Stephanie and Starfish Taylor
Stephanie and Chris Holy (founder of Starfish) go way back. Back to the days when the field of “graphic scribing and facilitation” was just coming on to the scene. They worked together on the first team that ever existed in Paris – and oh how the world of graphic facilitation has grown! A few years ago, the two of them reconnected; and although the world of graphic facilitation has grown immensely, it still remains a small world.
“Once you have worked these kinds of workshops together there is a tangible brotherhood/ sisterhood that is created.” – Stephanie Corne
Stephanie worked her first Starfish Taylor-run workshop in Korea, alongside graphic facilitator, Tikka Hun, and customer-turned-Starfish Taylor managing partner, Peter Day. This workshop challenged Starfish Taylor to recycle a third party’s strategy, revitalize and amplify it, and deliver a new roadmap ready for accelerated action. Stephanie and Tikka were indispensable assets of this workshop; by creating a customized graphical storyboard of the situation, numerous new ideas came to the surface, and the management team validated the power of collective inputs and points of views.
Today, Stephanie has also become a special branch upon the Starfish Taylor tree as our local partner in New York City.
Scribing in the Eyes of Stephanie
With a background in design, you can probably imagine Stephanie’s aptitude in assessing patterns: patterns in conversations, patterns in themes, patterns in client/customer relations. Once she sees patterns, she then begins to structure them in a way that both drives and reflects the conversation.
When capturing a live discourse, Stephanie drowns out all internal or external noise; being in her element means being relaxed, yet acutely focused. This allows her to capture and analyze the essence of content, and clarify the various themes being discussed.
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Stephanie scribes with a keen eye to her clients. She strives to truly convey the importance of visuals and the benefits of working together in a new way. Making clients understand these key facets accelerates the move towards solutions and allows them to prepare for future workshops. She focuses 100% on what can be of value to her clients, adapting to their needs, the challenge (or challenges) at hand, and then synthesizing all of this into a 360° service that reflects the Starfish Taylor methodology and mentality.
“My visuals show how the group created their own story and strategies step by step.” – Stephanie Corne
Graphics as a Universal Solution
While working with Starfish, she finds herself scribing and facilitating among the economy’s biggest industries, like Oil, Gas, and Pharmaceuticals, and for companies like CEMEX. With that being said, Stephanie works in smaller niches as well. She’s had the pleasure of working at a social justice event involving multi-faith leaders; she’s also lent her skills to theater, working at numerous rehearsals to help the lead actress, Catherine Dewitt, master her 2-hour long monologue. So, as you see, graphic scribing is an asset many industries can benefit from.
Stephanie also shared with us a common challenge she’s witnessed companies overcome once they incorporate a scribe and the magic of Starfish Taylor into their workshops and meetings. Many companies struggle with low meeting effectiveness: any results or progress made in a meeting don’t last, employees revert back to old ways, and the same problems keep resurfacing. Starfish Taylor aims to change that.
“A company who has been Starfished is a company with people who understand how precious it is to meet, listen to each other’s experience and ideas. It is a company who has seen people commit to a common vision and become the ambassadors of a goal created and tested together…It is a company that comes back because…they trust Starfish to do its magic again.” – Stephanie Corne
Ever heard of the Flynn effect? Stephanie mentions this term, which essentially suggests how humans have become smarter in the rational realm over the last 100 years, and how this is allowing humans to better navigate the abstract world. By having a scribe, she says, it allows clients to make sense of the abstract, to have a testimony of their experiences and exchanges, to grasp what’s going on in the company. It is their manifesto, their work visualized, and it is theirs to exploit, build upon, and learn from.
“After all these years it remains a great thing for me to witness the smiles of satisfaction on people’s face at the end of a workshop. There is a real contentment there.” – Stephanie Corne
Discover More About Stephanie Corne
Stephanie calls herself a “Merleau-Ponty and Carl Jung kind of artist.” Her personal artwork can surely reflect that. One project in particular comes to mind, the exquisite FaceMotions project. Combining her gifts for painting and design, it is a collection of photographs capturing the unique beauty of those born with Vitiligo. To explore the breadth of Stephanie’s personal artwork we highly encourage you to visit her site.
Stephanie is a big fan of all episodes of the Radiolab podcast on NPR. Her music tastes are as eclectic as we imagined them to be…from Highly Suspect, to Horace Silver, to Shostakovitch.
