I’ve seen John Ward do his magic with models and clay but this year at VizThink in San Jose the core message really sank in. It had to do with the way our body uses imagery in its core processing. It’s an understanding that is at the heart of why graphic facilitation works and how to deepen its impact.

From years of model making and designing with wood and structures, John has found that the act of just playing with materials brings up levels of awareness beyond the edges of our conscious minds. His process keeps people in this “embodied state” as long as possible and then releases into making sense out of it all with our more abstract minds.

Nick Payne, a budding facilitator from England, created a chart that popped the key message for me.

 

“Debrief the IMAGE before the IDEA,” he wrote. I immediately thought of the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s assertion in his Poetics of Space that the root of all our understanding of language is our original experience. The first time under water gives meaning to the word “submerge.” The first time in a dark closet gives meaning to the word “enclosed.” And I thought of George Lakoff’s more recent work on metaphor and meaning. I remember a lecture he gave at Stacy’s Book Store in Berkeley (now closed unfortunately) saying that as a cognitive scientist he used to think that with powerful enough computers they could characterize grammar and build translators. But he and others found, instead, that at the root of all human meaning is our unique experience, not grammar, and that is indelibly idiosyncratic and personal. And of course I thought of my teacher Arthur M. Young and his Theory of Process, insisting that purpose and feeling come before thinking, and provide the substance that thought uses.

So perhaps this is why groups that collage get so involved, and why last year’s International Forum of Visual Practitioners conference had three session using photographic imagery and cards. This may be why giving people the markers and paper and standing back is so powerful. It all taps into our deeper visual thinking, our every present but not always appreciated right brain and limbic system for which imagery is its native language.

What stood out for me about John’s evening session was how absorbed everyone was, and how hard it was to quit, even though people were exhausted from a full day of conferencing. I remembered when John took nine of us at The Grove through a process of using clay modeling to determine our values as a company. It evoked so much material it took hours to talk it all through.