Visual Collaboration

Have you ever felt stuck with methods, tools and skills that do not match the increasing complexity you are part of? Would you like to work in new ways that strengthen thinking, communication and collaboration? Visual Collaboration introduces a new and innovative way of working and collaborating that will help you successfully manage complexity for yourself, your team, and your entire organization. The method of this book unlocks any teams ability to collaborate in complex projects and processes. By using a systematic and proven approach to drawing and visualizing. Visual Collaboration is a unique visual business book that will enable you to develop visual languages to fit any scenario, create engaging and powerful questions to assist your visual process design and turn a white canvas into a visual template that can improve any meeting, project, or process. The core of the book - a practical and easy-to-follow method - THE FIVE BUILDING BLOCKS will most likely become your preferred way of working. The method is supported by plentiful examples, 4-color drawing, chapter summaries, and clearly defined learning objectives. Enjoyable and powerful, this book will help you: Use visualization as a tool to explore opportunities and challenges Translate complex concepts into easy-to-understand actions Engage employees and team members with effective strategic processes Incorporate drawing into your strategic organizational toolbox to strengthen communication and collaboration Develop and apply powerful visual literacy skills The authors, internationally-recognized experts in strategy communication and visual facilitation, have helped incorporate visual collaboration into more than 500 organizations such as LEGO, IKEA, the Red Cross, the United Nations, and many others. This book is the must-have resource for you to follow their example.

Visual thinking and drawing are both becoming increasingly important in today's business settings. A picture really can tell a thousand words. Visualization is a crucial part of the journey for companies seeking to boost enterprise agility, break down silos and increase employee and customer engage­ment. Visualizing thought processes can help break down complex problems. It empowers teams and staff to build on one another's ideas, fosters collaboration, jump-starts co-creation and boosts innovation. This book will help brush aside misconceptions that may have prevented you using these techniques in your workplace. You don't need Van Gogh's artistic talent or Einstein's intelligence to harness the power of visual thinking and make your company more successful. With the right mindset and the simple skills this book provides you the skills to develop your own signature and style and start generating change by integrating visual communication into your business setting.

Use eye-popping visual tools to energize your people! Just as social networking has reclaimed the Internet for human interactivity and co-creation, the visual meetings movement is reclaiming creativity, productivity, and playful exchange for serious work in groups. Visual Meetings explains how anyone can implement powerful visual tools, and how these tools are being used in Silicon Valley and elsewhere to facilitate both face-to-face and virtual group work. This dynamic and richly illustrated resource gives meeting leaders, presenters, and consultants a slew of exciting tricks and tools, including Graphic recording, visual planning, story boarding, graphic templates, idea mapping, etc. Creative ways to energize team building, sales presentations, staff meetings, strategy sessions, brainstorming, and more Getting beyond paper and whiteboards to engage new media platforms Understanding emerging visual language for leading groups Unlocking formerly untapped creative resources for business success, Visual Meetings will help you and your team communicate ideas more effectively and engagingly.

Intercultural Collaboration by Design introduces a framework for collaborating across cultures and learning to use multicultural perspectives to address pressing global issues. This handbook helps people work, learn, and teach across cultures. Through the activities highlighted in this book, virtual and intercultural teams will find a practical route for initiating and sustaining productive work across disciplinary and social barriers. Teams can craft a plan to achieve their goals by selecting the activities that best meet their needs and interests. First-person anecdotes from the authors demonstrate how the activities encourage teams to embrace diverse perspectives in order to create innovative solutions. With over 30 hands-on activities, this book will be of great interest to diverse teams from a variety of disciplines who want to enhance intercultural learning and co-working. Whether in the classroom or workplace, the activities are appropriate for a variety of collaboration contexts, without a need for background in art or design.

Collaborative Assessment is designed to help all professionals who work with visually impaired students understand the impact of visual impairment on assessing students' learning potential. Written by the expert assessment team at the California School for the Blind, this book focuses on evaluating students in a variety of areas, including psychology, speech and language, orientation and mobility, and technology, and provides a framework for developing a cooperative, interactive team of professionals from a variety of disciplines to achieve accurate evaluation of the needs and strengths of students. School psychologists, speech and language pathologists, administrators, teachers, and parents will find this book invaluable. Includes helpful forms and checklists and annotated lists of assessments in each area.

The dissemination of desktop publishing and web authoring software has allowed nearly everyone in industrialized countries to combine verbal and visual symbols into text. Serious multimodal projects often demand extensive teamwork, especially in the workplace. But how can collaboration engaging such different traditions of expression be conducted effectively? To address this question, Envisioning Collaboration traces the composing processes of expert graphic artists and writers preparing advertising campaigns to retain a vital national account. It examines the influences on individual and dyadic composing processes of what Csikszentmihalyi terms "the domain," in this case the disciplinary knowledge of advertising, and "the field," in this case the surrounding economic conditions and client, vendor, customer, and agency executive gatekeepers. Based on a 460-hour participant-observation and intensive computerized data analysis, Envisioning Collaboration is the first book to meticulously examine collaborative creative processes at an award-winning advertising agency, including audience analysis, branding, collaborative "moves," power and conflict management, uses of humor, degree of mindfulness, and effectiveness. The findings indicate the role of concepts in generating common texts by artists and writers, the role of the visual in individuals' composing, verbal-visual rhetorical elements in processes and products, and which verbal-visual techniques were most generative. Findings are related to pertinent research in technical and business writing, rhetoric and composition, and some key research in visual design, communication, advertising, neurolinguistics, management, and psychology. The book concludes with a pedagogical/training unit incorporating "gateway activities" for effective verbal-visual composition and collaboration.

Create better connected teams and hold more productive meetings In Collaborative Intelligence: Design Better Collaboration, Improve Team Productivity, and Build a Culture of Connection, the workplace collaboration experts at MURAL offer a holistic and comprehensive system for fixing today’s broken teamwork culture. This book introduces the emerging practice of collaboration design, a cutting-edge approach to crafting collaborative experiences with a high degree of intentionality so that they deliver extraordinary, repeatable outcomes. With a strong focus on activities and rituals that can be used by leaders and team members right now, the authors show businesses how they can innovate faster than ever. Readers will learn the skills they need to enable better collaboration, whether their teams are hybrid, remote, in-person, synchronous, or asynchronous. Based on decades of research, experience, and observations from working with thousands of teams globally in all kinds of collaboration spaces, this highly visual book provides the instruction you need to fix teamwork, transform your organization, and re-imagine what’s possible at work. You’ll also find: How to build playbooks of collaboration methods How to create an inclusive, equitable, and collaborative environment that invites participation and unlocks the genius of your teams How to access unprecedented insights into how collaboration happens in your organization Strategies for leading collaboration change at the organization level A can’t-miss guide for knowledge-work professionals, Collaborative Intelligence provides the direction you’ve been looking for to help teams innovate together.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th IFIP WG 5.5 Working Conference on Virtual Enterprises, PRO-VE 2017, held in Vicenza, Italy, in September 2017. The 68 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 159 submissions. They provide a comprehensive overview of identified challenges and recent advances in various collaborative network (CN) domains and their applications, with a strong focus on the following areas: collaborative models, platforms and systems for data-rich worlds; manufacturing ecosystem and collaboration in Industry 4.0; big data analytics and intelligence; risk, performance, and uncertainty in collaborative data-rich systems; semantic data/service discovery, retrieval, and composition in a collaborative data-rich world; trust and sustainability analysis in collaborative networks; value creation and social impact of collaboration in data-rich worlds; technology development platforms supporting collaborative systems; collective intelligence and collaboration in advanced/emerging applications: collaborative manufacturing and factories of the future, e-health and care, food and agribusiness, and crisis/disaster management.