The Power of Imagery — A Fugal Flow at the Chicago IFVP

I visited Chicago recently, and had a wonderful conversation with my past. The 13th International Visual Practitioners Forum started it. Brandy Agerbeck, a board member of IVPF, is from Chicago and thought we all ought to meet off the West Coast. Rob Benn, the current President, lives in Canada. Most of the design team were spread all over the country so the idea caught hold and there we were, at the Summit Conference Center—same skyscraper on Michigan Avenue that houses Obama’s world headquarters! We looked down on Millenium Park and the Miracle Mile (shown here). And the weather was perfect.

In 1968 this very location was overflowing with people being beaten by the Chicago cops. Vietnam protests clouded the Democratic National Convention, held then. I was a journalism student at Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. I wasn’t a protester but was following the war closely, and all my male friends could think of little else when it came to our futures. So I borrowed a friend’s motorcycle and went down to look at what was going on. I haven’t been able to shake the image of four Chicago cops from the first precinct closing in on me, me leaving, and then watching the beatings on television, in this very park I was now looking at.

But this post isn’t about politics, but about imagery and its power, especially deep, personal imagery. During this time I met and married Susan, my mate of 42 years now. Susan and I hadn’t been back to Chicago since those years, so I invited her to come with me on this trip, and we scheduled some extra days to backtrack through our own lives. As with any quest, the surprises became the points of interest, and they were more about my inner journey than external politics.

VIRTUAL REALITY
The Forum participants were all invited to bring digital cameras, laptops, tablets, i-phones and other tools. Four years ago we were all just taking a look at the impact these tools might have on the profession of graphic facilitation and recording. They are integral now. But the thread that jumped out of this summit wasn’t digital.

It began with Diane Cline sharing her work with archeology and antiquities and the generative power of art artifacts as images that empower storytelling.

I missed the first day due to client work, but got a flavor of Diane’s talk from this wonderful recording by Emily Shepard. The pattern of the display itself mirrors the topic in a very clever way. But I wasn’t really being “worked” by this image idea yet. That would come.

SERENDIPITY
Susan and I checked into the Club Quarter hotel at 75 E. Wacker Drive on Wednesday night, right on the Chicago River in plain sight of the Wrigley Building and the Tribune Tower, where I worked as a fledgling reporter right out of journalism school. There in lobby was John Ward! He was presenting in the morning on 3D Modeling and Strategy and had called a few weeks earlier asking if I had any photos from the clay-modeling workshop he conducted years ago as a way to identify and agree on The Grove’s values. A studio fire wiped out all his records several years ago, and he had no record. I dug around and found two packs of snapshots of all the clay figures, and the worksheets we spread around to make sense out of things. There was also a photo of Susan, Thom and I, along with Ed Claassen, Laurie Durnell, Diane Arsenian, Tomi Nagai Rothe and Bobby Pardini. (That photo started making me thing about getting older—LOL).

“I’ve got your photos,” I said as I greeted John. And right there in the hotel lobby opened up my suitcase and dug them out. He was thrilled. He then shared that the work with us was one of the first he’d done with clay. He had a background as a wood worker and had come to model making as a way to think, and was applying these techniques to planning. The clay seemed very promising, since it took people back to what he calls “original mind.”

“In fact, I found after a while that clay work was taking people too deep and pulled back to work with models again,” he said.

Up in our room Susan said she was very glad to hear what John said. She had been a part of the values clarification sessions and felt that we were heading into all kinds of things that the workshop at the time wasn’t prepared to deal with. She’s a person who feels things very immediately and deeply, and picks up on “vibes.”  I think this conversation is what turned my focus to the power of image. Why was the combination of tactile and visual so much more powerful than just a picture?

I shared Susan’s reflections with the Visual Practitioners as John began his talk, at his request, and examples of the breakthroughs we had playing directly, and often silently, with the clay construction. It nagged at me that John contended that drawing and writing keeps us too much in our familiar mind. Maybe this was because I was taking notes in my journal as I often do, and this practice is definitely familiar. And John was clear in his assertion. “We have to disrupt our patterns to get to original mind,” he stated over and over.(Contact John Ward at this link).

IN PURSUIT OF ORIGINAL MIND
I went from John’s talk to a breakout about using imagery as a catalyst for innovation and planning. This time “imagery” meant photographs and drawings, but ones selected to resonate with deep archetypes. The Center for Creative Leadership has created Visual Explorer cards that contain very evocative photographic images. (They cost $395 as laminated decks, but are free to download one at a time and print yourself if you persist in searching their website). They also commissioned one of the Visual Practitioners, Bruce Flye, a professor in N. Carolina, to produce a second pack of Metaphor Cards with hand drawings that will be available soon. Bruce and a woman from the Center were full of stories about how using these cards as a kind of “excursion” into right brain thinking deepened group work.

This theme deepened as I had lunch with Virginia Hamilton, a consultant who I would be recording the following day. She was also presenting on using imagery to support change processes, and was working with the same deck of images from the Center! I thought this was an unusual confluence. I remembered that at VizThink last January Christine Martell of Visuals Speak had a whole consulting practice building around her own select group of image cards! Is there something to look at here?

DINNER CONVERSATION
My own process was getting disrupted, and not just by the images of skulls and rainbows in the Center deck of cards. In the afternoon’s Open Ideas sessions I volunteered to show people what I was doing in Second Life, and took six or seven folks into our Third Life Lab, the Medicine Wheel, the Grove Galleries, our Storymapping space, and held a short meeting in a simulated Fireplace room modeled after our virtual conferencing room in the Presidio. A friend of mine joined me on the fly and we demonstrated how chat and IMing work in Second Life. (Yes I do have ponytail in SL-LOL).

I was struck this time by how rocked a couple of the participants in my session were by the “realism” of this virtual world, and how immersive it is. “Why will people continue the other way,” I remember one person lamenting. Was this kind of imagery working people like a kind of digital clay, or were they outside the experience looking in, abstracting, and perhaps judging? Is it necessary to get hands on? I know the most powerful aspects of Second Life for me are the deep conversations and getting my hands directly on the digital clay and building. Looking at other people’s tricky things is a kind of mind candy but doesn’t stick to my psychic ribs (to mash-up some metaphors).

At an evening Graphic Jam back at the Club Quarters I sat next to Mary, a new recorder from N. Carolina. Mary has a long background in mental health and social work, and is moving into facilitation as a new career. Her listening pulled me out. As so many of us who are called to this field, she is smart, open, curious, and not judgmental. She wanted to know how I got started in this work 30 years ago. She wanted to know how she could progress. I couldn’t help but tell some stories (see my E-Zine interview listed in my articles if you want the story). We were at a table with two people from Copenhagen, a fellow from the UK, a designer from Chicago, Mary from N. Carolina and me from the West Coast. Lynn Carruthers and Rob Bens would say words, and our whole table would immediately create an image in response. No question we are packed full of them!!

After the jam I fell to talking with Mary about where The Grove was now. I explained we are focusing on growing our products business as a way to expand the contributions we are making. I said that I wanted to move on from being the business leader, to writing.

“Oh, about what?” she asked immediately. “I want to write my book on Sustainable Organizations,” I said. “And another on vision questing.”

I’m always surprised how innocent conversations like this can be turning points, but this one was. I was surprised by what I said, and the feelings I had. And in my head were images of pages – not words. And the images had feelings that these words can’t really convey very well, but were what stuck out.

I became more aware of this later with Susan when we went to dinner. She shared her experience going to the Newberry Library that day and meeting a woman who had worked there 40 years, about the time Susan was working as a collator for a Herman Melville project. So our talk turned to writing, and I shared my conversation with Mary and the conversations with John. But I came out with something different with Susan.

“I’d like to write novels about the future of California and technology,”  I said, and the image driving my statement was from my desert vision quest,— a memory of flying over the San Joaquin Valley filled with water, and seeing suburbs reclaimed as truck gardens, and hot, steamy weather. Susan made a face. That wouldn’t be her kind of writing, being a Henry James scholar and poet. I immediately added “and maybe a book working with my journals, like a Vision Quest book.” Her face beamed. “Now that would be wonderful,” she said. Interesting. She has images for this, but not for the former idea.

JOURNALING WORKSHOP
That seed grew overnight. The next day’s Open Ideas session I volunteered to lead a group on journaling, sharing purposes and practices. I knew that this would water the seed of my imagination. To my delight seven people joined! And the experience was a marked contrast at the feeling level to the Second Life gathering.

Craig, a young product designer from Chicago who has come over to facilitation, carried a small black book filled with his ideas and drawings. “Let’s go around and say why we came to this session,” I started.

I began by saying that journaling was a core tool in my work as a facilitator, both for my inner development and for developing my skills in the field. “It’s to facilitation what doing exercises and scales would be for a concert pianist,” I said. “I’d like to hear what others of you are doing with your journals, and share some of the practices I’ve developed with mine.”

Craig said he wanted to share with others who were passionate about journals. He flipped through is book (one page of which is shown here).

Donatella from Brazil said she owned at least eight but never used them.  She was afraid to make mistakes. Her sister Donetta is an artist but hasn’t thought about journaling but was interested. Another illustrator named Jim who is getting into the field of facilitation said he preferred spiral bound books and loose paper, because he clamped up in a bound book and wouldn’t let himself work freely. Alex from Copenhagen has been a trainer and teacher all is life and uses visuals a lot. He had a wonderful mind map going in his own journal as notes from the conference. Bruce Flye came with his tablet, and had some scanned images of journal work he had done as an exercise in deep reflection, drawing from advice in Betty Edwards book, Working with the Right Side of our Brain.

What a juicy group! I found myself wanting to really open up about how much this kind of work has meant over the years. At journal #155 in my own work, I’ve used it in all sorts of ways, and have books full of illustrations and writing that I go back to regularly for inspiration and material. And what popped out again was the power of imagery, in both stories and illustrations. My observer self was threading all these things together, and I was fascinated with the pattern of activities we shared. Could this be a clue to how imagery works in the psyche?

IMAGERY AND CHANGE
My fugue on imagery reached a crescendo in Virginia Hamilton’s workshop, “Visual Thinking Tools for Change Management,” where I volunteered to record. This would be the fourth session at IFVP exploring how to dig into our deep imagery, what John called “original mind.”

Virginia has a consulting practice called Conversations Waiting to Happen and has been doing strategic planning and change for 20 years working with large systems. She has small groups at tables with the Center for Creative Leadership’s Visual Explorer cards. “Pack an image that represents change,” she invited the participants. Following this experiential warm up she gave examples of how she is using imagery like this to help people get past stuck places, express feelings, and connect with imagery at the core of their visions.

She drew from Kenneth Bouldings classic “The Image” for her “technology.” Boulding asserts that people operation out of images, that images govern behavior, that messages from our environment shape these images, that these images then hold our value. They can change and when they do our behavior changes.

I’ve always used the word image to refer to the rich, multi-sensory memories our brains produce. They often have visual elements, but can be feelings images, and movement images. The more common use of the term is for any visual picture. But I was interested in how Virginia was going for the deeper idea – that somehow we hold our sense of wholeness is compact, powerful “images” and that playing with photographic images and metaphor we can access that.

I won’t replay her whole lecture. Here is my recording of the first part that was Virginia's setup.

CHICAGO AS IMAGE
Following the conference Susan and I steeped our selves in Chicago and our own memories and images. This is another story… but one that was fueled by paying attention to the images that are at the core of my own life!

Comments

[Nancy White]

David, thanks for sharing these stories. I am so sorry I was unable to go this year (could not pass up a trip to New Zealand, no matter how much I love y'all!)

Nancy

[Pat Tuecke]

David,

I happened across your blog as it came up in my Goggle Alert on "Group Facilitation" I get a weekly alert with articles and comments that include "group facilitation'.

You may remember we've met and conversed at different conferences, beginning in San Fransico in the early 90', & IAF conferences.

I want to mention three things that I read on your blog that delighted me.

The first thing was your account of going back to Chicago and remembering your experience during the Dem. convention. I was in the Park that night, too. Similar to you, I wasn't there to acrively protest. I was at a summer program with an organization (a pre-coursor to the ICA) doing community development on the Westside of Chicago. A group of us went downtown just to see what was happening, As we pushed our way toward the front of the large group to better see what was going on, we got caught up in the crush. As the police moved in, we, too, moved out as best we could. I still got a bit of tear gas.

The 2nd thing I noticed on your blog was a link to my dear friends and colleagus in Toronto, the ICA Associates. I have worked with them often.

the 3rd thing was your writing about the session at your conference that Virginia Hamilton led. You said she "She drew from Kenneth Bouldings classic “The Image” for her “technology.” Boulding asserts that people operation out of images, that images govern behavior, that messages from our environment shape these images, that these images then hold our value. They can change and when they do our behavior changes." Boulding's Image has been foundational to the work of the ICA for 30 years. The "Technology of Participation - ToP" methods grew out of our study & understanding of Boulding's work.

The ICA developed a program, Imaignal Education, based on his insights that I've done with teachers, using his insights. I tell teachers that you can't change anaother person, but you can create the teaching/learning environment that is filled with message, that give a person the opprotunity to change. Actually, Everything that the ICA does is informed by those concepts that you metioned. In fact, it was a key learning for me and has informed the teaching, training and facilitation work I do.

I want to connect with Virginia. Her name sounds famimliar to me.

So thanks for sharing your journey.

Pat