James Baylay

Scribing for 27 years, I have developed my skills in a broad range of settings and for a diverse range of clients. I have worked with practically every kind of organisation from technology to accounting and government to pharma.

After achieving a 1st class degree in Fine Art I joined Ernst & Young’s Accelerated Solutions Environment in 1997. Here scribing was learnt as a facilitation technique within M.G.Taylor’s collaborative workshop process with an emphasis on capturing content so it could be used to aid decision making. We had to quickly understand and synthesise the conversation at hand. This meant painting broad strokes but also recording detail. Listening skills were as critical as imagination and a list as important as finding the right image. 

After being at the ASE for a number of years I have since worked in other facilitation centres, such as PWC’s The Difference and CapGemini’s Les Fontaines, for various facilitation companies and directly with clients. I was also a director of Scriberia in its first year and worked with them over the next few years as a scribe and to help train their new talent. 

I love scribing. I feel passionate about using my experience to adapt my approach to the conversation as it changes and to bring together all of the small clues and cues, as much as the big headline, to create a record that feels truthful to the people I’m listening to. The objective for me above all is that people feel I’ve really listened and got it. I use humour and metaphor where I can to reflect the content back in ways that hopefully skew the every day perspective to make it fresh and human. Sometimes that just means tuning into the humour people themselves always bring to how they describe their situation. But I would never crowbar in a joke where another framing device was appropriate: mind maps, pictograms, diagrams, infographics or just writing the right words down.