2-day in-person training workshop
Visual Storytelling at Work
Learn simple drawing skills for more effective meetings and communication
When
Thursday and Friday 27-28 February 2025
Location
Cape Town, South Africa 🇿🇦
Price
R5,000
Get everyone on the same page, by drawing that page
Solve problems better, get alignment more easily, and get results faster – in the meeting or after the meeting – by communciating your business content as visual narratives.
Drawing skills
Simple but powerful ways to draw just about anything
Analytical skills
Templates and methods to sort the signal from the noise
Facilitation skills
Tricks and tips to find the story, visually
Turn this...
Slides slides slides (text ‘fact-telling’)
- Too much text - hard to read, let alone connect with and remember
- Template-driven - optimised for making lots of slides quickly, not driving action effectively
- Aimed at everyone, not someone - hard for different audiences to relate to
Into this...
Strategy poster (visual storytelling)
- Attractive and informative - showing the essence of your message, with just enough detail in text and pictures
- Outcome-driven - optimised for memorability, shareability, and action, to get business results
- Audience-specific - whether it’s for the boardroom or the lunchroom, it’s geared to be read and used by specific audiences
YES you can draw like this! We will show you the simple, structured steps you can do to bring your business content to life through drawing, even if you’ve never drawn at work before.
Here’s what you will learn
- How to use the flipchart and the whiteboard more confidently with the essentials of clear, simple drawing and lettering
- How to use drawing to listen and communicate better using a strategic structured approach
- 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)
Unlock your strategic genius
This immersive 2 days of in-person training is ideal for:
- Project Managers
who want everyone to get more value out of meetings - HR Managers and Change Managers
who want to communicate change more effectively - Consultants
who want to add more tools to their existing toolkit
Draw your way out of these common problems
You and your team don’t have to suffer these problems anymore:
- Unproductive offsites and other high-stakes meetings, with nothing to show for all the talk
- Spending way too long making slide decks that are hard to understand and remember
- Not enough alignment with decision-makers and stakeholders
Weaving the various elements of your business content into a visual narrative makes it much clearer, as well as far more attractive, memorable, and actionable.
Training workshop outline
This training picks up where a lot of other training workshops end. Learn how to go beyond the regular templates and basic flipchart drawing, and learn how to truly turn complex business content into clear, compelling and actionable visual stories.
MORNING
👋 Setting the scene
- Introductions, agenda walk-through, materials and expectations
✍️ Drawing the elements of business
- Warm-ups and activities with drawing the elements of business communication, including people, icons, frames, lettering, and connections
🤔 Drawing tricky topics
- Using the FLARE method to draw abstract concepts and de-code common clichés commonly used in meetings and business communication
- Drawing visual metaphors
- Seeking out, using, and building upon a common visual language
AFTERNOON
🧭 Turning complexity into action using storytelling
- Understanding the essential elements of story
- How to bring out the essence of a narrative from complex business information
👁️ Applying elements of storytelling to visuals
- Working out the audience and purpose of your visual storytelling
- 6 ways to pack more storytelling power into your drawings
💡 Reflection
- Capturing what we’ve learned from each other today
MORNING
🔄 Recap
- Going over any questions or challenges together
🛠️ Practical ways to apply visual storytelling to your work
- What you can do before meetings to optimise for productivity
- What you can do during meetings to increase engagement
- What you can do after meetings to maximise momentum
AFTERNOON
☝️ Your turn
- Time to apply what you’ve learned to a current challenge or project in your own work
🧰 Adding to the toolkit
- How to apply these methods in online meetings and hybrid meetings
- How to digitise your analog work so that it keeps sticking around
⏩ Final reflections
- Capturing what we’ve learned, and what we’ll try differently in future
What others like you say about this training
Learning how to draw does not have to be a scary thing. Drawing at work using basic forms is something that everyone should master to be better communicators. Loved the content and interactivity. Ben is attentive, inclusive and full of great examples.
Kat
Customer Transformation Program Manager
Highly recommend this course to business leaders and facilitators to bring their approach to strategy alive.
Andrew Bird, Director
Foundstone Advisory
In three words: immediate utility and clarity. Ben’s delivery is welcoming and enthusiastic, and Ben shows incredible knowledge about the subject. I keep coming back to Ben’s courses; I learn more than struggling with most books.
Mark Woodyatt, Head of Operations
Meet your instructors
Axelle Vanquaillie
Axelle is a highly-renowned graphic recorder at Visual Harvesting, who has transformed hundreds of speakers’ words into attractive thoughtful visual summaries at conferences and gatherings all over the world, for over 10 years. She is also an in-demand trainer, leadership coach and speaker.
Her mission is to enable anyone in the world to convey a message with a drawing, and to help those drawings gain power in every organization, to do business and innovate more successfully. This passion fuels incredible amounts of creativity. Axelle is founder of Drawify (an AI-enhanced app that lets you make visual summaries of your content) as well as author of Start to Draw.
Ben Crothers
Ben is from Sydney, Australia, and is renowned for his strategic facilitation, business illustration, training, and graphic recording. As a designer for over 25 years, he learned the importance of always sketching his ideas, as well as helping others to bring their ideas to life visually, to create products and services that are more usable, useful and enjoyable.
This background has made him an in-demand facilitator for over 15 years. As an independent consultant at Bright Pilots, he enjoys helping teams of all kinds find and solve problems better, think and communicate together better, and ship faster. Ben has been invested in better ways of working since 2010, and was one of the original creators of the much-loved Atlassian Team Playbook. He is also the author of Presto Sketching, as well as Draw in 4 and 50 Remote-Friendly Icebreakers.
Join us in Cape Town!
This 2-day training course will be held in the stunning Cube Workspace, in Rondebosch.
Location: Cube Workspace, Rondebosch
183 Albion Springs
Rondebosch
Cape Town
The Cube Rondebosch Workspace is in the heart of the evergreen suburb of Rondebosch, nestled between the slopes of Devil’s Peak, the M5 freeway, and the Liesbeek River. It has its own café, featuring a charming covered patio that opens up to lush gardens.
Register now
R5,000
The Visual Storytelling at Work training course gives you access to:
- Hands-on activities to keep learning fun, interactive and interesting
- 15 visual template PDFs to use with your team after the training
- Time to work on your own challenge to apply what you learn straight away
Plus, get the trainers’ books!
- 📙 Start to Draw
by Axelle Vanquaillie - 📙 Presto Sketching
by Ben Crothers
Valued at R1,150, for only R800 extra.
That’s 30% off!
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More praise for this training
Ben Crothers workshop was a real eye-opener for me. I ve been in the strategic illustration business for over 20 years and have covered more than 30 graphic recording sessions during this time. But within just the first 20 minutes of Ben s workshop, I could already see how valuable his approach and methods were. Looking back, I honestly think if I had known even half of what I learned in Ben s class when I first started graphic recording, my work would ve had a much bigger impact in terms of engagement.
Ken Hope
Strategic Illustrator
My colleague and I attended the Start to Draw training by Axelle Vanquaillie! Easily one of the best and most valuable courses I ve ever taken! Now it s time to further practice the basic techniques, apply them to my own work context, and finally transfer them to the broader educational world (incredible potential!!).
Vic, Visual Thinker