New Year, New Applications
A new year is here, and with it comes new goals and challenges for businesses. Said businesses, now and in the weeks to come, are hosting one of the most crucial meetings of the year – their strategic planning sessions, sales kick off meetings, and department or company-wide meetings – to set the stage for the year ahead. These meetings, as you know, bring individuals together to motivate, set tactics, and provide teams with the information, tools, and inspiration they need to be successful.
In high-impact meetings, graphic facilitation is a game changer. Graphic facilitation combines live visual capture with guided meeting facilitation to promote clarity, build engagement, and create alignment. Starting your year off by partnering with an expert in graphic facilitation (like us) is a surefire way to ensure your meeting results in not only an impactful outcome but leaves your team with the momentum they need to succeed in the new year. Read on to learn how graphic facilitation can transform your first meetings into your best meetings.
The Role of Graphic Facilitation in High-Impact Meetings
For strategy sessions, sales kick offs (SKOs) and company-wide meetings to result in success, it’s essential that clear understanding and total alignment are reached within a session.
Here’s how graphic facilitation guides successful outcomes in high-impact sessions:
1. Strategy Sessions
Setting strategic priorities isn’t always a walk in the park. In strategic sessions, participants can often have different ideas about the direction, purpose, or action items of their team – which can result in misalignment. Worse, once set, they can leave a session with a vague understanding that stalls momentum and ultimately results in confusion.
Working with a graphic facilitator while setting strategy is highly beneficial to teams and organizations alike. Through guiding meeting discussions and activities, a graphic facilitator has the ability to not only uncover goals and strategic objectives, but they help visually map them. When these vital components are visualized, teams see connections in real-time, and more importantly, where they fit into the bigger picture. As a result, graphic facilitation creates shared understanding that aligns teams in strategic sessions, empowering them to move forward with confidence.
2. SKOs
SKOs are crucial to the success of any sales team. Designed to motivate, inspire, and equip participants with the tools they need to succeed in the year ahead – a successful SKO can be the difference between record-breaking sales or an outright bust. SKOs typically consist of information and data-dense presentations that participants must absorb in a short time span. For even your most engaged audience, this can be an overwhelming task. That’s why graphic facilitation is particularly effective in this scenario.
Companies that host SKOs and partner with a graphic facilitator turn an information-heavy session into an energizing, dynamic, and truly memorable engagement. A graphic facilitator ensures that all ground is covered, guiding sales teams through complex topics to ensure understanding. Better yet? Graphic facilitators then distill complex ideas and key messages into visual assets that stick. As a result, your sales team leaves with an actionable roadmap that acts as a north star, guiding their efforts over the year.
3. Company-Wide Meetings
Large, all-hands meetings often run into similar challenges: they don’t feel personal or impactful, especially for remote or hybrid teams. Often times, employees gawk at the company-wide meeting invite because they routinely turn into a one-way lecture from leadership to employees, or teams quickly get stuck in the weeds during them.
Whether its illustrating company values, celebrating team wins, or addressing upcoming challenges, visuals can create a sense of connection across departments and locations. It’s more than just alignment – it’s about fostering a shared vision that propels the company forward.
Key Benefits of Graphic Facilitation in Your Most Important Meeting of the Year
When it comes to high-stakes meetings – the ones you’ve spent countless hours planning, gathering key stakeholders, and securing resources for – graphic facilitation is the key to achieving crucial meeting objectives. By combining creativity with structure, it ensures your team leaves the session as an inspired and unified group, with clarity on what to do next.
Here’s how graphic facilitation makes a difference where it matters:
- Graphic facilitation boosts engagement. Visuals not only bring energy to a session, but keep individuals involved and invested in the discussion.
- Graphic facilitation turns complexity into concrete goals. Graphic facilitation takes the mud out of intricate plans and competing priorities, distilling them into clarified, understood, actionable visuals.
- Working with a graphic facilitator drives action. Final visual assets from a graphic facilitated session become more than a memento – they’re strategic assets that remind teams of key decisions and motivate follow-through long after the meeting.
- Graphic facilitation is inclusive and encourages participation. By capturing contributions visually, graphic facilitation creates an environment where every voice is seen, heard, and valued.
- One session with a graphic facilitator has the power to spark lasting inspiration. Visuals spark excitement and ownership around company priorities, enabling them to leave a session aligned and excited to tackle the challenges ahead.
All in all, graphic facilitation transforms high-impact meetings like SKOs, all hands, and strategic sessions into collaborative, productive sessions that align efforts and result in long-term success. By leveraging graphic facilitation, you ensure that your team leaves the room with clarity, motivation, and a clear path forward.
Tips for Integrating Graphic Facilitation
At ImageThink, we understand that some meetings some meetings might not warrant the cost or experience of graphic facilitation. Yet, we strongly believe that thinking and working visually always adds value. Incorporating visual tools, templates, or creative exercises can be a low lift way to introduce visual work or add impact to your meetings.
For SKOs, company-wide all hands, strategic planning sessions, and other engagements where graphic facilitation is best suited, it’s best to start early. Once the details are sorted for a meeting, ask facilitators questions to determine if they are a good fit for your goals. After selecting a graphic facilitator, collaborate with them to align on meeting objectives, design an agenda and activities, and ensure the session is tailored to your team’s needs.
A skilled graphic facilitator can help set meeting expectations by administering templates or activities prior to a group engagement. As a session unfolds, make your graphic facilitator aware of priority shifts, so they can quickly pivot to address and capture new focus areas, ensure alignment with evolving objectives, and maintain the momentum of the discussion.
Finally, be sure to ask your facilitator how to leverage your visual assets after your engagement to reinforce key messages and support follow-through of action items. Sharing these visuals with participants ensures they act as evergreen resources, inspiring action and maintaining alignment long after the session concludes.
Start the Year with Clarity and Action
Graphic facilitation is a powerful way to make strategy sessions, SKOs, and company-wide meetings more engaging, focused, and impactful. By partnering with a graphic facilitator, you’ll ensure your team leaves motivated, aligned on action items, and equipped with clear visual roadmaps to drive their efforts forward.
If you’re ready to start your year with energy, clarity, and action, get in touch with ImageThink today to learn more about graphic facilitation and how you can incorporate it into your next high-impact session.
