21 ways to use visual thinking in practice

One day our late founder and brilliant Dad, Andy de Vale, was planning a workshop he had coming up for one of his clients, during his 20 plus years as a business consultant. He thought, “well, how do we actually use visual thinking in WorkVisible?”. He started writing the ways on index cards and when he got to 21, he stopped (he could have kept going for a long time!).

Andy originally recorded a quick run-through of these on a digital whiteboard and now we’ve turned it into a blog. So, these are some of the key ways that we use visual thinking in practice…

1. Focus Poster

Using focus posters as a background for a session is a great way to focus the attention of a group.

2. Static Agenda

Creating an agenda visually provides a point of interest for the audience - the clock agenda was a favourite of Andy’s.

When you are working remotely, a poster agenda or visuals on screen work well and they can be created on a small format, from an index card, to a large format - such as a flipchart.

3. Dynamic Agenda

‘Lean Coffee’ is a great example of a dynamic agenda.

Other examples include the outcomes we want to get to, prioritising activities, or tools such as the ‘gradients of agreement’, to identify the most valuable points to have a discussion around.

4. Presentation

Using visuals in presentations is a powerful way to engage people and the process of creating a visual presentation helps you to understand your subject matter in more depth.

Flipchart posters, digital whiteboards, slides or overhead cameras with paper can all be used to create presentations.

You can draw live in a number of ways:
- Draw from scratch
- Draw from a rehearsed presentation
- A presentation that is already partially drawn and you complete it or highlight it along the way
- Include sections that you move around or reveal throughout the presentation

5. Meaningful space

You can collaborate in meaningful space using posters, either in a digital format or in-person and at different scales. In the agile world this is used during retrospectives to gain clarity. The process of creating posters can help you get to outcomes, as it forces you to be clear on the areas that are important.

You identify the questions that matter then draw a template that creates meaningful space around the questions. For example, in the image with the Rocket, we might have a question at domains A and B, such as, “where are we now? Where do we want to go? How are we going to get there?”.

The Bikablo posters book has good examples that you can take for inspiration and combine them with facilitation methods.

6. Capture conversations

Where: face-to-face, digitally

Visual games take you through a process using pre-drawn elements to tell a story, solve a problem, paint a picture and develop an understanding.

The games provide objects to talk around. For example, the treasure chest is the outcome we want to achieve by making a change and the cloud is the clarity we have about the current state. People are able to point to parts of the visual, which is a very powerful way of building dialogue and you can enhance it by adding pictures.

They are also fun to do, which is one of the reasons we love using visuals.

9. Draw alone

When you need to solve a problem on your own, drawing alone is a great way of exploring the problem, or a process.

We like to say, “if you draw it, you can do it” and “if in doubt, make a map”.

10. Draw together

If you have a problem that you need to solve, try drawing as a group. You can do this by:

1. Ask a simple question
Start by asking a simple question to the group.
2. Draw in pairs or alone
For example, draw a diagram. A city, a vehicle, a garden or a monster could represent the question, or current situation.
Ask the participants to choose the icon as this helps them to get into the right mindset.
3. Share with the group
Ask the participants to present their pictures. They can reference parts of the picture that relate to what is going on in the organisation, or the goal they want to achieve.
4. Ask progressive questions
Ask progressive questions and repeat steps 1-3 to build a dialogue

This can be done separately and then combined to create a single view, which encourages more conversation.

The drawing can be simple - it is the process of capturing information through progressively drawing together that helps the group to make sense of the problem and to create alignment.

11. Meaningful space - Reflection

A simple template that allows you to reflect, visually. At WorkVisible, we run the ‘great, good, bad’ pie chart periodically throughout the year.

Here is how we do it:

1. Draw a circle
2. Reflect on the work completed over a period of time
3. Segment it into the 3 areas:
Great work - that made us feel like we were fulfilling a purpose, that makes us feel ‘alive’ and was satisfying to achieve
Good work - doing a good, professional job
Bad work - the soul-sucking, difficult or boring work that you wish wasn't part of your day at all

Drawing a picture connects you to what is going on, helping you to reflect, take action and increase the amount of great work you are doing.

This can be done with many different subjects and it is also powerful when it is completed individually and then shared with a group.

12. Explore existing pictures

Exploring existing pictures is a useful tool. For example, you can draw a visual representation of your workplace that you can point and talk around. In the example above, something is happening with the plane in this organisation. You can clearly see what is going on around the plane, at a glance. Whereas, if you were having a focused conversation about how the wing is attached to the fuselage, for example, you might not think about the surrounding details that can be seen in the picture.

The picture shows connections between important areas that may otherwise be missed and highlights unintended or hidden consequences of what you're planning to do. Being able to view and consider everything in one place, helps us to make better decisions and align them.

Typically, this picture will evolve - more will be added to it or it will be completely redrawn over time. This brings clarity and allows us to plan, to explore what's going on before taking action and to ask questions about how making a change to one area will affect other areas.

If a new person is joining the organisation, the picture can be used to explain how things work.

The pictures are fast to do and they are overall accelerators for communication, alignment, planning and seeing what needs to happen next.

13. Visual summary

Visual summaries are an effective way of creating a shared memory and to capture a meeting, an event, a past occurrance, or to make a future plan.

’Creating a shared memory’ is what visual note-taking was called in the 1970’s.

Try it by taking rough visual notes during or after a session then create either a visual harvest or a slow sketch-note.

The visual summary can be used long-term, or just once as an aid or a memoir for a session.

14. Visualise progress

Visuals can be used to make progress visible. Kanban boards are all the rage these days, however, they can also hide a sense of overall progress - the big picture.

At WorkVisible, we run an exercise called the Objective Octopus, which is an effective hierarchical approach to how you achieve objectives. When we do this, we often map out each different element and how they relate and use this as a progress indicator.

In this image, we can clearly see that the two circles in green are ‘done’. The middle circle with the smaller circles that are attached are coloured in, to show that some details in the middle are ‘done’ but the overall objective isn't complete yet. Overall, this picture provides a clear way to understand progress.

When you are dealing with complex programmes where areas are interconnected, mapping it out in a simple picture and having a straightforward key to show progress, allows people to ‘get real’ about where they are and what needs to happen. This is a great way of creating a sense of urgency and action and of dealing with problems early on.

At WorkVisible we like to say, “we don't like to just make work visible - we like to make work unavoidably visible so there's no getting away from it!”. This way, we can't hide from the truth!

15. Remix

Remix is a powerful technique where you take your current picture and literally cut it up and rebuild it in a different way, going through multiple iterations of how things might look.

16. Story over time

Telling a story over time can be done in multiple ways. For example, in agile, you can create a picture of what's happened at the end of each sprint. Or for your team, this could be at the end of each quarter.

In the picture you can see you follow a sign then you make a decision to go in one direction. The next month you're able to make some progress, then you go screeching around a corner and come to a dead end, where there's a river in the way. The next time, you might make a bridge. Overall, this gives you a visual memory of a project and a visual story of changes in your organisation over time that people can connect with very quickly.

When we reflect on what has happened, often it is hard to remember the milestones clearly. Instead, you may have a pile of paperwork or reports that don't capture the full experience and successes are hidden and go unrecognised. As well as this, important information might not be visible or as front of mind as it needs to be.

The story over time visual flips this so that you can create urgency around areas that are important for the future. It helps you to make better decisions and take everything into account that is important.

You can either create individual drawings or have an overall metaphor for what you expect to happen. With the latter, you might sketch out a timeline in a light colour like grey, or pencil. This could be done digitally online, or in person. It helps to imagine the drawing as a timeline where you add what is happening along the way. A bomb may drop on us one day, then the next month we may win a trophy!

As you create this visual story over time it might deviate from the map. Perhaps we predicted and mapped that we would climb up a mountain at a certain point, when in reality, we end up climbing the mountain earlier than we expected.

17. Digital to handmade

Turning digital drawings into hand drawings can have many benefits. Often when things are created ‘perfectly’, they are seen as being firm and permanent. When you want to explore different ideas, having a ‘set’ view as a basis for your exploration can be an inhibitor to new ideas and valuable alternatives.

Transforming a PowerPoint, venn diagram or infographic into a rough and ready hand drawing makes people feel comfortable with tearing it apart. It opens the door for people to engage with the challenge and provide input in a way that they won’t with a formal, published artefact.

18. Rich picture

We can create rich pictures for a variety of objectives. It is a real workhorse and a way of enabling mass alignment and reuse.

It can answer questions such as, “how does this work? What does our organisation look like? How will this happen? What's the system that we're in and the ways that parts connect in that system?”.
All of these questions have a series of nodes and connections between them, in common. Depending on the circumstance, we can choose to represent them in different ways.

This creates an accelerator for conversation, communication and taking action and alignment. You can also reflect aspects back if parts change.

19. Storyboard

Storyboarding is another everyday workhorse that was popularised in film-making, as a way to visualise complex scenarios.

A storyboard has many different parts to it and it helps producers get a sense of what needs to be done during the film production process. This is a valuable tool in many different areas of knowledge work.

We use it all the time at WorkVisible as a simple way of sketching out a plan, rather than making a list. The storyboards show how we think things will go over time, with a mini ‘scene’. We do this with whole companies too. By imagining the organisation as a movie, we can draw out the ‘key scenes’ and show how they fit together.

We create a ‘movie storyboard’ for the company and use it to identify key areas to help them change for the better.

Storyboarding can also help you to think and to present when you’re running a workshop. They become facilitator guides, showing what we expect to happen. We’ve even seen them used in business cases.

Again, the drawing doesn't need to be sophisticated, it simply needs to indicate what you want to say. Often when you share a storyboard, having quirky, ‘bad’ drawings can increase the engagement.

20. Draw the words

In visual thinking, there is often a key point under each picture and drawing words is simple to do.

For example, after a brainstorming session using posters, where ideas are explored, we ask people to take what they've written and draw it and then have an exploration around it.

Drawings from a memory can also be powerful. The University of Waterloo in Canada researched study techniques and how to store knowledge in our long-term memory. The paper was named the surprising impact of drawing on memory as they found drawing was the best way to store information in our long-term memory.

When I’ve taken simple visual notes at a meeting, or afterwards - weeks, months, or in some cases, years later, I can pick them up and have a conversation around them, just from the visual anchor I've created.

In a group context, this is even more powerful since you're creating a visual anchor for a shared conversation and a shared memory.

21. Draw to do

We've got a saying at WorkVisible, “If you can draw it, you can do it”. This is because the act of drawing makes you think about a challenge in a practical way.

A personal productivity hack and a great way of getting accountability in a team is to draw the main thing you want to get done this week, on a card. Then put it on your desk or somewhere visible for the team and you won’t forget it!

In our experience, remarkably more gets done this way as opposed to having it on a list.

There are many more ways we use visual thinking - if you would like to find out what they are, please get in touch here. We are always happy to chat!