ComTeam Consultants Personally: Marco Stoll
“I think in images”
Marco Stoll, Managing Director of the Swiss ComTeam Academy & Consulting GmbH, shows me some of his drawings on his laptop. In a course on “Visual Communication” he got the idea to let drawings speak. Meanwhile these drawings bear his specific stile; they are little figures without a face, which transport certain actual situations, emotions or verbal expressions.
When Marco Stoll is travelling, for business or private reasons, he always carries his sketchbook with him. He makes sketches of people, objects and forms of all sorts. So he can sit in a museum or at the airport and put on paper what he sees in the surrounding.
Traveling is part of Marco’s business. For a long time in his professional life the destinations were mostly in Asia and America, today there is more traveling within Europe. “If you have spent weeks and months in foreign cities, at some point the curiosity in sight-seeing is satisfied. Then it is quite relaxing to just sit in the park and make drawings.” And he shows me a drawing of a family having a picnic in a park in Hong Kong.
His hobby and his profession truly meet in those little figures. This form of transporting topics is successful with people from very different cultures. People are tired of power point presentations. The handwritten flipcharts are welcomed as a change in times where there is an overflow of visual impressions. Carefully drawn, these figures transport warmth. It was only in Barbados where a participant commented, that he thought, a European expert would certainly use modern technique.
Another advantage is that these drawing on paper stay in the room for a while and in this way are present for the group.
But Marco Stoll does not have to go out in public for to be creative; he also draws out of his memory. “To draw is really something relaxing for me” he says.“I am very concentrated when drawing and can let go of daily business”. And quite often, he is simultaneously listening to an audio book. That’s inspiring and new drawing come to life. Since long he has had the wish to illustrate a book; but this is very time craving and up to now he did not have the time for this activity. But he ends the interview saying: “One day I will do it!”
