How Sketchnoting became the key to unlock a whole new way of working

 Case Study - Sketchnoting in Use in the Chemical Industry

Background

• Janet Greenwood runs a specialist consultancy, TT Environmental Ltd, helping high hazard industries such as heavy industry and manufacturing understand and comply with chemical regulations. They provide environmental consultancy services and GHS Classification Courses, which provide introductions to CLP, and also CLP mastery, which is all about ensuring that organisations are able to communicate clearly to customers and staff the hazards of chemicals.

How Sketchnoting is being used

Janet has been using Sketchnoting in her work since she did an introductory virtual workshop to Sketchnoting facilitated by Rachel Burnham in the summer of 2021. There are two main ways in which she is using Sketchnoting:

• Firstly, as a way of communicating urgent news to customers and contacts in a quick and easy to digest format. This has enabled Janet’s consultancy to get breaking information out rapidly to her client base and industry to inform and reassure.  Eg  a problem with the law underpinning CLP was identified and it was important to provide professionals dealing with this with timely advice on how to respond. Here is the simple but effective Sketchnote used to do this: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/janet-greenwood_state-of-play-with-annex-viii-to-clp-as-we-activity-6900757098003517440-W51n/
• Secondly, Janet and her team are now making extensive use of a variety of Sketchnotes within their training courses to summarise complex and detailed information on a single sheet.  She describes Sketchnotes ‘as a way of getting across years or even decades of experience concisely and in an easily understandable form, both to beginners and more experienced professionals.’ They had previously make use of flowcharts and infographics - one of the advantages of Sketchnotes is their flexibility, so that you can vary the approach used to present the content most effectively and also combine a number of approaches within a single Sketchnote such as flowcharts, words, diagrams, arrows, structure and pictures. Some of their Sketchnotes are more word based and some more visual eg setting out the hazards of particular chemicals. With a Sketchnote you can both get the big picture, the context and also specific details.

The impact of using Sketchnoting

• Janet and her team have had a very positive response to their use of Sketchnotes both as a communication tool and also as a learning aid from their customers and contacts.  Communications using Sketchnotes shared on social media have had an excellent response with people commenting on the usefulness of the information contained.
• Participants in their training courses undertake a series of tests covering each of the course modules and since the introduction of the Sketchnotes pass rates have improved. As other improvements to the courses were made at the same time this cannot be wholly attributed to the introduction of Sketchnotes. However, the trainer’s view is that participants understand the information presented more quickly and easily when a Sketchnote is used. In addition, individual participants have commented on the ease of understanding the Sketchnotes in discussions. This feedback from trainer and participants. when coupled with the test results, indicates a positive impact from using Sketchnotes.
• Clients have responded very positively to the use of Sketchnotes in their work – in this field of work, clarity is highly important – the risks of getting information wrong are high. So any tool which leads to great transparency of information is valued.
• Janet was so impressed with the impact of Sketchnotes for her business that other team members have now been on the online Introduction to Sketchnoting workshop and are now using Sketchnoting in their work.

Key Learning

A Sketchnote doesn’t have to be perfectly drawn to be highly effective as a communication tool. This is not about producing art.

In Janet’s and her colleague’s experience they have found that they can create one in about half an hour – providing they fully understand the topic. What the process shows up is where your own gaps in understanding are and so it helps you to pinpoint where you need to do more research.

The only downsides are that you go through a lot of pens and sometimes end up with ink all over your fingers!

‘It is like turning a key in a lock and opening up a completely new way of working’ says Janet.

Rachel Burnham

25/4/2023

How can Sketchnoting make a difference to the way you work?

Here is a case study looking at how Sketchnoting has been used in a business to work with customers and help the team become even more effective at communicating complex and technical information in easy to understand ways. It shows the value that visual thinking can bring and how it is a highly effective way of working, rather than just a fun activity.

Sketchnotes make use of a combination of words and simple graphics to communicate information. They can combine pictures, diagrams, flowcharts with words and so are a very flexible tool for use in learning, thinking and working. I offer workshops introducing professionals and students to using Sketchnoting for note taking, planning, reflection, sense-making and communicating.

With many thanks to @JanetGreenwook of TT Environmental Ltd for telling her story. It is great to be able to share this experience of Sketchnoting from the chemical regulations and health & safety field.

Learning and Performance Together

Rachel Burnham writes: I have written before about how important it is to focus on performance in L&D and in my blog post ‘The Performance Paradox’ I even argued that we need to focus a little less on learning to do so.   So I was really looking forward to be at ‘Learning Live 2017’, the conference organised by the ‘Learning and Performance Institute’ where there is a shared emphasis on impacting on performance. I have already written more broadly about my experience of this event in a previous post, so here I want to focus more specifically on my reflections around the relationship between learning and performance, which were challenged during the event.   

The emphasis on performance came strongly through right from this start of the event, with the Learning Live Question Time Panel and particularly the contributions of Charles Jennings such as ‘Be passionate about performance’, ‘The only metrics that count are business metrics’ and an observation by one of his colleagues that he shared, that ‘Learning is the intelligent by-product of continuous improvement in an organisation with a learning culture’. All of these I agree with most strongly.  In other words, for those of us in L&D, learning is not an end in itself, it is a tool to improve the performance of individuals, teams and the organisation and the learning may come from focusing on improving performance.

There was also the comment that we should stop using the term ‘learners’ and instead just refer to employees or staff.   Here I differ – I have heard this challenge before and I know that sometimes in L&D we can use the term ‘learners’ and end up distancing ourselves from those doing the learning or negate the wealth of experience and insight brought by those people we work with and serve.  The term can form part of a false separation of learning from work, when the two are increasingly intimately woven together and learning very frequently occurs through work itself.  However, I still like to use that term – instead I see myself as a ‘fellow-learner’ - I know I always learn so much from the individuals and groups I work and I acknowledge this freely.  I often use the phrase #alwayslearning.

But my taken-for-grantedness of this emphasis on performance was challenged at the event with a couple of comments from the floor.   Not everyone present shared this thinking about the importance of placing performance at the heart of what we do. In fact one person said ‘It sounds as though learning is a dirty word’.  They had understood the emphasis on performance as a devaluing of learning.  I was surprised and went over to talk to one of the people who had raised this challenge.  I am so glad I did, because we had a most interesting conversation as a result and continued talking over lunch. 

As a result I have realised how easy it is to assume that everyone has travelled the same path I have and has seen the link between learning and performance in the way I do.  I realise that I don’t always articulate my thinking clearly that learning and performance are both important.  That I don’t always make clear that I place stress upon performance, not to negate the value of learning, but because too often as L&D professionals we have limited its impact, by not thinking sufficiently about performance ie putting that learning into practice.  And by neglecting to focus on performance we have sometimes tried to apply learning as a solution to a problem it can’t solve or can’t solve on its own, if other factors (resources, communication, organisational design, workflow, etc) are involved.  

I came across a similar challenge earlier in the summer, when I had the opportunity to participate in an eLearning Network event whilst covering this for Learning Now TV – if you haven’t come across the eLearning Network before and have any interest in improving the quality and effectiveness of elearning I can highly recommend it.   Once again, I had been talking about the importance of focusing on performance, rather than learning and my neighbour challenged me on this.   In discussion, what came through was that the term ‘performance’ had different connotations to each of us.  She had previously worked in an organisation that focused on a deficit model of performance management, which was highly target driven and seemed quite exploitative in the way it drove the performance of employees to work harder.  So the term ‘performance’ to my neighbour came with an awful lot of negative baggage.  Whereas ‘performance’ to me, is simply about focusing on the ‘doing of work’ and about the effectiveness and ease of that.   I think that by focusing on effective performance at work more clearly, we will be making it easier to do our jobs and in less time.

But neither this does mean I don’t value or encourage learning for its own sake either.   I love to learn whether about L&D or other topics.   I’ve been learning Greek and I am fascinated by particle physics.  Sometimes, I set out to learn about something or how to do something with a very clear practical performance goal in mind, but very often I don’t.  Earlier in the year, I learnt how to use Snapchat, because a friend suggested it and only later have I worked out some ways of using it to aid learning – it is great for Working Out Loud and reporting on events (for an account of this see Mike Shaw's blog) .   In the Spring I started on a collaborative learning journey with Niall Gavin to find out about the use of VR and AR for learning – initially out of sheer curiosity, which resolved into a decision to share our learning with others in a series of blogs and vlog conversations (and watch out for a forthcoming update).  However, I doubt that I will ever, ever make use of my limited learning around particle physics for any practical purpose – I just want to know and have my mind-boggled.

And in self-development, in personal learning, that is absolutely fine – and in my book to be encouraged.  It taps into what Phil Race describes in his ripples model of learning ‘wanting/needing to learn’. Sometimes we need to learn something, sometimes, as humans we just want to learn something – our curiosity is fired up and that gives that drive to learn something irrespective of any immediate need to use it for any practical purpose.   And it may never lead to any to practical gain, but then again it might at some point down the road. Who knows where it will lead us, what connection it might spark, what path it may lead us on or what pleasure it may bring us.

However, in L&D our focus needs to be on the performance of the organisation both now and in the future and we need to keep that in mind.

When we talk about the relationship between learning and performance, we usually speak as though learning comes first and in the right conditions leads to improved performance.  I have been musing on whether this is always the case.  With the use of performance support tools (such as job aids, video ‘how to’ guides, templates), we can help people to work more effectively immediately, we can enable people to perform here and now.   So performance can be tackled first, before any learning has happened.   But in some circumstances, if you keep on doing that task with the aid of the performance support tool – can the knowledge get embedded, can the skill be built, can a new habit be developed - so that eventually you have learnt through doing?  Or if you use the performance support tool, do the work and then reflect on why that works and how it can be done even better – have you then learnt?   Perhaps in these situations performance comes first and then learning?

Learning and performance are both important for those of us in L&D roles.   If we focus on one to the neglect of the other, we won’t be as effective as we can be, as we need to be.   They are entwined.

Rachel Burnham

24/9/17

Burnham L & D Consultancy helps L&D professionals update and refresh their skills.  I am particularly interested in blended learning, the use of digital skills for learning, evaluation and anything that improves the impact of learning on performance.  

What happens in our brains when we improvise?

Rachel Burnham writes: Last week I took a week’s holiday to enable me to fully participate in the Manchester Jazz Festival.  As well as getting to hear lots of wonderful music (check out #mjf2016), I also went to a fascinating lecture organised by the Festival, in association with the Manchester Science Festival, about ‘What happens in our brains when we improvise?’  This lecture focused on musical improvising and was given by Dr Graeme Wilson from the University of Edinburgh, who is both a psychologist and a saxophonist.  The session was also supported by improvised music by Adam Fairhall on keyboards and Tom Ward on saxophone and flute.  Here is my sketchnote from the talk:

I found Graeme Wilson’s talk most interesting both from the viewpoint of someone who listens to lots of improvised music and as an L&Der.  It got me thinking a lot about what is going on when we encourage people to ‘improvise’ at work both in their day to day to work and when we are more specifically encouraging innovation. It also got me reflecting on my own practice when facilitating learning – as that very often has elements of improvising within it.

This is one of the very best sessions I have ever participated in that draws upon evidence from neuroscience.  Wilson explained that the session drew from a combination of neuroscience studies, predominantly using fMRI scans, cognitive psychology experiments and also interviews with musicians about their experience of improvising.  One of the things that particularly impressed me about the session was the way Graeme Wilson from the outset was clear about the limitations of these studies.  He reminded us of how impossible it is to actually interview a musician whilst they are playing and improvising – they usually have something in their mouth and are rather occupied!  So interviews are always after the event and an interpretation of what happened. He spoke of the artificiality and limited nature of many of the experiments and gave examples to illustrate.  He mentioned one particular example that involved a study of pianists improvising that required them to play the keyboard upside down and in the dark to enable them to be scanned!  He described the process of interpreting fMRI scans as ‘like watching television with the sound turned off’.  I think it made a significant difference to the way he spoke about the research, that this is both an area in which Graeme Wilson is not only a researcher, but also an active practitioner.   And during the session, we were treated to some of his playing when he and Tom Ward improvised together on their saxophones to explore some of the points discussed.

Here are three key areas from the session:

Improvising is demanding

One of the studies compared musicians playing someone else’s music to when they were improvising and identified that much stronger cognitive control is exerted when improvising.  Improvising effectively requires both mastery, but also the ability to ‘let go’.  One musician described improvising as a ‘mystery’ that required you to ignore mistakes when in the grip of improvising - this also sounds like being in a 'flow state' as Csikszentmihalyi describes.  A study of pianists (the one where they were playing upside down in the scanner) showed in their scans less activity in the brain areas associated with self-monitoring and inhibition.  In my experience you can often see and hear the moment when a group of jazz musicians relax and let go – the quality of the music immediately takes off.  

Graeme Wilson talked about the different degrees of improvisation you get in music, sometimes just sections of a piece of music are improvised such as in solos.  In this situation, musicians often describe themselves a focusing on playing key notes and then using familiar phrases – ‘patterns’ to get from one keynote to another – I relate this to the way we use habits or patterns of behaviours in daily life.  Some music has a much high proportion of improvisation and when there are no conventions to rely on, the cognitive load is huge.

Improvisation is social

Much improvised music is social involving several musicians improvising together.   Some of the studies shared explored the characteristics of this.   ‘Trading fours’, a common musical practice in jazz, where two musicians take it in turns to play in response to each other, has been studied.  This found activation of the brain areas associated with syntax and deactivation of the areas associated with processing meaning.   So improvising socially involves aspects of communication, but perhaps holding back sense-making/judging?

Again, from my own experience the most effective groups of musicians can very often be seen to listening carefully to each other and to be very attentive to each other’s body language. An example of this comes from the group ‘The Impossible Gentlemen’ who played during last week’s festival.   I have to confess to not being very keen on drummers, but Adam Nussbaum, the drummer from ‘The Impossible Gentlemen’ is a wonderful drummer and my observation is that he seems to always listening and paying attention to the other musicians.  I think the most effective listeners make better music together!

In other studies, it has been found that different musicians make sense of what is happening when they improvise together differently.  For example, Graeme Wilson and a colleague interviewed a number of musicians after a collective improvisation in which a number of musicians stopped playing and each person had a different interpretation of that event.

Improvising involves making choices

Wilson explored that when musicians improvise they make choices and this is more complex than some of the simpler models of music creation in other circumstances.   So musicians may choose to:

·       Maintain ie to continue playing as they already are – this is what is done most of the time. 

·       Or initiate change.  This is done less frequently.

Initiating change can be through either:

·       Doing something completely new, which is rarely done.

·       Or responding to what someone else is doing.  There are three options in how you can respond:

o   Adopt – start doing what someone else is doing;

o   Augment – build on what someone else is doing;

o   Contrast – do something different to what others are doing but to support what they are doing.

I found this most interesting and could relate it both what happens in conversations and also when introducing new ideas & practices to the workplace.  I think in L&D, there has been an awful lot of adopting going on when we have lifted wholesale practices from one organisation to another, without fully considering the different context in which we have been operating.  

Some thoughts from me on high performance

Drawing from this has made me wonder whether high performance in the workplace, from individuals and teams, that requires some element of improvisation involves:

·       Mastery;

·       Knowing when & how to ‘let go’ – ie break with convention;

·       Highly effective communication between co-workers, particularly listening;

·       Recognition that different degrees of improvisation may be needed eg sometimes just picking out key notes and using existing patterns of behaviour to move between them and sometimes all out collective improvisation.

I found this a very stimulating and thought-provoking session and I would love to hear your views on it.

Rachel Burnham

7/8/16

Burnham L & D Consultancy helps L&D professionals become even more effective.  I am particularly interested in blended learning, the uses of social media for learning, evaluation and anything that improves the impact of learning on performance. 

Agile Learning - Some Further Reflections

Rachel Burnham writes: At the CIPD ‘Leaders in Learning’ event in Manchester last week, Andy Lancaster invited a group of L&D professionals to consider how we might make our learning design process more agile.  This kind of agility is about being more responsive to the needs of our organisations and the learners we work with, being quicker to develop L&D solutions and perhaps also includes an element of flexibility in what we produce and certainly in the way we produce it.  Here is a link to the Sketchnote I created at the event.

We began by exploring why there is a need for L&D to become more agile in the way we approach learning design.   This is of course related to the pace of change in organisations and in the external environment, which requires organisations to become more agile in order to survive and flourish.   I am sure I don’t need to rehearse again the impact of changes in competition, technology, legislation & regulation, plus the challenges of responding to an uncertain world in the context of global markets, austerity in government policies and Brexit. 

L&D needs to keep pace with this and be able to contribute within our organisations to both to enabling individuals to learn what they need to respond to these changes and also to help individuals and teams become more able to create this organisational agility.   Within L&D, we are often working with fewer resources to meet growing needs.  There are risks if we keep working in traditional ways, with long lead-in times to the design of L&D programmes that we will be too slow to respond to emerging needs within our organisations and/or completely miss out on meeting some needs.  There are risks both to the effectiveness of our organisation and also the credibility and future of L&D in this.

Andy shared with us 10 points to help us to move towards agile learning design.   Here are some further reflections from me on each of these points – I may have paraphrased the wording of some of these 10 points.

1.  Determine business needs as top priority and respond with urgency

This is always important in L&D.  The focus of L&D has to be on improving performance in the organisation and enabling the organisation to better meet its objectives – so I was pleased to see this coming first in this list.

When we discussed how we could overcome challenges about changing our way of working to become more agile, the group I was in identified that focusing on the real ‘pain points in the organisation’ could help to generate sufficient support, particularly from senior managers and other key stakeholders to enable us to try this different approach.   Nick Shackleton-Jones, in a session on learning design at this year’s CIPD L&D Show, talked about identifying ‘what bugs people’ ie what do employees find challenging and gets in the way of them doing their job and then finding ways to address these issues. 

2.  Think big – start small

When trying out a different approach it often helps to try out something on a small scale or using a simpler approach than perhaps you would do normally.   This reduces the risk and can make it possible to get the resources or the ‘go-ahead’ to test out an idea.   I like the idea of running lots of small scale experiments which you learn from rapidly.  This connects to the idea of ‘Working Out Loud’ and testing out ‘half-baked ideas’ publicly –  or at least within your organisation and quickly getting input from other people to refine and add to these ideas. 

Many years ago, I worked for a small organisation that was working out how to do preparatory education on leaving home with young people – a bit like doing health education, but on the subject of housing.   We worked as an action learning project and tried out lots of different approaches to this preparatory education on leaving home and how to get it integrated into youth work and schools.   We were often trying different approaches simultaneously.  As there were only two of us working in the project across the whole of England and Wales –– one of our ‘rules of thumb’ when testing out an idea was to work with people who were already ‘hot to an idea’  ie we would search out volunteers.  Once we had tried out an approach, we would then work with people who were ‘warm’ and who perhaps needed a bit more support, encouragement or even challenging to try something out.

3.  Commit to a speedy development process

This is about our attitudes, but also about making it happen.   It would be worth identifying what causes the particular hold ups in your organisation.  I also think that clearing space in the diary now to be able to start on a new project in this different way would be a good starting point.

4.  Include learners in the heart of the design

I want to ask ‘Aren’t we doing this already?’ and of course we should be, but that doesn’t mean we are.  Often we rely on input from other stakeholders and the voice of learners is overlooked.  If you want to explore this further it is worth looking at Towards Maturity’s work in this area or a recent research report from Good Practice intriguingly called ‘The Secret Learning Life of Managers’.  Both of these pieces of work go far beyond asking learners what they would like and explore how learners learn in practice and what they actually do when they are faced with a challenging task at work.   There is a lot of interest now in developing our understanding of how learners learn effectively and in particular how they use technology to do this – there is the potential to develop this understanding much further through the use of learner analytics. 

But this point, also suggests involving learners in creating their own learning solutions and resources.  And so this also links to point 6 below.

5.  Curation rather than creation

The widespread availability of digital content in many different forms – blogs, video ‘how-to’s, infographics, flowcharts & other diagrams, podcasts (audio files), written guides, sets of FAQs – means that another change in L&D is to curate content rather than needing to create all your own content.   Curation involves searching out relevant materials, selecting the most appropriate, explaining why this has been selected and making this easily available to people who will find it relevant (everything from simply recommending it in an email, through to hosting this selection of resources within a digital platform such as a Learning Management System (LMS) or Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) such as Moodle or Blackboard).

Curating content and only creating content when it is specific to your organisation and not available elsewhere, can contribute to agile design of learning.

If you want to find out more about curation, I would recommend looking at the work of Martin Couzins and he can be found on Twitter @martincouzins.

6.  Create your own low cost content

The wide spread availability of smart phones and access to a range of free or low cost digital tools is making it much easier for L&D professionals to produce all sorts of materials in many different formats.  

This can also be extended to getting learners involved in creating their own content.  This could be through participation in communities of practice, perhaps an online group on the organisation’s Enterprise Social Network (something like Slack or Yammer) or thorough a LinkedIn group or less formal ‘Personal Learning Network’ such as via people connected through Twitter or some other social network.  It could be a colleague creating a useful job aid in the form of a flowchart explaining a process initially produced just for their fellow team members.  It could be a short video clip recorded on a smart phone.  The possibilities are pretty much endless.

Not everything needs to be produced to a Hollywood level of polish and gloss.   Something that is timely and highly relevant to your particular need can have just as much impact. 

7.  Scaffolding social collaborative discussion and learning

This is about using frameworks to provide some support and structure to help people get started in using these approaches for learning at work.  In a way it is an approach to providing a half-way house between a traditional highly-structured approach to a learning programme and a more collaborative approach in which learners have more input and direction of their own learning.   Look out for the work of Julian Stodd if you would like to find out more – he can be found on Twitter @julianstodd.

8.  Don’t be limited by resource availability

One of the potential barriers to agile learning is that we limit ourselves, because we focus on resource limitations, whether that is the availability of rooms, particular trainers or digital resources or finances.  Overcoming the latter was the focus of a session at this year’s CIPD L&D Show ‘Doing More with Less’ with Andrew Jacobs and Stella O’Neill  – here is a link to a Storify of the tweets from this session – look out for session E3.

9.  Learner access any time, anywhere … which includes digital

This is perhaps one of the most challenging areas, as it does require some technical expertise to identify the relevant digital platform for your organisation and situation.   Do take time to think this through.  Take advice.  Think not just about what will work here and now, but what would have some longevity and be sustainable for your organisation.

10.Don’t be a perfectionist – iteratively improve

As an individual this may be one of the most challenging of these tips – I know I always want to have any learning programme I’m associated with to be as good as it possibly can be.  However, that can be at a cost of all the other learning needs that go unmet and the missed opportunities.

As a parent, I have found it valuable to allow myself to not worry about being perfect – I like the concept of the ‘good enough parent’.  I have chosen where to place my priorities as a parent – home cooked food with lots of vegetables and fruit, a bed-time story every night and lots of hugs, but it does mean that the house is dustier than I would ideally like!  In a similar way, we may have to rethink our perfectionism in L&D and decide what can be let go.

These are some of my thoughts on agile learning design.  What does this prompt for you?  What can you being doing differently?

Rachel Burnham

11/7/16

Burnham L & D Consultancy helps L&D professionals become even more effective.  I am particularly interested in blended learning, the uses of social media for learning, evaluation and anything that improves the impact of learning on performance. 

Sketchnotes from CIPD L&D Show 2016

Rachel Burnham writes: Last week I had a very interesting time participating in CIPD’s L&D Show 2016, as a member of the Blogsquad.   I had the opportunity to attend the conference and report on it.  Here are all the Sketchnotes I created on the sessions I attended.

I will be blogging about the key themes from these sessions shortly.

You may also be interested in a broader curation of material from the Show by the brilliant Ian Pettigrew, which brings together a range of material shared via social media.

Rachel Burnham

15/5/16

Burnham L & D Consultancy helps L&D professionals become even more effective.  I am particularly interested in blended learning, the uses of social media for learning, evaluation and anything that improves the impact of learning on performance.