My Experience With The Liberating Structure “Drawing Together”

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Drawing Together is one of my favorite Liberating Structures. I love how people discover the rich potential of drawing with 5 symbols only and using no words, numbers, or other illustrations. Initially, people are often a bit hesitant when drawing is required. Yet it quickly turns into excitement when they discover the simplicity of the symbols and especially what it makes possible.

Christiaan Verwijs shared his thoughts on Drawing Together a couple of years ago in this article. In the meantime, I gained new ideas, learned important lessons, and discovered powerful connections with other structures. I’ll share them in this blog post.

As always, I’m eager to learn from your experiences as well. How have you used Drawing Together? What works best for you? What other strings of Liberating Structures have you tried? Let’s learn and grow together!

About Drawing Together

Drawing Together was created by Keith McCandless and Henri Lipmanowicz, based on prior work by David Sibbet and Angeles Arrien. It’s a Liberating Structure that is all about creativity and interpretation. It exists to reveal insights and paths forward through nonverbal expression. Instead of using verbal language as its medium for interaction, it uses constrained visual language with five purposefully abstract symbols. This simple vocabulary allows everyone to fully participate because it removes the influence of knowing more (or fancier) words, as well as being more skilled or faster at verbalizing thoughts into words than others.

Steps to facilitate Drawing Together

Below, I’ll share the steps on how to facilitate Drawing Together. This is just one way to use this Liberating Structure. Check the description on the Liberating Structures website for the original steps and more details.

1. (5 min) Introduce the purpose of Drawing Together. Make participants comfortable with drawing and the language by individually drawing the five symbols. A triangle represents a goal. A rectangle represents support. A spiral represents change or transformation. A star person represents a relationship, and the circle represents wholeness. With a virtual session, ensure these symbols are available in a shared workspace.
2. (10 min) Invite everyone to draw the first version of the story of their journey. Encourage participants to include the challenges, special moments, and surprises they faced while moving forward. Emphasize that drawing should occur in silence without words or other symbols. Participants can use the same symbols multiple times. Don’t explain the intention of this structure too much; trust the participants' creativity.
3. (10 min) Form pairs and interpret each other’s drawings. The person who has drawn does not speak at the start. First, have the other person interpret the drawing. Only once the other person has had the opportunity to share his/her interpretations can the original creator of the drawing add more detail. After 5 minutes, you switch roles.
4. (5 min) Debrief important patterns with the whole group. What was it like to have your drawing interpreted by someone else? Whose interpretation was quite close to reality? What are some obvious patterns you noticed?

10 Practical recommendations

I’ll share 10 practical recommendations, thoughts, and lessons learned randomly. I’ll also include strings of Liberating Structures that worked well in combination with Drawing Together.

1. Focus on the together part

Let’s start with something I didn’t fully understand about Drawing Together. It never really felt like drawing ‘together.’ How I experienced this Liberating Structure and how I used it myself resembled more ‘draw alone and inspect together.’ Most likely, this happens because I often use Drawing Together in public settings where people don’t know each other. Drawing together is more difficult because they don’t have shared experiences to use. As a result, everyone is drawing alone and shares it afterward. This isn’t wrong, but there are sufficient opportunities to encourage the ‘together’ part, even in public workshops. This is something to consider if you want to stimulate teamwork, trigger creativity, and build trust (even more). Keep on reading to discover a few tips.

2. Develop drawings with “1–2–4-ALL”

The foundational Liberating Structure 1–2–4-ALL is one way to promote drawing together. For example, ask a team to draw its journey. Encourage them to include the challenges they faced, the forming of the team, the successful moments, etc. Each person starts individually, develops a shared drawing in pairs, and afterward in groups of four, and eventually connects everything with the entire team. You can create one large drawing on a big (digital) canvas or make smaller drawings on separate pieces of paper and put everything together afterward. It’s cool to see how quickly 1–2–4-ALL enables a group to create a shared drawing of, in this example, their shared journey as a team.

3. Make it forward-looking

Instead of focusing Drawing Together on visualizing an experience, it’s also possible to use a forward-looking perspective. Have participants draw their professional journey for the upcoming 10 years as they imagine it at this point. Other examples are using Drawing together to visualize the product development life cycle, the future of a team or organization, or maybe even how they’ll handle conflict. An advantage of a forward-looking perspective is that it allows the participants to truly draw together instead of drawing alone and inspecting it together.

4. Use it as a recap structure

For example, move Drawing Together to the end of a session and ask participants to draw their key takeaways. Once they create their drawing, use Impromptu Networking to share them quickly. Invite everyone to have a quick conversation, and afterward, share important patterns with the entire group. If you’re part of a Scrum team, you can use a similar approach at the end of a Sprint. In this case, you invite all the team members to draw the flow of the Sprint. You can do this individually first and, as such, discover differences and similarities. Or make one large drawing from the start. A third example is to recap the development of a project or an ongoing product development endeavor. Chances are that it triggers an interesting conversation!

5. Encourage creativity

Drawing Together offers a visual language with five purposefully abstract symbols. Participants can only use these five symbols to express thoughts, ideas, and challenges. This constraint still gives sufficient opportunities for creativity. It might boost creativity. I always encourage participants to use different colors for the symbols. Draw a red, green, or orange symbol to give it an extra dimension. Draw symbols in different shapes and sizes. Merge symbols. Use the same symbols multiple times. There are so many different ways to use the 5 symbols. Give examples, and trust the group's creativity to use the potential.

6. Share drawings with “Conversation Cafe”

Conversation Café encourages people to listen and understand each other’s perspectives on a profound, shared topic or challenge instead of trying to convince or persuade others to see it your way. Sitting in a circle with a simple set of agreements and a talking object, small groups engage in consecutive rounds of dialogue. Conversation Cafe invites people to listen to one another’s thoughts and reflect on a shared challenge.

Drawing Together can serve as a perfect starting point for Conversation Cafe. For example, ask participants to draw their journey or challenges and share it via Conversation Cafe afterward. Or focus the drawing on the team’s journey, the progress of the product’s development, or the organization’s Agile transformation. Especially because Drawing Together triggers the creative part of your brain, a different dimension is triggered for Conversation Cafe.

7. Use it as input for “Generative Relationships STAR”

Generative Relationships STAR aims to help a group understand how they work together and identify changes they can make to improve group performance. All group members diagnose current relationship patterns and decide how to follow up with action steps together. The STAR compass tool becomes even more powerful when you use it frequently. After a first diagnosis, you can evaluate your progress as a group and see if things are improving.

Drawing Together can serve as a powerful Liberating Structure to get everyone’s thinking started about the team or group. Invite everyone to draw their teams' journey and include their challenges. Or draw the current state of the team. Optionally, share the drawing via Impromptu Networking or a simple 1–2–4-ALL, and afterward, create the team compass.

8. Connect “Drawing Together” to “Heard, See, and Respected”

‘Heard, Seen, Respected’ is all about building empathy and compassion. It invites us to share a story of when we felt unheard, seen, or respected. But also by inviting us to listen actively to another person's story. Having someone actively listen to your story — without them judging or interrupting you — is liberating. Listening also has great power as it allows us to “step into the shoes of the other” and recognize their worries, pains, and frustrations. Visualizing your journey before sharing it with someone else is a great warming-up exercise. It triggers participants to think about their struggles, challenges, and tough moments. It enables participants to express their personal stories even more richly.

9. Give and get help, with “Drawing Together” as a starting point

First, invite participants to use Drawing Together to visualize their journey. Encourage them to include important moments, challenges, and struggles. Afterward, give them a minute to reflect on their journey and think about a challenge they still face today. Maybe they already visualized it; otherwise, the visualization made them aware of a problem they struggle with.

Next, introduce Troika Consulting. This is a Liberating Structure that helps people gain insights into issues they face and unleash local wisdom to address them. In rapid rounds of “consultations,” individuals ask for help and get advice immediately from two others. In small groups, participants bring their drawings and use them to explain the challenge they want to get help with. It’s a great combination to build trust within a group through mutual support and create conditions for unimagined solutions to emerge.

10. Online works like a charm

Drawing Together is a Liberating Structure that is all about creativity and interpretation. It’s a structure that you can easily use online. Especially when you want to draw ‘together.’ Create a large online whiteboard with Mural, Miro, or a similar tool, and go wild! Sometimes, I ask participants to draw their journey on a physical piece of paper. Using physical paper within an online setting proves to be a powerful combination.

Closing

In this blog post, I shared my experiences with the Liberating Structure “Drawing Together.” It’s one of my favorite structures. I love how people discover the potential of drawing with 5 symbols only and using no words, numbers, or other illustrations. To learn more about Liberating Structures, check our Medium page with over 75+ articles, or join one of our Immersion Workshops.