Dpict’s book roundup for facilitators

Here at Dpict, we’re in the process of gathering a select group of books that are invaluable for facilitators. In addition to upholding techniques for very experienced practitioners, these are also accessible to anyone who wants to strengthen their communication with visuals.

Collaboration by Design

Collaboration by Design is a field guide on design and facilitation by the Open Field Institute (Philippe Coulomb and Charles Collingwood-Boots). The 300+ page book takes a careful look at purposefully-designed and facilitated workshops. How can facilitators, as enablers of collaboration, innovate and transform communities? This is a guide that’s practical, complete, and accessible.

Generative Scribing: A Social Art of the 21st Century

Scribing, of course, is a visual practice that works to capture and illuminate ideas as they’re emerging. Generative Scribing extends this art by “attending to the field of energy and relation between people, and to the emerging potential of a system.” This tome, written by Kelvy Bird (dpict Co-Founder), is essential for scribes, facilitators, coaches, and organizers, and for anyone who cares about how humans work together for the better good.

Leaping The Abyss: Putting Group Genius To Work

Leaping The Abyss: Putting Group Genius To Work is the single most in-depth description and analysis of the patented DesignShop® facilitation methodology invented by the MG Taylor Corporation. Written by two authors who attended a DesignShop event in 1995, Leaping The Abyss provides a detailed step-by-step account of the three-day event, including interviews and anecdotes from participants from a diversity of industries, as well as a behind the scenes look at how DesignShop experiences are created and the personnel who facilitate them.

Emergent Strategy

Inspired by Octavia Butler’s explorations of our human relationship to change, Emergent Strategy, by Adrienne Maree Brown, is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live. This book invites us to feel, map, assess, and learn from the swirling patterns around us in order to better understand and influence them as they happen. This is a resolutely materialist ‘spirituality’ based equally on science and science fiction, a visionary incantation to transform that which ultimately transforms us.

From the Front of the Room: Notes on Facilitation for Experienced Practitioners

This book’s focus is on front-of-room facilitation, and is intended for experienced facilitators. The author, Dan Newman, takes up this critical last step in the workshop facilitation practice. This is a great resource if you’re already experienced in other facilitation steps, from designing an effective agenda to managing the workshop’s ecosystem.

Community

Modern society is plagued by fragmentation. The various sectors of our communities — businesses, schools, social service organizations, churches, government — do not work together. They exist in their own worlds. As do so many individual citizens, who long for connection but end up marginalized, their gifts overlooked, their potential contributions lost. This disconnection and detachment makes it hard if not impossible to envision a common future and work towards it together. We know what healthy communities look like — there are many success stories out there, and they’ve been described in detail. What Block provides in this inspiring new book is an exploration of the exact way community can emerge from fragmentation: How is community built? How does the transformation occur? What fundamental shifts are involved? He explores a way of thinking about our places that creates an opening for authentic communities to exist and details what each of us can do to make that happen.

Picture This

Molly Bang’s insightful and accessible treatise, first published in 1991, has been revised and expanded for its 25th anniversary. Bang’s powerful ideas — about how the visual composition of images works to engage the emotions, and how the elements of an artwork can give it the power to tell a story — remain unparalleled in their simplicity and genius. Why are diagonals dramatic? Why are curves calming? Why does red feel hot and blue feel cold? First published in 1991, Picture This has changed the way artists, illustrators, reviewers, critics, and readers look at and understand art.

Marks and Meaning

Marks and Meaning is “an unbook” by Dave Gray — basically something that falls between a blog and a book. In this case, it’s a notebook of ideas that has accepted its “incompleteness.” It’s a document for sharing ideas when they are still fluid.

Design is Storytelling

Design Is Storytelling explores the psychology of visual perception from a narrative point of view. Presenting dozens of tools and concepts in a lively, visual manner, this book will help any designer amplify the narrative power of their work. Use this book to stir emotions, build empathy, articulate values and convey action; to construct narrative arcs and create paths through space; integrate form and language; evaluate a project’s storytelling power; and to write and deliver strong narratives.

Listening

Listening, Sixth Edition takes an experiential approach to listening instruction, providing extensive applied examples and cases within the context of the HURIER listening model. The text encourages students to view listening as a process involving six interrelated components, which are developed along the parallel dimensions of theory and skill building. This new edition offers a companion website as well as additional and updated cases, in-text exercises, and questions for discussion. Throughout the text, new content has been added to address students’ world of evolving technology and expanding social boundaries.

The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis

The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis has been required reading for intelligence officers studying the art and science of intelligence analysis for decades. Richards Heuer, Jr. discusses in the book how fundamental limitations in human mental processes can prompt people to jump to conclusions and employ other simplifying strategies that lead to predictably faulty judgments known as cognitive biases. These analytic mindsets cannot be avoided, but they can be overcome through the application of more structured and rigorous analytic techniques including the Analysis of Competing Hypotheses.

Understanding How We Learn: A Visual Guide

This accessible guide helps teachers to integrate effective, research-backed strategies for learning into their classroom practice. The book explores exactly what constitutes good evidence for effective learning and teaching strategies, how to make evidence-based judgments instead of relying on intuition, and how to apply findings from cognitive psychology directly to the classroom.

Make Space

Based on the work at the Stanford University d.school and its Environments Collaborative Initiative, Make Space is a tool that shows how space can be intentionally manipulated to ignite creativity. Appropriate for designers charged with creating new spaces or anyone interested in revamping an existing space, this guide offers novel and non-obvious strategies for changing surroundings specifically to enhance the ways in which teams and individuals communicate, work, play — and innovate.

We would love to hear what is on your list of essential reads!