The Art of Business

Picturing breakthrough in the Deloitte Greenhouse® Experience

Imagine a room where your team’s breakthrough journey comes to life in front of your eyes—not in a transcript or slide deck fated for a dusty bookshelf, but in a one-of-a-kind visual creation you can keep and share. That’s what can happen when a professional artist hears, interprets, and reflects your conversation in real-time.

Zara Stasi is the Deloitte Greenhouse’s^® official artist. When participants in a Greenhouse^® Lab come together in a consciously designed space to tackle complex issues, build better teams, or uncover new strategies, she is there to create a visual map of where the conversation—and the day—takes them.

This is graphic facilitation—a visual story of a live event. To create these visual stories, Stasi listens. She pulls out content from the lab session as it unfolds. Then she adds design elements to put ink to the ideas. The process not only preserves the discussion, but also contributes to it.

Perhaps you’ve seen a television ad or a corporate video that uses the “whiteboard technique” in which an unseen hand brilliantly sketches out a story. Spoiler: Those are scripted and rehearsed. Not so with Stasi’s art. She doesn’t know ahead of time what each session’s graphic representation will look like any more than the participants know over breakfast what conclusions they are going to reach. That makes her work all the more remarkable, and all the more valuable as a record.

“You’re ultimately making a brand for the day,” says Stasi. She emphasizes that while the art is important, beauty is secondary to her primary mission to simplify and synthesize on the fly. Using the ideas in the air as a starting point, she captures them in ways that try to foster emotion, memory, and retention. The result is an artifact that can complement the verbal record—words on paper are seldom in short supply—with something that can appeal to the spatial and visual parts of the participants’ brains.

Whether the original artwork is captured electronically or via photographs, Stasi’s Greenhouse^® Lab artistic creations often endure far beyond the experience. Groups take them back to their office to admire—and to share with colleagues who couldn’t be there.

People who might otherwise have been subjected to yet another slide deck are probably grateful. The participants who can see their ideas expressed in vibrant color often feel proud. And Stasi? She’s happy to have found a place where her talents make a difference.

Back to top

Want to learn more about the Deloitte Greenhouse® Experience?

Each Deloitte Greenhouse^® Experience is tailored to address your toughest business challenges through thoughtfully designed labs. Our labs use a three-part method—refined in 3,000+ sessions—to engage participants not only intellectually, but physically and emotionally as well.

Find out more about how Deloitte Greenhouse^® Experience works and what you can expect in a custom-designed lab.

Back to top