Storyboarding

Tools

Storyboarding

A tool for making ideas visible and stimulating creativity

An important tool for facilitating your next board or staff planning retreat is storyboarding. Storyboarding was made popular by Walt Disney as a tool for planning his animated cartoons. Over the past 25 years, Stephen Tweed has facilitated hundreds of storyboarding sessions for clients across the country. Whether its a board of directors strategic planning session, an executive strategy retreat, a department planning session, the development of a strategic recruiting plan, or the development of an individual career plan, youll find storyboarding to be a valuable tool.

Storyboarding uses large foam boards, push pins, index cards, and felt markers to make ideas visible and stimulate creativity. Every member of your strategy team will have the opportunity to actively participate in the process. Participants write their own ideas on cards, and the facilitator pins the cards to the storyboard.
storyboarding

In storyboarding, thinking is divided into two phases... creative thinking and critical thinking. In the creative thinking phase, you want to generate as many ideas as possible. You suspend judgement. You limit discussion of ideas. You encourage crazy ideas. Any idea is a good idea. You make ideas visible on the storyboard.

After the creative thinking phase, everyone goes into the critical thinking phase, where ideas are discussed, criticized, and prioritized. It is the critical thinking phase that makes storyboarding different from brainstorming. In the critical thinking phase, you eliminate duplication. You look for trends and recurring themes. You attack ideas but not people. The result is that the best ideas... and all of the people...survive. The outcome is a finely tuned plan of action for the future of your organization, department, or career.

At the end of your storyboarding session, all of the ideas discussed will be arranged neatly on the boards and the walls of the room. It is extremely easy for every participant to see clearly the results of each discussion. Then your facilitator will take the cards and create a summary document of your planning session. The result is that every participant has a sense of ownership of the plan that you have created. Owning the plan is a key to effective implementation. Storyboard is the most powerful tool we know of to insure the outcomes you desire from your planning process.

When you retain Stephen Tweed to facilitate your next board retreat, Executive Strategy Retreat, or departmental planning session, you’ll have the opportunity to experience the storyboarding process first hand and see for yourself the power of this terrific technique.

Assessments

At Tweed Jeffries, LLC, we use a number of online and paper assessment tools to give you a clear picture of your current strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for growth.  As we work with you to custom design a presentation or executive retreat, we’ll make available these powerful tools.  Some examples of the assessments available include:

  • The High Performance Board Assessment Profile
  • The High Performance Team Assessment Profile
  • The Strategic Staffing Assessment Profile

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