In this episode you’ll learn:

How drawing for others shows participants that you value their time

Why drawing on a flip-chart is more authentic and human and invites feedback, over a pre-prepared powerpoint presentation

The four-step system they teach, so that anyone can walk out of their two day workshop with the skills for visual facilitation

About our guest

Marcel combines agile team coaching with visual thinking. Marcel believes that a group of people drawing together on a whiteboard can change the world. He loves high-performing teams and therefore coaches teams everyday. He likes to share his experience in his trainings, as a speaker at conferences and as the host of a user group. He produced several videos explaining agile practices, principles and lean thinking using visual facilitation techniques. When he is not drawing he loves to meditate and travels around the world.

References

* Visual Friends

* Bikablo Academy

* Marcel’s Linkedin Article “Why start drawing today when you can become a visual facilitator tomorrow?”

Show transcript

Leanne : I’d like to introduce you to our guest, who believes that a group of people drawing together on a whiteboard can solve complex problems and change the world. He’s on a secret mission to bring visual thinking, visual facilitation, and story-telling back to every human on earth. He’s the co-founder, visual facilitator, and agile coach at Visual Friends and he is on the line all the way from Germany. Welcome to the show, Marcel van Hove. How are you going?

Marcel Van Hove: Thank you very much. I’m going very well, thanks for having me.

Leanne : Thanks for joining us.

Marcel: What a great introduction, thanks for that.

Leanne : The introduction works really well because your mission is really unique; believing that people drawing together can change the world. Tell us a bit about yourself and how you ended up in the world of not only facilitation but visual facilitation.

Marcel: Going back a couple of years, I worked in a– well, maybe go even one step further, I have been a geek, a software guy, my whole career. I’ve studied information, technology, and all those things. Then over time, I learned that I really prefer to work with people and to facilitate meetings.

With the agile movement, I got exposed to in 2003. I became an agile trainer very soon, Scrum master and agile coach in 2008. One day, it was one of our tuning days, which is like a get-together of the whole company in Hamburg, one of the co-founders came back from a training and– That was a training at Neuland with the Bikablo academy, which we train today in Australia.

We just looked at him, he explained Scrum to us in a stick-figure drawing. We just couldn’t believe what we were seeing because we would never expect that this normal guy could surprisingly draw like a pro. That was amazing.

Leanne : That is amazing. I guess a lot of people, maybe your colleagues as well in that room, would have seen it and been pretty stunned and surprised by how amazing this technique was. What lead you to then pursue it further and say, “I actually want to learn this and I want to teach other people?” Did you know straight away? Or did you have to go think about it, or did it come back a few years later? How did that all work?

Marcel: From the minute I saw it, I knew that this would be the thing that I want to do going forward. It was so amazing because one of the principles in agile way of working,