How to make visual thinking work like magic inside a big corporation

– Told by Susanne Krogh-Hansen

Our CEO, Andy had the pleasure of catching up with Ørsted’s Susanne Krogh-Hansen to learn more about her extraordinary six-year journey with Visual Thinking. Susanne has gone from barely drawing at all, to now being a full time Design Thinker and Visual Storyteller during a time when her company transitioned from being a black energy company, to a green energy company and entered the ‘Top 100 Most Sustainable Companies In The World” list in 2020. We discuss Susanne’s story and how Visual Thinking was integrated as a tool for innovation and storytelling. 

Before Visual Thinking was used in the organisation...

In 2012 I began working for Ørsted as a training expert. Back then, they were a black energy company, mainly financed by oil and gas. I led courses where people would sit in front of SAP, the big ERP system that a lot of large companies use, and asked them to click through the system to try and understand it – but I discovered that they did not really learn the IT systems, and the retention was low. At this time, no-one in the company was using visual thinking.

“We have to do something completely different because this is not working.”

Learning graphic facilitation

In 2014 I decided to learn graphic facilitation to support my role as a trainer and improve communication and the understanding of systems across the business. I expected some pushback from my manager, but to my surprise, she went for it.

A Director asked me if I could draw the entire ERP system, and I saw this as a chance to really test out my new knowledge. I could fail miserably, or I could take a huge leap forward - so I decided to take it on and began drawing the whole ERP system, with the guidance of the course facilitator who trained me in graphic facilitation, who came in as a consultant. We had a couple of workshops with people who knew the system well, and in the end, we had an impressive three metres of drawing of the full ERP system of our company. Whenever the director had to discuss any changes in the organization or in the IT landscape – he would gather the business partners around the drawing and say, “so we can change something here that influences somebody over here, and what about this? and we can add this new module, but that would affect this…”. People were blown away by the drawing and how it enabled them to have energetic, productive conversations.

Before the visual drawing, sometimes the  business areas would convince us that they needed a certain module, and then we would start trying to implement it – realizing when we had started the work, that it was not going to work!

As you can imagine, large amounts of money were spent on implementation, that we now save, because we know upfront that it has to be done at another level, or in another setting – or that it will not work at all.

Management supported me to use Visual Thinking as a trainer and organisational change manager

I think that visual thinking's main force is that you get people to empty their knowledge and work  onto paper. It does not necessarily have to be drawings – it could be post-its or cardboard – but when you see it on a wall or a board, it supports the understanding, getting an aligned picture and it improves the quality of the end result.

I use graphic facilitation when I am facilitating – for agendas and for visualising the output of workshops. Another example of use was when we trained people in a process with a visual training game on flip charts or visualised a project plan. My management recognised the value also and supported me with using Visual Thinking in my role.

I learned that sometimes I drew the wrong thing and that I could not be precious about what I drew, because I would have to put a big red cross on top of it and say, “okay, so I drew this wrong, what did you mean? How can we do the right thing?”. We got to the solution faster by making it visible. Otherwise, we would not have picked up that we were not all on the same page.

Work Visible: When the work is in your head, you can be quite comfortable with it being vague, because you feel as though you understand it. But when you try and write it down, or you try and draw it, you realise you can’t write it down in a way that is easy to understand. It reveals to you how well you really understand the problem.

Training 350 people in the organization

I changed roles within the organization from training management, into organizational change management. I began by training my six colleagues in graphic facilitation and they were thrilled by the ways they could use it in their work. I thought that was it, but then the lead test manager approached me to train her team also!

She had an ambition for her team to be present in all of the IT projects. Generally test management was considered to be necessary and valuable but it can be difficult to see and understand what they are actually doing. Often projects would say, “no we don’t need test managers”, and so the Test Managers really needed a way to be able to tell and visualize their job and how they are going about it, to create understanding and alignment on the value they add to a given project. This appealed to other areas of the organisation and so the training grew.

“Now, six years later, I have trained 5% – almost 350 people inside my organization in graphic facilitation because we never stopped using it.”

The training course still runs once a month, supported by graphic cafes where people can get a taste of graphic facilitation, or people who joined the course can improve their drawing skills – building an internal movement.

“Now we have reached a level where a large number of people at all levels of the organization know and understand the value of visuals”

As we went through the incredible transition from black to green energy, selling off the entire oil and gas section of the organization, the success was dependent upon us all being able to innovate and visual training helped ensure that a lot of people could use visuals to support this huge transition. It was the perfect storm for me.

Three years ago a company-wide digital strategy including agile, design thinking and change management was launched. All three areas really benefit from visual thinking, and the need for my skills increased rapidly. Visual thinking and graphic recording are now fully recognised as a skill that we need in the organisation to succeed with delivering value and innovative solutions in many parts of the organisation.

Next, the organization formed a department in design thinking and UX. I quickly contacted the UX manager and we agreed that we should focus on bringing visual thinking into the design work, and into the agile release trains with a focus on supporting innovation and storytelling.

“In six years, I have gone from doing almost no drawing, to visual facilitation, drawing and storytelling being my full time job.”

As a result I have now transitioned to being a full time strategic design thinker, visual storyteller and innovation sprint facilitator. 

If somebody has a process that is in trouble or there is a story that they want to tell about an organizational change, or a project that is so complex that they do not know how to draw or explain then they ask for my support – either helping them in a workshop, trying to visualize something that they can build on, or we co-create a storyline that I can draw a picture of or make a video about.

“Visuals are now used for UX, design thinking workshops, co-creation of processes and IT systems, storytelling and communication, and training and change management, to create alignment, simplify complex processes, prototyping and innovation.”

I have been lucky that my Visual Thinking journey has evolved with both my abilities and the company's development to be a recognised skill not only for me, but for many of my colleagues, whether or not they are managers, engineers, IT developers, User Experience designers or facilitators.