Crown Commercial Services: Our Vision
Rich Picture project, 2018

Every now again, I return to my graphic facilitation roots and work with Scriberia and our clients on ‘rich picture’ projects. 

Rich pictures are big, detailed diagrams that depict how a particular organisation works or how they want to work in the future - or sometimes even both. A good rich picture not only illustrates the systems within an organisation, but also helps explain who is involved in each part of the process, how they work and why they are important to the overall operation. 

The best thing about making rich pictures is getting together with a big group of people from an organisation and working collaboratively to create an image that chimes with all of them, no matter which department they are in. It’s great to use illustration and participatory workshops to help build a shared vision that organisations can feel united by. 

I’m particuarly pleased with this recent rich picture that I made with the transformation team at Crown Commerical Services (which is basically like Amazon but for the government).

I worked with Andrew Besford who was instrumental in getting inputs from as many CCS people as possible and worked super hard at making sure that all of those inputs were factored in to the final design. The image you see below is the final image, but before it came many different versions of the vision, masses of sketches and scribbles and about 4 billion post-it notes. Andrew and I chipped away until everyone was happy. 

I also want to thank my friends at Scriberia, for being so good at finding me these interesting projects, which really help to show how powerful drawing can be as a tool for bringing people together.