Many of us have used some variation of capturing meeting/brainstorming content with a large pad or whiteboard. At the MX Conference this week a team from Adaptive Path worked diligently behind the scenes capturing the content from the various presentations through graphic recording and reflected it back to us via boards like above (thank you for doing that!). You can see all of them here on Flickr. I am pleased to say that these boards map mostly well to my notes, but I prefer the boards created by the Adaptive Path team. They seem more complete and my notes are sometimes too linear. The above board is essentially an overview of all the main points discussed in an effort to address four key challenges facing us as we embrace the emerging discipline of managing experience through creative leadership:
- How do we lead in a changing environment?
- How do we sell experience design to our organizations?
- How do we balance our new jobs with our old responsibilities?
- How do we keep what doing what we have to and still do what we must do?
Over the course of the conference there were some excellent and successful attempts to provide answers and directions to these challenges. I still think that the best line came from Cordell Ratzlaff of Oracle when he said “Sometimes you have to kick some ass.” There was the well known story of Steve Jobs making an example of an executive at Apple who clearly leaked sensitive product information, and whose ass Steve figuratively kicked.
Conference content aside, the results of the graphic recording really have me thinking, and also rethinking how I capture information during meetings and work sessions. There is a visual mapping of information here that is incredibly efficient and useful, and ultimately creates a more complete picture than the note taking technique I have employed essentially since school. This begs the question… really, how often do we investigate our practices in business? How often do we really look for better ways to do things? Ideally, this is all of the time but I suspect we are all guilty at some level of getting stuck in the protocol of habit. I think sometimes you have to smash the system, sometimes you need to throw some stuff out. Sometimes you need to kick some ass.
I encourage you to check out the graphic recordings for each of the presenters. There are valuable ideas and practices there.