Use Graphic Recording To Make Your Meeting Worth It

If you’ve got a meeting coming up you may be considering using graphic recording to add more engagement. In this post, I’d like to highlight some reasons why investing in a graphic recorder for your meeting is worth it. There are three things that I think graphic recording helps you do. They are:

1. Simplify Complex Information
2. Make Understanding and Comprehension Easier, and
3. Make Ideas and Insights Memorable

Below, I’ll go into how each of these benefits leads to a higher level, more valuable benefit for your meeting or event. I aim to get you to think about how  you can leverage these benefits further.

Graphic Recording Helps Simplify Complex Information

Let’s begin by thinking of presentations and discussions like jokes- you need a setup in order to have the punchline make sense. But in the end, it’s the punchlines that create impact. That makes them slightly more important than the set-up.

In a similar way, a presenter’s or group’s insights are more important for creating change and inspiring action than the supporting information used to get to those insights. The job of the graphic recorder is to listen for and record those insights. Along with that, it’s also to illustrate the connection between those insights so that larger themes can be discovered more easily.

These insights and the narrative they create are like the best scenes of your favorite movie. They are the important parts of the movie because they connect and engage you. And the graphic recorder’s job is to help get the audience focused on what’s important. This keeps them engaged.

The higher level benefit of simplifying complex information is that it allows you to focus on what’s important.

Graphic Recording Makes Understanding And Comprehension Easier

Imagine a classroom where there are two focuses.

In one, the teacher relays information to you in a rote manner and you simply take down the information. In another, a teacher pauses to ask you apply the information shared and you engage with the information.

Which classroom will the deeper learning be more likely to take place?

The second one.

When you are taking in information from a speaker or conversation, it takes a lot of energy remember it. Hiring a graphic recorder helps  the people in the room be as present as possible. Your attendees benefit from being able to focus on creating and evoking their best thinking in the moment. The graphic recorder is focused on recording the main points and this eliminates clutter for everyone.

It becomes easier to understand because:

1)The attendees cognitive load is lessened when not trying to do two things at once, and

2)The attendees can focus on ‘crunching’ only what is essential.

This helps them connect to the main ideas being shared and frees them to decide what to do with those ideas. If they aren’t free, they may instead be wrestling with insignificant details.

The higher level benefit of making understanding easier is it gives attendees the freedom to engage, think creatively, and make better decisions.

Graphic Recording Can Help Make Ideas More Memorable

Imagine that it’s your birthday and you get a handwritten note in the mail. It simply says ‘Happy Birthday! Enjoy it!’. That’s memorable. But then imagine getting a handwritten note with the same message but there’s a hand-drawn portrait of you opening presents. That’s more memorable because it’s fun and a unique gesture of visual storytelling! But why does it stick? The simple answer is that more of your brain is activated. The Transitional Learning Center states: “We tend to store verbal memories from the information that we heard in the left side of the brain.  We tend to store visual memories from the information that we saw in the right side of the brain..One way that we can help our memory is by using both sides of our brain during memory tasks.” When your attendees are hearing information and a graphic recorder is drawing it out at the same time, they are engaged in a whole-brain, memorable way. Plus, the unique creativity the graphic recorder brings can only strengthen the memorability. We can go deeper to understand more. Let’s go back to the birthday note with your portrait on it. You may write a thank you card to the first sender for their thoughtfulness but you would probably gush more appreciation to the second. Why? It’s because of something called mirror neurons. What exactly are they? In an article by the The American Psychological Association (APA), it states: “Mirror neurons are a type of brain cell that respond equally when we perform an action and when we witness someone else perform the same action.” This even applies to the act of VISUALIZING the action. That means that even if you weren’t there when the person created the card and portrait for you, you’d still understand what action had to be taken via your imagination. You empathize because you can imagine yourself putting the effort into that creation and you’d like to return the favor. The research also states that if this can apply to feelings too. When your attendees see a graphic recorder drawing a happy face, mirror neurons allow the viewer to empathize with the image. This can conjure the same emotion (at least to a degree) in the viewer. It’s these emotions that can impact how the people in the room feel in a positive way. The graphic recorder has the power to inspire emotions via visual storytelling and this strengthens the connection to the content shared and promotes creative engagement. Lastly, consider the simple idea of reciprocity. When you bring a graphic recorder into your meeting or event space, it is clear that a big extra effort has been taken to engage the attendees. In turn, they are more likely to return on your investment because you’re making an effort to engage them in a fun, yet effective way. To recap, by using graphic recording your attendee’s whole brain is used and engaged, emotion is created, reciprocity is triggered , and action is more likely to be inspired.

The higher level benefit of more memorable insights is that it can increase creativity, motivation, and ideally, action.

After The Meeting: Using Graphic Recording To Bring It All Home

The higher level benefit of graphic recording is that it provides a meta-frame for what are probably the main goals for meetings in the first place. Those goals are too:

1. Focus on What’s Important
2. Engage, Think Creatively, and Make Better Decisions
3. Increase Creativity, Motivation and Action

The reason why meetings can get a bad wrap when it comes to being productive is that they have a reputation for being time-wasters. Ideally, the meeting will help you form an intermittent map or vision of next steps to be taken outside of the meeting space.

How can you use graphic recording to support the action that needs to take place after a meeting happens?

Since graphic recording provides the above 3 benefits, the goal can turn to keeping those 3 benefits alive after the meeting is over. You can use the meeting experience plus graphic recording as a step and experiment toward figuring out how to get people to engage with the process of taking action and creating results.

For example, a graphic recording is more of a ‘right brained’ artifact. It may inject inspiration into a left-brained system you already use, such as SMART goals. You might frame parts of the graphic and put it on the desk of the person who owns the goal or action and then reward them at the end.

A graphic recording invites you to connect something fun and engaging to something necessary and productive.

Or you may not have a system and it could be a great way to attempt to engage the people you work with in a new productivity process. Your part will be how you frame the path that the action and the person taking the action must take.

Will you offer them rewards? Will you negotiate an agreement? Who will you give ownership too? What kind of accountability will you have and will the person taking the action get to choose it? What’s worked before? And what hasn’t worked?

The graphic is an inviting and engaging reflection of what happened in the meeting space on that one particular day. And once you have that, you get to bring that reflection to reality. The visual guide of the graphic recording, just like a map, will prove it’s worth as you maneuver to achieve your goals.

If you’d like to talk with me about how to use graphic recording to get the most value out of  your upcoming meeting or event, you can contact me here. Thanks for reading, Nick Navatta