By hand not by slide

Whiteboard marker or slide clicker. If you had to choose, which one would pick? 

A marker in my hand gives me more freedom than a clicker for slides when I’m facilitating.  

✏️ More freedom to improvise in response to what emerges from the conversation. 

✏️ More freedom to engage even more with the people in the room. 

✏️ More freedom to be present and facilitate. 

I don’t waste time testing tech. I’m sticking up pre-drawn instructions and cartoons which do more than communicate with people in the workshop. They also make the room more interesting and give people something to look at and talk about when they arrive. 

And I never forget what a slide means.  

I’ve been drawing for workshops forever, but I hadn’t thought about the freedom bit. That came courtesy of Adriana Matriciano, a learning facilitator from Brazil.  

She declared her first workshop without slides ‘liberating’. She said she took the risk thanks to one of my posts about zero power point slides.  

How this helps the group 

So that’s what using markers over slides means for a facilitator. How does it help the people in the group being facilitated? 

From what I’ve seen, visual prompts, cartoons and handwriting make people lean in and I think that’s because we are drawn (pun intended) to imperfection. We’ve always preferred human over perfect. I think this is especially so now that we’re on the AI juggernaut. 

My imperfect cartoons and handwriting say, ‘a real person made this, with their hands, in real time’. That builds connection and starts to build trust. When people feel this, something shifts for them too.  

✏️ More freedom to contribute, not just attend. No slides signals that this isn’t a presentation, it’s a conversation.  

✏️ More freedom to show up as themselves, not just as participants. A hand-drawn visual signals that a real person is in the room with them, not performing at them. 

✏️ More freedom to speak up without fear of getting it wrong. When the visuals are imperfect, so is the room. 

Give it a go 

If you’d like to cut back on slides, try a few of my favourite visual prompts in this video.  

These ones are for the start of an online workshop, to help people connect to each other and the purpose. They can be easily adapted for onsite workshops. 

If you’d like some help with visuals for other stages in your workshops, please get in touch.   

I’m sure you’ve got visuals you know work. I’d love to see them 

© Jacinta Cubis 

Thanks for reading this far! 

Stay (fl)awesome!