Jodi Lanis is a frequent user of Dialoogle for facilitation purposes. She came across Dialoogle when she was searching the Internet for new facilitation tools, which she uses in her job as Senior Manager for Talent Management at a global healthcare company headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.

Jodi uses Dialoogle cards with all kinds of people and in many different situations.

“I do a lot of facilitation, and I find the Dialoogle pictures quite cool. I have used them with IT directors, HR people and financial people and many others, and I have never met anybody who did not like the cards. A technology VP was so excited about the difference the cards made in discussions that he bought them himself to stimulate creative thinking among his employees at staff meetings,” says Jodi.

Recently she facilitated an intense two-day meeting for a global group of 25-30 employees who were going through some extensive process changes.

“After lunch I spread out two decks of Dialoogle cards on the floor and asked everybody to find a card that expressed how they felt about the changes that were being discussed. – After a few minutes all participants had chosen a card, and storytelling began.”

“It seemed that although people chose different picture cards, their stories circled around the same themes. With a picture of a ship in the horizon one participant told the group that he was beginning to understand more clearly where the organisation was going and why. Another participant illustrated how she felt people in the group were making connections and beginning to see themselves like the cogwheels meshing together on her picture card.”

I have used Dialoogle as a facilitation tool with IT directors, HR people and financial people and many others, and I have never met anybody who did not like the picture cards.

“The cards bring good energy into a group. They enable people to tell a story and connect to each other. The storytelling process itself made this particular group of people excited about the changes they were going through, which was exactly my ambition for this meeting. We ended up on the same page, and everybody felt good and positive about it,” Jodi explains.

Jodi Lanis regularly uses small and simple Dialoogle exercises like this one to create diversity and recreation in extended processes like the two-day meeting – but also to close meetings.

“I closed this meeting by asking people to choose a picture to illustrate what they had been excited about over the past two days. In general people chose cheerful pictures of groups of some sort to express that they did not feel alone in the changing organisation any longer, and that they felt enthusiastic about the prospect of working together with new people.”