David Cooperrider stood front and center onstage, and welcomed more than 800 attendees sitting in the room or dialing in around the globe to ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership's first-ever Global Summit on Social Responsibility. "All change," said Cooperrider, the Summit's facilitator, "begins in the imagination and the mind."

Off to his left, positioned in front of an eight-foot-wide, four-foot-high sketchpad, Michelle Boos-Stone was busy illustrating that notion. Literally. As Cooperrider spoke, Boos-Stone used a variety of felt-tip markers and pastels to translate his remarks into a sort of pictogram - not quite a comic strip, not quite a flow chart, not quite a PowerPoint slide. She drew a friendly-looking cartoon man with his left hand raised high in the air, index finger pointing skyward, and a word bubble sprouting from his mouth: "Change at the scale of the whole…." From that simple figure flowed other words, symbols, and pictures - collectively linking Cooperrider to the speakers who followed him.

When the page was full and the session was over, Boos-Stone moved on to the next sheet and the next session. Over the course of the three-day Summit, which was held at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center outside Washington, D.C., in late April, she created about 20 of these highly stylized tableaus. "We were looking for her to capture the main points of the Summit as they were being reported out, as well as the energy in the room, which was high-level," said Christopher Wood, ASAE & The Center's director of social responsibility. "And her drawings really reflect that, because they're bright, they're happy, they're cheerful, they're creative."

The technical term for what Boos-Stone does is "graphic recording." The graphic recorder herself describes the process as trying to "synthesize what is being heard and taken notes on and pictured, so people in the audience can see what is being heard. They can see connections throughout the conversation, and they can see the conversation come out in pictures. Then they have a historical document that represents everything they've heard."

Graphic recording, Boos-Stone noted, plays to the fact that up to 85 percent of the population are visual learners. It was especially helpful given the Summit's inspiring but potentially abstract mission - essentially, to begin figuring out how associations can help change the world. "I was more emotionally attached to the material than perhaps something I would be doing in corporate America," said Boos-Stone, who lives in Long Beach, Calif., and typically works for Fortune 500 companies. "I find that I never have an opportunity to draw hearts. This is a meeting where I was able to use hearts, because there was a lot of talking about emotions and embracing."

Innovative Meetings Take Away

How do you draw an idea? Michelle Boos-Stone has sketched out some guiding principles:

• LIVE IN THE NOW. "It really depends on what the concept is and what they're talking about. I don't think about what I'm going to do before I do it, I just draw it in the moment."
• LISTEN FOR THE NUGGET. "I used to record everything, but now I listen for, what are you going to need afterward? What's important for you afterward?"
• USE GOOD COLORS. "I've studied color theory, and only used positive stimulus colors, including blue and green. You don't want to use a lot of black and red, which have negative affectations for people worldwide."
• MIX IT UP. "I trade off. I draw women if men are speaking, and vice versa. I have people of color, people in wheelchairs."

Christopher Durso is executive editor of Convene.
The Innovative Meetings column is sponsored by the Irving, Texas, Convention and Visitors Bureau, www.irvingtexas.com