Nevada Lane • Becoming a Visual Change Practitioner
Identify the visual tools or strategies that will help support the client’s objective for each step. Your options here are limited only by creativity! There are some visual hints at the bottom of the Planner to spur your thinking if you get stuck: graphic recording and visual templates to support bigger-picture thinking and group memory; collage exercises or group drawing to build engagement and tap into creative energy; gameboards to share information or play out future scenarios; and hand-drawn infographics, storymaps, and videos to communicate about change. Keep the solutions varied and always be mindful of tailoring the visual tool or method to the objective of each process step.
Consider the red thread that connects your visual tools across the process steps. What is the visual metaphor or theme that underlies the visual tools you’ll be using? Whether it’s a journey across choppy waters to a green and thriving land or a bike race up the Alpe d’Huez to a finish line on top of the mountain, the metaphor must resonate with your client’s organization and feel natural in their culture. Beware of imposing a metaphor on the client—what works for you may not work for others. Once you have identified an appropriate visual metaphor, pull it through all of the visual work you do during the change process (like a red thread that ties the work together).
Case study: Making goal setting engaging and transparent
I used the Planner with a 50-person Operations group that needed to transform their annual goal-setting process into one that was more transparent and engaging. The current process elicited groans from most members of the team, and many commented there were a) too many goals and b) too few people who knew what they were. The group had five sub-teams, and none of the sub-teams could articulate the goals of the other sub-teams, despite the fact they were supposed to work together to achieve their goals! In the future state, the group leader wanted:
A list of prioritized group goals that everyone worked together to develop in a grassroots fashion
Sub-teams to articulate how they would work with other sub-teams to achieve the group goals
A transparent and easy way to track and communicate progress against the goals internally and to stakeholders
I used the Planner framework in my discussions with the group leader over a period of a few weeks. We designed an initial change process that evolved as the work progressed. The steps we took, and their corresponding objectives and visual tools, are shown in the table below.
The visual red thread throughout the change effort was the image of a lighthouse, which emerged because the initial meeting location was in a nautical-themed hotel in San Francisco and because it conveyed a message of transparency and progress. The lighthouse image was included on the visual templates, the game board, the dashboard and the storymap. I added other maritime imagery to some of the smaller pieces (the stickers and suggestion cards, for example).
The rewards of making the shift
Being able to develop longer-term working relationships with clients to support their change efforts has been emotionally and intellectually rewarding. My personal relationships with clients who have been open to working together in this way have deepened and I have felt my role shift from being a loose member of the team to being central to the work at hand.
Nevada Lane • Becoming a Visual Change Practitioner
Process Step
Objective
Visual solution
Sub-team meetings
Draft objectives at a grass-roots level
Sub-teams make recommendations to other sub-teams about possible objectives
Large visual templates for team leaders to use in guiding sub-team conversations
Pre-printed suggestion cards for
sub-teams to fill in and share with other sub-teams called “Our $.02 Cards”
All hands meeting
Ensure all team members are aware of progress on all current-year Operations objectives
Share draft objectives using templates from sub-team meetings, gather feedback, and identify goals to which multiple sub-teams will contribute
Custom board game called “Match-a-Goal” where team members
match the objective to the sub-team and identify status
Graphic recording during presentations and group discussion
Custom stickers to identify
shared goals
Communicate internally
Make progress against annual objectives transparent
Large, hand-drawn dashboard
with space for sub-teams to post
“% complete” stickers
Communicate externally
Ensure stakeholders are aware of objectives
Large illustrated storymap showing Operations vision, purpose, annual objectives
Lessons learned session
with extended
management team
Gather lessons learned to improve next year’s process
Facilitated session with graphic
recording
Visual notes documentation
Intellectually, I’ve found it stimulating to be able to combine my visual thinking skills with my process consulting and organization development skills in a meaningful way. I’m showing up with my whole and most authentic self when I can bring both skillsets to the table, and have noticed that the feeling of dissatisfaction from not seeing the impact of my work has dissipated. I relish the fact that graphic recording has become just one tool (albeit a shiny, fancy tool) in my visual thinking toolbox and I am free to explore and design other tools that really meet the longer-term needs of the client and their work.
Equally rewarding has been to see how some clients, once they truly grasp how visual tools and methods can enhance every step of the change process, begin to overflow with their own ideas for visual tools. In the Operations group example I share above, it was the team leader who came up with the idea for the “Match-a-Goal” game that enabled the sub-teams to learn about the existing goals of all of the other sub-teams in a fun way, for example, and then left it to me to design the actual gameboard and rules of play. The same leader also had the idea for “some kind of sticker” that would be used to indicate which goals were shared by multiple teams on the large, hand-drawn dashboard. Through our work together, this leader has become empowered to work in a visual way. Her visual thinking light switch is now “on.”
Final thoughts
For those of you who are curious about organizational change and yearning to work with clients over the longer term to deepen the impact of your work, the Visual Change Planner is a framework for having the conversations with clients that can help you make the shift. For me the shift from working “at the wall” to working “beyond the wall” in deeper relationship with clients has been incredibly satisfying.
NEVADA LANE is a sought-after graphic facilitator and team development consultant based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her consulting practice, Lane Change Consulting, helps business teams move from ideas to action using the power of visual thinking, expert facilitation, and a deep understanding of the psychology of change. Her clients include many healthcare and high-tech luminaries across the U.S. as well as local and national not-for-profits committed to creating positive change in their organizations and the world. Nevada holds a M.S. in Organization Development and work
s frequently with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), the Drexler-Sibbet Team Peformance Indicator and the EQ-i 2.0, the world’s leading assessment of Emotional Intelligence. More about her work and upcoming workshops in Visual Facilitation can be found at www.lanechangeconsulting.com.
References
www.kotterinternational.com/the-8-step-process-for-leading-change
www.change-management.com/tutorial-adkar-overview-mod1.htm
Four Mindsets of a Visual Ecology in the Workplace
Re-visioning language through visual thinking
Misha Mercer
Every time I see Frank, an international software executive I work with, he goes to the whiteboard to draw. Sometimes he writes his summary thoughts into words and places them onto the whiteboard, and at other times he diagrams his ideas. He does this consistently, one-on-one with me and also in groups. On multiple occasions, he has also mapped out his thinking so he could share it with vendors and talent candidates. Sometimes it appears that Frank is sketching ideas to clearly distill complex variables, and working on a whiteboard brings focus. At other times, it seems that he is doing this in order to explain his thought process to his audience. Given the magnitude of moving parts, one might conclude that Frank visually maps on a whiteboard to
Bring clarity to his own thinking,
Share his ideas with others in a visual way,
Enlist others into the complexity once visually mapped,
Tell a story, and
Reference aspects of his diagrams while gaining buy-in.
Visual language is described as words, shapes, and images integrated tightly together.1 In this case, Frank would be demonstrating two-thirds visual language, predominantly using words and shapes to convey his meaning and messages. The point is, however, that Frank is using visual thinking methods in real-time in the workplace. The process is messy, abbreviated, quick, and in-the-moment. It allows for deepening of ideas, and also seeing the comprehensive complexity of situations. Consistently this is how Frank learns, teaches, and engages others, as it is patterned behavior. It is natural to him and immediately focuses the conversation with his audience. His techniques are not sophisticated, don’t require any additional time, and are always about revealing the components within a system that need solutions, ideas, or further discussion. If this is the premise of visual thinking—distilling complexity, mapping thoughts, quickly bringing attention to the heart of an issue, conversational input, and creating solutions—why aren’t all leaders practicing this way? What really is the issue?
As a society and within the workplace, I am not certain we have even tried and failed at instituting visual thinking methods. Rather, it appears that we have never actually made it past debating aspects of visual thinking and literacy, let alone instituting consistent curricula. There seems to be more deliberation of the value, the mechanisms, the applications, and the boundaries of visual thinking by educational scholars and institutions than there is definition of visual thinking and linking the value to the future of our world. As such, the workplace is left to institute creative methods with functional teams to advance innovation, collaboration, and social issues and keep pace with marketplace trends. What would happen if a transformative visual methodology could be an algorithm to explore all ideas, issues, and trends? What if teams put concepts and issues into a visual process at certain points along their incubation cycles and problem-solving journey?
Misha Mercer • Four Mindsets of a Visual Ecology in the Workplace
It is not uncommon to hear how quickly individuals say “I do not draw,” “I was never an artist,” “visuals are not for me,” “I don’t think that way,” and “I am not good with creating things.” In the future, these comments could be as outdated as saying today, “I don’t use a computer,” “I don’t have a mobile phone,” or “what is Facebook?” As we approach an even more digital and visual future, it would naturally be important to educate the workforce with advanced processing skills. But these emotional- and social- based comments are often filled with deep resistance and bias. The largest problem is that the focus of this resistance is placed on the wrong aspect. Visual thinking is not espoused as a medium for making pretty pictures that everyone likes, but rather a methodology to help what is hidden to be seen. It can be done in a messy or refined way, but the goal is to unpack complex ideas, sketch out thoughts, make connections, and link disparity. So perhaps the key is to debunk the myth that visual thinking is about drawing art and brand it as an incubation formula where art and science coexist.
Some leaders might argue that they don’t need to process like Frank does. The question now becomes: What is the risk if we don’t start to advance our processing skills beyond the linear, textual, and verbal format?
A shifting marketplace
New marketplace trends in social and digital areas are creating the conditions for an evolving information exchange. With the ever-changing networked world, visual literacy skills of the pre-digital age may no longer be adequate to successfully communicate within a society where the very nature of information is changing.2 The ability to decode and encode visual content now plays a fundamental role in communication exchanges and questions the proficiency that exists with visual literacy. Our visual culture, which influences our lifestyle, values, and beliefs, has created new expectations towards learning within the world.3
Presently, we are constantly bombarded with messages, consume five times the amount of information that we did in 1986,4 and absorb 100,500 words outside of work on an average day.5 Our eyes and brains are the gateway to enormous volumes of data, with 90% of the information being transmitted to the brain visually.6 Moreover, visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text.7 Communicating with images is quicker than with words and this processing speed is why visuals tend to “hit us in the gut.”6 In the context of everyday business, visual-verbal language may offer us a more comprehensive way to navigate the speed and complexity of information and enact new approaches to processing vast amounts of data.
Contemporary culture has become increasingly inundated with visuals. This raises questions about whether organizational leaders are prepared and enabled to demonstrate visual thinking and whether the workplace has kept up with marketplace trends. Consuming, exchanging, and being surrounded by visual data does not equate to being visually literate.8 Repeated interaction of limited functionality does not mean literacy. Even when exposure to visual content is high, technical proficiency may be low.8
A transdisciplinary perspective
Engaging in the idea economy requires a new style of business. Leaders will have to embrace change, harness data, manage risk, enable agility, and empower workplace productivity. This new, transdisciplinary approach may involve looking beyond verbal and textual modes, beyond visual thinking. To get at the root of complex problems, it is necessary to practice comprehensive thinking that links what is disjointed and compartmentalized and encourages a multi-dimensional approach. Additionally, a broader view of thinking helps transcend the silo limitations and disciplinary forms that exist within institutions. The changing landscape will require a breakdown of boundaries and a re-visioning of how leaders get their work accomplished. Language and communication exchange are morphing and transforming from linear to non-linear, from singularity to hybridity, and from simplicity to complexity, suggesting the existence of a new visual ecology.
Misha Mercer • Four Mindsets of a Visual Ecology in the Workplace
Possible starting points for transforming the discourse include the following four mindsets. Leaders will need:
Visual Thinking – Understanding how to engage beyond a singular verbal/textual format at the learning level.
Conscious Analysis – Evaluating the ability to access multiple frames and how to cognitively process information at the thinking level.
/> Discontinuous Change – Examining how to build integrative solutions across complex structures and domains at the system level.
Social Construction – Reflecting on long-standing beliefs and assumptions related to language at the social level.
Each mindset is part of a complex system within the workplace that ultimately drives engagement, innovation, and improved results.
Mindset One: Visual thinking
Competency begins with understanding. Visual thinking represents a unique view of the world from a different perspective. McLuhan’s idiom the medium is the message seems prophetic in the high-tech reality in which we now live.9 It is the notion that the world we shape, in turn, shapes us and creates a circular process of continuous shifts. This constant shift, in reality, helps formulate our beliefs, perspectives, and even our capabilities. The creation of new visual and digital realities poses a world and a way of knowing, through communication realms never conceived before.9 If language constantly changes because people and culture evolve, then why wouldn’t the visual aspects of language follow accordingly? Our development with these multiple realities—and potentially our survival—will require new thinking. Our abilities to understand what we see, interpret what we experience, analyze what we are exposed to, and create differently will depend on the infrastructure support with a visual language. The exposure to difference will call upon contradictory views that theorists have espoused: a rational, cognitive, and analytical approach and the opposing view of a more intuitive, creative, and holistic viewpoint.10 Fundamentally, learning visual thinking may require living in uncomfortable space where the answer is not clear.11 Three areas within mindset one, which explores the range of visual thinking applications, are the following: visual-verbal language, decoding and encoding, and visual communications.
Drawn Together Through Visual Practice Page 21
