Cara Holland turns stories into pictures to help people work visually - S17/E04

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Oct 28, 2025

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Episode notes

In this episode, Cara Holland shares her move from social work to graphic recording and the development of graphic recording training in response to a need she identified at the beginning of her journey.

She discusses how her art has evolved through various stages, provides insights into AI, explains why the unique process of graphic facilitation has yet to be fully captured by technology, and reflects on the story behind her book.

Running Order

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

Links

Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.

Tools

Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.

Tips

Be clear on what it is you're trying to achieve. Don't overproduce or overcomplicate what you're doing.
Ignore the rules.
Find a community, pull from each other and find ways to collaborate.

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 Rohde and I'm here with Cara Holland. Cara, how you doing?

Cara Holland: I'm doing good, thanks. How are you?

MR: I'm doing well. So Cara, talk to us about who you are and what you do.

CH: I'm Cara Holland. I'm based in the UK, and I'm a graphic recorder and a trainer.

MR: Okay, and talk to me a little bit. I think we all in this audience know what a graphic recorder does. Tell me about the training part. I'm curious about that.

CH: Well, I guess there's quite a lot to it.

MR: That's what I thought.

CH: It's probably, in one way or another, about 50 percent of my time. We have an online academy called the Graphic Change Academy, and we train people to do what I do.

MR: Okay, got it. Yeah, because I mean, when you say trainer, that could go in a lot of different ways, right? You could be an athletic trainer.

CH: Sure.

MR: You could be all different, but obvious it makes sense that you would teach the skills you know well and help people enter the business right because graphic recording and graphic facilitation and those sketchnoting are tough to do. They demand a lot of you as a person.

CH: They do. They do.

MR: Primarily, you are listening. I would argue that listening is way more important than your drawing skills, personally.

CH: I agree. Yeah, I agree.

MR: And we're not trained to be good listeners. We're trained to flip our screens and listen for two seconds and move on. So it's gotta be kind of an intense thing, but I suspect a fun thing, right, when you see people learning and then applying those concepts.

CH: Yeah, it's great. It is great. I think it comes from being in the business myself and in the early stages of my career, feeling that lack of training and feeling like I wanted somebody to give me some hints and some direction. And it sort of came out of that place really, a need that I had that I found hard to fill.

MR: Interesting. Huh, and so do you tend to focus on a certain student kind of profile or you're open to anyone who comes to you? And maybe in that case, who are the kind of students that come to you? What are their backgrounds?

CH: It's really varied. And so, we've trained people in 92 countries so far.

MR: Wow.

CH: So it's really widespread. And we have a suite of courses. I guess people come for different reasons and there are different courses to suit. The two big courses are be a graphic recorder and be a graphic facilitator and they're two distinct courses. So people come with different desires for both courses.

MR: Got it. I would think that if someone who is a facilitator now but doesn't do the graphic part might be more interested in the graphic facilitation side of things. Where maybe graphic recorders are someone more entry level who just wants to get into the business. Is that a wrong kind of assumption?

CH: I would say that you're right probably on the graphic recorder side, it tends to be people who want to be graphic recorders, although we get quite a lot of in-house people who are wanting to draw more in their workplace. And then the facilitators are really, really varied. So teachers and educators, community workers, people doing that kind of engagement piece on whatever topic they're in who just want to be facilitating more creatively.

MR: Yeah, integrating the visual component to some degree or another, right?

CH: Absolutely. It's all about the visual.

MR: Yeah, because I think, you think about a graphic facilitator, that is a really hard job. Like graphic recording is hard, graphic facilitation can be even harder because not only are you wrangling a room of people who may be squirrely, but then you're attempting to take the things that they're saying and make sense of them and then put them on the wall and then, you know, get a reaction and then obviously move them toward a goal or something, right? That's a lot of things to hold in your head and your body and get people moving forward.

CH: It is a lot of things, but I think the beauty of graphic facilitation in the way that I interpret it, and obviously there's different interpretations to what even this language is, but how I interpret it is there's a lot of pre-creation. And so, if you can create the right template, if you can have the visual assets around the room that support whatever it is you're facilitating on your subject matter expert niche, then those visuals carry you an awful long way.

MR: So, it's a lot to do with framing and preparation and research and understanding and strategy, those kind of things.

CH: Yeah, definitely.

MR: Like before you ever walk in the room with the people, you've got to have a pretty clear idea of where are we going to go with this? How are we going to get there? What are the elements that we're going to use to achieve it, right? All those things.

CH: Exactly. What will you need as a facilitator to have been successful in that session? What do you need out of those people? And how can you use visual tools and visual assets in the room to help you achieve that in the most effective, painless way?

MR: Right. I've done a little bit of this, I guess it would be facilitation when I worked for a financial services company as a contractor. And I worked on a whiteboard and we had developers that sat around the table with product owners and business analysts. And they, we took a feature by feature and designed them on those whiteboard. And I would just listen to what they said and draw what they were saying and then add my own commentary and notes to it. So it was in a sense, facilitation.

I think the good thing about it that I saw was, and I tell this to colleagues now whenever I work and do something like a mock-up even or a wireframe, is at least we have something to argue about because the worst thing that could happen is this illusion of agreement where we all think we agree on something and we actually don't agree and we all have 5 or 10 different, slightly different variations of the concept and by visualization, it can be really made clear like, that's what you mean? That's not what I think. Okay, well let's hash it out and maybe we have to work through some stuff to get alignment, right?

So ultimately the goal there is alignment, which is a long way toward your solution so that you are all aiming at the right thing. Because if five people are doing all five different things, you're have to have another meeting to clarify that.

CH: Absolutely. Yeah. The power of working visually is like getting it out of your head, isn't it?

MR: Yeah, yeah.

CH: And if you get it out of everybody in the room's head, you can see where you're misaligned is, you know, is magic.

MR: Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Those sessions were really popular. We did them every Monday and developers told me they always look forward to them. Honestly, I've told the story before. I did them because I was the bottleneck. I was one designer with 50 developers, product owners and business analysts all breathing down my neck looking for mockups. And so, my solution was, well, I can't hold up the whole team for my mock-up, so the other solution would be, let's just whiteboard wireframes, and worst-case scenario, we'd take a picture of our final solution with notes, and the developer could build it, and then come to me and say, hey, I built this thing, what do you think? And then I could react to it, right? That eased a little pressure. So that was a really practical. I think what I liked about it, it was very practical, it wasn't esoteric in any way, it was very practical, and it solved the problem, so.

That was pretty fun. So it's really important for me to get origin story. So we know you're a graphic recorder and you're a teacher, a trainer, and you teach in these spaces. How did you get here? Were you always doing this stuff? I mean, graphic recording is kind of a new thing-ish. I mean, David Sibbitt did it in the '70s and it's sort of grown over time. But I mean, it's relatively new thing in the scope of, you know, design and creativity as a specific practice, right? So how did you come into it and what did you do before you became who you are now?

CH: I mean, I guess the question here has to be how long do you want the origin story to be? Because I'm in my 50s, right? So there's decades that got me here. And I suppose, pinpoint moments that were maybe the stepping stones along the way.

MR: That sounds good. Yeah. I mean, we have time here, so we're a podcast. We can go longer if we want to. So don't feel constrained. But I think focusing on highlights or pivot points, I look back at my life and I think like, wow, if that didn't happen, I might not be where I am now, right? So those are really fascinating to think about because listeners may be facing pivot points in their own life and think, okay, well, maybe I shouldn't brush off this pivot point. Maybe I should pay attention because this could really impact my future, right?

CH: Sure. Yeah, yeah. Well, then I would say that I didn't go to university. So I'm to start there. I didn't go to university. I left home. I moved to another city. I started working in a picture shop because I was interested in art in the broadest sense, but I didn't consider myself in any way equipped to pursue anything to do with art. And so, I worked in a picture shop, and it seemed like, you know, maybe as close as I was going to get.

MR: It's pretty funny.

CH: And it served me well for a couple of years until I realized that perhaps I might actually want something that had a little bit of a career pathway or somewhere to go with it. And when I was 21, after a little bit of re-studying in social work, I got a job working in a hostel with young people, with teenage mums.

MR: Wow.

CH: And I was the only worker in this hostel that was present in the building. And I found myself using drawing as a tool. So we would draw to socialize, to create sort of like a relaxing space of something we could do together. And I would, with the young people draw in a--let's imagine what your flat might be like when you move out of the hostel, that kind of using drawing as a way. I didn't consciously do it. It's just I like drawing and I like to shoehorn things that I enjoyed into my work. So we would do a bit of drawing there. I didn't really give it any thought.

And then my next job in my mid-20s, early mid-20s, was developing a new project for a charity. And I ended up having a team that I managed and we would have to do--this was pre-computers, which is, you know, mind blowing now to think, but we had paper files and filing cabinets. And if we were writing a report, you know, it would be typed up and copied and sent out. All very old school. And every year, me and my team would have like a planning meeting where we'd look at, well, what have we done in the last year? Where are we going in the next year? What do we want to achieve? You know, the kind of thing.

And then every year in the early years, I was going about that, I take notes, we'd have flip chart, would write on the flip chart, that would get rolled up and turned into dust and rammed in a filing cabinet and lost forever. And one year, because I like drawing, for no other reason than that really, I decided we would draw our annual plan together. That annual plan went up on the wall. The team chose to display that annual plan because they were pleased that they'd done it, right? They were sort of impressed with the output.

MR: Proud of it.

CH: And they'd connected with the process by drawing, even though they were resistant at first. Everybody added to this picture. They drew the annual plan. The annual plan went up on the wall. And over the coming year, I would be at my desk in the corner of at sort of team office and I would see them come and get people and bring them in and show them the plan and then they would talk about the plan and occasionally they'd want to try and add something to the plan and by the end of the year everything on this plan had been achieved. And as a manager I was like well that's something like that's sort of gold dust right when you have a team doing the plan and feeling part of the plan and like they own the plan and they're proud of the plan. And that just got me curious, but I didn't really do anything other than start to shoehorn more opportunities for drawing into my job.

And so, they liked drawing the plan, we'll draw more things. We'll draw an hour one-to-one supervision sessions. And so, I started to draw more at work as a tool without really thinking about it too hard. It just, seemed to work. I enjoyed it. All right, let's do that. And then in the early '90s, I had a different job by now and was managing different projects. And I met a psychologist. All of my work has been with children and young people. Back in my days, I was a social worker. I had gone to night school in the job working with, you the previous team and I'd got my degree. I'd qualified as a social worker. I'd done all of those things.

And then I met a psychologist in this new job and she introduced me to person-centered planning and using visuals to help people plan the services that they're accessing and how they access them and where they are wanting to go and how that might be achieved. And that felt like a little bit of another light bulb moment. I went to a conference and at the conference was a guy called Jack Pierpont who, along with a woman called Marsha Forest invented a person-centered planet called the PATH. And Jack very kindly in this conference said, "If anybody's interested in learning how to do this, stay behind after, I'll teach you how."

So this guy's like a, you know, in his field of inclusive education is like a force, right? He's a big name guy and he stayed behind. And me and one other person chose to stay behind. And he had like a big graphic wall. I'd never seen one of them. He had a big roll of paper. I'd never seen one of them. And some big marker pens, like all of the toys. And he taught me and this other person how to do a path. And it honestly was just a revelation. was just like, ah, not only is this a very exciting thing to do, but it's drawing and it's big and I get to do it and it seems like it's a really effective tool. So that was a little bit of a revelation to me.

And it started me really thinking about, how can I how can I use tools that are used in person-centered planning in a more business setting? Which then got me exploring a little bit more widely. And I came across the Grove and David Sibbitt and started to think, actually, do you know what, there are these things going on in other parts of the world. And some of them have actually been going on for some time.

Like I'd seen mind maps before, but I hadn't heard of Tony Busan. I hadn't looked into that history of people using visual tools to try and make meetings more effective conversations more efficient. And so, all of those things really just floated my boat and I thought, this is what I want to do. And so, in 2006--probably a little preamble to that. So between the years of maybe 2003 and 2006, I was doing this exploration and finding out that such a world of work existed. I had no idea it even existed. I just thought it was something I did because I liked it.

And in this period of exploration, I started to build in more and more opportunities to experiment in my job. So I started to do visual templates for meetings. I started to graphic record meetings. I used to go out and train other people's teams in different things and I started to create big visual training sessions. So I would work through the session and fill bits in, you know, a big visual template.

And so, over the next couple of years, I just did as much of that as I could get away with really. And then one day I was shopping in town and a guy who was the manager of a team I had done some training for came up to me in a shop and he said, "We're still talking about that training. We've still got the picture up on our wall. Can you come and train us in this other thing?" And I thought, well, that's really not my job. So I said yes. And then I went home and I set up my own business. And that was the beginning of the next phase, I guess, of having setting up Graphic Change and calling myself a graphic recorder and a graphic facilitator.

MR: So how long did it take from that moment when you had the opportunity to--it sounds to me like you don't work in the other social work job anymore, so there probably was an endpoint to that.

CH: I do not. A little bit less than a year, I went half time almost straight away. Luckily, my job structure just made that okay to do. Yeah, a little under a year, I worked half time still in my old job and half time as a graphic recorder. And then yeah, jacked it all in and went full time. Early 2007, I was full time.

MR: Okay. So you saw enough work coming in that you could actually make that jump. Otherwise, you know, just because you have a company, it doesn't mean you can just quit your job necessarily. mean, but yeah.

CH: No, that's really true. I think I was quite lucky that it was like it was nearly 20 years ago. So was a long time ago when I started. And I benefited, I think very much from the fact that it was very niche back then. And there weren't an awful lot of people doing it. So I think if you were looking as a company and the certainly the big companies were. If you were looking as a company, you would find me because there weren't that many people to find.

MR: Right.

CH: And what that meant was I got some, I guess, high profile clients quite early on, like big corporations. And that, you get to then put them on your website. That leads to the next thing, gives you a little bit of credibility.

MR: Yeah, cred.

CH: And I also had a good network from my years in social work. I had local work as well for different smaller organizations, so I had a balance from quite early on and you know, that served me well.

MR: Yeah, you don't want to be beholden to just one big client because if they decide they don't want to hire you next year or to the next project, suddenly you've got a problem, right? You want to distribute those clients as much as is reasonable. I mean, you often don't get to choose your clients. They choose you, but having a mix is good.

CH: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So that was 2007. 2006, I started Graphic Change 2007. I went full time. And within the first couple of years, really, I'd started doing some training because I felt like it was missing. I felt like I would have liked some training to have stepped into and other people also might like that. So I started offering training and that was a very small part of my working percentages. And over time that just grew and particularly once we took that online then obviously it becomes--your reach is bigger but also, yeah, it's easier. It makes it easier to reach more people more widely.

MR: Yeah. Well, and especially if it's recordings, people can watch at their leisure, right? You don't have to physically be there to teach them. They can follow that. And whether you have live sessions, which is one way people do it, or, you know, online support where you're just chatting, so.

CH: Yeah. So we have a lot of the content is online because we have people from, you know, all different time zones. But for me, the thing that I really wanted, I think when I was, you know, in the early days, I really wanted feedback from somebody who knew what they were talking about.

MR: Yeah, a mentor.

CH: Yeah, I was conscious. I didn't know what I was doing. I was making it up. And I wanted somebody to sort of hold my hand a bit and give me some guidance. And so, from the very early days without training, like it's always been really important to me that everybody gets one-to-one feedback on everything. So every piece of work I see it, I feedback on it. It's an ongoing dialogue throughout the course. And to me, that was a really important part of it. And it's over the years that's built up.

And so, I think that probably took me through the middle stage of my journey. Growing the training, still doing the graphic recording, and very much sort of business as usual with the graphic recording. And then, that brings us, in 2018, my wife joined the business, who is more technical than me. And she built the online academy that we have now. So that's our own platform. And what else? I had a book published in 2018. That was sort of a bit of a key moment for me, I guess.

MR: What's the name of the book so people can go buy it?

CH: It's Draw a Better Business.

MR: Draw a Better Business. Sounds cool.

CH: And that came about because I was really conscious that I was running a small business and other people are running small businesses, but creatives running businesses don't necessarily have business skills. Your main passion is what brings you into the business. Your creativity brings you to the business.

MR: Right, doing your thing, yeah.

CH: And suddenly having to learn how to run a business is tough. And yet I was in the other half of my life, I was in all of these, you know, high level business strategic meetings and learning all of this business knowledge. And I felt that sort of disconnect between coming in my ears was big business expertise, but the other side of it was running this very small one-person business. So yeah, that's what the book was about. Then what else can I tell you?

MR: I'm kind of curious, so when pandemic came, were you relying more on like physical boards and being in person and how did that impact you? Did you shift to iPads or some online tool where you could continue to do that work? That seems like a theme for most agencies or individuals that do that work.

CH: Yeah. I mean, I was very glad we had the academy when the pandemic hit because the training continued. But yeah, the jobs, they fell off a cliff, didn't they?

MR: Yeah. Yeah.

CH: So it went from, it went from busy to I had a little job board next to my desk and I was just pulling those post-its off, you know, every day. It was quite--

MR: Yeah, crumpling them up and throwing them in the trash, right? Well, there goes that one.

CH: Yeah, it was a daunting time to have, you know, that was our business was the only income into our household. So it really was from, you know, we were doing absolutely fine to almost zero coming in apart from courses we sold. When it started, the new term had launched sort of a month before. So we'd done all those sales and there weren't going to be any new sales for a little while. So yeah, that was a daunting time and it did absolutely kick me up the ass and make me learn to record digitally. And that has stood me in good stead because it's not, although it has gone back a little bit towards people wanting, you know, big paper. I would say more people ask for digital now than paper.

MR: Yeah, I can see. I mean, there's, I think of immediate benefits to digital is often the format tends to be more conducive to sharing or publishing or posting where big, wall sized things are more difficult to, how do you show that without people's pinching and zooming, right?

CH: Yeah.

MR: So in a mobile context, they're great for in person, they're great for like your team to hang it on the wall. If you can convince them to do that. Because like you said, many of these pieces end up getting rolled up and put in a closet someplace. But it sounds like the kind of work you're doing typically would be stuff that would hang around and teams would hold onto and use basically with your mindset around it and why you would build it and maybe your recommendations to them, how to continue using it as a reference point, right?

CH: Yeah, I mean, in an ideal world, that's what we all want, isn't it? We want what we've done to be useful and to have a life beyond.

MR: Yeah, some period of time. Yeah.

CH: Yeah.

MR: Because eventually, you know, the one-year plan, after the one year, it's old news and you have to make a new one because all the context changes, right?

CH: Definitely.

MR: But that's good for you because then you have to go back and help them or at least be a facilitator. Unless you're teaching someone in the business to be a facilitator, which I guess is okay because then they would probably share with their colleagues like you guys should do this, talk to Cara and she'll get you set up.

CH: Sure, So yeah, think the pandemic was a key sort of step change towards a new way of working. And I don't mind it. I work very happily digitally. I still do really enjoy working pen on paper or pen on cardboard or pen on random surfaces. And I think maybe what has evolved for me in more recent years, maybe since 2018, 2019, and then the pandemic has been--because I feel like I've been at work a long time.

And to me now, what that makes me think is that I want to do work that makes me happy. Whereas when I was a little bit younger, my motivations were maybe slightly different. I wanted to work, I don't know, because I wanted to grow or I wanted to earn or I wanted a particular client. So I was striving, I think, for a long time, trying to work my way up and make my business successful. Whereas now in more recent years, I think my focus has shifted and I guess I'm lucky that it can, that I've got consistent enough work that I can shift my focus towards what do I enjoy, what sort of makes me happy, and how can I do more of that?

MR: Yeah, having a reputation certainly helps there, right? Having a track record and a reputation means you can make those selections like, I'm choosing to do this and not choosing to do that because that one is more interesting and more fun.

CH: Yes, definitely. And so, I think that's sort of the stage I'm at now, which I feel lucky to be in. It feels like another step change for me. And I'm enjoying being able to view it all just very slightly differently, maybe from further down the track than I've been able to before.

MR: Well, that's great. That's great. It sounds like you're in a good place and, you know, this business seems to have lots of twists and turns, so we don't know what the next twist and turn will be.

CH: That's really true.

MR: I mean, probably the next thing will be, you know, we chatted before we got started with how will AI impact this? How will an influx of lots of graphic recorders and sketchnoters and facilitators impact the business? Like, does it get spread across more people? We don't know that, you know, is it still valued by companies? guess that's, again, that's our job is to show the value.

CH: Exactly. Like I'm really conscious that I've been training my competition for a really long time now.

MR: Yeah. Yeah.

CH: But honestly, I like it. I think that the future for, I hope for me, I hope for other graphic recorders--this sounds maybe not how I intended. Artisanal, like, is a really misused word. But like I think the art of what we do is just is glorious. And I think the rise of AI just makes it more glorious. And I think the more people do in it and the more we can show the value of the human mind and human hand in the process, the more opportunity there will be. Like it will become more sought after, I hope.

MR: Yeah, it'll be more unique.

CH: Not less and what will drop off are those sort of lower end jobs that maybe what will happen--I don't know if this is true, but maybe what will happen is those early stepping stones will become harder to find for people who are starting out and as more experienced or people further down our careers, we're going to need to maybe find a way to build the ladder for those people because those low end jobs are what will disappear. Maybe that's the jeopardy is how do you, you're starting out, get those early gigs that are maybe the ones that are more likely to have been farmed out. And that's a dilemma--

MR: For new people. Yeah.

CH: -I think, you know, we need to, as an industry, figure out, because we do need new people. It isn't a closed gate situation. And the more people doing it, the more we can collaborate, the more people there are spreading the word.

MR: Well, I think there's a lot of opportunity. Like all the work that we're doing, if you counted everybody doing this work, like it's a fraction. We're a small percentage, right? Like you think of it that way, even though there's more people coming in the space, it's still a fraction and there's so much opportunity. So thinking of it as like this competition, it sort of is, but like, I think what'll be interesting is new people that come into the space with different perspectives.

Like you came from a social work perspective. What if somebody comes from, I don't know, a technical perspective or something else, like, they're bring a unique perspective and be able to address different people that you and I can't address because we're, because of our unique perspectives, right? Like, we have certain spaces that we fit naturally, and we hope that the skills of being visual and using it in a way to move things forward would expand into different areas that, you know, we can't address. That's what I always think when people write books, like you say you have a book. I'm excited about that because what that does is validate the space of visual thinking.

CH: Definitely.

MR: You know, my book is great, but maybe it doesn't excite certain people. Maybe your book is a better fit for them or, you know, like, just the reality that everybody's in a different place and like sometimes things just fit better because that's just who they are, right? It's not a knock against anyone's book or approach, but just that fits better.

CH: One of the things that I really try and get learners to understand or appreciate is that they can start from where they're at. So they have expertise in their history, their subject matter, their degree, their previous jobs. Starting from that position and looking around, there will be opportunities already waiting to be tapped into this visual market. And you're already an expert in wherever you've come from. And we don't need to necessarily be looking at where somebody else is. And there's such power in seeing ourselves as a community and finding ways to collaborate or finding our peers and learning from each other. Yeah, think AI is a threat in the same way as the pandemic was a threat and going hybrid and working online was a threat, but that what we do is not confined to creating a picture that AI could do if we asked them to.

MR: Yeah, I think, you know, the test that I've done and I haven't done one recently with AI is to tell it to build a sketch note from a--like, I gave like the Gettysburg address by Abraham Lincoln. Like it did something that looked like a sketchnote, but like all the words were gibberish and they were just random images. Like, I'm sure that it could probably improve, but like that is a very difficult skill to like make choices about what's important. Like it's really good at recording everything in a meeting. Like say we recorded this transcript, like it can do that pretty well because there's no--and it does summarization too, but sometimes those summaries are problematic.

I know Apple and their summary engine has had issues where it takes something that meant one thing in its full context and tried to summarize it and it meant something completely different, right? So the risk is there, you're going to let the AI hallucinate your meeting and maybe say things that weren't said because it doesn't understand the context. And so those are challenges that I think I haven't seen it addressed yet, it may. I'm not saying it can't, but.

CH: I've had clients already come to me who have come to me with AI images and said, "Can you improve the AI image? I've already got them to do this. Can you correct it?" So that's already happening, you know, where people are for--

MR: Interesting

CH: -for the, I don't know, their slide decks or what they see as sort of those everyday kind of visuals that maybe they would have hired somebody in to do, or maybe they would have used clip art. I don't know, but they use an AI for something more sophisticated to give them a more sophisticated visual. But they are so flawed, so flawed right now.

MR: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting too. I guess maybe this season is going to turn into the AI season. don't know. The other past seasons have touched on it, of course. like, I think what, if people are going to use AI to replace someone who would do normally what we would do, maybe at the low end or a small project, like they're going to face all the problems that we face, right? That it's really complex to condense ideas and like, how do you think creatively? And I mean, the AI isn't really gonna think creatively for you, it's just gonna take other people's ideas and kind of mush them together. So it may not be satisfying.

And then on top of which, like in my experience, I prompt a tool to give me a visual. I can't just go in and say, take away the six-fingered person and change their t-shirt to say this. And it just gives me like a whole new image. Like it can't do revision in that way, at least that I've seen. Again, it's possible, it's already happening, but like, think about all the overhead of a person who's just trying to get an image and they're struggling because they're constantly prompting and tweaking the prompting to get it to do that. Like at some point you're probably spending more time prompting than maybe, you probably should have hired someone just to do it, right? In some cases, I don't know. So it's interesting.

CH: I think it's a real education piece that we need to be able to explain what it is we do and how the visual output is just the finished product. But the process of how we get there and the thinking involved is not something that can easily be prompted into AI. If you want somebody to draw you a logo or create you a picture, AI can do that. You can say, you know, draw me this, but that isn't what we do. We just happen to be thinking out loud, you know, with pictures. But it's the thinking that people are hiring us for, even if they don't, they, yeah. The processing, yeah.

MR: Yeah, and the listening, right? The listening and, you know, those things, a combination.

CH: Yeah.

MR: I know a couple of seasons ago we had a guest on and she talked about using AI and she said her impression of like these large language model type applications, which is what most of us are dealing with. If they try to do everything, they struggle, right? Because it's hard, you know, and but if you give them guardrails and give them structure, and within a specific thing, like listen to our meeting and write everything down that I say and then summarize it to your best of your ability. Like that narrow framework, those tools seem to work better, but if you give it a swath of things that it has to consume and make sense out of, at least right now it struggles.

And that's sort of, in effect, what the job we're doing, right, is taking all this crazy stuff, like what's it like in the room? Are the people angry? Are they happy? Where's the contention? It can only transfer what they say, but what is the attention behind it or in the context of like, well, that department's angry because they didn't get as much budget last year and they're worried that they're not gonna get as much budget so they're more aggressive and like all these dynamics are happening, but it's not being documented anywhere. It's sort of a spirit in the room. Like you kind of need a person to identify that stuff.

And then like, okay, understanding that, how do we then approach this so that that department gets their message out so they feel like they're heard and they're not ripped off on not getting budget that they feel like they should have, right? How can I emphasize them? And, you know, that's all the kind of stuff that's going on, which is often misunderstood as not even being a thing, right?

CH: Yeah, we're not graphic recording everything that happens in that room. We're filtering, we're prioritizing, we're making connections, and we're bringing clarity to the whole day's conversations and summarizing that into something that is relevant and concise and memorable.

MR: Right.

CH: So yeah, eventually AI will be able to do that, but it's a little way off, I think.

MR: Yeah, well, I guess we'll see. You again, I don't say any of these things thinking it can never do it. I just haven't seen it yet. So it'll be interesting to see where the improvements come. Again, if it doesn't make money for the company doing the AI, they may not focus in those areas, right? If it's a really hard problem, it just may never do it because not that it couldn't do it, but no one is interested in making it do that, right? So--

CH: Yeah, people will be cheaper, I think, for a little while than to have a raft of expert prompters figuring out how to un-wrangle a situation they haven't been in yet.

MR: Yeah, potentially.

CH: You know, it's complicated.

MR: Yeah, it's interesting. Anyway, so that's our little AI chat. I guess it seems like it's hard to avoid these days with it appearing everywhere. So let's do a little shift. I'm really curious to hear about your favorite tools. Start with analog and then go digital. So I love to hear like pens, pencils, notebooks, post-it notes, I don't know, whatever those things are that you just seem to keep gravitating to because they work well in your work.

CH: I guess different tools for different types of work. So if I start with the big stuff, if I'm working in a big scale at an event, then I'm gonna be using my old Neuland graphic boards that are ancient and they don't sell them anymore. But I don't want to upgrade because I'm quite short and I can't really handle those easels and boards. So I like my old ones and Neuland Roll of brilliant white paper and mostly Neuland pens, like I'm pretty much Neuland. And so, that would be big scale, but I really like, not everybody agrees to let me do it at a big event, but I like working small scale at big events and working on--you can get like biodegradable phone board or card and working at maybe A3 scale and creating lots of individual images that can be moved around on a wall as a live part of the event.

MR: Interesting.

CH: So it can be grouped or prioritized as an active part of the facilitation. So I really enjoy doing that and I think it has a different kind of value. So depending on what the client is trying to achieve, I might suggest that to them and I really like that. I also work on a small scale because I keep a public visual journal. And when I'm journaling, so I have like a Leuchtturm. So that's what I keep my journaling.

MR: It's like an A4 size.

CH: It's slightly smaller than A4. I think it's like B5 or something.

MR: Okay, all right.

CH: I might've made that up. So I really like that. And I would probably use like a Micron--

MR: Microns, of course, yeah.

CH: -pen and either Neulands or Copics for color. So that would be my journalling. When I'm sketchnoting, I quite like to work really small. So I have like--this is my current one, which is really small.

MR: Yeah, it's even smaller than an A5. It's probably like a--it looks like a traveler's notebook size. Something like that.

CH: And that's what I'll just use, you know, do sketching in. Yeah. Yeah, that kind of thing. So I really like working, you know, that kind of just with whatever pen. So whatever pen I have, I'll do that.

MR: A little less precious, I guess, right?

CH: Much less precious, and that's always in my bag, that one.

MR: There you go.

CH: And I really like, yeah, I just like the act of pen on paper. I wouldn't want to ever move too far away from that. And I think at the minute I'm exploring a bit more sort of graphic journalism, at the minute, I'm hoping to start a project that's based on that sort of live situation, illustration and pulling together a narrative from lots of individual stories. So that really interests me and that will all be pen and ink, probably a fountain pen, which I haven't decided which one yet, and watercolour, I would think. But that's a project I'm just sort of dabbling in now. So that would be my analogue tools.

MR: That's great. Then I assume probably an iPad and maybe Procreate, which everybody says.

CH: Yep, it's true. Yeah, it's hard to bit, I think, for ease of use.

MR: Yeah, I'm a Procreate user for certain things, illustration a lot of times. Although I've been using Concepts a lot in the last couple of years and quite like it because I'm an old graphic designer who came up with Adobe Illustrator and vectors. So there's some very powerful things that it can do, which I suppose also would include Fresco if you're in the Adobe world. But basically, the idea of vectors and movability and resizability and those kinds of things are pretty cool. So, nice.

CH: I've just, not quite just, but a few months ago, I made the move away from Adobe and to Affinity, but I'll be honest, I haven't learned to use it yet. So I'm waiting for something to make me learn to use it.

MR: That project. Yeah, I'm like that too. Okay, that project I'm using that tool and then that sort of forces you to figure it out.

CH: Yeah. Whereas now I'm thinking of more and more projects where I can just be more analogue. So I'm regressing, I think.

MR: Or just, know, varying yourself. You know, if you think back, we talked about the pandemic before. I think one of the positive things. I mean, if you can take a positive thing out of that is I think it forced a lot of people who were really only doing, you know, physical boards to learn the digital and where it fits with them. And what it did for customers is it opened up the menu, right? So you didn't just have, okay, I can either do a big board or nothing. Or a small sketchnote or a big board or nothing else. And now you had digital and you could come into a meeting and do it live and switch the camera to it and, you know, have probably the ability.

Like a lot of times when I do this kind of work, I will, I'll take a recording, I'll turn it into a sketch note so it's not necessarily live, feed it back to the client. They will then say, this isn't the focus we want or there's a typo right there and I'll just make some tweaks and then it. That's now ready for sharing or printing or whatever they need to do with it. So that's an interesting opportunity too. So I think having these more options is good for both customers and for us if we're willing to be adaptable.

So I want to shift to the last thing we're gonna do, which is I always like something practical. Let's say there's someone listening to visual thinker or whatever that means to them and they're maybe stuck in a rut, or they just need a little inspiration, what would be three things you would offer them, mindset or practical tips that would help them kind of move forward and get excited again.

CH: So first of all, I'd say be really clear on what it is you're trying to achieve. And by that, I mean, I think the perception of graphic recording is very shiny. It's very, it's these beautiful big graphics and it's all very slick. but graphic recording can be that stuff you talked about at the beginning, can be in the room, much more, you know, evolving in the moment.

MR: Rough and tumble. Yeah.

CH: It's more of a working tool, right? I call it that sort of roll your sleeves up and get a bit scrappy with the information. Doesn't have to be tidy. Doesn't have to be in a particular kind of pen. Doesn't have to be, can be on anything, in any tool, but it's graphic recording still, right?

MR: Mm-hmm.

CH: So be clear on what it is you're trying to achieve. What does the client need you to achieve and work accordingly. Don't over produce or over complicate what you're doing if you don't need to. That would maybe be my first tip. Second would be, second would be, maybe it's similar to first, ignore the rules. I think we're really good at thinking there is the right way of doing stuff. And there isn't, if you, if you think about what makes you happy, what subjects you're passionate about what way you like working, know, maybe you like working with I don't know charcoal and watercolor Well, do you graphic recording that? it?

MR: Find a way to do it.

CH: Exactly, so sort of pursue your passions and your way of being fulfilled because life is you know long and hard and you can make yourself stressed or you can make yourself happy in these little moments. We don't have control of everything or many things even but if we can make some choices about where we focus our work, then that's a good thing. And also it's a little bit about why your work is your work. So it's a little bit about individuality, I think.

MR: That's good.

CH: And then I guess the third thing is to find community. Like seek others, whether it's in in graphic recording, whether it's finding other people who share a passion for particular way of working or a subset of the graphic recording community that works in the way you do on the subject that you do. So to find your people and, you know, pull from each other and find ways to collaborate.

MR: Get that support. Yeah.

CH: I mean, even, you know, that'd be the most exciting thing. Find ways to work together and, you know, connect with the people where you can be mutually useful to each other.

MR: Yeah, I found those are most satisfying when I've partnered up with people that I admire and we've done work together. It's been great.

CH: Yeah.

MR: Well, those are three great practical tips. Thank you for sharing those.

CH: You're very welcome.

MR: And then the last thing we'll do in the episode is how can people find you? Where do you do your work? I know you have a sub stack that you're doing and you probably get websites and training.

CH: Yeah.

MR: So tell us about those. We'll make sure they get in the show notes.

CH: So Substack, I'm enjoying Substack at the minute. We have the Visual Edit is the graphic change newsletter. So that goes out to, I don't know, about 1400 people or so. And that's sort of practical bits about being a graphic recorder. But also, we've just started the graphic recorder club literally a couple of days ago. And that's sort of like a membership space on Substack where you can hopefully learn in a bit more detail and connect with other people. And also on Substack, keep my journal, the jot, so I have a couple of Substack publications. I like it as a format a lot. So if you're into visual journaling, that's where you'd find me.

MR: That's the one I'm subscribed to and I enjoy it when you post.

CH: If you're interested in training, we have the Graphic Change Academy site, graphicchangeacademy.com and on there you'll find all the courses. And I'm also still on Instagram, but honestly, I've got limited energy for social media and the energy I have is more on Substack right now. So technically I'm on Instagram and I'm also on LinkedIn, you know, I'm going to say, I'm going to say come to Substack, find me there. That's what I'm going to say.

MR: Yeah, and your links to those other places like LinkedIn and Instagram will probably be in your profile so you can get to them. Yeah.

CH: Probably. Somewhere, maybe, yeah.

MR: Maybe.

CH: There's a limit, isn't there, to where you can be.

MR: Yeah, there's almost only so much energy you can put out there. So you have to make your choices.

CH: Yeah.

MR: You have to make your choices.

CH: Yeah, definitely.

MR: So cool. Well, thanks, Cara. Thanks for being on the show. Thanks for sharing your wisdom and your story. It's always great to hear another story and hear where you came from because I think in your story is the universal, which is everyone came from some strange place to this. Because like we said at the outset, this is a pretty new space. So everybody had to come from somewhere else.

I mean, maybe now there's young people that are starting out in this space as professionals and will stay there their whole careers for all we know, right? But maybe for the generations before that, you would have come from somewhere else. And I think that's still going to be true. That people are going to come from odd places. And I think like you identified, bringing your unique perspective, whatever that interest it is and overlaying it on top of graphics is really powerful because that gives you a unique voice. So thanks for reminding us of that.

CH: Yeah, you're welcome. And wouldn't it be great if they did teach that graphic recording existed at school? Like if I had known that in art class at school, it would have been just like a genius moment. But yeah.

MR: Yeah, I mean, I think you could take private classes, kind of like graphic change, but I don't know that there's any universities teaching it. Again, it could be that we're just not aware of it. That would be cool. So maybe it's your opportunity.

CH: I think there have been some moves towards certifying certain elements of it. But I'm not really into that either because think, yes, as we formalize it and say you have to have a qualification, it excludes so many people. you know, just tell everybody about it. That's enough.

MR: Great. Yeah, yeah. Well, thanks so much, Cara. Thanks for being on the show and for everyone who's watching or listening, it's another episode of the Sketchnote Army podcast. Until the next episode, this is Mike, and I'll talk to you soon.

Cara Holland turns stories into pictures to help people work visually - S17/E04

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