Move your critical initiative forward — faster — through live sketching

Let’s say you are in a meeting and everyone is asked to imagine a dog in their head. Chances are each person would envision something different — a terrier, toy poodle, a golden retriever, Snoopy — each with different qualities and characteristics.

The same thing happens when people are tossing out new concepts, ideas, platforms, and systems as part of an organizational change. Everyone has something different in mind. So how can you get everyone to picture the same thing — achieve alignment?? 

By getting them to see it together with a secret ingredient: a live sketching exercise. 

Facilitated visual exercises such as live sketching takes strategic planning and execution, or any important initiative, to the next level.  Led by an experienced artist, live sketching encourages active, enthusiastic engagement, capturing ideas and creating a shared vision. It’s a highly effective method for articulating complex ideas, gaining critical, early buy-in from stakeholders, and creating an overall organizational transformation roadmap in an understandable format.

Live sketching translates ongoing conversation and ideation for all the room to see. It turns abstract thinking into tangible storytelling and elevates creative thinking.

Early alignment is essential to successful organizational change

As we’ve touched on, alignment issues can disrupt new initiatives and prevent them from ever getting off the ground. People aren’t aligned if they are disengaged, they lack energy and enthusiasm, are confused or in conflict, or don’t share the vision.

Live sketching overcomes these issues by:

• Creating an atmosphere that encourages everyone’s input and active participation
• Invigorating the room with momentum, shifting the energy to encourage creativity and lead to the generation of new ideas and viewpoints
• Highlighting the nuances between perspectives and providing necessary clarity, allowing you to zero in on the most critical elements of your initiative
• Synthesizing your story into a unified (aligned) vision that’s widely understood

When it comes to understanding complex thinking, a picture really is worth 1,000 words. Live sketching makes it easier for a group of people — no matter their role or position in your organization — to literally get on the same page. 

What does live sketching actually look like?

This is far beyond cute drawings. It’s about getting people to let their guard down, make the task at hand a little more fun, and helping people to really get it. Because when they see it, they understand it and can affect real change. 

The creativity of live sketching helps to alleviate the monotony of bullet points. When it’s drawn out, people are looking at and responding to something tangible. They start to understand: “Oh, that’s where this process begins. Those are the steps. That’s where it ends. That’s where the customer sits.”
 

We get there by asking questions like: Who is the target? What do we want them to understand? What are the three questions they need answers to? What is your call to action? How does that work? What does it look like? Where does it start?

As the group begins to answer those questions, live sketching interprets that information visually, connecting ideas, building upon them, and moving towards a story everyone can see through the same lens.

Align your organizational change campaign with live sketching

Live sketching sessions bring teams together to visualize ideas and tell a common story. When people align around this story, they build on each other’s ideas instead of working in silos or at cross purposes. 

You develop a unified narrative that clarifies your organization’s strategy, and everyone understands the priorities and their role in contributing to the overall goals. 

This approach also creates connections that didn’t exist before: connections across teams; connections to the leadership’s vision; connections to the products they build and to their end customer.

By the end of the session, you have a more cohesive strategy, accelerating progress on your most vital organizational change initiatives.

If you’d like to learn more about how a live sketching session with Tremendousness can start your project down the right path, we’d love to hear from you.