“I found the experience excellent. It was reassuring to see other people in the room saying, “Well, I’m not good at drawing, I find stick figures challenging. It made me feel very safe.”
The step-by-step process allowed Linette to tackle one mini skill at a time without sliding into the familiar mindset of “I can’t draw.”“Going through the steps, each time I thought, yes, I can do this and yes, I can do that too.It was challenging to put up our creations on the walls and, at first, I was scared that my work would be the worst. But I was delighted to see that we all did different things, we interpreted things differently and absolutely everyone had something really impressive. It was amazing to see the skill developing around the room.”
Back at work, initially Linette was apprehensive to use the skills she’d just learnt. She began practising by taking visual notes during meetings without showing it to anyone. Once, at a strategy meeting, she decided to share her visuals with the team, quite pleased with what she had sketched.
“The manager looked and said, “Wow! They are fantastic”, shared them with the product leadership team, got the same excited response and my drawings were published on the strategy internal webpage, for everyone in my area to see. I did have to run away and tidy it up a bit, because it was sketched on lined paper without proper markers.”
From then on, Linette became known as the visual person at work. “People would ask me, “Oh, we are trying to get this idea across, can you draw a thing?” She also began to regularly take visual notes during monthly strategy meetings and they were always very well received. “I feel it’s certainly because of these visuals that people higher up in the organisation knew a bit more about who I was, people who otherwise might have not met me or interacted with me.”
And that’s how Linette ended up in the meeting that we started our story with. “Essentially, all I did was listen to the team and sketched what they were saying. They had all the information but the challenge was communicating all that complex conceptual data visually.”
Unfortunately we can’t share the drawings or the details of the project here, but we can say that thanks to Linette’s drawings helped communicate the process to a lot of people. In addition, visualisation, as a part of the process, was recommended to the next team that was working on a similar project.
Since then Linette has done a few other things. Visual Friends training gave her the courage to enrol and complete a nature illustration course. Practising visualisation by creating visual summaries of non-fiction books led to her being approached by a publisher who saw one such drawing on instagram. It is now going to be used as an illustration in a future book. Linette is also mastering the Apple Pencil and virtual scribing. Her morning ritual during the covid-19 isolation is drawing virtual zoom backgrounds.