings instead of simply creating a list or report. Others leveraged lots of different colors. Still others used all one color. Heck, one group drew our ecosystem map out as their visual template, put ideas down on sticky notes, and then moved them around spatially on the ecosystem map based on where the connections truly were. All of the flip charts we created were unique, all of them were Good Enough to get the idea across, and all of them had their entire team engaged in the process.
 

Try this: When drawing out ideas with your team, provide just enough structure to support the team’s work (e.g. provide a basic visual template to guide the team’s exploration of a subject) without micro-managing the team’s work. You’ll get so much good stuff when you allow people to draw out their ideas in ways that work for them.

 
I think that all this was possible because of the two permissions we set before even getting started:
 
5. Give yourself permission to play, and give your inner critic permission to hang out at the coffee shop while you do so! When we create and maintain the space – both internally and externally – for folks to draw out ideas, we end up creating and maintaining the space for folks to draw forth the best in each other. It’s listed last, here…but it’s really the first thing we do. Everything else falls into place team-wise once we establish those permissions.
 

Try this: Model these permissions yourself and through every aspect of the meeting space. The environment you create for your meeting sets the expectation for what’s going to happen at that meeting. From the way you dress to the way you engage with your team, make it clear that it’s okay to draw gloriously imperfect images to communicate ideas, and that it’s okay to play and have fun with our work!

To Recap

 
So, if you tried drawing out ideas during our conference session, want to try it with your team, but don’t know how they’ll respond to it in your next meeting…remember your own experience with drawing out ideas that very first time. We:
 

 
So pick up that pen and draw out ideas with your team! It’s a deceptively simple process that generates powerful results…and once your team picks up the pen, they may never want to put it down again! ;^D
 
I cannot wait to see what you draw forth,