Big Picture Thinking is an evolving art form that is connecting right into the pulse of those in businesses and social and political organisations. Artists are really putting their creative wisdom at the centre of the business working-world; where left and right brain are meeting, engaging, communing and creating.
As artistic facilitators working in companies, we work with randomness and we follow its scent; we bring curiosity to the mix and co-create with what exists in a live meeting. We attempt to slip between the words and make participants’ intentions, intuitions, meanings, and yearnings, visual. It’s a great art of listening and what results seems quite often magical offering a chance for all those present to see passed the logical and dive into the rich tapestry of who we are as well as the wealth of possibility the situation contains.
What results is engagement, and from engagement a contagious creativity appears.
Engagement is that substance which, once consumed, connects us to life’s threads with enthusiasm. Here time passes differently, and we are often left with a sense of having been somewhere else, of having experienced a richer few moments.
As artists often working live within the meeting context, what happens is that as we capture a conversation, we go into a very deep listening space and a sort of channel opens up through which the rich variety of information being shared arrives at and manifests in some form on the canvas.
This creative process is opening us all up, artist and participants alike. By throwing our conversations up in the air and catching them differently as they fall, a far wider field of possibility and solutions appear with results we couldn’t otherwise have thought up.
We’re not talking about drawing lines and arrows to outcomes, that’s a linear process we may certainly get to later. For now, we are talking about making the real wealth and creativity that people share when they talk together, visible. We are talking about working and playing within a liminal space where intuitions, tensions, urges, joys, possibilities, and potentials, are captured, drawn out and seen by those working through their shared issues.
Because the visual maps that result give people a better grasp of what is so commonly intangible to us, they are projected into an expanded thinking space. It is from here that we can make far more informed, inspired and enterprising decisions about the moment and about our future.
By Vanessa Smith, Visual Facilitator, Leadership Coach from Crafting Connection
Visit www.craftingconnection.com for more info.