papershine

This series of three graphics are based on work done by organizations taking part in Oregon’s Good to Great system’s change project, facilitated by OTAC. During their last quarterly meeting, each agency sketched out a visual depiction of their journey thus far, during the first 18 months of the project. They all chose different metaphors, but similar themes surfaced. Each agency had trouble getting started and each reached a turning point. The power of their individual metaphors allows them to share these ideas in different, but equally compelling ways.

I did not take part in the last quarterly, as Abe was fresh to the world in those days. It made redrafting the images hard, because I did not hear their words explaining the metaphor and the images chosen. I particularly struggled with the analogy of a race, as used by PCL. The project certainly has elements of traveling, but hopefully not over the same ground again and again. And the real competition is to improve upon our own work, not to defeat anyone else. And yesterday when we looked over the images again, the people who drew the original brought up the same concerns.

Visual metaphors are incredibly powerful, but that power can turn against the creator quite easily. The strength of a metaphor lies in its depth. So the race metaphor worked as movement or even as an organized team approach, but failed at the crux of what racing on a track is, going over your tracks again and again. As one of the creators pointed out, their effort was more like the Baja 500. It’s a straight race, where you never know what’s over the next rise. Sounds a lot more like system’s change work. The easy fix was to put a ramp off the race track. If we were to develop this further, we would pursue the Baja 500 metaphor, if for no other reason than the fun of drawing off road vehicles.

The images below link to the OTAC page where the full-sized files reside.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 12th, 2006 at 5:08 pm and is filed under graphics.