10000 Visuals Delivered – Graphic Recording, Visual Strategy, Target Picture, and more

10000 Visuals Delivered – Graphic Recording, Visual Strategy, Target Picture, and more

10000 visualizations have created ten thousand valuable solutions

10000 visuals delivered to our clients! Visual Facilitators has set a new record. As a team, we have created over ten thousand visuals since our founding in 2005. We are proud of this achievement and in this post I would like to share a bit about the background.

What were and are our Success Factors?

• The wealth of experience of VF
• The VF Method
• The versatile VF team and perfect matchmaking
• The VF customers and their range of challenges
• The VF mindset: Attitude and Awareness

10000 Visuals: Spectrum and Scope

As a team, we’ve had the opportunity to take a glimpse to the inside of thousands of client organizations, have been been involved in hundreds of event types, and encountered (compiled) many dozens of challenges over and over again. As a result, a huge puzzle of experience, insights and perspectives has formed within us. For example, we can compare how thousands of companies deal with, let’s say, the topic of digitalization. Or how a single industry or niche deals with a whole spectrum of different challenges.
What have we done with this wealth of experience? Our own company, as well, has to face the enormous changes in the world. We need to adjust our alignment and shape our evolution – including all of what affects us, when we participate in the change processes of client organizations. This is because we are deeply aware that our customers do receive an answer as well as a building block to their solution from us. And can rely on us to always be solution- and customer-centric.

So Visual Facilitators has created an incredible range of visual practice and has worked in numerous industries and settings. Mostly we have deployed our client solutions in the mid-market and as well everywhere from startups to academia. Among the more than 10000 visualizations are:

• Visualization of strategies, goals and corporate culture issues,
• simple representation of everything that is complex and needs to reach people,
• Graphic Recordings,
• target images  and visual strategy,
• process visualizations,
• visualizations for change and transformation,
• explanatory videos and much more

Our clients benefit from working visually: They are now able to understand and communicate information-loaded topics and contexts. And thus are able to really reach their people or customers.
We never offer our clients just an „image“ – but above all a process that supports them in achieving and implementing goals. From our side this requires primarily an inner attitude and a mindset. This enables us to bringe a wide range of challenges into transformation towards a solution.

10000 Visuals: Market-Leading Experience

Recently I was scrolling through our VF photo archive and realized that it contained well over 50,000 photos of our work, visualizations and graphic recordings. What a wealth of visual work!

Behind every photo, behind every visualization, there is a story, an experience and a success. “This photo archive is the most extensive image archive of graphic recording and visualization that I know of – and possibly the largest in the world!” said David Sibbet (b. 1944), to us in the summer of 2023 in our office, when visiting at one of our regular meetings. He is one of the most important founders of visualization methods and of graphic recording.

We are a pioneer in the field of visualization and have perfected our craft from the beginning by constantly learning – and this even today from the founders of the methods, like David Sibbet. We have thus always incorporated any experience gained from our work into the our existing body of knowledge, mapped it in team onboarding, and keep it up to date on a regular basis. There are always new, important and also unexpected things being added to our experience.

While we used to offer a very broad spectrum of visualization methods, we are now specializing and bundling the experience into some premium solution offerings. This also brings our market-leading wealth of experience into a focus.

Today, we specialize in meetings and visual strategy – in other words: We are less and less to be found doing graphic recording at conferences and lectures. Since we used to work a lot at such events, for example, the treasure chest of our experience also includes the fact that we have often documented the words of high-profile prominent speakers:

VIP Graphic Recording – Prominent Speakers

What amazing experiences can be found among the more than 10000 visualizations! Here are just a few examples of hundreds and hundreds of prominent speakers: world-renowned business experts, consultants and authors, and many top CEOs, for example, from global corporations on all continents, and many more.
Also numerous politicians were present, such as German chancellors, several presidents of countries, European prime ministers and more. And in sports we met legends who have achieved world fame and that every child knows.

We were in the room when people who have experienced and achieved truly extraordinary things told their stories: From the airline captain who made an emergency landing in the Hudson River in 2009, to the container-ship navy captain who was hijacked and kidnapped by pirates, to the renowned press photographer who shot the iconic picture of the 9/11 flag – just to name a few.

Even in the field of consciousness evolution we were present to visualize by means of graphic recording among many others for: Gabor Maté (holistic physician, addiction expert, speaker and author), Father Anselm Grün (Benedictine priest, leadership trainer and author), Dr. Don Beck (founder Spiral Dynamics Integral), Stanislav Grof (founder of transpersonal psychology), Ken Wilber (founder of Integral Theory) or Thomas Hübl (teacher and author working in the complexity of systems and cultural change) – and many more.

10000 Visuals: The VF Method

Over the course of our 10000 visualizations, we have continued to refine our approach. Today, every client, whether in graphic recording, for a strategy rich picture or a change map, is guided through our unique VF standard process.

Simply because this approach and method has proven itself. It is fully customer-centric and ensures that any collaboration helps to deliver a contribution to the customer’s goals. So it’s not just “drawing a picture”. Out there, there are many vendors for that, especially in the illustrative field. In contrast the VF Method sees a visual as a change and transformation tool. So we always ask our clients “what for and why?” (purpose), then “What should change or shift into a transformation?” as well as “Who should be reached and when?”. The goals that we listen to and agree upon are our compass, the direction in which we work and that constantly aligns ourselves as well as the client by means of our unique method.

In a nutshell, the VF Method consists of three steps: We plan, we make visible, and we launch. These phases have sophisticated sub-steps that intertwine and keep moving us and the client to the next stage in turn. All the way to the launch, a well-considered roll-out of the visualization in the customer system is planned, so that reaching the goals is ensured. This launch has to work, because as they say so aptly: “There is no second chance for a first impression!”

10000 Visuals: Impossible without the Visual Facilitators Team

Visual Facilitators consists of a dedicated and passionate team. We work closely together to deliver the best possible results for our customers. Over time, we have continued to optimize our processes and workflows on the way to our 10,000+ visualizations.

Along the way, important mistakes have been made. Learning, optimizing and designing interfaces between roles, improving communication and quality standards, and much more were constant themes. Some of our office staff did really pioneer this, see also our founding story.

Our team’s goal: The optimal customer experience. Part of that is our VF matchmaking: The promise that we will assign each client the most appropriate team member as far as possible – a match for the challenge the client faces.

To achieve this, we train the team. We run internal training workshops and coaching. We would like to take this opportunity to thank our team who work hard every day to support our clients’ goals.

10000 Visuals: The Transformational Potential and Customer Experience

What is the difference between a doctor and a graphic recorder? A conventional medicine doctor usually only treats symptoms. But a Graphic Recorder helps address complex problems at the root and works directly on the solution.
Similar to how a doctor prescribes medication to alleviate symptoms, a visual practitioner uses visuals to contribute to perspective integration and thus solutions by means of overview, interconnectedness, and a better understanding of complex relationships.

Visualization has great transformational potential when implemented in a goal-oriented way

Supporting this transformation is the aim of the more than 10000 visualizations we did deliver. Ideally, that’s the exact tangible experience customer have. They are able to make complex topics and contexts understandable in no time and to are able to communicate them further within the organization.

In other words: Something that, before, seemed impossible.

So, in any assignment our work goes beyond the creation of an image. We offer our clients a process within the aforementioned VF Method that helps them move towards their goals. Through our visuals, they can get to the heart of their ideas and visions and provide a clear direction for their work.

In doing so, we use an approach that is based firstly on the roots of facilitation and secondly on integral theory. This allows us to include numerous facets in our work – whether economic, scientific, cultural, psychological or geopolitical.

So that transformation is not just a word, but becomes an experience.

Focus and Attitude: Evolutionary Systems Change and Consciousness Work for a Better World

Unser Anspruch als Visual Facilitators ist: Visualisierung hat Impact.

Our claim as Visual Facilitators is: Making an impact. What is a body of work of 10,000 for? You might think: That’s just a number. By going beyond that, we mean that we see our work as part of an evolutionary systems change that leads to a new, regenerative world. We are convinced that our approach contributes a significant success factor to newness and innovation both in startups, in research and in well-established organizations.

In today’s world, many people realize: The drivers of meaningful change are not politics, NGOs or philanthropists. Nor are they the ultra-large global corporations. It is entrepreneurs who want to improve and achieve something and take it to the business community. In Germany, for example, 91% of all companies are family businesses. They train 80% of all apprentices and provide 60% of all jobs. In times of centralization and power takeover by global investment companies, these companies are therefore a community against socialist state-planned economy.
Back to the topic of system change and a better world… In many countries family entrepreneurs are also environmentalists no. 1! Under the (German) social media hashtag #MachenStattKleben, they show on social media how real environmental protection works in practice.

We support such entrepreneurs and organizations.

The 10000 visuals delivered have enabled entrepreneurs and their organizations to make visible their often very complex issues and correlations. For stuff that was often hidden or unclear, visual work has been able to improve internal communication and collaboration. Which leads to more creativity and thus contributes to innovative solutions.

So we use our activity as a platform for awareness and development. We believe that changing the world is only possible through changing consciousness. That’s why we use the power of facilitation, through which we (when needed) support client workshops and meetings in a dialogue-oriented way. This helps people to get to the point and to host their events with real results. Further, it broadens their perception and awareness, enhances their self-reflection, and improves their ability to effect positive change in the world.
Our work gives our clients the opportunity to “see through the matrix” and understand more. It’s not just about creating images, but also about the process behind them. We believe (and get feedback) that our work has real benefits for our clients and does contribute to a sustainable and more equitable world.

Globally Deployable and Operational, Connected and in Touch with Communities of Practice

We work globally. We support organizations everywhere – no matter if a country is in de-industrialization, like Germany, or is an innovation hotspot, like Dubai. We are well networked worldwide and are in close contact with both business associations and the visual practice community. We know that as Visual Facilitators we are in a creative coexistence with many other colleagues, circles, communities and processes that map an evolutionary stream. This is something we are very grateful for! We therefore act in such a way that we both share our knowledge and experience, but also externalize questions that we cannot answer on our own – so that we generate added value, learning, collaboration, joy, excellence and trust among ourselves and for our clients in the spirit of evolution.

Conclusion

We are very proud of our achievement of over 10000 visuals delivered since our founding in 2005. The treasure of our past projects and work, our market leading experience, our dedicated team are some of the success factors for our clients. The transformational potential for our clients and our global footprint make us an indispensable partner for anyone in shift and change.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank our clients as well as our entire great team for the trust and cooperation. We are continuing to keep our work at the highest level and to support our customers in the best possible way.

Here’s to the next 10000 visuals!

Will one of them be yours?