Pasadena City College - Manager’s Retreat
Experience:
We designed and facilitated a retreat focused on four key questions Pasadena City College was to face in the coming year. In partnership with Mary Corrigan of Tracking the Wisdom, we created a unique kind of planning meeting to strengthen community among the 50 managers. The safe space allowed for genuine dialogue around key challenges and sparked creativity—inspiring the managers to envision the future. The management team contributed their voices to the planning session and ended the day with a renewed sense of shared purpose.
Solution:
Graphic Facilitation, Visual Experiences, Studio Services
Impact:
An agenda intentionally designed for open dialogue allowed the group to move from tactical to more exploratory conversations. Including a mix of exercises and small versus large group conversations allowed all voices to be heard and validated.
Time in the agenda and physical space in the room was specifically planned for participants to design and draw out their vision. Using drawing as a thinking tool, we surfaced ideas that were new and future forward.
Graphic recording captured the participants’ journey and reflected back both the learnings and the process used to get to their vision.
The graphic recordings were used later to communicate their new vision to stakeholders not in the room.
The wall-size agenda and visual displays of the four key questions created a shared frame of reference throughout the day.
Visual templates allowed small groups to engage in a self-facilitated visioning exercise.
“We’ve always had tactical meetings. We want to be vision-focused and connected to the work so we brought in the Graphic Footprints team. ”
