If you have ever had the opportunity to share your work with children you will understand the challenge, joy and inspiration of it. I was fortunate enough to be invited to speak to my daughter’s class during their module on “How we Organize Ourselves.” I realized as my daughter introduced me as “this is my Mum, Heidi, she works with computers,” that I had some explaining to do.

Providing a clear message that explained what I do, how I do it, and why was a fun challenge. I began by explaining my most challenging job to organize; motherhood and “family management”. I think I caught them off guard on that one, but that was part of the fun.

I then proceeded to draw a picture on the board of my process for teaching social strategy. I covered topics on understanding our stories, our networks, stake-holders, knowledge keepers, sharing knowledge, networking, strategy, knowledge sharing tools and visual communication.

I was pretty pleased with their engagement, until we came around to the final round of questions. “I thought you work with computers?” They asked.

“Computers, devices and apps are all important tools in the workplace no matter what our jobs,” I tried to explain. “My main job is helping people communicate with other people using these tools so they can do their jobs better and be happier.”

“Yeah, I get it. Like when I talk with my cousin in America on Skype, while we build stuff on Minecraft. Cool.” He said.

If only my clients all could get it so quickly. Maybe it takes a fourth grader to learn the most basic thing of all, the benefit of communicating and maintaining relationships.

The journey has begun with an intense week of orientation into the Fielding Graduate University doctoral program for Human and Organizational Systems. In the next 3-5 years I will be digging deeper into my work with my Social Optimization Theory applied to Leadership in the New Social Paradigm from many angles. I am excited and inspired by the potential to learn, and grow personally while contributing to my field. Above are my sketch notes from the final session with advice for moving forward. I will share research results on this site and more as I come across interesting things of value for practitioners. Fielding provides a great balance between the scholar practitioner model which allows me to delve deeper while in practice.

Please do not hesitate to contact me should you or your organization be interested in participating in or benefitting from the research.

Thanks Tomi (Graphic Facilitation) and Laurie (Strategic Visualization) for two great weeks of intensive workshops at the Grove. Your instruction was enlightening and inspiring! I look forward to putting it all into practice. I leave San Francisco with a smile and bundle of ideas ready to role out for a busy Spring. Cheers!!

There is a sudden burst of interest in visual communication which has identified both a great opportunity and a challenge.  Where are you, how does one find you, and what else do you do.  I have several great things coming up that all could use more eyes, ears, pens and perspectives.  I see this is a wonderful chance to shout out and do my share as social strategist, a connector and an advocate for the doodle revolution.

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Another year another South-by-Southwest, a dense gathering of techies, creatives, educators and businesses in the delightful city of Austin, Texas is almost over. After nearly a week of intense panels, networking, trend spotting, eating, learning, blogging and creating I am left with a sense of inspiration from the people, excitement at the opportunities and, well yes, relief that it is over.

I took part in PepsiCo’s Livescribe team, pulled together by Maya, documenting the conference with our Livescribe smartpens. It was a great opportunity to test this wonderful tool, which is definitely an incredible innovation on the hardware side of things, recording pen strokes as vector drawing, while simultaneously capturing the audio. I look forward to testing this further on my return.

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Here’s a start of the capture of SxSW Interactive this year as I take Sketchnotes for PepsiCo as an experiment using the Livescribe. Great tool and I look forward to using more. Will update later on the results, but for now here are some photos and the Sketchnotes thus far.