Visual thinking is a powerful tool for seeing the future your organization is building and achieving it more quickly. It’s a set of tools and skills that work seamlessly with other philosophies and methodologies (like Agile, Lean, etc) to support a more human-centered way of working.

You’ve likely seen visual thinking in action when you or someone on your team jumps up to the whiteboard to help you explain a concept. You may have also seen it at a conference where someone is drawing images on a large board during a keynote, to capture and reflect what the speaker has presented. Whiteboarding and graphic recording are two examples of visual thinking. But they are only the tip of the...marker. 

Here are 10 ways visual thinking skills can help individuals and teams in your organization work through tough problems and communicate more clearly.

The most common way information is exchanged in any organization is one-to-one or in small groups. The most effective way we learn is through visuals. Teams who can communicate information visually in a variety of settings are best positioned to share what they know.

When an individual is able to jump up on a whiteboard, or grab a napkin, and work out a complex idea on paper, they are communicating at a deeper level than if they simply tried to explain the concept with words. Those watching have a better chance of learning and retaining the information shared.

When everyone leaves the meeting nodding their head, they may feel like they’ve understood the topic or conversation. But we know it doesn’t necessarily mean that all the information was heard or understood in the same way by each person. We have all had the experience of noticing gaps and breakdowns in understanding between team members days or maybe just hours later. 

However, when concepts are shared visually, your team can better cut through the noise. 

Key points are more clear.

The flow of information or relationships between ideas are seen by everyone.

And we can be better assured that everyone at the table is sharing the same picture. 

In short, visually presenting complex ideas increases complete knowledge transfer in your team.

{2} Capture Key information During Meetings, Webinars, and Presentations 

When the ideas and information shared in meetings and presentations stay top of mind after the fact, they are more likely to impact your organization in a positive and lasting way. The mindsets are more likely to stick and new behaviors are more likely to be performed and practiced. 

A visual thinker who is trained to take visual notes can benefit the whole team in similar ways. 

They can visually capture information that is communicated verbally or through text, helping people better learn and understand it. Visuals are used to create models of a topic or concept discussed. Not only that, but visuals can make those concepts more memorable acting as anchors for the new ideas in our minds. 

Others who attend the same meetings or webinars share an understanding with each other on the topics and they can use a shared visual language to reference and discuss. 

{3} Improved Professional Development of Your Team Members

As I mentioned, visual note-taking is majorly beneficial to teams, but it also benefits the individual taking the visual notes. Every member of your team has a different job to do, or a unique perspective to bring, and they need to be constantly learning and growing in their role. Developing a reservoir of knowledge and skills requires reading books and listening to experts.

Regardless of the topic, visuals allow people to more deeply learn, synthesize, and integrate that information into their work. As the skills and capabilities of individual team members grow, so does the capacity of the organization.

Visual note-taking requires a different level of listening to identify the most important information and quickly decide how to visualize it. Those deeper listening skills are great for personal learning and for working as a team.

Visual note-taking in training and development increases the value of an individual to their team.

{4} Capturing outcomes and feedback during a retrospection.

We expect that sometimes things go wrong or results “go south”. The only “failure” is not learning from it. In times like this, we look to the data and to our team to suss out the reason things went wrong. It’s in this retrospective work that visual thinking can help recover better feedback and insights. 

Where data is concerned, visualization tools like Tableau are able to help you see the story of the data. You can change views and quickly identify trends and abstractions. Visual thinking can even be used to visualize data if you don’t have the tools, or to get rough ideas of the story the data is telling when you’re away from a computer. 

It’s in the work with your team that visual thinking provides the engagement and effect we need to help them reflect and feel heard. Using visual thinking in team collaboration amplifies its benefit to your organization. 

But the feedback and reflection shouldn’t be limited to data. If your team is feeling like they just took a loss, then sharing those feelings and experiences is important. When we visualize those feelings, we can help individuals and others who feel the same, also feel heard. As a team or project lead, it is important for them to feel that YOU hear them. Visual thinking makes that exchange more tangible.

Drawing out those feelings also separates them from the individual, and allows them and the team to hand them off to the canvas, and by proxy the group, to hold. Creating some distance from our feelings allows us to have a more objective view of the path forward.  

Visually facilitated retrospectives allow teams to feel heard and seen. 

{5} Capturing sparks and ideas during a brainstorming session

Generating new ideas to solve new or existing problems is foundational in innovative teams. In any exchange of ideas, even a small thought can generate a dozen new ideas. Drawing out these ideas can generate even more of those sparks. To increase ideation even further don’t just visualize the ideas - examine how they connect to each other. Maybe you use a mind map or other framework to show the branches of thought that may be missed or lost in the conversation.

As ideas become more visual they get more tangible. The details become sharper. The edges get more refined. And the puzzle is easier to put together. Drawing out a process, a product, or storyboarding an experience, allows us to start to see where the idea falters or soars, where it can be improved or refined. 

Visual thinking allows teams to see to generate more sparks in ideation.

{6} Processing and sorting through an obstacle

When we run into obstacles of significant size or complexity, we have to take a step back and better understand the problem before we can brainstorm a solution. Stepping back allows us to get a broader view of the situation.

Systems are very difficult things for people to hold fully in their minds. We can hold onto one or two pieces at a time before we add another piece which causes the first to fade. Visual thinking extends our minds by placing these pieces on a canvas (which could be paper, a whiteboard, a digital platform, or more). Instead of complexity fading away, it comes more clearly into focus we bring all the pieces into view. 

Now we are ready to sort through and reorganize the pieces. We can exam each of them more deeply, later return to our 10,000 ft view, and then descend into another aspect of the problem. We can view the patterns, connections, and especially the gaps.

Stepping back and taking the time to truly understand the complexity of a problem saves time in the long run once it’s time to execute a solution.

Visual thinking shows us the whole of complex systems so we can dig into the details.

{7} Processing and clarifying the purpose of the company or a project

How you communicate the purpose or vision behind your organization or a given project can change the entire dynamic around achieving it. 

The first step is knowing your own vision clearly. This often requires wrestling with your own vision, your values, the paths you want to take, and the way you want to get there. Visual thinking can allow you to sift through those ideas, organize, and articulate them.

If you have a clear vision but your team can’t understand it, then it doesn’t matter what your vision is. Your team will fill in the blank and act towards the vision they have in their minds. 

The purpose of a project or organization has to do with transforming an old reality into something new that doesn’t exist. Like complex systems that I mentioned earlier, vision is another thing people are notoriously bad at visualizing in their minds. 

But, being able to visualize that future state or the change you will bring about can be exactly what your team needs to focus, align, and progress to that goal more quickly.

Visual thinking brings clarity to your purpose and focus to your team. 

{8} Laying out the broad strokes of a product, plan, or project

Important outcomes aren’t achieved in a single step. Anything worth creating, building, or executing has some complexity. Not to mention that no two projects, plans, or products are exactly alike. Before you dig into the details, it can be helpful to visually lay out a skeleton of an idea, get stakeholder feedback, and then iterate a couple of times before committing resources to it.

For an app or website, this could be a basic wireframe drawing. When developing a new product, drafting the pieces and parts and how they fit can make the desired outcome more concrete. Developing a plan with many moving parts may benefit from a rough sketch of the general steps and where different resources may be applied. 

In many cases, you can prototype the idea and develop 2-3 versions before solidifying it with more formal tools. It’s the time spent in these tools, which can be time-consuming and hard to change, that we can avoid.

Visual thinking lets you iterate an idea with flexibility until you’re ready to solidify a direction.

{9} Map out a new process or revise an existing one

Processes are the backbone of your work. The steps we take to provide a service, create a product, or complete a task are what move your business forward. And these processes are constantly changing and adapting to the individuals and environments they exist in.

When a process is unpredictable, siloed, or upsets other processes, it is worth reviewing and revising it.  And visual thinking can help. 

Visual thinking can be used to extract that information from the source so it can be documented. Once it is documented, you can know what needs changing. Or you can train others or task others to take on the process. And once a process has been organized and made visual, it’s easier to pull together feedback and innovate the process to achieve more predictable outcomes.

Visual thinking maps processes that can be documented, evaluated, and taught. 

{10} Storyboard a narrative for a presentation or pitch

Stories are the most common way people organize information in their minds. From the founding of a business to the viral marketing campaign, stories are at the center of their success. But constructing and communicating good stories doesn’t come naturally to everyone.

Many visual frameworks exist that can help us construct and tell better stories. We can use those frameworks to map the stories we want to tell and make them better. Or we can hold them in our minds in order to construct better stories on the fly. 

As you know from countless marketing campaigns, your story is even more effective when you can share visuals along with the words. Visual thinking can help you think through the sequence of a story in little scenes. These storyboards can be turned over to designers and creatives to develop highly polished content. 

Alternatively, you can sketch out a 3-panel sequence of events that help you tell the story. Scribbling down a story on a whiteboard, in a notebook, on a napkin, in the middle of a casual meeting will make a huge impact on those you’re sharing it with. 

Visual thinking adds more impact to stories you tell in any setting.

Key Takeaways

Visual thinking is about bringing sometimes messy, simple visuals into everyday conversations so your teams can better capture information, process ideas, and communicate with others. It’s a very human-centered skill that has value for the individual and really shines when used in collaboration with others. From the spark of an idea to research to preparing the launch, visual thinking is a different way of getting there. 

Visual thinking is beneficial anytime, anywhere.

Bring Visual Thinking Into Your Organization

If you are interested in bringing visual thinking into your organization, Relumed offers facilitated conversations that feature visual thinking and we teach leaders and teams to use visual thinking in their work through live (virtual) trainings and online courses. Contact us today to learn more.