Visualising Change Series

An introduction

At The Yunus Centre, Griffith University we’re committed to building capabilities around impact literacy, which necessarily involves engaging with the messy nature of change.

We believe that visual representations are key to increasing engagement, enhancing understanding, and improving retention of key concepts and practices.

“…unless our words, concepts, ideas are hooked onto an image, they will go in one ear, sail through the brain, and go out the other ear. Words are processed by our short-term memory where we can only retain about seven bits of information (plus or minus 2) […]. Images, on the other hand, go directly into long-term memory where they are indelibly etched.” (Burmark, Visual Literacy, 2002)

We use imagery and graphics throughout our work and have decided to surface them more intentionally through this series as a way to contribute to greater understanding and engagement with the emergent ideas we’re exploring.

The ideas presented in this series are not new — rather our focus is on bringing existing ideas together in new combinations.

“ Every creative act involves bisociation, a process that brings together and combines previously unrelated ideas”
(Koestler, The Act of Creation, 1964)

This combining and re-combining in new ways is at the heart of transformative social innovation: that is, the dynamic processes of social change that bring together all the actors involved — including concepts, policy instruments, new forms of cooperation and organisation, methods, processes and regulations, and the complex relationships between diverse actors such as people, institutions and organisations, laws, documents, strategies, and technologies (McNeill 2017, p.55–56; Howaldt et al. 2014, pp.19–21).

Assembling and configuring these actors in new and different ways is often at the heart of effective change processes. There are a number of visual tools, frameworks and representations that can help make the range of actors involved in change processes more visible, and to open up thinking about the possible relationships between them, that we use regularly in our work. We’re always in the process of developing new ways to use them, including designing new iterations.

In keeping with our core value of ‘working out loud’ — both internally as a team and externally — we’ve decided to write about how we are using and iterating them as we go. So over time, as we find the space to write things up, we’ll be posting here a series of blogs focussed around visualising change.

These pieces are intentionally short and accessible — we aren’t aiming to provide a lecture on the topic, but to foreground some key concepts and ways of working with them that make sense to us. We hope you find them useful!

Read: Creating Intentional Futures with Three Horizons +Challenge Mapping