Our Story

The Graphic Method sprang from a friendship and collaboration. After close to a decade as assistant to the Chairman of Global Business Network, Lynn decided to try out a new skill colleagues had been recommending to her – graphic recording. Blessed with beautiful printing and an extraordinary ability to listen, Lynn stumbled upon graphic recording and a whole new career. Lynn was trained at The Grove Consultants International and promptly found herself traveling with the Chairman, but no longer as his assistant, now as his graphic recorder.

GBN embraced graphic recording, adding this new core competency to its scenario planning practice and strategy offerings. Lynn began to work with GBN’s senior practitioners, supporting their consulting meetings and projects, all over the world. She developed the visual practice at GBN, providing graphic recording and visual tools to GBN clients, practitioners, and similarly to a broader audience when GBN was acquired by Monitor Group in 2002.

Sophia joined GBN in 2001 and was immediately drawn to Lynn’s office space with its broad expanse of blank walls, long roles of paper and bins of colorful markers. As a project manager, Sophia included Lynn, first in team planning meetings and then into the larger meetings, and experienced first-hand the genuine power of graphic recording. Five years later Lynn asked a colleague if she’d be willing to take a chance on a clearly gifted but as yet untried graphic recorder. The rest, as they say, is history.

Sophia now runs her own practice, working with Fortune 500 companies such as The Walt Disney Company, Google, Genentech, and The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, to create different experiences through visuals. She believes that when groups are given the power to voice and visualize their own ideas, they have better conversations and then make better decisions.

Since that day in 2001, Sophia and Lynn have continued to collaborate, dream and scheme together. They’ve developed and delivered a graphic facilitation workshop for the IAFNA’s annual conference and breakout sessions at the IFVP’s annual conferences. They also designed and produced the entire annual conference, the first sold out one in IFVP’s history – ALOHA 2011.

Fast forward to 2014. Sophia’s practice, Graphic Footprints, is doing well. Lynn decides to leave her comfy corporate life (after 22 years with GBN) to try the life of a freelancer. And they realize the time has come for that comprehensive training course they have been talking about for the past decade.

It had become clear to both Sophia and Lynn, as they met more and more members of the IFVP community and the graphic recording world, that their experience – of stumbling upon graphic recording – was a common occurrence. And that there is a growing interest and need for an ongoing training program, with continuous learning through workshops, real-life practice, and mentorship. That’s why we launched The Graphic Method.