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October/November
2003
John Ward |
Featured
Member Interview
Scroll down to read or click on a link to jump
to the question and answer
What was your path to becoming
a Visual Practitioner?
How long have you been in practice?
What is your greatest strength as Visual Practitioner?
What makes your style unique?
Tell us about one of your favorite project.
What do you see in the future for yourself as
a visual practitioner? For the Visual Practitioner community?
What books are you currently reading?
Share with us two of your favorite websites.
If someone made a movie or documentary about
your life, what would it be called?
Who
would you most like to meet whether the past or today?
What inspires you?
Any final thoughts?
What was your path to becoming a Visual Practitioner?
How
long have you been in practice?
My
Father was an industrial designer and a corporate executive at
Corning Glass in the 40’s and 50’s. Our home and my
childhood in upstate New York were filled with exotic manufactured
objects and art, mostly of Scandinavian origins. Frequently, the
people who created them and the executives from their companies
gathered at our house and let their hair down. For me it has always
been a given: design, craft and business are a ménage a
trois!
My formal
art and design training began at 15. I took classes at a nearby
art college, did my undergraduate work in design at Carnegie Mellon,
worked on an mba at the University of Chicago, studied photography
at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and finally got an MFA
in sculpture and photography from the Art Institute of Chicago.
In the late 60’s early 70’s it paid to stay in school
if you didn’t want to fight the Viet Nam war.
Disillusioned
by the system, especially government and big business, I dropped
out in the seventies, went back to the land and taught myself
woodworking. I rounded off the decade spending three years in
a Zen lay-monastery on Sonoma Mountain. It was there that I learned
to listen, first to myself and then to others. It was there that
I experienced the community model that I used to run my design
studio and woodworking business from 1980-1993. It was at Artisan
Woodworkers in 1985, that I first grabbed a sharpie marker and
a sheet of melamine plywood to draw a picture for my employees.
We drew out and diagrammed how the company HAD to work if we all
wanted to keep our jobs. For the next eight years we revised the
drawing, erasing the old with lacquer thinner, and adding the
new. It worked. Then, in 1992, when I was on the board of directors
of the Tropical Forest Foundation at the Smithsonian, an executive
from Herman Miller facilitated our strategic planning retreat
with the use of hundreds of postit notes and several whiteboards.
Another light went on in my head. I could do that! How else were
we going to save the forests?
In 1995 I
started consulting with small businesses. I drew diagrams that
looked a lot like Sam Kaner’s meeting profiles with “groan
zones” in the middle. And, I frequently asked my clients
to build tangible physical models of their ideas and strategies.
My focus shifted to the corporate world in 1997. That same year
Inc Magazine wrote an article about my kinesthetic modeling; and
a visitor to my office pointed out that a fellow named David Sibbet
was doing in two dimensions what I was trying to do in three.
Our meeting was the spark that ignited my current practice. I’m
lucky. I arrived at graphic recording and facilitation rather
well prepared. And now, when I work with groups, either as a recorder
or a facilitator, it comes naturally. They talk. I listen and
draw. And sometimes we build models too. Un, deux, trois!
What is your greatest strength as Visual
Practitioner? What makes your style unique?
What
do you see in the future for yourself as a visual practitioner?
For the Visual Practitioner community?
In
my work “visual” means a lot more than “graphic”.
It also includes the spatial and kinesthetic aspects of how people
think collaboratively when they work together. At my best, I show
up as the visual facilitator, not as the visual expert. I get
people up and moving around, changing the room frequently. They
draw THEIR ideas, build models of their structures and act out
their scenarios. When it comes to stimulating business thinking
and decision-making I will improvise on any art/design-based technique
in my repertoire to get people involved and generating the imagery
themselves. This image and metaphor-making actually empowers and
enables their more familiar academic forms of thought. Just as
neuroscience has begun to accept body-mind linkages that were
once considered frivolous, I see the organizational world coming
around to the fact that people are much more motivated and productive
when they think in a variety of ways. It will take some time though,
for people to learn how to integrate all the different disciplines
that this implies. It is our next big step.
Tell us about one of your favorite project.
Tinkering
with the edges of what we know. For the past three years I’ve
been collaborating with the gadfly neurologist, Frank Wilson,
author of “The Hand” and hand analyst Richard Unger.
He’s read over 50,000 pairs of hands. At first we only met
because of our passion for the hand’s seminal role in our
lives and our thinking. Then the Graham School at the University
of Chicago asked us to do a workshop to explore related business
issues, both strategic and in professional development. We’ve
done three of them now, and each one takes us further along our
paths. As a result, viable work opportunities have arisen in the
worlds of education and big business. The workshop has garnered
the highest rating ever at the Graham School. And participants
pay us the ultimate compliment, “It’s worth the price
of admission to watch three old white guys model the kind of edgy
experience that they ask of their students.”
What books are you currently reading?
“The
Voyage of the Space Beagle” by A.E. Van Vogt. A 1939 sci
fi classic. Recently a prospective client said, “If you want
to understand our team, the dilemma we are up against and why
we need you, read Voyage of the Space Beagle”. A group of
specialists on a spaceship are threatened by a supremely intelligent
beast they do not understand. They fight amongst themselves and
study the problem to death while the beast decimates the crew.
The hero is a generalist. I’m not done yet; but I think I
got the job.
“Goodbye
Chunky Rice” and “Blankets” Two graphic novels
by Craig Thompson – feast your eyes on these! They are sensitive
and realistic, the antidote for the obsessive violence and superhero
stuff. And he’s only 28.
“Cracked,
Putting Broken Lives Together Again” a realistic look at
addiction and the pain that it causes by Drew Pinsky, the Loveline
radio talk show host. When my 15 year old son with blue hair pays
out $25 for a hardcover book and reads it in a sitting, I figure
I better pay attention.
“Here
is New York” – a 1948 poetic essay by E. B. White that
captures the spirit of the city then and now. He eerily anticipates
9/11, seeing the city’s vulnerability.
Share with us two of your favorite websites.
The
New York Times is my morning coffee. Actually, I check it
all day long. We have given up on television.
Netflix
has replaced cable for us. 15,000+ dvd titles, more than any video
store, rarely out of stock, great service. You can see practically
anything you can think of, if you don’t mind being 4 months
behind what’s in the theatres and waiting 3 days for your
choice to arrive by mail.
If someone made a movie or documentary about your life, what would
it be called?
It
would be called “Being John Malkovich meets Thic Nat Hahn”
co-starring Alexander Calder and Britney Spears.
Who would you most like to meet whether the past or today?
Alexander
Calder and Britney Spears – I think I better explain. First
I think I already know Malkovich and Thic. As for the other two,
it is a curious mix’ but ultimately, I’m most interested
in power and what people are doing when they tinker. These two
folks introduce so much awe and cognitive dissonance into my quest
that I’m sure I would learn a lot from meeting them. Btw:
celebrity is a kind of power; and I wonder if or how she understands
hers. Don’t you just love to hate her? And, can you think
of anybody who doesn’t love Calder? He
upstaged Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim in New York thirty
some years ago; and he’s doing it again to Frank Gehry this
fall in Bilbao. Such innocent and inspiring power from a tinkerer!
What inspires you?
Any
final thoughts?
I
am inspired by working with people who are trying to change the
world. It is - tinkering and power – ménage a trois
– déjà vu all over again.
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