Kelvy Bird grounds her work in sustainability with a distinctively creative flair - S16/E03

Sketchnote Army Podcast

In this episode, Kelvy Bird shares how her artistic background influences her visual approach to scribing ideas and how it becomes a powerful tool for facilitating deeper understanding within groups.

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The Concepts Sketchnote Workshop video — a unique, FREE, hands-on workshop video where I show you how I use the Concepts app to create sketchnotes on an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil.

In this one-hour, eighteen-minute video, I cover:

• The Infinite Canvas as a sketchnoting power feature
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• How vector elements let you size and repurpose your drawings for ultimate flexibility.

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Running Order

• Intro
• Welcome
• Who is Kelvy Bird
• Origin Story
• Kelvy's current work
• Sponsor: Concepts
• Tips
• Tools
• Where to find Kelvy Bird
• Outro

Links

Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.

• Kelvy's website
• Kelvy's Book
• Otto Scharmer Book
• Otto Scharmer Book
• Bill Isaacs Book

Tools

Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.

• Neuland Outliner ink
• EagleCell Graphic boards
• Chalk markers
• Moleskine paper
• Procreate
• iPad

Tips

1. Experiment and try new tools/approaches.
2. Preserve a sense of mystery and beauty in your work.
3. Prioritize self-care both physically and mentally.

Credits

• Producer: Alec Pulianas
• Shownotes and transcripts: Esther Odoro
• Theme music: Jon Schiedermayer

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Episode Transcript

Mike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike and I'm here with Kelvy Bird. Kelvy, it's so good to have you on the show.

Kelvy Bird: Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor and a pleasure.

MR: We've been trying to get you on—I think I've been trying to get you on, you may not know this, but for the last couple of seasons and it finally worked out, so I'm excited. You do some really cool stuff. You're really unique, I think, in the visual thinking space with the way you approach things and the way you think about things. That's my perspective, is you're really unique. And so, I wanted to bring that to other visual thinkers who may not know who you are, right. It's such a wide community that there's little pools and spaces where you may not know things, so it's always good to reveal that, to make you known. I'll just turn it over to you. Let's first hear in your own words, who you are and what you do.

KB: Well, first, thanks so much. When you said I'm unique, I had a little bit of like, "I am?" That made me happy. Anyone who's watching the video, I have to apologize for my particularly summer feral 90-degree look, but for those of you listening, I hope you'll be spared. I'm Kelvy Bird. I grew up in the Hudson Valley in New York State. Just about an hour North of New York City. My whole family was from the city originally. I grew up near the woods.

And a big part of my origin story, those people who do know me have probably heard this many times, is that my parents split up when I was three, and so I grew up going between households, between rule sets, between cultures. They were very culturally—well, I mean, not so much culturally different, but there were a lot of differences between the households at that time in the '70s. Both homes were in the woods, and so I have a strong continuity with nature. Also, that led to my probably keen sense of observation. When I'm in spaces I'm always kind of at the edge of a system before engaging with a system just from a very early childhood, you know, a safety mechanism of—

MR: It's what you operated then?

KB: Yeah. I mean, it's like, you wanna know that—if you're unsure of environments, you know, you kind of check it out before you really immerse yourself in them. That's really lent itself—well, I probably became ascribed in some ways because I have that natural inclination to observe. I studied art and art history at Cornell in Upstate New York and graduated, I think like '88 or '89 in the Reagan years when there was like, you know, "What could you do as an artist?" You could work in a gallery or a museum to feed your art or you could live in the woods and make candles. What I had planned to do was, I envisioned a really quiet slow life for myself. Which has been very much the opposite of what unfolded.

MR: Of course.

KB: At some point, so I was making art and then I was out living out in the Bay Area after school and I was doing collaborative art, and then I met some people who—Chris Allen, who was working with Matt—well, was working with an on the board for Matt and Gale Taylor and of MG Taylor. And so, he kind of got me connected into their work, and that was my introduction to scribing. I was working with them for a few years before I really started to be comfortable scribing. I did a lot of sketch noting, I guess now we would call it, thanks to you.

MR: Yeah.

KB: And you know, time to really learn my visual vocabulary and my method of processing information. Then learn from people like Christopher Fuller and Brian Kaufman. Francis Gillard was in the system then and alongside Peter Durand. Peter and I kind of came up together in that space.

MR: Okay.

KB: Yeah.

MR: He's one of the other guests in this season.

KB: Oh, cool.

MR: So we can hear his story. You're gonna be in with him. I'm kinda—

KB: There's—oh, go ahead.

MR: I was gonna say, as I understand, I know I don't have a cursory overview of scribing in that space. My story was I started discovered the Sketchnoting 'cause it just made sense. Then as I got into it and started practicing it, stumbled into the whole scribing community. Like, "Wow, these are my people. I mean, they work on a large scale, but like the principles are the same." And as I understood over time, it seemed like there were two schools that you tended to come from. It was either MG Taylor or David Sibbet's space. That felt like the two, maybe there were more, I don't know, maybe there's some different ones in Europe, but in the U.S., those tended to be the two schools that you would come from. I think like Brandy Agerbeck, I think she's MG Taylor trained, right?

KB: Yes. Yeah.

MR: They're probably similar, but I'm sure there's probably cultural differences that are a little different.

KB: The contemporary scribing with David Sibbet—I've written a little bit about the history, and I did some research for my book. Somewhere out there, there's a history and other people have expanded on it and brought it to be more current, but it originated in the '70s in the Bay Area with David and his colleagues. Then Matt and Gail were also working with this method in Boulder, Colorado with Jim Shannon, who was one of the first people to scribe in their context. The biggest difference I think is David and The Grove use visuals as part of a facilitative. They facilitate while they're drawing.

I think now it's become maybe people who learn from them more graphic—I shouldn't speak for this because I don't really know, more like graphic recording. Then with MG Taylor, the scribing was embedded in a range of facilitated methods like music and documentation, the environment, how the chairs were set, how the room was set, how walls were set up for people. The whole scribing was one element of many domains of facilitation.

MR: Almost thought of as an experience, like a whole experience and considered that way.

KB: Yeah, yeah. It was a more immersive maybe. Also, it wasn't just the scribe scribing, the participants of these large-scale design shops, they're called, are all scribing. People while they're working, are using big walls to draw on. It's very social in that regard where it's immersive and social.

Yeah, I should just say—one thing I didn't mention and is just after working with MG Taylor, I was living in the Cambridge area in Massachusetts and got involved in dialogue and systems thinking and human dynamics and the presencing work. And so, my scribing has taken a particular turn in that direction because of my experience post MG Taylor, you know, it all sort of weaves in, but yeah.

MR: Interesting. Well, so you're a scribe and you do scribing for companies mainly, I would assume, and organizations?

KB: No, mostly I'm scribing for—oh, sorry, you were still going with your question.

MR: No, no. I'd love to hear who do you scribe for? Who are your main customers?

KB: Now since the pandemic and even before, I was trying to focus more in educational context and less business. I haven't scribed in a lot of big business context for a while. Maybe a few companies here and there, but not like back, you know, 20 years ago. Then with the pandemic, even before I realized that the impact of flying on me as an individual and my own body system, and then also just what it was doing, contributing to for the environment and others, I didn't wanna fly, so I'm not flying anymore.

That has really shifted work. So I've gotten more digital and clients have included. I go on site for stuff in Boston. I do a lot of work with MIT and I've been teaching locally at some of the various schools like Babson and Handover. I have a project at UMass here close to where I live and the Presencing Institute still, of course, you know, I work with them when we're doing things on site, but it's really reduced. Oh, I've done a lot of work with the UN in the past year or two, it's been all digital.

MR: Interesting. That's an interesting shift because I think there was a huge shift and the pandemic forced it on, I think on a lot of people. It sounded like you were a little bit ahead of that curve. You were already edging toward doing digital stuff before you had to.

KB: Not really. I picked it up pretty much—like the first week of the pandemic I was delivering a program. Then I quickly knew though, we all are gonna need to pivot. You know, it's like sometimes you can choose how you wanna evolve your practice and sometimes conditions evolve your practice for you. That was a case in point where you know, you could kind of figure out how to go with what was called for, what was needed. No, I was scrambling to figure it out. I had done some digital stuff before, but not live-scribing more like motion graphics.

MR: Yeah. You hadn't fully invested in it as a primary way that you've worked, right. That would be not the case. I think a lot of people in the space, visual thinking space ran into the same thing. A lot of the interviews that I did around that time and after that time talked about the scramble. I talked with William at Sketch Effect and he talked about they were fortunate. They had been seeing digital and had been experimenting, but again, they had not committed fully to it. They were doing physical in-person stuff. They continue to do that.

It'd be really interesting now that the pandemic's, you know, a couple years, you know, since it peaked, like how has that impacted these companies? What percentage of digital versus in-person? In some ways, to do a corollary, digital is a little bit like CDs or streaming. Then, you know, the scribing on a board is sort of like a vinyl record, right? It's like this thing or something, in some senses or in some perspectives.

I don't deal with those two together much. I do most of my stuff digitally, but personally, I do you know, analog things. So it would be interesting to hear from—maybe do some polling of companies that do this. Like, "Hey, what is the percentage, what is the feeling in the space? What do companies and educators—and what do they want? What do they think they want?" Maybe that's—

KB: Yeah, I think that business—sorry to keep cutting you off.

MR: No, it's okay.

KB: I'm very excited to talk, so I have to like—

MR: Yeah, let's do it.

KB: - talk, minimize my excitement here. From what I've observed, businesses where the digital scribing might be projected large in a conference with big effect, that seems to be really popular. When you have big audiences and you have a big screen, that really maximizes the show.

MR: You can do a lot more than you can with just the board in front, which may be for the people in a large space, hard to see, right?

KB: Yeah, certainly. I haven't worked like that in a while. What I tend to do are more immersive environments. I really like this feeling—my art was always like that. My fine art was more really geared towards deep reflection. If you go into a room of Roth Goetz, like at the Tate, modern or some space where you have—or like Donald Judd has a space out in like Marfa out in Texas.

When you're in an environment that has art set up in a way where you go in and you are with the vibration of the work, that's a completely different experience than if you have one image on a wall that's projecting out or you go into a cathedral, right, you go into a space of mosaics or something that's been created to envelop you in vibration in some way. That's a very different experience than one, you know, board at the front of a room.

I've done, you know, all different types of setups and I'm not dissing or I'm not throwing anything—I'm not putting anything down because they all have their place. I tend to prefer when you can create some resonance, like you create some sort of vibrational, a tonal thing that people aren't even aware of. It's just more of a feeling where the drawings help the sense of containment and safety in a space. Like a nest, you know, the drawings become a nest.

When I work with executive education at MIT, for example, they have a few rooms with gyrus boards that go all the way around the room. And so, if I'm working for five days, the whole room will get filled by the end. The group that's in there has—there's a different type of pattern recognition that can also happen because you're looking at—if you were to have your drawings—a lot of them up from similar content or over the same set of time. You know, things come out on one session that then might repeat the third or the fourth or the 10th session.

And so, you can create a visual icons or things that start to signal similar themes across time. That's really interesting to me. I'm trying to seek out those types of situations like where you're working with one client over time and the images become part of the cultural memory and knowledge, and yeah, does that make sense?

MR: Yeah. That's totally fascinating. It made me think of, for a while, I worked for a company, Johnson Controls, a big multinational in Milwaukee, and they redesigned our studio space for our design space. They had this one corner by the front door, they didn't know what to do with it. It's like this long, narrow space, so they just put a door on it and then put whiteboards in there. I remember I had a big project that I was trying to sort out with lots of information, and that was my room. I claimed it. I had stuff everywhere on the walls. I had stuff on the whiteboards, stuff stuck on the walls.

I always liked going in there 'cause I could go in there, I would immediately get up to speed with where things were and I would start saying like, "Oh, there's a connection between that wall and that wall." I would start seeing all this because it was concentrated in this space. I would tell people, "I'm gonna go live in my work for a little while." It was a pretty fascinating experience to be there, so.

KB: That's so cool. Yeah, that's exactly what I mean, where, because you—and this goes, where talking earlier about slow and fast thinking. This goes back to helping the cognitive overload that we have in the world. If you're helping people slow their minds down, you present data back, so you scribe in a way that reflects the data and the information in a session back with the specific words and you know, particular images that might represent things, but then you're also setting it up for a slower absorption rate, you know, over a duration when the mind is not as pressed.

Like in your room, you find other types of connections that you might not have made. I mean, for me, that kind of gets into the mystery of life, you know, where you're setting it up for discovery and curiosity. Instead of providing all the answers, you're creating some conditions for the unknown to live still.

MR: Yeah, you're organizing the information to some degree, but you're not making the necessarily connections. You allow the observer to make those connections, it sounds like. You mentioned at the outset—we said that you're a little different. I think you're unique in the way that you approach things, which is I think awesome. I would love to hear, you talked about this difference when you went to Massachusetts that you started thinking about different stuff. Talk a little bit about that origin. How did that change what you had learned? Or maybe it didn't change it, but maybe it built on top of it, and how did that change your perspective and the work that you did? That's really interesting to me.

KB: Yeah, that's a great question. Thanks for asking it. When I started—oh, I came to Massachusetts to help open one of the MG Taylor environments in Cambridge. While we were in that space, Peter Senge and the Society for Organizational Learning came in to see if they could use the space. Then another company called DialogOS came in to see if they could use the space because everyone in the area was looking for a large-scale space to bring people together. Ultimately, it didn't work out because the space was too open. The walls were movable, but they didn't offer enough containment and enough sense of—

MR: Separation in some way, maybe

KB: Separation and like quiet. There wasn't enough quiet in it. That didn't work out. But then I met these people and got really interested, what is this dialogue stuff? And so, I started working more in that area. What interested me and still does, is it comes back to this mystery. When you have a circle of people and they're sitting together intentionally with a certain awareness or mindfulness about being together and slowing down together, what comes through, that's the dialogue or, you know, that's the word coming through the space.

That was really interesting to me. It probably links back to going between my parents. You know, I haven't made this connection, but the space between the ride between my mom and my dad’s was about 10 minutes or 15 minutes. Packing up from one household, going in the car with my brother, just like looking at the side icicles on big sheets of rock or moss along the way or vines or things, that was the, in-between space where I'd be able to—like a suspended reality.

I used to love to fly for the same reason. Well, I never loved to fly, but once I was in an airplane and you're in that suspended state—I always like that suspended state. In the dialogue work, you are in a suspended state, so you're consciously letting other people speak and waiting until it's your place almost or when you're called to enter into the space. When the word is meant to come through you is when you speak. And so, I immersed myself there. I thought it was really interesting. I basically did whatever they needed. I took notes for years, texting notes I didn't draw.

Then I started scribing in those environments, and then I started integrating. Then I realized like, oh, the drawings can represent this emergence space which is very different than the drawings representing the words. So it's both. Like the drawings representing the words and the drawings being like an echo in the pond. Like you throw a rock into a pond and there's the immediate plunk, and then you kind of have the ripples out and I don't know, maybe something like that.

Then when I got involved in the presencing work, it furthered that that kind of inquiry that I had, my own personal inquiry about how we can just be together in different ways. You know, like as human beings. How can we be together as human beings in a way that feels whole and not fragmented, and how can drawings support that kind of wholeness? I think that's been my inquiry all along.

MR: That's pretty cool. Talk a little bit more about presencing. I don't know if I have a good definition of it. I'd love to hear your definition.

KB: The work was founded by Otto Scharmer and Katherine Kaufer and others, Arawana Hayashi. Dana Cunningham is another one who was in at the very beginning. Otto basically had done the research and the presence thing is when you bring the emergent future into the current moment, so you slow down enough to sense into what wants to unfold. The word itself is a combination of presence and sensing.

MR: Oh, okay. Got it. Got it.

KB: So you're intentionally reflecting in a way to allow the future to find you. I don't know, sounds kind of weird, but rather than projecting into the future and saying—like, letting it come from just your head of, I think this is a good idea. I'd like to build this building and then you just kind of—

MR: Make it happen.

KB: - make it happen, and you kind of force your way through which is our western, northwestern society for, you know, since the industrial revolution and before colonization. It's a process of being found, you know, rather than, yeah.

MR: A little bit of like a—I sense emergence maybe as part of it. Like letting things emerge.

KB: Definitely.

MR: Like, I think about, it was, yeah, Stephen King. He talks about in on writing book that he would write these novels and he said he was more like an archeologist than a writer. He would have his brush and he would be brushing off bones, and the bones would tell him things. He said that he would write and he wanted to go in one direction with a character, and the character would just refuse and would go in a different direction and tell him what the character wanted to be or do. He thought that was really weird.

It reminds me of this emerging—you're immersing yourself in this story, which in his case, he's making it up, right? He's setting the conditions for it to be this situation. He's setting out to say, I'm going to write a story about these seven characters, and here's the story arc, but like within that, these characters sort of tell him what they wanna be, that is really crazy. But it sounds a little bit like what you're describing in some ways.

KB: Yeah. It sounds very parallel. You're listening. It involves really deep listening to what is what you're bringing forward. So when I'm drawing or scribing, a lot of things now—cooking, you know, you feel into what it is you're trying to create and you listen to it to say like, does it need more salt or does it need more red or does it need a big line here or does it need more containment? You know, so you're getting your cues from the thing and your observation or your ability to attend to what is coming to life as you're with it is what sets apart the quality of the life that's coming to form, if that makes sense.

MR: Makes me think too about being in a state of flow or being in the zone.

KB: Yes.

MR: But, you know, getting in that, like—I've been in the flow state many times, and sometimes I'm able to get myself into it with conditions that I set music or a coffee or whatever. It's a great space to be, you know, time just disappears which is strange, but kind of cool. So, I mean, it sounds like all these things overlap a little bit.

KB: Definitely, definitely.

MR: The other thing I thought about when you talked about your trips between your parents was Dave Gray talks a lot. He wrote a book about liminal thinking. Talks about liminal spaces, so like the spaces in between. Even, you know, going back, we talked about, you know chatting a little bit about AI, our whole way we're thinking about doing things is changing. We're sort of in an, in-between state right now, I feel like, in these years, right? Going from, like, you might even say like pre pandemic to post pandemic is that we're in a transitional state. I don't where we're gonna end up or have we ended up somewhere? I don't know. It feels like there's always a transition happening, but it feels more transitional than normal.

KB: Oh, definitely. I really agree with you there. I love Dave's work, by the way. I'm such a huge fan of his and I know that book. I think I've already mentioned, you know, the mystery, like preserving space is a mystery of a liminal space is beautiful because in some ways, for me, it's so hard sometimes to be in because things aren't clear and I want things to be clear. I want to know when the plumber will show up or I want to know what the weather will be so I can dress appropriately and not get caught in the rain like today.

But then learning to be the acceptance, you know, just learning to be with what is, my gosh, that's like my lifetime's work. That liminal space, it can be so beautiful if we're not caught in anxiety and over—I should say, if I'm not caught in anxiety and overwhelmed by it, it can be a really mysterious and delightful place, but it's easy to get really it gets thick too, right? It can get a little bit, like, you just want clarity.

MR: Yeah. Yeah. After a while, "Okay, I've had enough of this."

KB: You just wanna wake up and get vertical?

MR: No more liminal. Let's do something, you know?

KB: Yeah.

MR: I'm curious, this is a really outta left-field question, but when did you start drawing? Did you draw since you were a little girl? Like, you talked about these trips between like what was the spark for your drawing and how did that manifest over time? Obviously, you're still doing it, so, but you even talked about like when you met these people in Cambridge that you were taking tech notes, right?

KB: Yeah.

MR: So the visuals were not coming out. I've had those moments in my life as well, so, but it still seems like an anchor or a touchstone or something that keeps bringing you back to it. Talk to me about as a little girl drawing and then how that has changed over your life.

KB: I always drew from, as long as I can remember. I mean, I grew up—my formative years were the '70s, and so in the early '70s we drew, we just did everything by hand. There was, obviously no computers or anything like that. Actually, my dad was a computer programmer, and so I did grow up drawing on punch cards. He'd bring home punch cards from coding. My early sketchbooks were punch cards.

But yeah, it was always a sense-making method for me before even knowing—you know, obviously, at 10 years old or four years old, there's not like the word sense-making, but I was always drawing and you know, I was like, doodling like little shapes or things. We had lots of coloring books and both of my parents were pretty creative. My whole family's pretty creative, so we were surrounded by a lot of art and art was really valued which I think is something that I wish I saw more of in the world.

Like every creative, anything that my brother and I did was celebrated and, you know, put up over the previous thing on the refrigerator. We were very encouraged in that way. So I never had, what a lot of people say is like, I drew and somebody made fun of it, and then it shut down the drawing and there was a lot of embarrassment about like, oh, I can't draw a certain thing. I never had that because my parents were so supportive of whatever we wanted to make. But also, you know, they were working all the time. They weren't around that much. So my brother and I would just go out in the woods and play with sticks and just be creative in lots of ways, but I always drew. Then going to art school, I drew in high school and—

MR: Furthered it. Yeah.

KB: Yeah. I went on an art program in high school with Parsons, with school of design. I was really, really privileged to have my creative thread supported my whole youth basically.

MR: Yeah, because that—

KB: What you asked, I got so enthusiastic about my parents there.

MR: Yeah. No, I think that's all part of it. I'm just I always wanna dig into the motivations or the origins of how you ended up in a place, and it seems like there's so many people who start out drawing and then for whatever reason, there's all kinds of theories about why it happens. I'm sure it's varied for every person, but they kinda lose it, right? I experience it when I teach sketchnoting, the basics. My approach is to bring it back to like shapes, as simple as like five shapes so that you can just get into it without feeling overwhelmed. Then a lot of people that do it, they feel like they haven't drawn since they were maybe in middle school or something like that.

KB: Yeah. I have to say, we talked earlier about maybe you're gonna ask a question around like if you get stuck, what people do when they get stuck, but I would just say for me, drawing there's nothing more freeing than working with my hands. Probably because it quiets my mind. I have a very rambling, anxious mind and overactive, you know, in good ways too, but when I draw, it calms my mind down.

It could be with a stick in dirt or it could be, you know, then in elementary school we probably had different assignments, like, you know, making books for your parents at Thanksgiving. Then in college it was all the things you were supposed to do like painting and printmaking. Then scribing, it was also, scribing is just another sort of form. In essence, you're free when you draw. And I feel free and I do stuff that like nobody has to look at. That's the best is when you relieve the pressure of anybody—

MR: Yeah, just do it for you.

KB: - being it, just do it and make something on the inside visible on the outside for yourself.

MR: Yeah. Well, it's been fun to hear and get more of a sense of where you came from and what you're into. You definitely have a different perspective about this stuff which I think is needed. A lot of times I think, you know, because its business oriented very often 'cause they pay the bills, there tends to be—you know, and I'm a practical functional person a lot because my dad was very practical, so I've always got this art side and the practical side, and they tend to merge in the middle, but there tends to be like this pressure to perform, deliver, and meet deadline. You know, and we have to, that's just part of life.

KB: Yep.

MR: I think it's really important what you're talking about here is to not forget to set aside time or space to just let things emerge and reveal to you. Really interesting. If you have anything, you can give us a show note for how to maybe get into this on a website or something, or a video that might help somebody who's curious about this to maybe experiment with that. That would be really interesting. We could talk about that after we're done with the show and put the link in so people could see what you're talking about and maybe give it a try.

KB: Yeah, but I'll also say I'm also incredibly practical, so I haven't been talking about that, but you know, I've had my own business search for whatever, 30 years and I love spreadsheets. Anybody who knows me or has done any program with me, I'm like a spreadsheet maniac. I really like attention to detail and I really like numbers. I really like knowing that I can pay for things and they go hand in hand. My structured self of me supports the creative side.

MR: Interesting.

KB: And the creative side couldn't exist without the structure. If I were just like all, you know, emergent blah, blah, blah, you know, it would be ungrounded. It would be like this airy sort of like swirly thing. No, you need all the elements, so.

MR: You need both sides. Yeah.

KB: I've got boulders in my life too. I've got things holding me down and I appreciate them a lot. Yeah.

MR: That's cool. That's good. Well—

KB: So, yeah.

MR: - it feels odd just to make a shift, a transition, but I'm really curious, what are the tools that you like to use? We talk a lot about tools, not so much the tools make a difference, but sometimes they do. Sometimes it's nice to have things or maybe they're—you know, my dad always taught me, "There's the right tool for the job. Don't be afraid to buy good quality tools because, you know, in five years you're gonna need to take off that whatever, and you're gonna need that tool." Right.

So in my mind, I've got this idea of quality tools because the last thing you need is the marker or the whatever, failing at a critical moment, right? So you gotta get the good stuff that, you know, will be reliable. There's a reason why. So what are the tools that you like? Pens, paper, pen, computer software and things that help you.

KB: I am right with you with tools. I love tools. I just restored an old chair from the '60s that I had. I could not find anybody to restore it and so I took it apart and I had to get all the glue off the little pegs. I got this like little file set and, you know, appreciated my teeny little files to file in the little grooves of those pegs. Yeah, I'm a big tool person too. In terms of supplies for our work, it's just been all these years of really refining what works.

I don't have a massive amount of colors anymore. I have a very reliable toolkit for each surface. For dry erase, I have—I get all my inks from—I used to get them from Neuland, but now that I'm not flying, I can't really get them anymore, but I have a lot of—I mix my own colors also across all mediums. I've got a whole set of like chalk stuff for blackboards, dry erase, paper. Paper and foam board, not foam board eagle cell board, you know, that kind of slick rigid surface, but a sustainable version, not foam board.

That's different than paper because paper has a life to it. Like this, you've drawn and it starts to—you know, it has humidity and it has other things going on, so I have a slightly different set for those. But yeah, I don't know, not getting into the details. You have to just find what works for you. I wouldn't suggest—I mean, the Neuland outliner ink is a total staple. I cannot work—that's a critical ink to have. I would pay anything to have that shipped to me, but I really lean towards what's sustainable.

Now what I use or I get the—I don't have anything here, but I have the shells. I can't think of the brand. They're plastic shells that you can put—oh gosh, I can't think of my memory's going. But then I have the same shells for each ink, and then I get separate inks, and then I mix my own colors in those shells. I also have arthritis in my right hand so I had been wrapping all of my—I have like a wide marker with a raft, with like a grip so that my hand can hold a little more lightly, which I think contributes to—

MR: You modified it.

KB: Yeah, which I think contributes to the—a sense of flow is when you're not holding a pen so tightly. That's been a challenge with digital scribing. Like everybody I use procreate probably. The thing that I love about it are the layers, the colors. You know, using it in a way not to mimic what you can do by hand, but using it for its own—what you can only do with a digital medium.

MR: Yeah, yeah.

KB: That's something that I've been trying to experiment more with is what is each medium will lend itself to. You can do things on dry erase that you can't do on paper. Like certain textures, you know, putting something on and then using your hand to remove, but then you can't really blend colors on dry erase.

MR: Yeah, there's limitations.

KB: Yeah. Each have their pluses and minuses. For like large scale—another thing is I've been trying to be sensitive to the production of things. Like where am I getting my papers from? I haven't found a great paper source, but yeah, just trying to get things reduce shipping reduce waste, you know, only do things that can be recycled or erased and washed down. Just like minimizing footprint that is priority. That's kind of premium is just minimizing footprint beyond certain color or a certain brand or anything.

MR: That's a consideration. Like circular economy.

KB: Yeah.

MR: This idea that—

KB: Exactly.

MR: It's got a plan.

KB: Yeah, exactly.

MR: Lifespan all the way from beginning to end and could be recycled in some form. Yeah. What about your personal—I'm guessing you maybe do like personnel books where you write in the journal and visualize, do you have a notebook—

KB: Yeah, I should show you. I should show you—you're gonna be horrified. I've been journaling or doing like sketchbooks since I was probably 12, so I've got boxes and boxes, but at this point they're all—it's like this, but I write. It's like I write, so it's like, you know, I don't really—

MR: It's a craft paper cover, flexible. It looks like one of those—maybe even like Moleskin I think makes sense, right?

KB: It's Moleskin. Yeah, it's just like writing. And let's see if I have any drawings in here even. Yeah, I might have like little things. Sometimes like little symbols help get an idea across more than—but I've been using these for a long time and yeah, sometimes it's mixed. I aspire to do the whole sketchnoting thing. At some point, I will, because I think there's so much potential there, but yeah, they're not very organized.

MR: Well, the great thing about sketch notes, the way I look at them as it's on a spectrum, right? You can have lots of writing and then just little images that help support that. That's one way or you can go full image with, you know, annotations at the other edge, so.

KB: Yeah. Well, again, like I was talking about drawing being like a freeing art, writing is another freeing thing for me because—like, no one's gonna read these journals.

MR: They're just for you.

KB: Yeah, they're just for me. If I'm doing something for someone else, I'll tidy it up. Like, you know, it will be—

MR: It's different requirements.

KB: Yeah. yeah, I mean, if I'm taking notes for somebody else, I'd do it on my iPad at this point.

MR: Your mind shift—you're in a different mind space when you're doing it for somebody else too.

KB: Yeah.

MR: If you're imagining who's the recipient, is this gonna help that recipient or not, and what's the most critical thing I can share with that person? Which I don't know necessarily.

KB: Yeah.

MR: Right.

KB: But I have to say, like, one other thing is just, and I'm aware for you of the time and for people listening, but is I really do bounce between order and freeform. I'm in sort of like a meta trend of it now, of trying to be much more freeform in my life in general. Like, hence showing up like this today. But I've been ordered for a long time to be professional and have a business and, you know, do programs and get clients and have what I do, like look good and look professional, and it's been very tiring.

I have to say it's been more exhausting than I realized. And so, I'm trying to balance that out with just more spaciousness, more gardening, more stuff like that doesn't have to do with work. That's like an age thing probably where I am in my career. If I had been more attentive to the extreme nature of our work earlier, I knew it was—I could keep up with the extremity of it, but traveling and being in different places away from home, hotels, whatever, all that stuff, different foods, there's a lot of rigor in that kind of work. If I had been more aware of balancing that along the way, I would have.

MR: I mean, at the beginning it's exciting, right? It's part of the excitement of doing the work and at some point, it becomes a drag to a degree, right? I know that, you know, getting to the space where I'm doing the work is great, but like everything up to that point is like a struggle. And if you just have to do the struggle, right, you start to be more aware of the struggle, then it becomes less exciting in a way. I don't know. That's the way I would describe it.

KB: I think it's been very exciting. More people are probably better at play. People with families have vacations built into their lives. I don't have a family, so I just worked all the time. It's on me, but if you don't have the structures of society kind of saying, "Okay, now it's summer, you should take time off." You forget. So I'm trying to remember all that now.

MR: Trying to catch up, huh?

KB: Relearn. I'm trying to catch up with all of you who know better. Yeah.

MR: Interesting. Well, talking about guidance, let's jump into the question, the practical thing, and this is, give me three tips for someone who's listening, who's a visual thinker, whatever that means to them, who maybe is in a rut or just needs a little encouragement. What would be three things you might tell that person?

KB: Yeah, so three tips. Coming back to the materials, I would say, change it up. Put yourself in a space where you can experiment. That would be one. Two would be, I guess just the theme of this whole conversation is—so one is experiment, two is mystery and beauty. Three—hmm, part of me wants to make it 10. Three, I guess it would have to be like, keep yourself healthy. Because if you wanna go full force and travel around the world and, you know, have that intensity, you need to have stamina for that and you need to look out for yourself physically and mentally.

And if you choose to work locally, you know, in all ways, wherever, whatever medium you're using or wherever it is in the planet, looking out for our own health and wellbeing, mental and physical, and also that of our peers and our communities, I think is probably pretty key. Bodies age, you know, so take good care. Yeah. Experiment, mystery, care.

MR: That sounds like a good combo. It's good trial [unintelligible 49:34].

KB: I should listen to my own advice.

MR: Sounds good. Well, where Kelvy can we find you? What's the best place to find your work websites? I don't know how much social media you do, but.

KB: I have basically stopped social media. I mean, I still have all my accounts, but I'm posting very little mainly because of AI. I'm trying to pay attention to what's right underfoot, basically. That's the real thing. I have my website, kelvybird.com. I wrote a book called Generative Scribing. If people wanna learn more about the interior—it's not at all a how-to-book-on.

MR: Sounds philosophical to me.
[pause 50:27 - 51:05]
Hey there. I kinda lost you for a minute.

KB: Yeah, sorry about that. I think I froze, or I must have been talking—I was talking about getting off social media and trying to get more connected with what's right around me, and it froze.

MR: I lost some of the—

KB: Yeah, so my book—

MR: I got like the first tip and then there was some breaks.

KB: Oh, really?

MR: Yeah. So for whatever reason, the network just was—I dunno if it's one of our side is a little bit flaky, so.

KB: The first one was around experimenting.

MR: Mm-hmm.

KB: So just give yourself new tools, try new things, put yourself in new context, you know, be curious. The second was around mystery, like preserving the mystery of life and seeing beauty in things essentially. And the third was around self-care, mentally and physically 'cause the work takes a toll.

MR: Got it. And then as far as the best place to find you, that would be kelvybird.com.

KB: That would be my website, kelvybird.com. Also, I wrote a book, Generative Scribing. And so, if people wanna know more about the inner mechanics of my practice or generative scribing practice, they could go to the book. It has a lot of frameworks for dialogue and presencing and those types of things. Also, just talks about the model of practice that I use for my work.

MR: So that would touch on, if someone, if you were listening about the presencing we had discussed before, that would be the place to go to go deeper on that book.

KB: That would be a place that book that would intersect presencing with scribing and visual practice. If you wanna know more about presencing specifically, you could look for Otto Scharmer's work on Theory U. And there's a book, The Essentials of Theory U, that's a really good starting place. Then there's a book by Will Isaac’s on Dialogue, which I think is also pretty foundational to my practice. Yeah.

MR: Interesting. You sort of taken these multiple worlds and blended them together in a way that made sense for you, sounds like in the book.

KB: Yeah, probably it's my own—yes, in the book. It definitely is aimed to integrate the all the different pockets of work experience that I had had in practice. Yeah.

MR: Oh, that's great.

KB: It's very easy reading, I have to say. Each chapter's about two pages with pictures, so.

MR: Excellent. Well, there you go. That sounds like a perfect visual thinker’s type of thing. Well, Kelvy, this has been so much fun to have you on the show and learn more about you and your history and how you think about things. Thanks so much for the work you've done and the impact you've had in the community and you continue to have. So thanks for being who you are.

KB: Well, thank you for all that. And thank you for who you are because I'm just a huge fan of you and your work and all you've brought into the world and into our field of practice. So, right back at you.

MR: Oh, thank you. That's really great.

KB: Yeah.

MR: Well, for everyone who's watching or listening, it's another episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast. Until the next episode, talk to you soon.

KB: Bye.