Nineteen80 is a management consultancy and creative agency focused on transitions. As a Xennial, I was born in an analog world, and came of age in a digital world. As the world transitions from command and control to distributed teams, analog to digital, concentrated power and wealth to distributed knowledge of the crowd, Nineteen80 seeks to bring the best of both worlds together to create something better.
I've been following Tim on Twitter for quite some time and we finally got a chance to talk in person.
Bio About The Guest
Tim has worked for over 21 years in visual communication and strategy. He lives to bring art to life and create experiences that allow people to change and see things anew. Tim is committed to telling compelling stories, going to unexplored places, and finding and amplifying what's most excellent.
Episode Summary
In this episode, Tim and I spoke about...
Resources
Connect With Tim May
Connect With Daniel Hoang
Date recorded August 13th, 2020
Music from https://artlist.io/.
This podcast was edited by Naya Moss and Namos Studio.
Nineteen80 is a management consultancy and creative agency focused on transitions. As a Xennial, I was born in an analog world, and came of age in a digital world. As the world transitions from command and control to distributed teams, analog to digital, concentrated power and wealth to distributed knowledge of the crowd, Nineteen80 seeks to bring the best of both worlds together to create something better.
I've been following Tim on Twitter for quite some time and we finally got a chance to talk in person.
Bio About The Guest
Tim has worked for over 21 years in visual communication and strategy. He lives to bring art to life and create experiences that allow people to change and see things anew. Tim is committed to telling compelling stories, going to unexplored places, and finding and amplifying what's most excellent.
Episode Summary
In this episode, Tim and I spoke about...
Resources
Connect With Tim May
Connect With Daniel Hoang
Date recorded August 13th, 2020
Music from https://artlist.io/.
This podcast was edited by Naya Moss and Namos Studio.
Daniel Hoang: [00:00:00] In this episode of Season 2, 1980 podcasts, I'm talking to Tim may. He's a creative director at a company called XPLANE. I've been a big supporter and follower of XPLANE back when Dave gray was the CEO and it was just a company that really shaped how I thought about change management, because they did in a visual way, they use graphics, they use culture, various different tools to communicate.
And that's really what I'm all about. And so I'm a big fan of XPLANE and I've been following Tim on Twitter for quite a while as a creative director. And we've never actually met in person. We had one phone call earlier this year, and as I was putting together at season two, I decided to reach out to him because I think I needed Tim that fill in the final gap that I'd had.
Because I needed someone that was a leader and a creative director in this specific niche. And so I think Tim's gonna round out this whole crew. It's an amazing group of people and I'm really excited to let's get to it.
Hi everyone today, I'm talking to Tim May. He's the creative director at XPLANE is a change management company based out of Portland. And I've been a big fan of them back when Dave Gray was leading it, they are innovative in the visual design space and they help create change culture, all kinds of different, really amazing things.
And they do it in a visual way. And then Tim and I connected on Twitter, several years ago and we've stayed connected. And we connected earlier this year as I launched this business. And it was really cool to kind of reach out to him again and say, Hey, let's hop on the podcast. Let's talk a little bit about how XPLANE does it.
And specifically from a creative perspective, as a great of director of how he does it, and we're going to learn a lot of cool tips, tricks, and techniques learn about the visual thinking school and a lot of approaches that Tim takes into leading change. Because earlier we heard from Pam, a bestselling author about communications and making sure messages land.
This is coming from a culture perspective coming from a visual design perspective. And it's just yet one more perspective to add to our toolbox as we make transitions to change. So let's get to it.
Alright. Hey, welcome back today. I have an incredible guest. Tim may. He's the creative director at XPLANE. It's an incredible firm in Portland, Oregon, but they are a global reach. I have been a big fan. It is actually, Tim may or may not know this, but X plane has been the guiding principle for my own personal business.
And how I've always wanted all my business to be. I just never had a chance to work at XPLANE specifically, but I really liked just the way they see the world, how they treat change and how they treat visual thinking. And in fact, my Genesis individual's thinking started with Dave Gray and I think he was the founder of XPLANE back in the day.
And later on in the season, I have an interview with Sunni Brown as well, who also was a big influence on me as well. So Tim, welcome to the show.
Tim May: [00:03:06] Thank you so much, and really appreciate that. And I've been working at XPLANE since 2008. so it's quite a long time to have a single job. but I also, I'm kind of a convert, too visual thinking, via Dave Gray's eXPLANE in the sense that, yeah, it's the reason I still work there.
I love what I do there. There's really, I worked that way. When I'm not working for eXPLANE now that, but being able to integrate visual thinking into my life and the work that I do is just, it sort of becomes a pardon me.
Daniel Hoang: [00:03:40] So you're in where you do, you were influenced by Dave Gray in the space, right?
Tim May: [00:03:45] Yeah. Oh, definitely. Well, he's still a part of the company and, you know, he founded eXPLANE in 1993, and he actually has Seattle roots. I don't know if you know, but he was at the Seattle Intelligencer. He did infographics, and design. And that was where he kind of gained his, passion for, you know, as he was looking at the newspaper, he'd see the business section with all the numbers and everything.
And he was like, What does this mean? This looks like the operating system in the world and I don't get it. and he wanted to make that clearer to people. So part of the Genesis of eXPLANE was that, you know, being able to kind of see the value of information graphics, but also trying, wanting to eXPLANE things that skinned hidden to people. So that they'd be clear.
Daniel Hoang: [00:04:25] Right. Exposure to Dave was, I think he did a white board. fireside chats back in the day. And he would just kind of doodle on his little tablet. I guess the one that this was before tablets were even invented. but he was writing on the white board talking about things, eXPLANEing things.
And I was like, this stuff's fascinating. And I was like, okay, I think this way, how do I become more like this guy in the last season, I interviewed Leela fever from common craft who does the little paper cuddle explaining our videos and. Both you guys and him, like this, were leading edge at the end of the day, right?
I mean, this is before infographics were around before all this stuff we see today and we take for granted, it was carved out back in the day. And incredible. I'd like to hear more about your history. How did you come to be, how'd you fall into XPLANE and what's your background?
Tim May: [00:05:07] Yeah. I started out as kind of, you know, a riddle and child of the eighties.
I was not very good at concentrating on anything but drawing. Like I can draw all day, but, you know, my math teachers told me I'd make a great artist. But don't go into math. so when I graduated with a degree in drawing and painting, thinking that I might be a studio artist, like that was the direction I thought my career would go.
and the kind of first little career crisis I had was, it was really lonely and I really liked people. And, so it was less, I mean, I was kinda okay with being a starving artist, but at the same time, I wasn't okay with being alone all the time. so kind of, I'm a natural curiosity for people and how they work.
drove me to more commercial art jobs. And I had some weird jobs coming out of school, but, I, we settled in Boston and, there, I began with a company in '99 where, It was, kind of web 1.0, right. That they, that it was building things that were somewhat interactive. There's a lot of visuals to them.
I was kind of a illustrator designer, and really enjoyed that. And then I worked for a group at Hewlett Packard that had a really interesting mandate. They were a group that was literally in a garage where they would wash down their company cars. and it was trying to recapture the spirit of the garage at Hewlett Packard, where.
They wanted to innovate. And this innovation team was very much about, trying to find technologies that were being developed at Hewlett Packard and spinning them out as organizations. So this was kind of an icebreaker, innovation lab. And in that, sort of. Broadened my world to understand like what consulting is and how you actually take ideas and make them viable and get them out into a marketplace.
So that was a pretty cool introduction to that way of thinking. and I worked at Hewlett Packard for about four years. And in between that time, I moved from Boston to the Northwest, and worked out of the Vancouver Washington, office that Hewlett Packard had a big plant there where they used to make printers.
and then. After a little bit of time there, I worked with some design agencies in Portland and some marketing agencies where I kind of missed the sexy side of it. Like I wanted to do more. You know, when you're in a large organization, sometimes you don't have a lot of reach in the work that you can do and you don't have a lot of creativity.
and so working for four there's a company in. Portland, a firm called curiosity. That was really fun. and we had some really interesting projects run through there. but then when the opportunity came to work at eXPLANE, I think the thing that really intrigued me from the start was XPLANE.
Design in a very different way. my, both my parents are, professors. And so I've always loved, you know, sort of education, my wife, professor as well. So it's kind of in the blood, like, like I'm the black sheep, not, you know, teaching at a university somewhere, but I love the idea. That by using visuals, you can help people change behavior in ways that you can't otherwise.
the, and all of us have been through so many bad PowerPoints, that we just, there's a real value in sort of the social side of using art to help people change the way that you use the design. and by walking through the image with a person. You're able to get them so much further than your bullet points or, you know, sort of like the other means that often people will think about change.
Daniel Hoang: [00:08:30] my first exposure to the professional world I came in and everything was on spreadsheets and PowerPoint. And, you know, just bullet point after bullet point. And I just don't think that way, that's not how my brain works. And for me, English is a second language. So even then, like I had a, that the barrier of the English language in itself and we weren't explaining things very well in written form.
And early in my career, I came across Dave and Sonny Brown and number of people that were into kind of this visual thinking. I said, Hey, what if I just kind of took images and kind of create the images to eXPLANE all this technical stuff. And I created a very rudimentary version of an infographic and it just caught fire.
Right? So the clients we were working with all of a sudden they're like, can I just want that one pager, give me that image and that's good. I don't need the rest of the report. Right. Cause that's what I really need. I need to build to my constituents. And so I found the power of visual thinking.
and I think one of the premises of this show in 1980 is I'm also a child of the eighties. I grew up in an analog world. Right. I drew on paper. We did stuff with phone books. This was before the internet, but then it came of age during a digital world. I saw the power of digital. So you and I were chatting over zoom on.
On the internet. So digital has such powerful things, but I think the combination of those two spaces, and you talked about visual thinking, so this is where I want to go next. And the visual thinking is I do a lot of prototyping. I do a lot of writing and on paper versus digital, I have all the tools to do it digitally, but I still prefer to on paper.
And so I want to kind of understand your philosophy a little bit. You do teach a program or a course called visual thinking school, and it's actually coming up very soon. Tell us, tell the audience what that is about.
Tim May: [00:10:01] Yeah. so we've kind of rebranded those as visual thinking bootcamps, in this sense that we were trying to accomplish quite a bit in a short amount of the time.
And, it's one of the, my favorite things that I've ever done in my career. I really enjoyed it, being able to help people. that there's a certain point, right? There's a little threshold where once people start to see it work then, and they see that the thing that they built started a conversation and kind of got a fire going for somebody else.
Like it is, you know, the sort of way of you feeling like you've discovered fire. So yeah, we're actually have, a couple of courses that we've built out as a part of this. There's a one Oh one and a two Oh one. Both of them are about a total of eight. To 10 hours of content that are broken up over a couple of weeks for an online teaching environment now, you know, being the drawing and painting materials, you know, I love getting my hands messy and working with markers and paper I think is a.
It's a better way to connect with humans and humans to kind of come together than online. the level of engagement is just hard, right? That we have screens, not imagine Daniel, you've got your zoom window, but you probably have five or six other windows open that might be calling for your attention.
And we can get people in a room with markers posted on some large sheets of paper, that there's really a different kind of, Mechanic. Not mechanic, but it's a dynamic there, it happens where people are, are understanding each other in ways that are not political, that are not based on sort of agendas, but just by getting your ideas out of your head, up onto the walls and being able to evaluate them.
Not without ego. you're able to much more quickly come to alignment, right? th it seems like more than anything else. When there's a team that's going to work on a challenge and they work visually to be able to tackle the challenge. All of a sudden that sort of collaboration, visual collaboration is the least.
Guarded form of collaboration in my view, right. That we love to fight over words, right? That's the wrong word that you chose for that thing. but for some reason we images make us come together. Like we don't fight so much over the bad picture that we just drew. and I think that the other thing is people's level of discomfort, withdrawing.
A lot of people who don't draw regularly, they say, you know, the things I hear most often, I only draw stick figures. and I'm terrible at drawing. and I think that, by letting go of those fears and embracing your inner four year old and just putting the marker to paper and drawing something.
Also gets rid of some of your biases and some of your, the kind of preconceived things that work their way, the ticks that work your way into your writing and everything else. you're kind of able to evaluate things a very different way. so the boot camps are, they kind of go through.
The foundational blocks of first understanding that visual thinking is a language in the same way that music is a language programming has languages. When you reach a level of proficiency with that language, you can write your own work in that language. So that, as you said, start with any language, right?
you start with the alphabet and Dave gray has talked. You might've talked to other guests about having a visual alphabet. There are 12 characters that Dave Gray has identified that are kind of key to building everything else. and if you think about the way people learn, and you have a, you know, as you speak English as a second language, right, you start with the alphabet and then you start to understand, like, what are the nouns?
What are, how do I put those together with verbs and other types of speech? In order to make a coherent sentence, and envisioning a well thinking language, you take these basic shapes, how do you combine them in ways to make coherent objects that people can understand? and then as you start to build your vocabulary and your understanding of the language, you're able to start to tell.
Stories right. Then now you can put a few words together and you can make those words make sense. And you're able to create images and vignettes that are compelling. so we try to start with that sort of basic version of it, language and move all the way up, being able to tell stories. and then from your ability to tell stories, visually that sort of fits into.
Frameworks that we would consider are more or less the kind of grammar and scaffolding for how you start to tell really complex visual stories. So any information graphic that. Well, let me say this in the last 10 years, information fixed have become very popular and there are lots of them that are kind of, of about fonts and informatics and showing pie charts and that kind of thing.
and that's great. I love that people have embraced the, you know, the it's not just the niche thing that it used to be. At the same time, the work that eXPLANEed does is much more about. Getting an actual response, making something happen as a result of the work that we've put together than just informing people about this infographic on this topic.
so when we engage with our consulting clients, a lot of times the graphic that we build together is an artifact that is. Part of a larger change program, but there are so many other elements that are part of that change that we're trying to make happen, that the, that clients want to be more customer centric and the in creating a culture of customer centricity inside an organization, the graphics that we build reflect, people's thinking of, you know, that they're a great way of being able to catch that vision of the thing we want to create.
What does that look like? really great for capturing. The customer journey of the future, right. That we want to see how our customers are working together. and so putting those things together, you know, being able to visualize that is by far the easiest way to communicate it and get people to buy in.
So all of these are things that are part of this, visual thinking bootcamp that we'll talk about. How about customer journeys? We talk about frameworks, we talk about empathy mapping and some of these other things that are part of what XPLANE is contributed to sort of. So the world's visual thinking lexicon
Daniel Hoang: [00:16:15] And it's a journey. It's not like a boot camp. You take boot camp and you're done. It's an ongoing journey. And what I discovered is, when you talk about visual alphabet for adult learners, you don't just go in and all of a sudden you're an expert in this space, you are learning the basic building blocks. So it's the equivalent.
My five-year-old right now learning basic words. He's going to have to go on a journey. It's not gonna go out and write a Shakespeare play overnight. Right. And it's going to take a lot of time. And I love that you're putting these building blocks together and it started going on this journey. What I've noticed a trend is with you, Sonny Brown number of others, as they've progressed in this journey, things get really almost to a level of spiritual philosophy, right?
And so this practice, it's no longer you no longer doing Pictionary. You're not playing a little game and it's, this is a cute little thing. It gets to a point where the practice becomes really deep. I find that you're connecting to people at a completely different level, right? We're starting to connect individuals, organizations, and we're shifting, we're moving ties, we're changing things.
And it's not just more of a mechanical practice. I'm trying to understand this a little bit more because I'm trying to figure out myself cause I'm getting close to that point in my personal journey. But I'm also seeing my heroes yourself, Sunni Brown, Dave Gray. Once you get to this super expert level, you start becoming like this philosopher, let's a spiritual guide.
It's just a whole different level.
Tim May: [00:17:30] Yeah. You know, it's really interesting. And you're right. I think that there's so much of what. Has come about in the visual thinking space is an, is that empathy side, right? The more we're able to empathize with people and the more we're able to connect with them there really is that the thing that I mentioned about being in person that is hard to replicate over zoom is there is an energy that people have, right?
the sort of, you know, that I'm not going to get. Way out there, but the idea that the sort of the energy field that people create, right. But there, and that leaders inside of organizations are always dealing with, the kind of context in which their employees understand the organization.
and so there is this sort of. I mean, it's not religion, but culture is close, right? that a culture inside an organization. Well, I've got a friend and, who was, one of the design directors for Jordan brand. Right. And you think about what an iconic brand that is. And you think about the anthropology of that brand, where we're, when you're understanding Jordan and the brand, right.
that she. Created you have to understand the Michael Jordan was in the, that there are these legends that are a part of that are the archetypical moments that you need to know. You need to know about the game in Utah, where Jordan was sick, but skill still dropped, I think 34-40 points and managed to win this playoff game. And sort of, you know, the game six. You know, like rise up, hit the game. And what, you know, there are these moments that are key to understanding that person. And I think that really maps to the work that we do inside of organizations that as we work inside of organizations, it's really important for us to understand the context that we're in when we're working in and knowing sort of the energies and the anthropologies that are key to understanding how that organization would work.
So I do think that as you kind of. Move along. I think, you know, I think Dave Gray and Sonny Brown are both fly. Like just amazing in the sense that you look at Dave Gray's liminal thinking work. Right. And it's still very much about, it's a visual explanation of the way. People come at each other and are able to kind of get outside of their bubbles.
Right. Well, I like being able to get outside and pull, you know, the whole hold your beliefs loosely so that you're able to fully understand, and always be on that path of learning and growing and understanding. So, it is interesting that some of it has gone that direction.
Right.
Daniel Hoang: [00:20:04] I don't think you're that far out, because if you think about Jordan, right. And when I put on my Jordan's actually jumped two feet higher. It just simply by wearing it. but energy level, right? Let's take sports in that locker room. When the guys are together, getting ready to go out, play the game.
There's an energy level. That's there. Any of us it's played sports. We know we're about to compete. There's just a strong energy. And when the energy goes away, we don't compete very well. Right. We lose the game. We're just not really into it. And so there is a magical mystical thing, but it is that stuff should also exist within the core environment, the work that we're doing.
Right. And I think sometimes we disconnect the two ways, well, athletes can have it as a raw, but work has to be boring and work has to be dull, dry in it, but that's not true. And I think this is where in order to affect change in order for us to move the work forward, we gotta, we'll continually be thinking about the energy.
Now I want to pull this conversation back a little bit, to be a more accessible to the average audience here. And I know we can talk about mural. We can talk about some of the online virtual experiences. And everyone's talking about that now. I want to go back to the analog piece of it because you and I'm looking at a screen and my screen is air quote, bigger, 15 inches, screen and are my phones four or five inches.
We're always staring at this little tiny box and you're tiny. Right. And then this little box, and I'm looking at it right now, but in real life, or we have big presences, right? we can move things around. We can be energetic. I want to paint a picture on what an experience looks like in the, I've done a lot of this work as well.
When you're talking about large scale, we're talking about large sheets of paper, four by eight on the walls covering the entire walls with paper. And so what we're doing is we're changing our field of view, right? So our field of view right now on this screen is a little tiny. Hosted champs, his eyes, you know, picked her up something that's happening.
But when we expand to an entire room, let's paint the picture of the audience. What does this experience look like? When we do visual work with paper markers, pens, what does that look like?
Tim May: [00:21:57] Yeah, I, that's a great thought. And I think that there's always, whenever we're working with clients, one of the things that we make sure we're able to do is before we meet together in any room, we need to be able to case the joint and rearrange it so that it will work for a collaborative experience, right.
The light, like you have these. Corporates kind of like stereotypical go places that they've put together where there's the usual shape, right? The big U shape with the screen on one side, right. Those places have been built around them. Passive experience right. And they have been built so that one person presents and other people watch.
And by creating a space where we're using walls and sheets of paper on the walls and post it’s on the walls and markers, you are. Creating an engaging experience that requires engagement. so we ask a lot of our clients, we would be terrible. wouldn't be that terrible, but our work would be much less effective if clients said, come in and fix our stuff for us.
The, and B, because that would essentially cut them out of responsibility for its success. And where I feel like visual thinking is incredibly powerful is when we bring them into the process and they cocreate the solution with us, they're invested like they're bought in because they've, they remember they drew that one little picture that made it into the final piece that we put together.
So the way they eXPLANE generally works is we would, work with an organization and this is all we're were able to make this work online. And we found a lot of ways using technology to bridge that gap, but you just sort of paint the picture of what it was pre COVID. we would generally go. Work with them for a couple of days.
and often the first day and a half is just about getting the ideas out of their heads and up onto the walls. And then we'd usually take some time to refine what we've learned and quickly synthesize that into, and an image or two of what we think this is what we're trying to say. And then we throw some darts of that image.
Like it's, we're not precious about it, but being able to. To get their feedback on the work that we've put together. Usually that image becomes the cornerstone of what we end up building together. and in some cases, those images have literally become the wallpaper of the organizations that we've worked with, where they've put those things everywhere.
And in fact, one of the sad things that we did with an organization just right before COVID hit was we had this blueprint version of one of our. information graphics that they wanted, that they had printed large with, QR codes so that people could look and give feedback through the QR code.
and everyone in the company is they walk past these in all their corporate offices. So we're going to see them. And that was like, They went up a day before everyone was told to go home. So I think they're still there, but we're just not getting a lot right now.
Daniel Hoang: [00:25:02] Very sad. I have a similar story at a NGO, we were creating these beautiful murals on the wall where people can walk past and engage. And then all of a sudden, no, we're all home or we're not going to be in a state in indefinitely. And we don't know what the future exactly holds. And I want to get some guidance from you. And I want to share a little bit of my point of view as well. I think there's so much out there around future of work, what the future of work looks like, and we're going to be more distributed, less distributed.
But it's very tech centric, right? It's very technology centric. And especially as we're working remotely from home, what my biggest fear is working to over index on the technology side and forget the humanity piece of it. And as people I go back to work, they're coming back in the office, we're going to design walls where it's just plastered technology or there's a little AB you know, heat on, off that's right in the middle walls.
We can't hang anything in the wall. The whole purpose. If I were to give advice to anyone that's rethinking what your future office looks like. I think. Use the office, not as a technology center, but using office as a place. It's the campfire, it's the campfire where humans get together and do human things.
And then we go home and we do stuff virtually back and forth like you and I are doing right now, but the office, the only intent of ever getting people together so we can do human things. And so I would almost argue the office of the future has very little tech at all. It's a space where we can get in there, collaborate, touch, feel, play around with things, interact with things.
And then we come back. We do our work on a computer all day long. w what are your thoughts on that space?
Tim May: [00:26:25] Yeah, no, it's interesting. You say that because as I speak with you, I'm in my teenager's bedroom that has in front of me, four large screens, you know, and he's got a, you know, he's got a surface.
we've got it. The technology is moving to our homes. Right. And we need that to be able to work. with each other. And I think that's not going to go away necessarily, but I love the idea of, or office space being the place for the campfire, the place for the clubhouse, but really a place where humans can get together and work together in a human way.
I think that, and as you're saying, technology doesn't need to play a big role in that the more that you're able to work, Well, one of the things we like to call this sort of work out loud, right? The by working with post notes and sharpies and paper, you're able to better express, kind of what you're thinking.
and you're also able to, you're able to connect a little better. that's a, that's an interesting thought. And I do think that the. the future office, you know, I pray that it doesn't look like a cube farm, right? The future office really does need to be set up for collaboration and a space where it's going to be even more important because they're probably going to be fewer opportunities for humans connect, and having that physical space is still going to be key.
Daniel Hoang: [00:27:46] Now, let's learn a little bit about what we can do today, right? So that our listeners listening to this episode today, I think we are, you're likely sitting in front of a computer screen all day long. I think what you can do. And what I have over here with me is I have my Mike Rody Sketchnote idea book, right?
it's a paper notebook. I have sheets of paper floating out there, right? We're not shuffling paper now because we're doing a recording. You want only hear the scrunchies, but I think that one of the best things you can do if you're working at home now is to carve out time away from the screen. And I think that's why we're having zoom fatigue is for some reason, people feel compelled to sit in front of a zoom meeting for eight hours a day, carve out that time, do your work on paper, write actually build entire PowerPoint index just on paper before I even open up PowerPoint. And that way of working just gets you away from the screen, reconnect you the physical world.
And yeah, we are reconnected. MINDBODY is all connected. So I think the simplest thing you can do today is. Yeah, maybe get rid of your, to do list. That's digital, get rid of your digital, somebody at a digital tools that you're currently using and go to paper. And I think that simple shift is I reconnect you back with your humanity.
We connect you with your mind and your body, and it's going to change the way you work. And in fact, you should continue that even when we do go back to work. Right. And I think that practice has always been a part of me. Half my work always stays in an analog paper form and the other half is on digital.
Tim May: [00:29:05] Yeah. A part of, and a part of my job is creating a visual capture of conversations that a lot of times when we're working, eXPLANE we'll. Pair a designer and a consultant together, and I've done both roles. But there's something sort of Zen and interesting about when you're listening to a conversation and making that visual capture of the conversation.
And it's similar to Sketchnoting, but it's, it has a specific purpose, where we kinda know what we're trying to get out of it in the end. And so you're listening for specific things, but generally that. Process of drawing on the large, you know, 24 by 36 post-its there's a magic to a, particularly with new clients.
Who've never seen it before because they will have had the conversation and they're accustomed to the old world where everyone goes into a meeting. They all talk over each other, they take their own set of notes and they go away. What it accomplishes is creating that single shared set of notes that we can look back and litigate an audit and say, Hey, let's change this let's change this.
That's probably correct, but maybe we need to move this. and you're, as I said before, the level of alignment goes way up. People are much more. On the same page because they've worked together to solve that problem.
Daniel Hoang: [00:30:23] David Sabbet from, the Grove calls it a group memory. I took their graphic facilitation program and it's that the magical thing when the group has the same memory and the same understanding of something, as opposed to just individuals fighting over.
When you, as a group operate as a one, just, it takes things to that complete different level. We're starting to slowly wrap up. I appreciate you coming and joining today. I think today we talked about visual thinking bootcamp. I'm a little old school, so I call the visual thinking school, but visual thinking bootcamp.
And definitely we're going to put links into the show notes into where you can check out Tim and xplane. if you do get a chance to sign up for the program, I think it's a great way to get really in depth in this space. And I think for my listeners, one of the best things you can do now, while, especially while we're in lockdown and in COVID is train builds these skills because it's a long journey.
I know I started mine almost a decade ago and I'm still learning every single day. And so the sooner you start, the sooner you start building some of these skills and you're going to engage and interact in the world in a completely different way. Tim, I really appreciate you coming today and look forward to talking to you again.
Tim May: [00:31:25] Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And, and yeah, the bootcamps are a blast. we try to recreate the same, the energy that we have in the room, but map it's on. Yeah. And one of the notes that you mentioned actually is we make these short for a purpose, right? That in the old version, we would do them in a day and eight hours because you can manage the energy in a room when you're together, when we're doing it online.
We do it in two hour stints. So you kind of have it's long enough that you can learn it, but then you have a little time to chew on it before you engage in the next piece of content.
Daniel Hoang: [00:31:54] and that you can model it for your other meetings as well. Cause that's, I think that's a leading practice best practice for online meetings a day is you can't do these eight hour retreats, but you can do something similar to what you're doing with visual thinking bootcamp.
Tim May: [00:32:05] Yes, very much. I would recommend anybody planning on having an eight hour zoom meeting to reconsider.
Daniel Hoang: [00:32:12] Alright.
Tim May: [00:32:12] Thank you so much. Have a great day.
Daniel Hoang: [00:32:16] All right. Hey, I hope you really enjoyed that time with Tim. I did cause it was amazing. I always wish I could spend more time talking to him.
Now do check out Liz visual thinking bootcamp live programming is really incredible. They've done a lot to kind of bring it online. It's great in-person experience, but it's really now an online experience, which I think gives it, makes it more accessible before you had to go either to Portland, periodically the offer in other areas.
But, just wasn't accessible to everyone. And what COVID has really done is made a lot of this programming available to everyone. So come check it out, go to XPLANE.com. And check it out and hey, if you liked this podcast, please subscribe, leave a like comment, whatever you have within your platform.
It definitely helps a lot. And Hey, shoot me a note back. I'll send you a sticker. Thank you.