Joran Oppelt reflects on his journey through music, marketing, spiritual community-building, and visual consulting and how they’ve shaped his unique perspective. He offers an inside look at the latest developments at The Grove and thoughts on emerging AI trends.

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Running Order

Intro
Welcome
Who is Joran Oppelt
Origin Story
Joran's current work
Sponsor: Concepts
Tips
Tools
Where to find Joran
Outro

Links

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Tools

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Tips

Own the problem.
Break down the big thing into smaller digestible pieces.
Ask for help.

Credits

Producer: Alec Pulianas
Shownotes and transcripts: Esther Odoro
Theme music: Jon Schiedermayer

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Episode Transcript

Mike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike and I'm here with Joran Oppelt. Joran, so good to have you on the show. Thanks for coming on.

Joran Oppelt: Yeah. Joran.

MR: Joran. Joran.

JO: Yeah.

MR: I need to practice it, Joran.

JO: Yeah.

MR: Well, it's good to have you on the show. It's interesting because we crossed paths, I think on LinkedIn. I saw we've been following each other for a while, and I saw that you joined The Grove, which immediately ticked off flags in my head, like, The Grove, you mean, David Sibbet, The Grove? And sure enough, it is. For those who don't know The Grove and David Sibbet are legendary, I guess in the work that they've done in the visual thinking field. Probably a lot of what you count on as normal and routine was pioneered by David and his company back in the '70s, maybe even earlier. Welcome to the show. I would love to hear more about what you're doing there, and you can jump right into your origin story if you like as well.

JO: Sure. Yeah, I'm now a senior consultant at The Grove, and I began this career in this field as a graphic recorder, so starting analog on Phone Core, you know, at an innovation consultancy in Florida 10 years ago. That's where I first discovered The Grove. My boss pulled out a Vision Journey template, and I was like, "Wow, really? We're just gonna draw a picture of an arrow going into the sun, and it can be that simple," you know? Of course, it's not that simple. There's a lot more that goes into visual consulting, but now, after having spent five years there and three years leading a consultancy of my own and now landing at The Grove, it does feel a little bit like `coming full circle. Yeah, it's just an honor and a privilege to be able to work alongside the team there at The Grove, so yeah. I'm thrilled.

MR: I bet. That's really great. That's great. I think it's really exciting to see that they're continuing to invest in young talent to come in and lead the organization so they can continue to be relevant in business and in the world. That's cool.

JO: Yeah. If you could consider of 48 to be young, then they continue to invest in young talent. Yeah, absolutely.

MR: Well, I mean, you know, David is getting up there now. I think he's close to or is maybe is retired now. I'm not sure.

JO: He is retired. Yeah, he just turned 80 and he's retiring. Gisela Wendling, his partner is now the new CEO of The Grove, and yeah, she is my boss. David's not my boss, so.

MR: Wow. Wow.

JO: Yeah.

MR: Wow. That's pretty cool. Well, I'd love to—

JO: We're definitely leading into like Grove 2.0 territory.

MR: That's really cool.

JO: You know, it's definitely, this is what the Grove looks like post David Sibbet, so it's an exciting time. And, you know, Gisela's got a real bent toward organizational development and that level of strategic consulting, so it's gonna be really fun to see what the organization can do and deliver in the future.

MR: I think it's really important to reinvent yourself regularly. I know that that's been the case in my career, and I suspect individually it's important, but also organizationally important to reinvent. Which is speaks to what Gisela's thoughts around probably reinvention of the organization that you provide a different perspective in the company that you work with. That's pretty cool.

JO: Yeah.

MR: Well, I would love to hear how you got to this place. Maybe going back even to when you were a little kid, did you always draw, was that something that was part of you, or like, how did all that work?

JO: I always drew, yeah, like sharks and dragons, sharks and dragons over and over and over. I drew comic books and I would staple them together, you know?

MR: Me too.

JO: I mean, that was my happy place. You know, I was at the dining table with a big stack of blank paper and pens and a stapler, and that was where I would draw books. It's funny, flashback to, what was it five years ago? When I discovered a Mural as a visual whiteboarding tool. It had been in our tech stack at Ridge for so long that we were like, "Well, we have these things like Proposify and whatever, and this thing called Mural, but we never used it." But then the pandemic hit and we were like, "Let's take this Mural thing off the shelf and see what it does 'cause we've gotta convert everything we do in person to virtual."

When I opened up my first Mural and discovered it was just a blank, basically a big limitless sheet of paper, I was like, "What can I do with this?" Then I had the light bulb, "Oh, what can't I do with this?" Right? I started kind of gamifying our workshops and my background in graphic design and art direction kinda came back online. I was like, "Okay, this is like being able to design the room and decide where the furniture is and what's on the walls all at the same time." Creating those virtual experiences with whiteboarding tools, it took me right back to my happy place at the dining table with the blank paper and pens. So, Mural's been a real godsend and a real area that I specialize into.

I'd say the origin story though, for me, feels more like there is this moment that I feel defines me as a facilitator, and that is trying to bring two sides together all the time. Bring different perspectives in alignment. That was my birthday party, I was probably eight or nine, and I had just moved to yet another small town in Midwest, Wisconsin, and thought, you know, I got these four or five good friends of mine, guys I used to hang out with. And now these new four or five guys that I'm hanging out with, and man, I'd love to hang out with 'em together on my birthday. I thought this would be a brilliant idea. I thought it'd be great. I thought they'd get along like Gangbusters.

We get a Holiday Inn and got all these kids in one or two rooms, and it didn't go as planned, you know? I don't know if they were vying for my attention or loyalty, or if it was the competitor cities or schools that was at play, and people were acting out. I remember getting outta the elevator and one of my friends went like this and smacked my grandmother in the face. There was just stuff happening. It was like making the whole experience was going sour. Then we got in the pool, there was a swimming pool inside, and we'd ordered Domino's Pizza, and we had two liters of Pepsi and there were arcade games along the side, just behind like a little half wall centipede with a little track ball.

I would jump in the pool and swim for a while, and I'd hop out and I'd grab a piece of pizza and I'd drink some Pepsi, and then I'd run over to the arcade game and I'd play Centipede, and it would electrocute me, I'd get these electric shocks from playing the game, and then I'd jump back in the pool, and then I'd hop back out and I played the video game, get electrocuted again. It was just this happy moment that I remember when all the guys were happy and finally getting along. I think that kind of defines the first time I successfully facilitated a group experience was this. Maybe it was the electricity powering me up in that moment from the video game, but I feel like that's the superhero origin story for me.

MR: Was there something you did to bridge that gap between those two groups of friends? Was there some moment where you gave them an ultimatum or did you just work it?

JO: No, I stopped trying and I started swimming. That's all it.

MR: This is what we do in our group. We swim and we play games, and we eat pizza and drink Pepsi.

JO: Yeah, and get electrocuted.

MR: That's what we do, so if you wanna do that, you do what I do.

JO: Yeah.

MR: Interesting. Interesting. That could be a really interesting modern party for adults, right? Where you recreate that moment, maybe on your 50th birthday or something like that, with all those same friends.

JO: Oh, that'd be a trip. Yeah.

**MR: Interesting. Where did it go from there? You're now 8, 9, 10-years -old. What are the threads that you saw going through grade school and high school and college? Did you see those threads? Did you go in different directions?

JO: Well, yeah, there are eras. There are these defining eras of my life. The first one was musical. I started a band, was writing my own songs for years and finally in high school, got people that would agree to play music with me. We'd play at the cool bars and clubs in Tampa Bay at the time, Brass Mug and Gasoline Alley. Green Day had just played at the Brass Mug, and we were freaking out like, "We're playing at the Brass Mug." That first era of songwriter, producer, band leader, front person, that whole thing, that skillset of writing songs, assembling them into an album, recording them in a studio, packaging them, presenting them, designing an experience, performing that experience, that whole thing was the first era.

Then the second one was marketing. The first job that I had that then lasted over a decade was a marketing director at an alternative news weekly in the southeast, so this creative loafing, we were in Atlanta, Charlotte Tampa, Sarasota. I was a Marketing Director for the Tampa Paper for 10 years. That was where I learned to really get innovative and throw things at the wall to see if they would stick. This is right at the time in journalism, when journalism was being changed by things like Craigslist that was gutting the classified section and citizen journalists and blogging, which was changing the way stories were reported on and all kinds of things. Disruption was happening in journalism at the time.

Being from the music scene, I was allowed to engage a local music store as a sponsor and build out our archive room with all the back catalog in there as a recording studio. We would bring artists in, and people to perform, and do interviews in this really cool room, free NPRs tiny desk. This was way before—I mean, the sales team didn't know how to sell or position this thing at all. They were like, "What's Jordan doing playing In the Closet again?

You know, like, they didn't have any idea what we were doing, but we were able to innovate content in a way that yeah, really set everybody up for the future and where journalism ended up going. That was a fun time to be in that as a career, but then when I got out of that, marketing had changed. Marketing was all sales and ClickFunnels, and I didn't wanna do marketing anymore. That's when I found graphic recording and began my visual consulting journey.

MR: What was it like early in those days? Was it hard to convince people or your firm to do that or was the firm pretty well established and knew how to sell, I guess, the services and the solutions that you're really offering? Was it tougher at the beginning?

JO: You mean the first consultancy I landed?

MR: Yeah. Yeah.

JO: No, we didn't have any trouble in the beginning. I mean, my CEO who was doing most of the sales. She was just a compelling personality and magnetic and was really charismatic and really plugged in socially and a great networker and a great attractor, you know? Just did a great job of selling the work. We had a niche, we focused on innovation training. We were setting up internal innovation teams to do large scale change work in their organizations, but also write their internal innovation playbook along the way. We focused on one thing and got clear on what we were doing, and that made it easier.

MR: That's interesting. What kind of things did you learn as you shifted? Were there, I suspect that both the music and marketing experiences probably bled or fed the work you did as a graphic recorder and graphic facilitator. Can you make any of those connections? Are there threads there that you could connect?

JO: Yeah. I mean, I think it really is art as a community builder, that's been the thread, the common theme throughout all of it. The other big era in my life that I haven't mentioned was that of spiritual community. I was a prayer chaplain for a few years at a Unity church, which is like a new age, new thought, metaphysical spiritual community. It was too metaphysical Christianity for me and I wanted something that was more pluralistic and interfaith so I left the path of ordination through Unity and started my own just completely independent thing called the Integral Church, which was based on integral spirituality and integral philosophy.

Carl Young and Joseph Campbell, and Alan Watson, you name it, like, "Where can we pull spiritual wisdom from?" And we really did a lot of creativity in that group, community as well. Like making art, mask making, music making, dance movement, you name it. That was a real central part. It was also really inspired by Matthew Fox's work around creation and spirituality which is really creativity centric. So, I would say art as community builder is the theme that runs through all of this. Whether it's graphic facilitation or spiritual community or marketing or music and performance. All of it is building a community of people who speak a common language and are leaning in the same direction towards some dream or vision, you know.

MR: I suppose that's important too, if you're doing any kind of creative work, artistic work, ideally you want people to experience it, right. The reason you're doing it partially is for you. You do it 'cause you wanna do it, but you do like having someone experience it and the idea that someone else could have something turned on in them because of what you experience is really cool. As an example, I just wrote an article, I dunno, a couple weeks ago, where I talk about what it was like—I came up in the days when everything was analog, there were no computers, and I talked about what it was like to do graphic design in those days, the yield days, right?

JO: Yeah.

MR: In doing paste-ups and all this kind of stuff. Ultimately, I wrote it for myself 'cause it felt like it had to come out, it wouldn't let me let go of it until I finished, even though it was frustrating through much of the process, but I ultimately got there. The discussions I've had with other people of my generation who remember that, for them it brought to life, "Oh, that's right. I forgot about all that. What kind of markers did you use?" There's all this discussion that happened because we could connect at some level, and additionally it probably shares with other people who didn't experience that, like, "Wow, that's what it was. There was some cool things about that."

You appreciated when that gave you context for when the desktop design revolution came, you could see why it took off because if you knew how it used to be done, the shift, it is sort of like, we're talking about AI now, right? What does that mean? It's real early, we can't imagine where it's gonna go. Just like we couldn't graphic-design in the desktop publishing. Ultimately, I did it for myself, but there was also, I wanted an audience to appreciate it, whoever that audience was. That seems like a thread that I sense in the work that you do.

JO: Oh, yeah. I mean, you're speaking my language now, man. It's like my very first job in media was at Black and White Arts and entertainment—Arts and Fashion tabloid in Florida. It was like offset, we modeled it after Women's Wear Daily, which was a fashion magazine. And so, it was this really clean designed social paper. And I used Aldus PageMaker.

MR: Oh yeah.

JO: I had a wax roller, and I would wax the flats and I would print the pages out or sections of the pages out, wax them down, wax on the ads separately, and lay the page out on a cardboard flat, and then stack those flats in a cardboard box, drive that box to the printer 30 miles south where they would shoot 'em with a big camera. Nowadays, I tell my kids this is what I did, and they're like—part of 'em is like, "Why the hell did you do that?" Then the other part they're like, yeah, it's like a zine, you know? And I'm like, well, I guess. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's like, if you still do collage or any kind of mixed media work, that hasn't changed at all.

MR: Right. You could still do that work. Yeah.

JO: But it's like the transition from like VHS and DVDs to all the content being in the cloud. Gone was the file cabinet full of 8 by 10 glossies that we had to scan and cut every time. Now, it was just a folder on the computer full of JPEGs, you know? So it was just a matter of storage and access and that was the big paradigm shift.

MR: Yeah. It's funny how you look back and you see, like, you think AI is an example. I mean, there's all kinds of things you could point to. Oh, it's this radical disruptive thing and it's gonna be so different. I'm not sure that it is. It's just like if you look back in time, all these disruptions kind of follow a similar pattern. Now some had more influence than others based on the context they come into. I think there's gonna be probably a—the optimistic version of AI is probably not gonna be quite as great as we thought it was, but it's not gonna be as bad either.

Probably it's gonna settle in at some middle point where we just—like now it's this big deal, but at some point, we're gonna like, oh yeah, of course, yeah, there's AI someplace in here. I think it does this thing for me. It's just the way I work and AI just does this, I guess. That's probably what it's gonna be like in 10 years. We won't even know where the AI is. Where now it’s like AI's getting slapped on everything because it's the new thing, right?

JO: Yeah, and I feel like we're the Lars Ulrich of the Napser, you know, like, "You're gonna take my job away. You're taking money outta my pocket." It's like, yeah, we're gonna get to a point where we're we have other revenue streams that are feeding the artists in a different way. Granted, I get it that the modern 360 deal and the modern music scene is a mess. It's not what it was, but it's like, it's what it is now. There's more kids playing music now and it's like, that's how are you gonna measure success? A millionaire cash and a check or the amount of kids making music, you know?

MR: Right. Or the influence you have. I've stumbled on this guy, his name is TribalNeed. It's a guy in Berlin. He goes into squares in Berlin, and he is got this old analog, I don't even know what it is, it's keyboard and he's got all these things hooked up to it. He's got a microphone and a keyboard and speakers. I guess he plugs in, it has a battery. He goes to these squares in Berlin and all over the world, and he just sits down on a blanket and he starts doing analog techno. He starts playing something and he's got looping and he does stuff with his voice and he taps a drum. You got these Germans, within half an hour, dancing and in this trance state, right.

Is that successful? I think so, because he's influencing all those people in that square. All their kids are there, their awareness and they're watching this guy make this, right. We think about even the work we do, if it's digital, there can be a danger where our customers don't realize like, yeah, we worked really hard to do that, but they don't see it. They just see the output. So to see someone sitting in a square with this analog equipment, like, okay, he's a musician and he is producing something for me that will probably never be exactly repeated the same way.

It moves in this direction of experience, which I think we, as coming back to visual thinking, I think there's opportunities where we can do the same thing with the skills we have. Even maybe integrating in the AI in some way. I don't know how that's gonna fit in for us. Maybe it will help us in our research phase that nobody sees that is annoying to do and takes time and maybe that gets compressed. I dunno.

JO: Yeah. Even if it was just—I mean, I've done graphic recording in Tandem before, and that just means somebody's doing the capture and somebody's maybe coming behind and doing color fill or doing like little call outs or whatever or just doing capture on stickies and then slapping it up and then the person captures that. You know, you're just working as a tag team. Even if there was an AI version of the capture of that, spit me, you know, generate highlights from the last two minutes of the discussion. And then I'm gonna translate those visually, right?

MR: Yes.

JO: I'm gonna do the thing the robot can't do but leverage the strength of what the robot can do to make what I'm doing stronger, faster, more efficient. What'll take the stress and the cortisol levels down in my body so I can be more present with the iconography, whatever it is. Right. How do you partner with that bot to be stronger and better together?

MR: Yeah. Because I mean, the bot might show you five things. It's like, oh, based on what I'm hearing of those five things, that one thing is most important.

JO: There's the one Yeah, exactly.

MR: Grab it and stick it in or recreate it based on that reference. So I think there's opportunities. Where that's gonna go, I dunno. Now we've completely veered off your origin story, but I think, it seems like we're at the place where you are, right? You're talking about The Grove, which is this, institution, I guess if you could even call it that in the visual thinking space, thinking about reimagining what kind of service you provide, maybe even the customers that you're gonna reach out to in a different way. Maybe talk a little bit about that, what you see now that you've been here while you haven't been there very long, what do you think the vision is, or at least that you can share?

JO: Well, I can tell you what I've been brought on to help with, and that's to really help deliver and train around the team performance system. That is the Drexler Sibbet model of team performance, which is a seven-stage model of team development that's based on Arthur Young's theory of process. It's a beautiful, elegant, yet simple model. That's a system that's been used at Mars and Wells Fargo and Humana and Nike and Apple everywhere. Part of what I'm doing in my role is to continue to certify people in that model, whether you're a workshop graduate or a enterprise practitioner or a survey administrator. There's just a lot in the team performance ecosystem, and so, I've been brought in to help with that.

Then there's another product called strategic visioning, which is basically the Grove's Visual strategic planning system. That instead of a V it's a figure eight, but it's also based on past, present, future and the four flows and going back before you can go forward and moving that kind of vertical continuum of ultimate freedom to ultimate constraint, from vision and strategy down to implementation and operations. That's another product that has a lot of offerings around, again, training, certifications, workshops, things like that.

There's also just kind of one-off consulting work that may or may not be based on either of those models. There's also the fundamentals of how to be a graphic facilitator. Then there's the one-off of, you know, we need somebody to come and help us facilitate a session. We're working on some kind of org change or goal setting or, you know, sometimes it's just like a customer experience journey, whatever they need. So it's real similar to the work I was already doing, but at the heart of it is the products offerings and services that the legacy offerings that the Grove already has in place.

MR: That's really fascinating. I hadn't realized how extensive, how broad the offerings were. I see what's going on. I'm on the mailing list, so I see things, but it was pretty interesting to hear it in that concise way. The idea of team dynamics is really fascinating because I think there is a real challenge, right? With we see the pandemic and how that's caused both hybrid teams and remote work. That has to be a challenge that companies are facing, right? They have to deal with these things. And how do we make our teams work regardless of the medium, right? Whether you're in person or not, or maybe it's a mix, right? That's gotta be a challenge that they face. So it seems well timed in that regard.

JO: Yeah. Yeah, hybrid is the bane of my existence right now.

MR: I think it's challenging for a lot of people. I know I've gone to my office usually once a week on a Wednesday. I used to go on a Monday, and I bailed on that because in Milwaukee, in the downtown area, nobody's there on Monday because of hybrid. They hit the middle of the week, so Mondays and Fridays are tougher. Actually, if you want to go Monday and Friday, that might be the day to get work done 'cause nobody will bother you and there's nobody around, right? So you could strategically use that. But it's an interesting dynamic that we—

JO: For me as a facilitator, it's just easier if we just pick one, you know? I don't care if you're a hybrid team, but spend the money to bring everybody into a room and let's be there and feel the chemistry and the energy together and read the body language and feel the intention of each other or let's do it remotely and we'll use Zoom and we'll use Mural or we'll use Teams or whatever. This attempt to include everyone, even if we're half there and half out, it's never been successful to me, you know? And it's never felt like those people are really there with us.

The most successful we've had has had a co-facilitator facilitate with those virtual participants. You've got some stuff going secondhand to them, and then maybe they're in a breakout of their own, and then that person will report out for them, but that then they're not in the room and it's like, you're still only hearing from one person, and it's not an elegant solution. So there's just no replacement for getting people in the room and being able to lean back in your chair and whisper behind somebody, which that's the speed of life, that's the speed of business, that's the speed at which these meetings need to happen. To me, it's still important to get people in the room for the important ones.

MR: That feels ideal, yeah. I think like you do all remote if for some reason you're spread across the world.

JO: Yeah. Sure.

MR: Maybe in that case you just bite the bullet and bring everybody to one place that's central, right, and take that opportunity to connect people together. That's ultimately the, the point of much of this either teams or a strategic visioning, right?

JO: Yeah.

MR: You want people in the room represented so you get the full picture 'cause otherwise you could produce something that doesn't include somebody, and then you end up having to tear it up and do something else in the future if you don't get it right the first time as much as you can, right. Interesting. Well, this is feels like a good time to shift to tools. We haven't talked a lot about your specific practice, but I suspect you still do analog work as well as digital. You mentioned Mural. I would love to hear—

JO: I don't, surprisingly.

MR: Really.

JO: I mean, sometimes, if I'm in the room and we're doing some graphic facilitation, I mean, you can see behind me, I'm still testing big Neuland markers. I mean, I still use markers on posters or boards. But I'm not myself doing the analog graphic recording or sketchnoting you might say, that I was doing at Ridge. At Ridge we had a team of like six graphic recorders that were doing this work. I would train them and work alongside them, but I eventually just kind of got out of that work and did more of the facilitation and the consulting and the coaching.

MR: Got it.

JO: I do in a pinch when it's just me in the room and somebody makes a joke about the organization is a sleeping giant or whatever, the membership of the organization is a sleeping giant, I might run to the wall with a marker and draw a giant laying down with Zs coming outta his mouth. It's just in me. I cannot do it, you know?

MR: Yeah, exactly. What about you personally? Is there, when you process information, like you're thinking and brainstorming and things, is there anything you do there that might be analog? Are you pretty much focused on—using tools you're like Mural to do that work? Where do you do that work now?

JO: Yeah. Mural, I mean, it's just my comfort zone. It's where I have a little like design shop if I'm working on concepts or process maps. I've got a project board that's just like task to-do list kind of things. If I'm taking notes in a meeting, I'm usually the one to say, "Hold on one second, let me create a Mural real quick." And starting to put stickies on and sharing my screen or inviting people into it. It's just become the place I lean to work visually.

MR: Sort of a good center place.

JO: Yeah.

MR: Do you make use of any of the—I believe it's Mural, the one or Miro, the one that has the iPad app. I think it's Miro. Have you used any of the drawing capabilities of a tool with an iPad Pro? Is that something that's possible?

JO: Yeah, yeah. The Mural has an okay—and I love Mural, but it has an okay drawing, you know, it has like maybe two or three different pen tips and that's about it, you know but you can draw on the mural and then that drawing becomes an object that you can move around. We've had graphic recorders in the Mural with us, drawing directly on the Mural and annotating if you would, but iconizing stuff and visually commenting on what's happening during the workshop. But for the most part, if there's a graphic record that needs to exist as a document, that is a takeaway, we just have them sharing their screen and doing a graphic recording in Procreate on Zoom, so you gotta look at Zoom to see the graphic recording and look at the Mural to do the work.

MR: I see. Switch a little bit. Okay.

JO: Yeah.

MR: It sounds like maybe I'll just open it up to whatever tools you find interesting right now. You talked about Mural, so obviously that would be one. What are some other tools that you like? They don't have to necessarily be pens or pencils or notebooks. Sounds like you're not using that anyway or maybe you are, I don't know, but.

JO: Yeah, I don't know. God, that's a good question. Mural virtually. I mean, the Neuland markers are still the go-to. I've got these cuddies I carry them, you know, everywhere I go. I will tell you a hack I found recently. This is a little case for electronic devices. You're supposed to put your cables and your chargers and your whatever, your iPad or whatever in it, but really this thing is great for—is to hold markers and tools. And then in the bottom is all my tape and my tennis ball that I usually use as a teaching tool. Like all that stuff is in the bottom half of it. The device tote is my latest favorite tool 'cause it's carrying stuff. I used to carry it around in a little like cardboard box, and now it's like in a nice little thing with a handle on it.

MR: We'll have to hit you up for a link to the one that you like and share it for those who are curious about those objects and then they can filter what makes sense for them. It's kind of nice to have a go-bag, right. You can just have it all ready to go and grab and go.

JO: Yeah, and I've seen people use travel shower totes too, where you would hang it on your shower head. You know, those things that kind of fold down vertically.

MR: Yeah.

JO: That same thing.

MR: You can be creative in the tool that you're using to carry your tools.

JO: Yeah.

MR: I suspect you might take that to a meeting and maybe you don't touch it all. Maybe you spend your whole time in Mural, but maybe that's the meeting where the sleeping giant isn't announced. You can grab your marker outta your go-bag and go over and visualize it on a wall, right?

JO: I have a chime like a bell in there too, with a little mallet that if people need to stop the breakouts or become present again, I hit it and it cuts through all the noise, you know, yeah.

MR: Wow. That'd be interesting to hear what you use for that. We'll follow up in the show notes for any of these tools.

JO: Yeah, cool.

MR: We'll share 'cause they could be useful. I never thought about having a little bell like that.

JO: Yeah.

MR: That'd be nice.

JO: Yeah, and there's these too, which are the, you like the fries are up kind of bell.

MR: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

JO: But the one I have is long and cylindrical. It's like, you can get it at any like Sam Ash guitar center or music store kind of thing, and it's only about five inches long and it's really just cuts through and has a nice sustain and everybody just quiets down.

MR: Gets to their attention. Is there a certain note that seems to work best or is it just [crosstalk 33:55].

JO: No, I don't even know what. Well, and the thing with chimes is like, they're not really tonal instruments. Same with like symbols on a drum set. They're kind of like all tones and frequencies at once. They're not really keyed in that way, so I wouldn't be able to tell you what key it's in.

MR: Okay. Nor does it matter, right. It's just that object. Interesting. Any other tools that you can think of as you're starting to scratch through the corners of your mind here?

JO: Well, SessionLab. I mean, shout out to SessionLab.

MR: What do they do?

JO: They're a website or an app I guess you would call it nowadays where you plan your agenda. For those of us who have had to like do them by hand or in a table or spreadsheet, every time a chunk in your agenda, a block in your agenda goes from 20 minutes to 45 minutes, you've gotta redo the fricking math from that point down, all kinds of things fall through the cracks and sometimes you make mistakes. This is an app that's block-based and you just tell it what block you wanna bring in. It's a report out, it's a Q & A, we're having break here, it's lunch here, we're doing this activity here.

You set the times and then it adds up your total. You can export or print different views or versions of the agenda detailed or abbreviated. It's just a really great tool. They've got a little community. I say little, it's huge community around the tool that is always sharing best practices as well. That'd be a good tool for people to know about.

MR: Yeah. That's even if, let's say you're a graphical recorder, sketchnoter, and you're responsible, you could build your own schedule to know, like for different reasons. Like, where can I sneak outta this thing if I have to go to the bathroom or whatever. There's ways to use it in multiple ways.

JO: Yeah. I always call that meeting with the client, the content mapping where it's like, okay, you have these panels or these whatever pieces of content or right on top of each other. When is the graphic recorder going to the bathroom? When are they eating? You know, is this the time where we maybe talk about having a second graphic recorder on site if you want all of these things captured, you know?

MR: Yep.

JO: But that content mapping meeting in my mind is where yeah, you would pull up an agenda and say, okay, this is happening at such and such a time. And they usually provide something to you as the client does, but it's usually, yeah, again, a table in Word and it's cumbersome and it's, you know.

MR: That could be nice too, even if you worked with that customer as an interactive tool where you're actually building it with them and say, "Okay, well, if we do this, like, okay, if they were to go the bathroom? Oh, okay, we can steal some from the next session. You can come in 'cause we're gonna do introductions, so you got five minutes." That gives you this way of working together to kind of nail down how things will go. And then they get a copy, right, so they know too.

JO: Yep.

MR: That's pretty fascinating. We'll definitely get some links for you all so you can check these things out and as much as we can. Joran, can we talk a little bit about tips now? I'd love to hear at least three. You can go beyond three if you like. And I frame it as someone, as a visual thinker that are listening to the show, watching the show and maybe they feel like they're in a rut, they just need a little bit of encouragement or a different way of looking at things. What would be some tips you might share with that person?

JO: Lemme step away for just one second. I'll be right back.

MR: Okay. All right.

JO: Okay. The tips I will share, the three tips that come to mind first are from this book that I wrote with my wife and it's called Visionary Leadership. It's three steps for any leader who feels like they are stuck or at a crossroads or experiencing pushback or conflict or just something's happening with them. Based on all the interviews we'd done and all the consulting work we'd done, it felt to us like there were these three things that if leaders did this, they could break through those crossroads’ moments. The first step was to own the problem. Whatever is happening around you, it's sometimes easy to point your finger and deflect and blame and do all these things that aren't really taking responsibility for the things you can control, you know?

Owning the problem is step one. Step two is to then break the big thing 'cause It always feels like a big thing. It always feels like a big rock, a boulder, an impasse. Break that big thing into smaller things. We compare that to, if you had an organizing project or you were cleaning out a closet, you'd basically pull everything out and you'd start to chunk it. Like, here's certain types of things, here's categories of things. I'm gonna get rid of these, and these are maybes, whatever, right? But you break the big monster Yeti of a thing down into smaller, digestible pieces, right?

That could be just on paper, that could be in Mural, that could be physically, you know, organizing the work doesn't matter, but you gotta break it down into smaller chunks. Then that third step, and this is I think some of the best leaders I've worked with have the hardest time with this. The third step is ask for help. I think a lot of the times we want to do it. We have something to prove. We feel like we're leading by example, by, you know, taking the work back away from somebody and doing it ourselves. We think we're showing them how that's done.

We're showing them how to take work away from somebody and take more back on our plate. That's what we're modeling in that moment. The asking for help piece is huge for, you know, not only scaling yourself and in a fast-moving complex, chaotic environment, but also kind of to keep you sane and centered and healthy in the midst of all of that. So yeah, own the problem, break the big thing into small things, and then ask for help.

MR: Now those are three. Oh man, I love that I could apply that to my own life, like right now.

JO: Yeah.

MR: That's pretty great. I love it.

JO: The other reason I ran to my bookshelf was, 'cause I don't know if you've seen this, this is my latest book, Facilitation. Let me just real quick find the page that you are on.

MR: Oh, wow.

JO: Let's see here. Yeah, we've got a whole section called MVGD. It's Minimum Viable Graphic Design.

MR: Oh, nice.

JO: It's the basics that any facilitator will need to know about working visually, right. We take Brandy Agerbeck's idea of like layers and levels, right. Things like that. You are the first section here in your seven types of sketchnoting composition.

MR: Oh, yeah.

JO: We just want to give you a little shout out here.

MR: Oh, thank you. That's really cool. I'm very honored. That's pretty amazing.

JO: So hopefully we've been pointing some people your way too.

MR: Well, that's good. That's what I like about this community is it seems to me at the years that I've been in it, it's very much a everybody wins kind of community.

JO: Yeah.

MR: People wanna help each other, people wanna do things together, and they celebrate each other's wins. That's something else I've noticed. It's less of a, "Oh, you won, so I lose," you know, zero-sum game. It's more of a growth mindset. Everybody wins together. You know, every time you win, it makes it easier for me to win in the future, right?

JO: Yeah.

MR: I feel like that's true throughout the community and in all the cases that I've gotten run across it. I just wanna thank you for the work you're doing now with The Grove and that team, but also the work that you've done in the past and all the influence you've had that make my life easier. Thank you for doing that work. I appreciate it.

JO: Yeah. Thanks, Mike.

MR: This is where we wrap up the show. What would be the best places for people to find out about you? I suspect the Grove would be one place. I don't know, off the top of my head, what that URL is, but I'd love to hear your other places too.

JO: Well, now it's, yeah, thegrove.com. You can find me there. My email address is Joran_oppelt@thegrove.com, and I can provide that to you. You can feel free to reach out to me anytime in the notes. Of course, there's books. I've written books visual, meetings, field Guide and Visionary Leadership, and this new one on facilitation. Of course, the Grove has a wealth of books out there. There's the visual series on Wiley, on visual leaders, visual teams, visual consulting all kinds of amazing books on graphic facilitation. Gisela, our new CEO just published a brand-new book called The Liminal Pathways Study. This is all about organizational change and how to navigate the complexities of change.

MR: Which I think we're all dealing with right now. If anybody's listening and there's some way things are changing, we just touched on AI and how that's probably gonna change things, but there's all kinds of other change that we deal with and we will continue to deal with. It's part of being alive, I think, right, so.

JO: Yeah. It's not going away.

MR: It's really cool. I know that you're also on LinkedIn. Are there any other places where people might follow the stuff that you do and the things you share?

JO: No, I'm on LinkedIn a lot. It's one of the tabs that stays open, so I would partly invite people to connect with me on LinkedIn. I mean, it's pretty clear if you're a spammer and trying to train people on how to sell or make videos. It's pretty clear the people I don't accept friend requests from, but I accept most friend requests, so please connect with me on LinkedIn. Yeah, absolutely.

MR: Great. That sounds good. Well, for anyone who's listening or watching, that's another episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast. Till the next episode, talk to you soon.

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