Women on Corporate Boards
Client: California Partners Project
Collaborators: Flight Design
• strategy • facilitation • graphic recording • synthesis • story shaping •
Discovery
In the summer and fall of 2020 I teamed up with an exceptional group of women to support the California Partners Project in their endeavor to collect, organize, and visualize data tracking the progress of SB-826, landmark legislation in the State of California that mandates gender equity on corporate boards.
We spent a great deal of time exploring what the project needed. Having worked with a few team members in the past, they initially reached out for simple data analysis and visualization support. In the end of discovery, our vision clarified: we needed to expand beyond reporting quantitative data. We needed to gather qualitative inputs through a series of strategic group conversations, synthesize our findings, and help fill out the story that needed to be told.
Concepting
Once we agreed on the approach to supplement the quantitative data collection about SB-826 compliance with qualitative data from leaders in the business and board diversity spaces, we set out to map the universe of this project and clarify the needs of the focus group design. Ariana helped facilitate a series of discussions that helped us land on a series of 5–7 90-minute workshops that would center around three questions.
A visual agenda for our initial design session: Who, What, Why, and How were the important questions to answer.
An Illustrated outline of the deliverables we identified:
Live Visual Notes for each question and a synthesis / summary visual
We put a lot of thought into the framing and phrasing of the questions to make sure they were distinct, specific, and open ended enough for people to take in the direction toward where the energy of the group was heading. After finalizing the design and schedule, we set out to communicate our plans to the focus group participants, 46 business leaders, investors, and experts in board diversity and governance.
This is the first slide of a short document we shared with participants so they were clear on our goals, expectations, and conversation topics.
Design and Deliver
The focus groups happened over the course of two weeks in November 2020. We designed the groups to have a “host” participant, outside of CPP, who would lead the conversation and open up for questions. A CPP team member was also there to provide additional facilitation support, while I took visual notes and Ariana captured important quotes in a google doc. After each question, we would pause the conversation so that I could recap and validate what we heard with my visual capture.
Each group started with a question on page, and as the discussion evolved I tried to follow along with my capture, highlighting connections and grouping similar sentiments.
After each session concluded, we looked for quotes and key themes. This turned into a 60-page document full of rich information that we ultimately needed to summarize and synthesize.
One of the pages in our detailed notes included a table of key themes to see what was cutting across multiple sessions.
Some early visual concepts to help illustrate the emerging themes in our document.
After a bit of brainstorming, we ended up landing on a central visual metaphor that could contain all of the ideas. The metaphor isn’t actually much of a metaphor: a board room, visualized with a series of waiting rooms building around it. Different doorways represent ways for women to get seats at the table. We compiled these visuals into a summary document that we shared with participants so they could see how their conversations contributed to the overall findings.
We put a lot of thought into how to build the story construct in a way that could morph into future products, like a series of animations.
The process and work contributed to the 2021 “Claim Your Seat: Women of Color on California Public Company Boards” report.
Dream
After wrapping this stage of the project, we had a ton ideas about how to continue developing the core visual and messaging. We dreamed of animations with voiceovers, documentary style interviews with dynamic visualizations to bring the content to life, and so much more. Disappointingly, a California Court struck down SB-826 in May 2022 and the legislation is now indefinitely halted, which you can learn more about here.