5 Reasons Why It’s Time To Bring Visual Thinking Into Your Work
An underutilized skill in business is visual thinking. But there are valuable reasons to bring it into your work.
When I first managed a team of artists, editors, and producers at TruScribe (a whiteboard animation studio) I really enjoyed taking the time to sit down with them at the end of the year and reflect on their work, their goals, and future.
One thing I always looked for and brought awareness to in these reviews was the things they had taken on, created, or accomplished that were outside of their ‘job description’.
I did this for a few reasons.
I wanted to see where they were learning new skills
I wanted to know what was energizing them and what was draining them
I And I wanted to find out what they wanted to pursue next
At that time, we weren’t a large organization with a lot of layers or many options for job mobility. Even so, I wanted to create as much opportunity as possible to explore new skills that aligned with their interests and the organization's needs. I also wanted them to feel seen and know how much I valued those things as well.
Looking back on my career as an art director, consultant, and even as a business owner, I always wanted to bring more value to any team I was a part of.
In reflection, there was one skill that consistently allowed me to bring unique value regardless of the role or job - visual thinking.
Visual thinking is a skill that improves job performance in almost any role because it addresses one of the most crucial breakdowns in an organization, communication. By bringing visuals into everyday conversations (weekly updates, problem-solving, planning, etc), you will help your team jump communication hurdles and work better together.
Here are five ways visual thinking can bring value to your career and to your team.
Improve Listening with Visuals
Listening is important for so many reasons; understanding, building trust, etc. Most people struggle with listening fully to what others are saying. Instead, we often start to formulate our response before someone is even done talking. We then focus on how we can interject our idea and less on hearing what’s being said.
And that’s when we’re actually engaged in the conversation. When someone’s attention is split, their mind drifts to their own problems and concerns.
Either way, the result is that we’re not walking away from our meetings with the full picture.
Visualizing conversations consists of filtering what you hear, which means you identify important information and then decide what to visualize. You’re opening yourself up to what others are saying, and you’re looking for how their ideas start off and wrap up.
One way to get started with visual listening is to try it in your personal note-taking. If you build this into your habits, you will see your own listening skills improve.
Then, try bringing it into a meeting. If you visualize the conversation on a whiteboard for others to see, you improve their ability to shake off distraction and engage with the conversation as well.
Listening is a skill that is useful across all areas of a business, for yourself and your team.
Communicate more clearly
Most of our communication at work is verbal or text. Communicating this way is quick and “easy”, but to the detriment of clarity and retention. We are tragically bad at remembering information that we receive only verbally or by text. The retention rate is a dismal 10% after 72 hours.
Communication challenges can be overcome in planning conversations and in presentations.
As a visual thinker, I use visuals at the earliest stages of a conversation, which helps clarify a conversation right from the beginning. Sketching things out in broad strokes gives me and my collaborators a clear idea of what each of us is thinking. We quickly find the differences.
From there, I use visuals to further refine the idea or plan. This may be with diagrams, maps, and or a common visual language. The visuals become artifacts and waypoints for us to remember where we’ve been and where we’re going together.
But then there is communication during presentations. If you’re communicating information that is complicated and hard to understand or that needs to stick with the recipient long-term, you need to make it visual. Many people try to solve this with densely packed presentation slides. But the way people construct decks (spoiler, the decks are too often poorly designed) has also shown to be detrimental to communication.
Visuals are key to helping us understand each other more clearly. Visual thinking allows us to bring that clarity with us wherever we work.
Increases employee engagement and inclusion
When I read about the decreasing levels of engagement that employees have in their work, it’s often due to something like:
poor alignment to the company’s purpose
poor communication of what’s happening next
poor recognition of an individual’s contribution
This lack of engagement is a huge obstacle for organizations and one that many leaders find difficult to remedy with common tools and mindsets around the relationship between employee and employer.
The leading organization in Human Resources, SHRM, suggests 7 practices for improving engagement, many of which have to do with being seen, heard, and valued.
A huge benefit of visual thinking in meetings and conversations is that people can tangibly experience their ideas and contributions being heard and then seen through the visualization. Experiencing this on a daily and weekly basis can create a more consistent sense of being heard.
Capturing feedback and ideation this way also ensures that leaders will see those contributions, which they can incorporate into their decisions.
Capturing their ideas, incorporating them into decisions, and recognizing those contributions is how engagement increases!
Create clear purpose in more areas of your work
Another cause of low employee engagement is a perceived lack of purpose. It is the sense that we are pushing buttons and flipping switches but can’t see the impact.
Sometimes leaders find it difficult to communicate purpose and vision. Other times the communication of the purpose and vision of a company or project is simply buried. Often, people lose sight of them amidst the day to day work on their plate.
For leaders, visual thinking can be a way to process and refine their own vision or the vision for the organization, making it easier to share with stakeholders. Being a visionary doesn’t mean its always easy to articulate that vision. Drawing it out, viewing it through your eyes, refining it - all of these can happen quickly when we get visual.
For employees, having the purpose represented visually helps them see exactly how their work contributes to the whole. And a visual is more likely to stick with us. Visualizing that connection helps the employee to keep that in mind when they're stuck or feel unaligned or unrecognized.
Visualize your purpose so that it is more clear for your team to follow and more memorable when they seem less connected to it.
Foster creativity And problem solving
Creativity in work is about an individual or team’s ability to generate new ideas. It is about being able to evaluate the details of a problem or opportunity and connect the dots to potential next steps.
Fear can be the biggest inhibitor connecting those dots and generating ideas. Fear of an idea being chastised. Of wasting time and energy on a bad idea or a fear of failure.
So try this instead: rather than shouting out an idea, draw it out. Put the idea on paper and move it around. Keep what works and drop what doesn’t. You know how, when we say something out loud for the first time, it doesn’t sound as good as it did in our heads? With visual thinking, you can create the best version of the idea on your own before you share it.
When brainstorming with others, give everything space on the board. A single idea may not be the winner on its own, but once you add it to the mix it creates another connection point for the discussion.
Visualizing ideas outside our own minds also allows us to detach from some of the emotional weight, bias, and ego that we hold.
Once you have an idea, map it out a few times. Take a few practice rounds on paper. Try out a few things. Once you have evaluated enough options, you’ll be confident to take the next step which is to invest some time and energy into doing it for real. And then use the drawing to reevaluate it once you have some data.
Another barrier to problem-solving is complexity and feeling overwhelmed by the size of the problem or opportunity. The solution can get convoluted quickly when we try to hold it all in our heads.
So stop relying on your own memory and your mind’s eye to be able to wrap your head around an idea. Externalizing the elements of the idea on paper, or a whiteboard. Then focus on one piece at a time until it all starts clicking into place.
Key Takeaways
Visual thinking gives us the ability to make the intangible tangible. It uncovers more connections, spurring creativity. And it reduces the feelings of overwhelm and fear, clearing space for creativity to flow.
But like any new skill, incorporating visual thinking takes time and repetition. It is a habit that takes practice. So consider picking up a pen, pencil, or marker. Jump into visual thinking and see for yourself how it can transform the way you work.
If you are ready to visual thinking to your organization, schedule a free consultation or demo today. Or you can begin your personal journey as a visual thinker through our courses and training.
