Identify the Story You Want to Tell

A Visual Timeline is a classic storytelling device in which you or your team will reconstruct the story of a past event by drawing a dynamic line that depicts the ups and downs of the event.

You'll begin by identifying the event that you wish to depict for your timeline. Here are some examples:

• Create my individual leadership or vocation story
• Reconstruct more than eight years of our company's institutional memory since the day we were founded, with key decisions from our major stakeholder groups
• Capture the broad story of a one-year design project with our team
• Tell the story of our weekend at the beach last summer (with Mom, Dad, and the kids all having an opportunity to tell their version).
• Recall my changing emotional state since just this morning, for creating a mindfulness diary.
• Working with my partner to take turns telling the story of our marriage

As you can see, this is an infinitely scalable activity, in that you can depict very brief and recent events just as easily as you can render complex, multiyear epics.

Here's how to conduct the exercise.

Establish the Start and End Dates

Have team members turn their blank page sideways (landscape). This horizontal space is the canvas for their timeline.

Have them draw a line near the bottom of the page, leaving plenty of room above it.

Because this is your story, you get to decide when it starts and when it ends. (For example, perhaps you want to make the case that “the story of our health-care project” actually began in the year when James Watson and Francis Crick conceptualized DNA, or maybe your timeline begins “two years ago, when I joined this team.”)

Draw a Line that Tells the Story!

Think broadly of everything that happened from the beginning to the end. Good events are up; negative events are down.

Don't plan what you will draw in advance. This is an intuitive process. Just grab the pen, start remembering, and let the line reflect the memories. Because we store our histories as emotional information, you will probably have no trouble recalling the main ups and downs along your timeline. While some people choose to move slowly and thoughtfully, I have seen others produce a dynamic line in 30 seconds.

You'll also notice that the examples I've shown aren't particularly polished. As always, this is not an exercise in art but in communication. For this exercise your rough, shaky line is just as effective (or more effective) than the beautifully rendered output from that one coworker who went to art school.

Reflect for a Moment

Look at what was just created in the space of less than 2 minutes! Your simple line is loaded with meaning, feelings, and memories. When you look at your line, it will bring your history and the accompanying memories vividly to life.

In fact, your line is also loaded with meaning for others. Although we don't know the details (yet), we can make some inferences about your story. In the top-left image we can see that things were going awesome in the period after March 2013—and that something really dramatic happened soon after that good run. We are already making a connection to this story at a purely abstract, emotional level.

But that's not a great way to tell a story. Let's bring it to life by populating the line with more meaning.

Fill in the Story Details

Imagine someone might later review the line that you drew. You can imagine the questions they will want to ask. “Why does it start at that low point?” “What is that turbulent area that looks like white-water rapids at the end?” “Why does it swing up and then down so dramatically at that point?”

Enhance your timeline with text, titles, and simple icons and stick figures to bring a little more meaning to the presentation.

To build participants' confidence in their own visual competency, I often provide an Icon Cheat Sheet to demonstrate how simple stick figures, arrows, and icons can communicate a great deal of meaning. You can find a reproducible copy in the Appendix.

Draw out the Meaning

In Circle of the 9 Muses, the telling of the story or presentation of the timeline is never the end of the conversation. It is always the beginning. The purpose of these exercises is always to draw out some deeper meaning, reveal our mental models, and then turn that awareness into something valuable that can move the organization.

My colleague David Sibbet is the world's most influential pioneer in the use of visual-thinking techniques for organizational meaning making. In his conception of the visual timeline, he has participants leave a horizontal space near the bottom where they can capture key learnings at each of the major inflection points. This prompts the storyteller to start illuminating some of his or her own mental models, and act purposefully in using the image as a tool for knowledge sharing.¹ I did this at one organization where young professionals remained in job rotations for about 18 months before moving to the next job, and none was being deliberate about capturing what he or she learned and sharing it with the organization. The value delivered by this exercise—with the key learnings called out—was quite dramatic.

Finally, write the title of your story beneath the line.

People sometimes express surprise at how engaged they become in the process. It is a reflective process and one in which the teller becomes deeply absorbed. Even when exceedingly rough in style, the final image holds a great deal of value. It becomes a knowledge artifact in which people have invested a great deal of meaning and attention. Expect to see many participants take out their cell phones to capture a picture of their drawing. Most people will roll their drawings up carefully to take with them. I've never seen anyone throw his or her drawing into the trash.

The final step, of course, is to take turns telling the stories. In small groups, present your visual timeline and answer questions. Then be ready to receive with full attention the fascinating stories that your friends and teammates are waiting to share with you.

Applications

There are a lot of ways you can draw value from those squiggly lines and smiling stick figures.

There are three primary ways that I use this.

The first is as a pure storytelling exercise, as described above. Bring your team together, give everyone a piece of paper and markers, have the team work individually to draw their timelines (usually around some shared experience, such as “our journey ever since the merger”), and then take turns presenting their stories to one another. Make note of the interesting differences, similarities, and overarching themes as your team members tell fascinatingly different versions of the same shared story.

Second, you can use it as a mining exercise. I discussed earlier how sensitive the environment is to storytelling and how sometimes it's difficult for stories to show up. But the visual timeline is very effective in forcing stories to emerge. Change is a potent generator of stories, and therefore stories live in the many inflection points of the timeline. Every time the character of the line takes a sharp upturn or downturn, you can bet a story is lurking there. If you have a group of people who say they can't think of stories, pull out a sheet of paper, and have them start drawing the line. Tell them that the resulting line is a gold mine of stories, just waiting to be harvested and told. “Pick any inflection point on your line, and then tell that story!”

The third way I have used this is collectively. If your group is tasked with creating the institutional memory of your work, project, or organization, it can begin with the horizontal timeline with the start and end dates and then begin telling stories along the line. (See how this is described in more detail in “Fractal Narratives.”) After they have identified the stories together and posted them on sticky notes, they can move the sticky notes up and down on a flip chart or whiteboard and then draw the line that connects them. In this group version of the exercise, participants draw the line after identifying the stories and not before.

Those are just three possible applications. As you pull your team into this fast, fun exercise, be sure to reach out to share the innovative uses you have discovered.

Other Options and Ideas

The Visual Timeline is an incredibly flexible tool, and there is no end to the variations.

Go big. I saw one group create a large visual timeline across the long, felt-covered wall of a hotel ballroom by sticking push pins into the wall and connecting them with yarn. Over the course of a three-day conference, they pinned corresponding knowledge documents and photos to the wall along the line.

My colleague Susan Gabriel is a leadership development consultant at Goodwill Industries International, and I loved her innovative use of the timeline. Before a program, she draws the entire history of Goodwill on a whiteboard along a timeline—and then over the course of the program invites participants to post their stories to the timeline. It may be “I joined the company at this date,” but Goodwill is an old organization! The best stories are the ones where participants connect their personal stories of healing and rehabilitation to historical events that happened over its history of more than 110 years!

Make it fractal. On a flip chart or whiteboard, create a line that represents your perspective of the team or project—and then assign each team member to tell the story of the line between two inflection points by rendering that segment line on a separate piece of paper. Thus, the visual timeline becomes a container for lots of smaller timelines. A true fractal storytelling structure.

Take it into the future. The ending date of the timeline doesn't have to be in the past or today. If you wish, project your ending into some point in the future! Once you cross over today with your marker, keep going! Your timeline becomes speculative and you or your team can use it to forecast possible future scenarios with all of their predicted ups and downs.

Break the rules. Some participants will want to break the rules by drawing multiple divergent lines on their page—or by adding extra character by furiously scribbling tangled, untraceable lines. Let them! This exercise encourages creativity and ingenuity. Because it is an exercise in assigned meaning, let participants bring their own spin to it. The lines mean what they say it means.

Where Do I Go from Here?

As you can see, the Visual Timeline is highly flexible. It can be used for future visioning work, for institutional memory work, for individual or collective story mining, for team building, or even as a team energizer. For that reason, it connects in one way or another to most of the other ideas in this book.

A next step may be to be more disciplined about constructing institutional memory through Fractal Narratives (Chapter 11), or to organize in Story Circles (Chapter 2), so that team members can begin sharing the specific stories at the inflection points within their timelines.

You may have participants respond to their colleagues' stories using a listening construct, such as harvester/witness (as described in “Summoning the Muse,” Chapter 6). The timelines also provide a large enough pool of stories that you may wish to begin drawing out the meaning through Story Element Extraction (Chapter 13).