Paired Drawing

The same richness of shared learning and growth emerged from the Scrum Gathering in London and third leg of the Visual Thinking Skills Whirlwind World Tour. I was proud to see another cohort of visual thinkers leaving the pre gathering workshop armed with the necessary skills and confidence to visualise the mass of talks on offer. I too took to the graphic board to create a visual map of insights but the real magic was yet to come.

I had the wonderful opportunity to join forces and attack the canvas with the awesome @Tamsen Mitchell. That’s right, 1 piece of paper, 2 visual thinkers, 2 pairs of ears and a bag of pens. The learning from this experiment was tenfold. To start there was the shared synthesis. Anyone who has attended a workshop with Tamsen and I will know that the 3 step process of live visualisation is to actively listen, synthesize ideas and to finally draw. The synthesis is key and is what really makes us human. A picture is simply an offshoot of our thoughts. By clustering post-its and sharing ideas there was a greater opportunity to remove any cognitive bias that may be the consequence of a single brain working in silo.

The second key takeaway for me was the opportunity to work in harmony with another person. There was no space for ego or hierarchy, simply 2 minds working collectively to populate the canvass with insights. I highly recommend paired drawing within your teams to generate ideas, solve problems and build trust.

This is a great exercise to simplify complexity and create alignment across teams and organisations. Gain alignment and clarity over the look and feel of a future product or the underlying needs of an end user. Give it a go!