8. Activate your resources

Image of an easel and a poster over it and on left-hand side is the image of a pen.
Cartoon image of five blocks placed side to side, along with an image each representative of them drawn above them. These blocks are together labeled “the five building blocks,” and are individually labeled the following, from left to right: (1) discover your visual language, (2) design your collaboration process, (3) define key questions, (4) create engaging templates, and (5) prepare to scale., (6) enable group learning, (7) map your skills, (8) activate your resources, and (9) Do's and Don'ts. Drawn above these are posters with related images with the following text: participants, facilities, equipment, and materials. A cartoon image of human icon on eight block with drawing equipment can be seen.

Choice of resources

All meetings, projects, and processes are different and place different requirements on your resources. Your participants are your most important resource—without them there is no process. All other resources, such as your facilities, equipment, and materials, must be used in a way that they best support the work and engagement of your participants and the purpose of the process.

Whether you need to facilitate a smaller dialogue or design a large-scale conference, it is important to consider how best to put the available resources into play. If, for example, you forget to take the acoustics of the facilities into consideration, even a well-planned process can fail because your participants can't hear anything.

On the left-hand side, image of human icons, three sitting on a chair while one standing in front of a projector sheet explaining the diagram drawn on it at the backdrop. On the right-hand side, three human icons sitting around the chair with a window on the back wall can be seen.

Participants

Activate your main resource by giving roles and responsibilities to your participants so it becomes clear to everyone who does what before, during, and after a process. Here is an overview of the roles and responsibilities that it might be good to delegate or pay additional attention to when working visually in large-scale processes.

Facilities

Establish requirements for your facilities, because this is ...

Get Visual Collaboration now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.

Start your free trial