Sophie Smiles

Sophie is a visual facilitator, graphic recorder and storyteller with 20 years experience helping organisations co-create, clarify complex ideas and communicate with impact.

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Professional Background

Sophie is a long standing associate of Catalyst. She works across corporate, charity and independent sectors, helping leaders to articulate purpose, align teams and embed change using visual and design thinking. Her unique skill set brings together business improvement, facilitation, design and visual communications.

Experience

Sophie founded a start up business to connect change leaders, leading cross-industry communities of practice and facilitated b2b collaboration for 10 years. She worked as Head of Creative Collaboration for design agency Scriberia and toured as a professional musician.

Expertise and Approach

Sophie uses creative facilitation to translate strategic vision into stories, aligning teams through co-creation. She works at the intersection of strategy, leadership and change, blending creative problem solving techniques with expert faciltation and visual communcations.

Catalyst & Industry Roles

Sophie works with Catalyst clients to visualise strategy, engage people in change journeys, and support culture-building efforts through participatory visual design. Facilitating creative collaboration and designing visual communciations is something Sophie also does within and for Catalyst.

Qualifications

Sophie is trained in Lean Six Sigma, Design Thinking, Systems Thinking, Creative Leadership, and Communication. She studied with IDEO and applies human-centred design to all her work. She holds a first-class honours BA in Illustration & Visual Communication.

Achievements

Sophie is an award-winning animator. Her short film ‘We Are Fireflies’ was selected as a finalist at Raindance and winner of Best Animation at the Berlin Women’s Film Festival. She is a published artist and musician and her work can be found in business publications, public murals, albums and global business communciations.

Research

Sophie is passoinate about bringing visual literacy to people who wish to make positive change and tell a story. Her research into graphic autobiography in 2023 informed her use of visual narratrive devices in professional contexts and inspired the development of workshops that enable people to tell their personal stories through comics and drawing.

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