"How did you get into this?" ▫️

Transcript edited for clarity

I'm currently sitting in the spot where my graphic facilitation career began.

I say that I stumbled into this work, and I thought I would tell you the story since I'm here right now.

December 1992, Alumni Recitation Hall

I'm in a classroom on the campus of Grinnell College, a very small but mighty liberal arts college in the middle of Iowa. I

was a first-generation college student who had no idea what college meant or how it worked, but my intuition said to "go there."

The secret sauce of Grinnell is that every student takes a first-year tutorial class during their first semester.

This skill-building course teaches you how to write, research, and speak—all the things you'll need over the next four years and beyond.

Because this was a skill-building course, the topic was less central, which gave professors an opportunity to teach very specific subjects they might not normally cover in the general course catalog. I ended up getting utopian literature.

The utopia part makes sense—the literature part does not.

I still don't understand how I ended up in that class, but that was the topic we used to develop our writing, researching, and speaking skills.

This particular classroom has been completely renovated since then. They've wrapped a whole new building around the original building, but this is roughly where it happened.

We had one big oval table instead of individual seats, and definitely had chalkboards on both sides of the room.

The Final Presentation

At the end of this utopian literature tutorial class, we all had to design our own utopia and present it.

Very on brand for me, I turned the assignment into a craft project.

I made little handbooks about my utopia for each of my classmates and professor.

Years later, when I got a copy of it, it tickled me that you could tell everything about my family of origin when you read this utopia—it was all about people not having parents.

Eighteen-year-old me made her family dynamics pretty obvious in that little handbook.

The night before my presentation, I saw it visually in my head.

The next morning, I headed into class and drew out my presentation at the same time I was speaking it.

I was at the chalkboard presenting verbally, then I would turn around and draw, then turn back and speak—verbally, visually, verbally, visually.

Standing against the wall in the back was my literature professor, Paula Smith.

She looked at me like I was an alien who had dropped from the sky.

There was nothing hostile or patronizing about it—just pure bewilderment, like "What is happening right now?!" She didn't stop me, though.

That was the moment.

That was when I thought, "I know what to do. I'm going to draw my presentation."

And I did.

That was the only time I did that in four years of college.

We're talking about 1992 to 1996—we didn't have digital cameras or video cameras yet. Just to give you a sense of how much time and technology has passed between that December 1992 moment and today, I'm recording this in 2023.

Full Circle

I'm going to get choked up telling this part. In 2014, I was invited back to Alumni College and got to teach there—the first non-professor to teach and speak at Alumni College.

I gave a session about visual thinking, and the college hired me to do fascinating work defining what self-governance means, which is a core principle of Grinnell's culture.

Launched out into the world

Three and a half years after that presentation, I graduated from Grinnell in May 1996. I went in thinking I'd become a biology major, but I like to say I got down to the phospholipid bilayer and that's where it stopped. I changed to a studio art major, focusing on printmaking and etching.

In retrospect, I understand that my love of biology was about hands-on learning and taxonomies and systems—learning about amazing organisms, their complexity, and how they work.

As a studio art major, I had my final critique with my printmaking professor, who had a very contentious teaching style—basically grind you down and see if you survive.

He said, "You're really good at illustrating ideas."

Because of our contentious relationship, I thought he was saying I wasn't a fine artist but could be an illustrator.

That's what I made of it at the time.

I moved to Chicago, got a retail job in art supplies, and about four months later realized I didn't want to work for that kind of person. I went into the wonderful world of temping.

Kathy's Call

One of my classmates, Kathy Clemons, was working for a temp agency placing people. She called me up and said, "Brandy, I've got an opportunity for you."

I said I didn't want a full-time job, just temp work.

She said, "No, this place is a six-day contract. And it's very Brandy."

I showed up for the interview at a brand new office space designed to run change management workshops—a management consulting company using IP from another company.

I was 22 years old and didn't know management consulting from change management workshops, but I showed up.

I was talking to this lovely gentleman, Allen, and looking around this space filled with mobile dry erase walls—not just rolling walls, but true furniture dividing the space, all with dry erase surfaces and fascinating mobile furniture. Something was very interesting about this place.

During the interview, I mentioned I could draw. Allen lit up, pointed halfway across the space where someone was drawing at one of the big dry erase walls, and said, "You're going to do that in 20 minutes."

I said, "Of course I am."

Part of it was that I was too young to be scared. But the biggest part was that seed planted in part one—at the chalkboard where, the night before my big presentation, I thought "I've got to draw this, because that's the way this works."

There's two of us?

Four years later, in 2000, I was no longer contracting for Ernst and Young but was out in the world as a graphic facilitator. I learned about the International Forum of Visual Practitioners (IFVP), the professional organization for people who do this work I'd stumbled into.

The geographic center of the work was the Bay Area in Northern California, around an organization called The Grove. I headed to the West Coast for this conference.

Our icebreaker was to line up in order of how long we'd been doing this work.

Instead of choosing October 1996 when people started paying me to do it, I chose part one of my story,  December 1992.

We all lined up, and then turned to our neighbors to share our stories.

I was sharing the story you've already heard—mapping out my utopia on the board—when I felt a little tap on my shoulder.

This gentleman asked, "Did you just say Grinnell?"

Grinnell is tiny and mighty, and plenty of people have never heard of it.

But when you're a Grinnellian and you hear "Grinnell," you have to tap that person on the shoulder.

It turned out to be Anthony Weeks, a wonderful colleague who also went to Grinnell.

We've been fantastic work colleagues ever since.

It was such a wonderful confirmation that this was the turning point—at the beginning of that conference, I was sharing this tiny but mighty place where it all began, and I got tapped on the shoulder by another person from this college who was also doing this very odd work.

That's how I fell into graphic facilitation, all thanks to my first-year tutorial at Grinnell College, when this alien who dropped from the sky decided that if I needed to give a presentation on a utopia, I was going to make a handbook and draw it out at the same time as I was speaking.

There you have it. Thank you for watching.