Cereal, breakfast, oatmeal. This is part of a forthcoming project called Morning Routine, a collection of icons and tools to help parents and children navigate the tricky time between waking up and getting out the door.
Struggle, overwhelmed, impossible task, needing help, futility.
A graphic about graphics that I’m using as part of my nascent marketing campaign.
The final graphic from the co-op board meeting posted inside the store.
In a previous entry from August 2005, I presented the first graphic version of the Positive and Productive Meetings process. This was built for a short, introductory paper about PPM. As we were developing the course book, I decided to redo the graphic entirely. The course book includes a running sample of a small team working to change their meetings. The new version of the process includes the characters from the team and better matches the bolder, iconic style of the PPM organizing principles.
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.
I created this quick tutorial to help people understand what a P.A.T.H. is and how to read and contribute to one. This is part of a larger personal project to launch our family back to the East Coast. This tutorial is no substitute for full P.A.T.H. training; it’s merely intended to help the unfamiliar navigate the process.
A P.A.T.H. is a planning process that uses graphic facilitation and a specific template to guide people towards taking action. It is a shared process in which a community of people come together to support a person or group to make a dream happen.
1 The title defines the P.A.T.H.’s purpose.
2 The conversation begins with the North Star or the dream. This is the global view, the big dream, the themes and values that guide the actions.
3 The goals are clustered around themes and must be Positive and Possible.
4 The first column in the arrow, Now tells us where we’re starting from. This should set up tension between where we are and where we want to go.
5 P.A.T.H.’s build community. Enroll invites people to take specific, productive action that makes the goals happen.
6 Stronger captures the things we need in life to keep going, to push towards our goals over the long term.
7 We start with a mid-point 7 and work back to set tasks.
8+ Further mid-points help to break down the long and demanding parts of the P.A.T.H. into manageable chunks.
9 The last and most important step tells us how to begin, starting tomorrow to make these dreams come true.
Disruption is the one constant for young people with developmental disabilities in the service supports system. Many kids move from placement to placement, pushed along by rules regarding age and suitability of setting. All young people must move from their existing program, generally a group or foster home, when they turn eighteen. Even under the best of circumstances, this transition is difficult. There’s great uncertainty; it is often very hard to find any openings, never mind a place the kid really wants to move to. The process is cumbersome as well, involving a host of people sometimes dispersed across the vast expanse of Oregon. There are often people involved with overlapping roles, but with very different expectations. This graphic was created to help clarify the process and who is responsible for the various steps.
The “Transitioning Youth” graphic demonstrates a complex, yearlong, 18 step process on a single page. Icons and text reinforce each other and tell a story. This learning graphic is laid out to invite note-taking, engaging users on many levels all at once. The color key at the bottom clarifies role accountability within the process and is clear even when printed or copied in black and white.
Click the image below to link to a larger, more legible version. Many thanks to Amber Desjarlais for her help.
At long last I’ve completed the swim lane add-on template, allowing you to double the length of the original tool. I’ve also revised the original slightly, to clean up the design and make it fit better with the add-on. Both are intended for 11″ x 17″ printing. By cutting the margin of either template where the pages meet, you can get the lines to run seamlessly into each other. The add-on should work well enough to just continue adding time and tasks to your swim lane.
Swim lane tool template
Add on template for the swim lane tool
I would welcome any comments or suggestions for further development.
I have recently become interested in how to manage large scale projects using graphics. In most of my research it seems that the tool or software dictates how the project is organized. On Tufte’s site I found a great discussion on this, including a lot of information on swim lane tools, so called (I presume) because each person or entity with task and responsibilities has their own ‘lane’ along the horizontal axis. I decided to devise a template for this tool, that one could use or customize to create a swim lane for their own project. That template is available below as a pdf file.
Here is a sample I created in Illustrator using the template. The sample project is an intense three week process we recently went through responding to an RFP (Request For Proposals) in a competitive bidding process. No, I don’t work with anyone named Scout, but I wish I did. Names and specifics are altered for the purpose of this sample. Click on the image for a larger, more legible version.
< I like how the information lays out intuitively; it's easy for the eye to track progress along the process. Some of Tufte's samples use drop lines to link events and responsible parties to dates on the timeline. In a three week project that didn't seem necessary, but certainly possible. The color coded phases across the top let you know that there's some writing going on in the proofing phase. There's room enough for added detail or handwritten notes as the project proceeds. I think that would be especially valuable for an organization that's trying to learn from their project processes. Quick notes about what worked well or what missed the mark would be invaluable and closely linked visually to the meta data about the process.
The pdf template has great versatility. I think it can lead almost anyone through the creation process. It can be printed out and worked by hand. Blow it up on the poster copier at Kinko's and you could facilitate a whole group through developing their own swim lanes, seeing where they fit in and how. It builds accountability and if it were posted somewhere public in the office, it would let everyone understand the process, see conflicts and measure progress. I'm very much a novice at Illustrator, but I was able to create this sample in short order, meaning digital copies could be easily created, shared and revised throughout the life of a project. I used color very simply in the sample, but color coding could add levels of detail and complexity.
The lanes on the template are uniformly spaced, unlike the drafts on Tufte's site which respond to how much any one person or group has to do by giving more space. The template could still be used as development tool, and such spacing issues could be managed when creating the working draft of the tool.
I would welcome any comments or suggestions for further development.
