Do you want to boost your visual storytelling skills at work, and you're in or near South Africa? If that’s the case, then you're in luck: I'm coming to Cape Town, South Africa, to run two separate training workshops on visual storytelling, in February 2025.

What do you mean by ‘visual storytelling’?

Visual storytelling is a bit of a catch-all phrase to describe applying simple drawing and visualisation to written or spoken content – especially business content – to create visual summaries. Those visual summaries can be mixtures of text and pictures, arranged in succinct and attractive ways, to make the content easy to read and easy to remember.

You might have seen these as:

• Sketchnotes
• Graphic recording charts or boards at conferences
• ‘Rich pictures’ or strategy posters
• Infographics
• Storyboards and journey maps...

The list goes on!

The storytelling part comes in when these visual summaries are used to connect, summarise and distil various elements of business content (such as company vision and values, strategy, customers, goals and results, operations and people) into a narrative that is more than just facts and figures.

This narrative is made to bring out much more meaning, that helps your target audience (e.g. employees, stakeholders, the board) connect with.

So, why do this training?

The amount of information coming at us at work isn't about to die down, so we need 21st century skills like strategic thinking more than ever. Drawing skills help you to think better on your feet, and to sort out the signal from all that noise much faster.

When you boost these skills, you can significantly increase your value to any team or organisation.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

• How to draw just about anything more confidently in clear, simple economic ways (even the tricky things you’ve been struggling with!)
• How to upgrade your icons to more creative ‘mini-stories’ using our very own FLARE method
• 6 essential elements to business narratives, and how to apply them to your visual storytelling, in meetings and flipcharts
• How to use visual frameworks in meetings, to get groups to collaborate and align more effectively (even when it’s online or hybrid)

Where can I sign up?

There are two in-person training workshops:

• 2-day workshop - Thursday and Friday 27-28 February 2025
• 1-day workshop - Saturday 1 March 2025

Who should attend?

This training is ideal for you if you run meetings and you want to get much more value out of those meetings. It’s also for you if you have to create internal business communications and you want them to be more compelling, memorable and actionable.

Joining forces with Axelle Vanquaillie

Not only am I training some similar content that everyone enjoyed in Europe last year (and at other times in other training workshops), but I’m joining up with none other than Axelle Vanquaillie.

Axelle Vanquaillie in action, graphic recording at a conference

Axelle is a highly-renowned graphic recorder with Visual Harvesting, and has captured hundreds of talks at loads of conferences and gatherings around the world for over 10 years. But this is just one of many arrows in her quiver: she is also an in-demand trainer, leadership coach, speaker, AND founder of Drawify, an AI-enhanced app that lets you make visual summaries of your content.

Here is Axelle doing the sort of thing that you will be learning how to do yourself in our training:

 

If that wasn’t enough, her passion for helping anyone tell their story through simple drawing also extends to writing, and she’s the author of Start to Draw.

We’ve trained together before (visual storytelling, as well as agile methods and visual facilitation), and I’m stoked to be training together with Axelle again, in Cape Town.

Register now, and don’t miss out on the earlybird discount

Spaces are limited to 20 people per session, so don’t miss your chance to join either of these sessions. You can register now by clicking on either of the workshop links above.

Axelle and I hope to see you there!