Pictures from the second Safe Conflict Synergizer, focussing on collaborative projects in the Middle East, held from October 23-26 in California at Mayacamas Ranch. The 25 participants included peacebuilders from Yemen, Israel, Lebanon, Egypt, and American peacebuilders, leadership trainers, philanthropists, and social media experts. This 3 day event was hosted by the Safe Conflict Project and the Mediators Foundation.
Pictures from the Legal Leadership Summit, Manitou Springs, Colorado, 2-4 October 2011.
Hosted by Kim J. Wright, author of ABA best selling book ‘Lawyers as Peacemakers’ , Cutting Edge Law and the Renaissance Lawyers Society.
Last month GOOD magazine held a contest to doodle something good in the world, as part of their Doodle series. I submitted a piece about non-violent communication, based on Marshall Rosenberg’s work. My work was selected as one of the top 50 submissions. Please click here to see my sketch and the three winning pieces.
Taking It Personally: What Egypt, Libya, Japan (etc) Can Teach Us About Our Own Personal Transformation.
Mark Gerzon is one of the key architects of the field of global leadership and an experienced facilitator in high-conflict zones. He has advised a wide variety or organizations including the US Congress, multinational corporations, and the United Nations. His two most recent books are Leading Through Conflict (Harvard Business School Press) and American Citizen, Global Citizen.
Based on his book American Citizen, Global Citizen, Mark Gerzon gave an interactive presentation at Naropa University, Boulder, Colorado, as part of the Authentic Leadership Lecture Series. He challenged the audience and shared his view that, as we approach 2012, the major transformations in the Middle East, Asia and elsewhere contain powerful, potentially life-saving teachings for each of us personally.
I captured this inspiring and thought-provoking talk in real time on April 12, 2011.
The first map below gives an impression of the live graphic capture of Mark’s presentation. The second map shows the visual harvest of the small-group discussions about the question “How does this relate to you, your identity, your relationship with your points of view”?
(Pictures 1-3 from video by Boulder Video Design/Erik Keeney)
The Safe Conflict Project (www.safeconflict.org) hosted this event from April 3-6 2011 at the Pocantico Center, with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation.
The Safe Conflict Synergizer was a gathering of about thirty international experts from a wide variety of peacebuilding organizations, new media and social entrepreneurs. To name a few: United Nations, Economists for Peace, The Conflict Transformation Collaborative, PeaceDirect, GPPAC, Berghof Peacesupport, Alliance for Peacebuilding, National Peace Academy, Twitter, Earthdance, Rockefeller Brothers Foundation, and the Weatherhead Center of Harvard University.
The pictures below give an impression of the vision and the commitments of this group. The rich process of collaboration of the participants, and the thoughtful work of the meeting facilitators to invite these results has been captured by a professional videographer. (To see all pictures click here)
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Feedback from the Safe Conflict Project
Susanne’s skilled graphic facilitation of our critical groundbreaking meeting of a diverse group of global peacemakers, philanthropists, strategists and media experts was fundamental to our success in aligning participants with collaborative projects.
Using maps that Susanne created both in advance and then in real-time during the meeting, our group was able to capture and maintain awareness of key information, concepts and completed work. Susanne’s extraordinary ability to rapidly capture, synthesize and graphically represent our collective thinking doubled the speed and tripled the quality of our communication.
Having the maps available gave us access to our non-verbal minds, let us see connections that we would not have otherwise, and let each person see the context and importance of their work relative to everyone else. Because of Susanne’s nearly superhuman ability to listen, everyone felt fully represented in the maps, which gave a valuable sense of completion and progress that allowed us to cohere as a group and move ahead.
Post-meeting, the maps make our job writing the meeting report 100 times easier. We are able to produce an inspiring, accessible document with colorful and fascinating images of our work. All the participants are grateful to be able to share something as useful, concrete and beautiful as these maps.
We can’t imagine having the meeting without Susanne–her contribution brought the meeting to a whole new level of fun, professionalism and accomplishment for everybody. Having her there was not additional–it was absolutely essential.
Nathan Otto, co-founder The Safe Conflict Project, co-author of Give Peace a Deadline |
On an abstract level the mediation process is about words as containers of energy. The intention is to invite people and parties to talk: to listen and to speak to each other. In this carefully guided exchange of words understanding may take place and energies between people, groups and their shared interests may shift. Besides the words of people, words are also the containers of information, details, history, technicalities, procedures and all other elements that need to be taken into account in order to resolve a conflict.
How do people, parties, stakeholders and mediators process all these words, while making clear and effective contributions in the meetings? Visual support is an excellent way to ground the words on paper, and to help people center themselves in the big picture. Ultimately the intention is to ‘draw’ people closer together. Then new words, new energies can emerge and be ‘settled’ on the paper.
This sketch shows some options for visual containers during a multi-party mediation process.
The White House is going low tech! The CEA chair explains the issue of tax cuts to the public on a white board, using simple graphics and plain language.
click here to see the video Tax cuts
A quick flip chart capture of a webcast of the United States Institute of Peace, presenting a panel discussion on the prospects for Peace in Aghanistan. 
P5Y is a fresh and ambitious peace organization, founded by Nathan Otto and Amber Lupton, the authors of ‘Give peace a deadline‘ . In March 2010 P5Y held a 3-day strategic planning session with a small group of inspiring and highly effective people. I assisted the facilitation team in visualizing the vision, the meeting process and the action planning. The maps reflect the collaborative thinking and planning work. The maps also provide an engaging tool to communicate the essence of the next steps to thought leaders, decision makers, donors, partners and peacebuilders of all sorts.
click to enlarge
On March 27, 2010 I attended this Conference at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies of Notre Dame University. A wonderful learning opportunity to meet young peacebuilders, and hear about a variety of research projects and fieldwork.
I did a brief talk on Peacemapping and two demonstrations of live mapping.
I drew these maps during the panel on ‘Creative approaches to peacebuilding’. What you see is real time work, no touch ups. I had 10 minutes for each of them, without knowing the content of the presentations ahead. Just listening and taking my best shot at the can to capture the essence of the talk. Click on the photos for a larger view.
This is a capture of a panel and audience discussion on “careers in peacebuilding” of about 30 minutes. Again no touch ups. The graphic recorder is witnessing the meeting, and reflecting the thoughts and ideas that have been exchanged, in a low tech format. As low tech as the nature of collaborative working and thinking.
Uncategorized | Susanne | 
January 9, 2012 8:29 am | 
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