More than many roles, the title “Chief of Staff” may indicate certain responsibilities but obscure others regarding the skills that will be most beneficial for you. The position can vary widely depending on the organization, the leader’s working style, and the specific challenges at hand.

The Chief of Staff: A Generalist with a Purpose

What keeps the role of Chief of Staff interesting is its generalist, cross-functional nature. A Chief of Staff can navigate various areas of your organization and facilitate communication and collaboration across them. That’s the known aspect of the role. The chief of staff serves as a force multiplier, helping leaders streamline decision-making, execute strategic priorities, and manage stakeholder relationships.

But what makes a Chief of Staff truly effective is not just their ability to move across functions but how they integrate their generalist skills with their specific background and expertise. The key factor in finding the right-fit Chief of Staff for you is understanding what particular skill sets or industry knowledge someone brings to the role.

Getting Clear on What You Need

To identify the right person, ask yourself:

1. What should look different six months or a year from now? By understanding what needs to change, you can better identify the skills needed to get there.

2. What gaps am I trying to fill? Are you looking for someone with deep operational expertise? A strategic advisor? A communications and stakeholder management pro? The more clarity you have on what you need, the better your search will be.

3. Where do I need leverage? A Chief of Staff can help manage priorities, lead special projects, and improve organizational efficiency. But do you need someone who excels at internal operations, external relations, or both?

4. What kind of experience will complement my leadership? Do you need someone with startup experience? Government or policy knowledge? A background in finance? While a Chief of Staff is a generalist, the right experience makes a significant difference in how quickly they can add value.

The Balance Between Generalist and Specialist

The best Chiefs of Staff bring a unique mix of adaptability and expertise. They can shift between high-level strategy and hands-on execution, bridging organizational gaps and accelerating progress.

For example:

• If you’re leading a high-growth startup, a Chief of Staff with experience in scaling operations and investor relations might be the best fit.

• If you’re running a large, established organization, you may need someone skilled in internal change management and cross-departmental coordination.

• If external communications and partnerships are key priorities, you might seek a Chief of Staff with a background in PR, government relations, or stakeholder engagement.

Final Thoughts

The Chief of Staff role is dynamic, which is why it’s essential to go beyond the title and define what success looks like for your unique needs. Understanding the intersection of generalist skills and specialized experience will help you find the right person who not only complements your leadership but also fills the gaps that will move your organization forward.

The clearer you are on what you need, the easier it will be to find a Chief of Staff who can hit the ground running and help you lead with impact.

-Marita

The Power of the Gentle Nudge

Keeping the wheels turning is not about strict protocols; it’s about tuning into each leader’s workflow and adapting my approach. Over the years, I’ve honed a toolkit of strategies to help drive leaders toward timely decisions and actions:

The Calendar Hold

By blocking out time on a leader’s calendar for essential approvals or focused sessions, I make these holds visible in their existing routines. This small step significantly boosts the chances of engagement and follow-through.

Meeting Work Time

Instead of deferring action items to a later date, I carve out time in our meetings to tackle critical decisions on the spot. This not only eases the mental load of revisiting tasks but also keeps initiatives progressing smoothly.

 The Follow-Up Preview

Clear communication is key! A quick note like, “We need this decision today. If I don’t hear back, I’ll check in tomorrow morning,” establishes clear expectations while keeping things light and effective.

Making It Work for Them, Not Me

The essence of a successful nudge lies not just in the strategy used but in my adaptability. Each leader has their own rhythm, and I focus on syncing with their style instead of imposing my own. Some prefer regular, structured check-ins, while others thrive with a bit more freedom and gentle nudges.

 At the end of the day, flexibility is key. The right nudge at the right moment can make all the difference in keeping projects on course, ensuring clarity, and ultimately supporting leaders in reaching their goals.

-Marita

Many organizations and leaders assume that operational support has to be a long-term, indefinite commitment. But sometimes, what you really need is a short-term boost to get unstuck, implement a strategic initiative, or establish systems that will serve you well into the future.

That’s where fractional Chief of Staff support comes in. A 3, 6, 9, or 12-month engagement can make all the difference in helping your organization move from where you are to where you want to be—faster, smoother, and with less stress.

What Can a Fractional Chief of Staff Do in a Short-Term Engagement?

Set Up Tools and Systems

Efficient collaboration and streamlined workflows are essential for growth. A fractional Chief of Staff can help assess your current operations, implement the right tools, and create systems that enhance productivity and reduce friction.

Launch a New Initiative or Strategy

Whether you are launching a new program, expanding your team, or adjusting strategic priorities, having dedicated operational leadership guarantees that you create the structure to maintain momentum long after the engagement concludes.

Support Hiring and Organizational Growth

If you need full-time operational support but are unsure where to start, a fractional Chief of Staff can help you identify the right roles, streamline hiring processes, and prepare new team members for success.

Why Fractional Support Works

Fractional operational support doesn’t involve adding another layer of complexity. Instead, it creates clarity, builds momentum, and ensures that the systems and leadership are in place to support the next phase of growth. A short-term engagement provides exactly what you need without unnecessary overhead or long-term commitments.

Not sure if fractional operational support is the right fit for you? Let’s chat. A focused, time-bound engagement might be just what you need to unlock new opportunities and move forward with confidence.

At some point, my chapter with them comes to an end. While there’s always a twinge of ambivalence in wrapping up, I remind myself: the goal of my work isn’t permanence—it’s progress.

What Offboarding Looks Like

A successful fractional engagement doesn’t just end—it transitions smoothly to ensure lasting impact. Here’s what offboarding typically involves:

1. Knowledge Transfer: Ensuring that all key processes, systems, and insights are documented and accessible so the team can carry forward the work seamlessly.

2. Leadership Transition: Whether handing off responsibilities to a new hire, an internal leader, or a newly formed operations team, the transition is carefully planned to set them up for success.

3. Final Strategy Alignment: Reviewing progress, outstanding priorities, and the long-term vision to ensure continued momentum.

4. Post-Engagement Support: Depending on the needs of the organization, this could include periodic check-ins, advisory support, or simply staying on as a trusted resource.

Always Cheering You On

My role is to equip these leaders and their teams with the tools, clarity, and momentum to soar. And as they do, I get to transition into their biggest cheerleader, celebrating their wins from the sidelines.

To all my clients—past, present, and future—thank you for trusting me to be part of your journey. Here’s to growth, new chapters, and cheering you on every step of the way! 🪴✨

-Marita

We have explored why it’s important to communicate visually; it improves engagement in conversations, creates a shared understanding, and makes information more memorable. 

Now let’s talk about HOW you can be more visual. 

There are 2 major ways to be more visual in your work - you can find existing images that meet your needs or you can create them yourself.

Where to Find Existing Images for Visual Thinking in Your Work

If you are using images for visual thinking in your work, starting with images that already exist is a great choice. There are many sources that have 

The Noun Project

We like to use simple icons and graphics when we collaborate visually and The Noun Project is a great place to start. You can search through millions of images to find the right icons that meet your needs.

Google Images

If you want to use visuals that already exist you can access billions of images through Google search. These images are owned by their creators, so you can’t use them for commercial purposes, but there are other times and places where it’s fine to borrow. Use in a visual mood board, as a reference, or how many people use animated gifs when sending texts to peers. 

Stock Photography Sites

If you want to avoid the nuance of borrowing images, there are websites like Unsplash or iStockPhoto that provide stock photography and iconography that can be accessed for free or with a subscription. 

App Clip-art

Many apps like Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, or Apple’s Pages and Keynote have some image or icon libraries. Often more limited, they can certainly be useful in a pinch. 

Even though these images are only a few clicks away, searching for the right image can take more time than you might expect and you still may not find that exact right image.

How to Create New Images for Visual Thinking in Your Work

Commission an Illustrator or Designer

When you need something unique or customized, commissioning an illustrator or a designer to create your visuals can ensure you get exactly what you need. Graphic design is a billion-dollar industry and it’s likely your organization has a graphic designer on the team or as a freelance resource. With a clear scope, communication, and iteration, anything you imagine can be created to a high polish.

But it’s not necessarily right for every situation. Because commissioning images requires a higher budget and more lead time, it’s better suited for projects where the information and ideas being represented have been refined and are ready to be shared. When dealing with the chaos and mess of new ideas, polished graphics are a waste of time and energy because everything’s still changing.

For visual thinking, the most important factors are being able to create visuals anytime they’re needed and to be able to visualize anything that you may imagine or that might be discussed. 

Needing customized visuals at a moment's notice can make stock image databases and custom commissions more time-consuming or expensive for most of your visual collaboration work. 

Drawing them yourself

Hear me out on this. Try drawing images and icons yourself.

I teach drawing as the primary method of visualizing ideas in real-time because of how flexible and versatile it can be. And drawing means simple lines, shapes, frameworks, and basic icons - not the Mona Lisa.

Here’s what makes drawing a core skill in VAST visual thinking.

Drawing is flexible.

You don’t need an internet connection or expensive technology. Paper and pens can be found nearly anywhere you might need them. And drawing can also be used to visualize any topic no matter how abstract or specific. 

Drawing is fast.

Creating a specific image, map, and diagram can happen in seconds or minutes. Drawing images, maps, and diagrams that don’t exist yet can happen at the speed of the conversation required to think it through. And it’s that time from saying something to seeing it on a board or page that is what really matters. When you quickly draw something out, you will be able to get everyone on the same page and make more informed decisions.

Drawing is free.

Learning to draw is something anyone can do. You might use a course like we offer to jump-start your journey and learn some basic icons. And you can easily access free inspiration to grow. Will you be as good as Leonardo DaVinci? Unlikely, it’s not important for visual thinking. It takes much less refinement to draw what’s required in most brainstorming, strategy, or planning sessions. But once you learn to draw something, the skill is yours and you can use it anytime you want.

Drawing is freeing.

Once you learn to add new images, shapes, and icons to your visual lexicon, there’s nothing you can’t visualize. You can visualize problems, solutions, realities that don’t even exist yet.

Drawing is forever.

Every stroke, shape, icon, or framework you learn to draw is yours in the end. They become part of your visual library or lexicon, to use without a second thought. And this human skill becomes even more valuable the more you practice and add to it.

Drawing is fun.

Moving a pen or pencil around, making marks, messing up, moving on, and improving. Doodling and sketching with more and more confidence. While some people fear being judged, most people respond to drawing as if it’s an unexpected gift.

Drawing is familiar.

Drawing may be the oldest form of communication, predating written languages. As kids, we pick it up naturally, and somewhere between 3rd and 5th grade, your natural drawing skill was focused on writing letters and words. As you’ll hear me say many times, writing is drawing. And once you start drawing, it might just feel like riding a bike to you.

Anyone Can Become More Visual in Their Work

If you still doubt that you can learn to draw or have emotional and mental blocks, I want you to know that you’re not alone. Many non-artistic professionals that have been through our course have felt it too.

For example, Susan, an accomplished Ph.D., psychologist, and author came into VAST convinced she was incapable of drawing. After finishing the course and understanding how to make the most of her skill level, she recognizes new benefits and has more fun in her work. And she is excited to practice more and improve her skills.

Another student, Joe, a successful entrepreneur, also believed that he couldn’t draw. In fact, he thought that he shouldn’t draw and that it wasn’t right for his work. After working in VAST, he not only discovered that he could draw, but that there were many reasons he should be drawing more in his work. Now he is finding new ways to bring visuals into his conversations with colleagues and clients.

Want to learn a few quick icons? Check out these videos and see what you’re capable of.

Now you are ready to choose how you want to improve in these skills and commit the time and energy that’s right for you. 

Enjoy your visual thinking journey!

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.

1. I wanted to see where they were learning new skills

2. I wanted to know what was energizing them and what was draining them

3. 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.

Despite these being largely creative companies, I wasn’t using visuals in the ways you might be thinking. I used visual thinking for innovation, strategy, planning, and more…it just so happens that our client-facing products and services were also visual. 

I’ve encountered countless business professionals who use visual thinking to elevate the work they do every day. They range from individual contributors to CEOs. They work in marketing startups, fast-growth tech companies, and market-leading enterprises. 

Not only do these professionals work in different industries, but they also use visual thinking in different ways. Some used it to communicate strategy to their team. Others visualized websites structures before spending time coding.

The reason I was finding people with these skills in such a variety of places is that it is often an incidental skill. None of them intentionally learned to use visual thinking, nor were they artists, it just developed out of necessity. They had each stumbled into using it in their work. 

They didn’t even call it visual thinking! But then again, neither did I until relatively recently.

It wasn’t until 2020 when I first heard the term, that I realized that all these different people were using the same skill in different ways and I want to show more people how to use it in their work.

I want to give incidental visual thinkers ways to develop these skills with intention. I also want to give professionals (even those with zero visual background) a framework to understand visual thinking and a clear path to becoming visual thinkers.

This is where the VAST Visual Thinking framework comes in. 

VAST Visual Thinking Framework

Frameworks help us arrange, filter, and see the relationships between things more quickly - and it’s no coincidence that they are often visual. So of course I needed to come up with a framework. 

There are 4 areas that visual thinkers can explore to gain skills, mindsets, and tools. These areas are:

Visual

Adaptive

Sharing

Tools

Together the 4 areas spell VAST, which is helpful in that the many ways you can be a visual thinker and the many uses for visual thinking are vast. Despite that vastness, there are basic building blocks that almost anyone can adopt, and there are more advanced skills that the most driven can opt into.

This is why I call the 4 areas of focus, the 4 paths of VAST. Each path then has levels based on a progression of these skills, mindsets, tools and time to exercise. 

There is one things I want to make clear:

I don’t expect anyone to master every level on every path.

You may not need to master any level of any path to be a great visual thinker. Some visual thinking only requires 1 level in each path. I’ll expand more on this later. 

Let’s jump into each of the paths and learn a bit more before I convey what I think is most important about this framework and why I created it. 

V is for Visual 

This path is about developing your natural drawing ability to visualize information and ideas. In my work, I focus on drawing over other forms of visual creation because of its speed and versatility. When practiced, drawing is the fastest way to create images anywhere, anytime.

Drawing is also a very natural skill for people compared to using computers and other design software. The reason visual skills are so incidental to people's work is because most people aren’t encouraged to develop their childhood drawing skills in the same way we push writing and math. We’re largely out of practice, which is why it can be daunting. 

Many people get caught up in the idea of artistry. The Visual path reflects that at a basic level, simple messy lines and shapes are good enough. But if you want to develop high-level visual skills and artistry, this path can help you get there. 

If you’re daunted by the visual part of visual thinking, don’t be. It’s only one part of what you need to be effective.

A is for Adaptive

The second path is Adaptive. It focuses on how visual thinkers approach different needs in a business. Being able to draw doesn’t help you if you don’t know what you need to draw for a given situation or conversation. Business is dynamic and often requires us to switch quickly from a 10,000ft view to action and tasks. 

When you have experience in your field, you know the language, what information is important, and how to apply it. When applying visual thinking to your work you’re largely looking for tools and frameworks that apply. But it can be important to know why you’re using those tools and frameworks and how you might apply them to other areas of your work and life. 

S is for Sharing

Visual thinking can bring a lot of value to you in your personal or solo work; speeding up learning, externalizing thoughts and ideas, prototyping plans, etc. But the benefits multiply when you use visual thinking in collaboration, whether that’s brainstorming with a colleague, gathering feedback from your team, or using it to present on stage.  

If working with others comes naturally to you, then there are ways visual thinking can make that even more rewarding. If you find collaborating, communicating, or working with others difficult, visual thinking might be a way for you to do it in a way that works for you.

T is for Tools

The fourth path is about learning the Tools of the trade. I love being able to use visual thinking anytime, anywhere, with just paper and a pen. But using the right tools for the environment is always preferred. You can’t take a whiteboard to a lunch meeting at a restaurant and paper might not be suitable for a virtual meeting. 

During the 2020-2021 pandemic lockdown, many people learned to adapt a lot of things to the virtual space. But many people I’ve spoken to tell me they have lost the ability to use a whiteboard with others. Fortunately, there are many new ways to collaborate virtually. These will be crucial for the future of business, so it’s important that we adopt them as soon as possible. 

The 5 Tool paths aren’t necessarily a progression. But they will help you find the tools and information to fit the tools to your work.

Mastering the Paths

There isn’t one way to ‘master’ visual thinking. I want you to use this framework to find the right path or paths for you. You don’t need to learn all or even most of it to be a visual thinker. You can choose how to integrate visual thinking into your work.

The 5th level of each board is often where people have put in the practice and gained the most confidence to push their style, get on stage, and lead with visual thinking. But those aren’t the majority of visual thinkers in business settings. 

Most people are using visual thinking to scratch out ideas, iterate a product prototype, tell stories, and so on.

Let me give you a better idea of what I mean.

The VAST framework is meant to help you understand and choose how you want to apply visual thinking in your work and build the skills, tools, and practices to specifically achieve it.

Ready to take the next step in your visual thinking journey? Register today for my latest course, Unlocking Visual Thinking in Your Work.

We’ve all sat next to someone in a meeting who doodles in the margins of their notepad. If that isn’t your habit, you might be concerned that it’s distracting from the conversation around the table. And for the person presenting or facilitating, the lack of eye contact might be unexpected and off-putting.

I know these concerns because I’ve always been one of those people who doodled in the margins. But I didn’t always draw to the full benefit of my team and myself. However, over the last 20 years, I’ve transformed my doodling habit into visual thinking, and in the process, I’ve learned just how valuable having someone with drawing skills can be for my clients, my team, and myself.

So here are five benefits of drawing during meetings.

There isn’t one single reason for this. It may have been:

• How the material was presented.

• Whether the participant was engaged.

• Fear of asking questions for clarification.

• The complexity of the topic.

• Digital distraction during remote meetings.

But imagine if the conversation was captured with live drawing. This tool, visual thinking, allows us to use images to more clearly communicate an idea. It also gives others concrete elements to reference, ask questions about, and remember later.

Often it can feel like an extra step and an expenditure of time to get visual with a conversation. But you can save energy, time, and resources by making sure your team truly shares the picture of the goals and the path to get there. 

For those observing, the drawing is semi-performative, which is fun to watch (don’t discount fun in engaging people!), and seeing the conversation through visuals increases attention and participation. 

The images, icons, and diagrams help us better understand and remember. They create more connections for the brain to hold onto. That means that after the meeting is over, team members are more likely to remember the information and apply it when they need it.

In these drawings, a shared visual language begins to emerge that can be used to communicate more quickly and clearly within a team. A shared language is often a component of a strong culture. 

Beyond the visuals themselves, visual thinking allows you to more easily make the intangible tangible. 

When you give your team a clearer, more tangible idea of your purpose and the transformation you want to create, and how their work contributes to it, your employees will be much more engaged.

{3} Feel Heard

When someone’s words, ideas, and feelings are drawn out, there is a handing off of those elements from the individual to the canvas that makes them more real. They hold space. The individual is seen.  There’s a record of their contribution. And there is recognition of their value in the team. 

As leaders, one of the simplest and most impactful things we can do to show that we value our team is to show them that you hear them. They give more of themselves, their passion, and inspiration when that effort is seen and appreciated.

The compounding benefit of that equation is that you receive the insight, perspective, and experiences of your team. This gives you the ability to see the whole picture more clearly. A clearer picture leads to better decisions.

When done consistently, this benefit compounds even further. Feeling valued allows people to open up more, become even better contributors. Visual thinking provides the means to make their value visible.

{4} Spark Creativity

Ideas start as wisps in our mind - hard to grab onto and name. For them to be of value to our business we need to conjure them into being, give them form and shape. Drawing and sketching is often the first step for many inventors and innovators. The sooner you can start giving an idea shape, the better!

Giving an idea space on a canvas or board gives it more space in the minds of others. Suddenly, more of their cognitive resources are focused on the work - and I mean that in a couple of ways.

First, our brains are “visual first”. If there’s a visual component to the problem and we are presented with visuals, we go there first. We find information more quickly with our eyes than we do with our ears. Not just because we are sight dominant, but visuals can convey more information than text or audio. 

Secondly, when you externalize thoughts, like drawing them out on paper or a board, you free up your mind to think about the next, hopefully more important thing. By offloading the work, we are able to lay out all the pieces of the puzzle and get a 10,000 ft view. 

Lastly, the drawings become stepping stones to more and greater ideas. We think about things differently through our eyes than we do in our minds' eyes. We even start to see where the gaps are allowing us to explore around more corners. 

{5} Collaborate Better

Visual thinking in collaboration brings the previous four benefits together. It is a microcosm of your company as a whole.

That shared understanding is one of the first things a team seeks at the start of their work together. A picture of what they want to achieve together. Digging down into that purpose or why can be difficult, and it can also be hard to keep front and center. Visual thinking can help collaborators sort through that purpose and visualize it so it can remain in focus throughout the project.

Visual thinking is an engaging way to share and capture information and ideas. In collaborative work, that exchange can be dynamic and high-energy, but it also has to be handled respectfully so that each contributor feels heard and valued. 

There’s more than one way to solve a problem and the unique talents and experiences of the group, as well as external constraints, will determine what path the group takes. The ability of a team to generate creative ideas and sparks can determine their success.

Key Takeaways

These are only some of the ways visual thinking practices and tools can bring value to your team and to your business. While verbal and text communication can feel like they allow us to communicate at lighting speed, it’s often inefficient and flawed. Words don’t provide everything that people need to capture, process, and communicate information as quickly and fully as they need to perform at their best in their work.

Visual thinking is a people-focused skill that can be incorporated at all levels of your business.

If you are interested in learning more about how your business can cultivate all these benefits from visual thinking or want to experience it for yourself, contact us today. 

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.

Are you able to articulate the reason behind your OKRs or KPIs? 

If yes, great. Then you may proceed with your planning process.

If no, then you have some work to do first.

Whether you use a general data dashboard, OKR’s, KPI’s, SMART goals, or something else, the Constellation System of visual thinking provides a framework for you to identify goals and outcomes that will set your business on a clear path forward. 

Objectives and goals must move you toward your organization’s vision or why. If they don’t, you are wasting your time by tracking the wrong thing. 

In our work, we find that adding a visual thinking element to the goal setting and planning process can be an effective way to ensure that anything you track and make progress on is done with purpose.

But first, let’s define a few terms. 

OKRs, KPIs, and SMART Goals Defined

An OKR, or Objective and Key Result is a strategic framework for deciding where you are going and how you are going to get there. An objective is a clearly defined goal, and key results are measurable ways to move towards that goal.

Related to Key Results are KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, which is similar to the Key Result from OKRs. KPIs measure the performance of certain metrics. They use SMART criteria or the idea that goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based.  

No matter how your organization sets goals and identifies metrics, you first need to take the time to evaluate why you want to measure something. You need to understand how that fits into how you want to move your organization forward.

Use Visual Thinking to Clarify Your Organization's Purpose, It’s North Star

Before you set goals or objectives for the year, the quarter, or even the month, you need to know where your organization is going. What is its purpose, mission, or why? We call that your North Star, and it is what everything in your business is moving toward. 

For example, the why for our team at Relumed is for leaders to reignite the irrational drive in others. Everything that we offer moves us towards that North Star.

The Constellation System offers a decision-making framework, using visual thinking and mind mapping, for you to explore and connect any goals you have with the actions you will take. It consists of three main sections for mapping - WE HAVE, WE DO, and SO THAT.

Everything an organization is working towards falls under the idea of a SO THAT. The North Star is the ultimate SO THAT, but you can a SO THAT for next week, next month, next quarter, or next year. 

Take a minute to reflect on your organization’s North Star. Is it easy for you to define? Is it meaningful to you? Is your team able to explain it?

Then break down the SO THATs that you are focusing on, you may look at SO THAT’s for the next month, quarter, or year.

In your visual map, all of the goals and outcomes that you set are versions of a SO THAT. It makes the Constellation System extremely flexible - you can use the same mapping framework for your plan for next month as you use it for the big picture of how you want your business to grow towards an exit. This is on purpose. Visual thinking and mapping is a new concept for many of us. By having an accessible framework, you have very little to learn in order to start using it successfully.

Every SO THAT should connect and move toward your North Star, or your ultimate SO THAT. Your SO THATs that lead toward your North Star become your objectives. 

Use Visual Mapping to Identify How to Meet your Goals

Now that you have set your SO THATs, or your objectives, you can map out how you plan to accomplish them. For this exercise, the Constellation System offers a decision-making framework for what to track to monitor progress. 

What do you do?

The next section to complete is the WE DO section of the map. When you are mapping out what you do, you should be able to connect every single WE DO to a SO THAT. 

For example, if your SO THAT for next quarter is so that we acquire 10 new customers, that can become your Objective. You know that is the outcome you want to achieve. If your North Star is to bring your product or service to an entire industry, then you can connect that to your quarterly SO THAT - 10 new customers is yet another segment of your target industry!

Then you want to identify what you will do to make that happen. You may have several WE DOs towards that. Maybe you will do video marketing, webinars, and networking to achieve your goal. If you connect video marketing to your SO THAT of acquiring 10 new customers, then that connection point is where you should identify what you will track. Will you track the number of video views? Increase in YouTube subscribers? Clicks on links in video descriptions? Maybe you will set up a Google Analytics goal to track website visits from video marketing.

What resources do you have?

The third main section of the Constellation System is WE HAVE. While we won’t explore this section in-depth in this exercise, it is a map of your resources. What do you have available to you (tangible or intangible) to accomplish your WE DO? Similar to how you connected your WE DO with your SO THAT, you can connect your WE HAVE with each WE DO. This will help you identify gaps (or abundances) in your resources. 

Connect the Dots

Once you have mapped out your WE HAVE ~ WE DO ~ SO THAT Constellation Framework, it’s time to start connecting the dots! Draw lines connecting each WE DO with a SO THAT. Each connection becomes an opportunity for a goal or key indicator.

The key is to make sure you are tracking data that informs your understanding of progress towards your SO THAT. If you track the number of staff hours spent on video marketing, that will only tell you how long it takes to make a piece of content. It won’t help you understand if your video marketing efforts influenced any customers.

Benefits of Visualization in Communication of OKRs or KPIs

Working through a visual map of WE HAVE ~ WE DO ~ SO THAT to identify relevant and effective OKRs or KPIs isn’t just a fun exercise. Using visuals in planning and communication with your team helps you see problems and opportunities in new ways. It helps ensure that your team is on the same page. It provides a tangible reminder of where you are going. It makes your work more impactful. And it sets you up to use data-driven goals effectively.

When you have a culture of visual thinking in your organization, you will look for any excuse to make content more visual, and thereby more visible.

You and your team can work through this exercise on your own - remember to start small and simple. Or you can bring in visual facilitators to design your Constellation System and set you up for success. Either way, infusing your planning process with creative, visual thinking will be energizing for your team and will lead to better use of OKRs, KPIs, or any other tracking process you put in place for your organization.

Clients often bring us in for one on one sessions when they are working on bigger, systems-level questions. But we offer workshops and we are developing courses for you to learn this way of visual thinking to apply to your day-to-day work - making your work more creative and easier to communicate to others on your team.

So let’s think about how 3 business questions could be explored using the Constellation System of Visual Thinking - around short-term goals, maximizing resources, and change management communication. 

Question 1: How are we going to meet our goals for next quarter?

The open-minded curiosity of “how” is so important in this question. Keeping in mind there are several ways to accomplish goals, it is helpful to think about your goals for the next quarter in a few ways.

Think about how the quarterly goal you have set is moving you toward your big picture goals, or your WHY for your department or organization. When your goals are in alignment, you are able to make better use of your resources and better lead your team with integrity and purpose.

The next thing to examine is your resources. We call that the “We Have”. If you want to know HOW you are going to meet your goals (your SO THAT), you then need to evaluate what you have available and what you may need. What staff do you have available? What other resources do you have available?

Then, think about all the possible HOWs, which we call “WE DO” to keep the focus on actions. Say your goal is to bring in 3 new key clients next quarter, which you have already determined is in line with your company’s goals for the year and ultimately aligns well with your purpose for your company. How you bring in those clients could be through investments in marketing, increased sales efforts, strengthening relationships with past clients, or any number of other methods.

But once you start mapping it out, you realize that your organization has the most resources available in marketing and you are best positioned to grow your marketing efforts to meet your goals.

Now, this way of thinking isn’t completely new. But it puts things into a logical order and, by mapping it out visually, you are able to ‘show your work’. You have examined the options, you have mapped out how they would work, and you made a decision that you are able to communicate to your team.

Question 2: Are we utilizing our resources effectively?

Yes! This is a great question to explore! There are so many layers to this question but an important starting point is to decide what you mean by resources. You have your physical resources (equipment, space, etc). You have technology. And you have your people, who bring skills, experiences, expertise, networks, and more.

Often mapping out resources is an area where clients are surprised to see the extent of what they actually have available to them to grow their department or business. This may be in part because it is easy to focus on what we don’t have and what we need to get things done effectively.

Once you create a visual map of your “We Haves” in the Constellation System, you can start to evaluate how you are using them. Create your “We Do” section and start mapping out what it is that you do. This can be done at an individual level, a department level, or an organization level. Of course, there are varying levels of complexity for each, but the more narrow you look, the more detailed you can get. The broader you look, the more you can see the big picture and how things fit together.

Then, draw some connections. What resources are you utilizing for each of the areas in the “We Do” section? Where are the gaps? Where is there an abundance of resources?

Now, imagine. What do you want to do? Why? What is needed to make that happen? Then start connecting the dots.

Finally, question what you see. Is everything that you have mapped out necessary? Is everything helping you meet your goals?

Notice that we have offered a lot of questions. The point of this visual thinking exercise in the Constellation System is to question everything, but with a means to take action. You can definitely analyze the questions of how effectively you are using your resources with the Constellation System. By visualizing it, you will likely even notice connections and opportunities you hadn’t considered before.

Question 3: How can my organization better communicate change?

Communication is easy to talk about and easy to assume everyone means the same thing when they say it. But what is communication and what kinds of communication do people need to be successful on a team?

Have you ever talked about a planned change with someone on your team (or even your manager or director) and left the meeting feeling like you were definitely on the same page...only to hear from someone else on the team a very different version of the conversation? These breakdowns in communication are super common. We often talk without deeply listening and make assumptions without clarification.

In our busy days filled with client expectations, deadlines, and more, it makes sense to try to be efficient with communication about change, or to only communicate the change that we deem relevant to certain team members. But hearing about those differences in communication can be disorienting. It can call into question how you are working with your team, manager, or director. It can make it challenging to know where to focus your attention.

But it doesn’t have to be like that.

Despite busy schedules and that annoying constant of change in your organization, people want to know where the department or organization is going, they want to know why, and they want to know how they fit into the bigger picture. And getting everyone on the same page takes clear and compelling communication (forgive the alliteration!).

The Constellation System provides a visual map with everything pointing toward your “SO THAT”, your where, and why. Communication and change management is a hot topic because it is so often applicable. We experience planned change and unplanned change in our organizations regularly.

Creating a visual like the Constellation System, especially when it is done collaboratively, ensures that everyone is on the same page, and it serves as a North Star as you take action on your “SO THAT”. 

Here is a sample process for using the Constellation System to communicate change:

1. Leaders or decision-makers discuss and develop their own Constellation, mapping out where they are going and why.

2. Bring together the team (depending on the size of the team, this can be done in several sessions or as a large group) to share the Constellation, asking for input and questions from the team.

3. Finalize the Constellation graphic and share it widely. This can be done by creating a finalized infographic and sharing digitally, creating a video that shows the Constellation, or even putting the graphic up in the office (when you are working in person) and asking for written feedback directly on the graphic.

Making the Constellation System part of your change management process provides a variety of ways to communicate about change and brings everyone into the conversation using easy-to-understand visuals.

Key Takeaways

The Constellation System is an engaging, collaborative way to explore business problems, from big picture problems to resource and activity alignment, to change management communication. The system brings visual mapping and deep listening together to provide a powerful tool for your business to move forward.

What kinds of questions would you like to explore with the Constellation System?

Imagine you’re planning a vacation and you’re going to share it with a co-worker. You’re telling them about white sandy beaches, verdant green palm trees, and clear blue ocean coves. Or perhaps 300-year-old architecture, boat rides down a canal, and lamp lights illuminating cobbled streets.

There’s a good chance that your co-worker shares a pretty good idea of your destination. They can easily picture the sort of location you’re jetting off to or the experience you’re going to have. That’s because you’re planning to go someplace that is known or at least is made up of elements that are familiar. Most of us have seen those images before; on tv, in magazines, and online. 

Words alone can work for ideas that are familiar. Even then, images strengthen the signal. 

Things get tricky when asking people to imagine something that they’ve never experienced before. This is why ideas that are cultural, generational, and even personal, are more difficult to share with words alone. 

This is what’s happening when you communicate the vision of your company to investors, leaders, and employees. 

You tell them about becoming the best in your industry, scaling 10x, and providing 360-degree service to your clients. Or perhaps you talk about having innovation at your core, a flat organization, and open career paths.

There’s a good chance that only a handful of your team has ever experienced or witnessed anything like the vision you hold for your company. 

Where is that? What does that look like? How do you get there? 

Innovating means choosing a destination that few organizations have been. 

The people you lead can’t see it. You can’t Google it. Which means you’re much less likely to get there. That’s how important being able to physically see with our eyes is.

Seeing the Spark

From the beginning, when you first decide to take a trip you have to narrow down the options. You start by looking up pictures of these places. First, you Google the destinations for images. Then you visit Wikipedia pages and travel sites or find a book at the library. Eventually, you find yourself on Pinterest. Curated collections of images present the ultimate version of the trip you hope to have. 

There isn’t a Google images search result or Encyclopedia Britannica entry that depicts where your business is going. There’s no travel agency or Wikipedia page. 

And you will not find the vision for your business on Pinterest. 

If you try and picture a successful business, you might see a large building with your name on it. Maybe it’s in a prominent city. That’s how we imagine many Fortune 100 companies.

You might imagine modern stylistic furniture bean bags and ping pong tables from stories you’ve heard about fast-growing Silicon valley start-ups. Often that’s just window dressing, not the whole picture or the substantive part of their success.

Looking to Those That Came Before US

One medium that humans can process in a similar way to visuals is stories. More accurately this method allows our imaginations to fill in the blanks more easily. There are books, articles, and documentaries about businesses and leaders that we look to for a picture of success

We read about purpose-driven organizations scaling the mountains of record revenue growth. These stories share what they accomplished and how they made it. The path they took to somewhere new, somewhere exotic. 

I just started reading “Delivering Happiness” by the late Tony Hsieh. This book contains the path Zappos took to reach $1B in sales in less than 10 years. Tony shares his personal entrepreneurial journey. Towards the end, he provides some frameworks that can be used to reflect and strengthen the vision for your business. Reading books like this inspires many of us and gives us perspective to add to our foundation and tools for our toolbox. 

But even if we want to take our company in a direction as Tony Hsieh did, his book isn’t going to get us there. Here’s why. 

Visuals Stick With Us

You could give everyone in your company the same book and they each take different lessons from it of what the future could be. They still may have no idea what your vision for the company is.

Here’s the kicker. Only 10% of the information your team reads or hears is sticking with them. 

People are visual processors. We evolved with sight as our dominant sense, for good or ill. That same information when delivered visually is better understood and 6x more likely to stick in their mind. Every part from planning to execution to evaluation is made better when our people see something. 

Seeing is Believing

Back to your vacation. Being able to preview the location and the sites influenced your decision to go to a tropical island over a European city or vice versa. Picturing yourself in one setting or another is what builds your excitement for going. It builds your resolve for doing the hard work to get there; the planning, preparation, managing funds, and whatever arrangements we have to make sure our home and work aren’t chaotic when we return. 

For most of us, it would be ridiculous to do any of that without a clear picture of where we’re going. So often this is exactly what we expect of the organizations and people we lead. But there is no Pinterest for your business. No images exist of where your business is going.

The future of your business can be visualized.

Think It, See It

Hollywood is full of hundreds of crews that bring imagination to the big screen. George Lucas had an idea of what the alien cantina could look like on Luke Skywalker’s home planet, but it took creature artists, puppeteers, cinematographers, and actors to translate those words into visuals and bring it to life. These imagination translators put a world that doesn’t exist in front of our eyes, and it expands what we are able to imagine. But you don’t have to look to Hollywood. 

Of all the things I’ve learned to do to build brands that resonate or create memorable customer experiences, cultivating the skill of visual thinking has served me the most. 

I’ve brought people joy with a single sketch and I’ve won business by being able to show definitively that I understand the problem on the back of a napkin. 

When I started a whiteboard video production company back in 2011, we thought we were just chasing a stylistic trend at first. It didn’t take long to realize how powerful the simple drawn image was at conveying huge, complex, difficult ideas. To adapt a phrase, drawings punch way above their weight class. 

We started Relumed trying to imagine a new way of thinking and seeing business. 

Visualizing conversations are the window into the minds of the leaders we serve. Drawn images put those thoughts into physical form that can be explored and shared. Through this combination, we make the intangible, tangible. The invisible becomes visible. The idea that is difficult to share and easily forgotten, is easy to share and catches fire in each of the people you share it with. 

Go Ahead, Create Your Own Pictures

So when you want to convey your vision, use drawing and visual thinking to find clarity for yourself. Find a visual thinker in your midst. Your organization likely has one or two. They’re the ones who doodle at meetings or are asked by their peers to work their magic on the whiteboard. 

It can be crude to start. Visual thinking isn’t about masterpieces, it’s about showing ideas and how they connect. 

You can hire professional visual thinkers, like us, for our experience listening and visualizing the right details. 

You can even train people in your organization to bring visual thinking to your meetings and communication. Those sketches and whiteboard drawings can be given to a designer and made beautiful and branded. 

When it comes time to share your vision with your leadership, employees, potential investors, and partners, you should always communicate visually. 

Infographics, videos, etc are worth the time and cost to create. And you have to make them custom to your company and your vision. Because the vision of your business isn’t on Pinterest. 

If you want to learn more, schedule a conversation with us today. 

NEW FRAMES AND LENSES

A few years back there was a slew of videos titled “My <relation> sees color for the first time!” With a thumbnail of a protagonist surrounded by a rainbow assortment of balloons, who we are told through the caption is colorblind. This was someone’s parent, child, sibling on their special day; a birthday, an anniversary, etc. They would be handed a gift. Confused, and surrounded by family and friends, our main character would open the gift.

In the box were what looked like sunglasses. The crowd impatiently urges the recipient to put on the glasses. Then they start asking them to look at the pre-inflated balloons and asking them to name the colors. In at least one of these videos the balloons were left in their original package — how disappointing! This is where the pay-off came for the gathered family and friends and us as viewers. 

It takes a minute for the person wearing the glasses to see a difference. In real-time we can watch them experiencing color in a brand new way. There is shock, there is disbelief, there is laughter, and there are almost always tears. 

The glasses were a literal way for the recipient to see color in a new way. And at that moment everyone appreciated color-sightedness in a new way. 

A NEW FRAMEWORK FOR BUSINESS PLANNING AND STRATEGY

This is what frameworks do. They let us see some things for the first time and other things in new ways. I absolutely love finding a new framework that allows me to view the familiar and mundane with an explosion of color. Those fresh perspectives give me energy and motivation. It’s like I’m leveling up. They inspire new ideas and directions like finding a hack or shortcuts to my usual methodology. 

Exactly like the friends and family in the stories above, I want to share Relumed’s Constellation framework with you and others because we’ve seen it change the way people view their business. It might look like an ordinary pair of sunglasses, but try this on.

THREE PIECES

Our mantra is, “WE HAVE. WE DO. SO THAT.”

These three simple concepts allow us to break down business at a variety of levels for visualization, alignment, strategy, and planning. This is important for discovery and exploration. But even more important - this Constellation framework makes it simple to communicate with others. Clear communication makes adoption and execution faster. 

Let me expand on this phrase a bit more, and then we’ll talk about how to use it.

WE HAVE...

...tangible and intangible resources like people, skills, relationships, experiences, perspectives, passions, beliefs, and assets. For an individual entrepreneur, you could restate this as “I Have” and focus on your personal resources. For a company, “We Have” encompasses the resources of the whole organization.

WE DO...

...incidental activities that are core to all businesses like leadership, accounting, management, marketing, sales, etc., and intentional activities that are specific to a product vs a service company or an industry. Even beyond that, there are the things that are unique to how you and your team work that make what you do magic.

SO THAT…

...you can make an impact in the world. If not the world, then on the culture, in your community, to a system, a group, or an individual. Whether it’s the purpose for your business existing or the purpose for choosing this quarter’s big project, an outcome is a piece that ties this all together.

SO THAT brings together PURPOSE, VISION, and GOALS

SO THAT starts with the premise that you can make an impact in the world. At the highest level, it helps us discover, clarify, and communicate the intent of our business. Both “what are we going to accomplish?” and “how are we going to change the world?”. Not just “what problem do we want to solve?”, but “how much of the problem do we take responsibility for solving?”. If the only thing our Constellation framework does is further the adoption of purpose as a driver for engaging customers and employees, that might be enough.

We find that “SO THAT” can be applied at many levels of an organization. Teams and individuals can use it to give purpose to this quarter’s initiatives, personal projects, and ongoing metrics. It’s such a simple and unique starting point. But it’s simplicity keeps purpose front of mind across the business.

WE DO is all about ACTIONS, STRATEGY, And TACTICS

When describing your business, it’s common to start with ‘what’ it does. And it can be easy to try to do all the things (or keep doing all the things because that’s what is done). But that also means it can be difficult to really take stock of all of the activities, initiatives, and processes that were created, perpetuated, and never questioned again.

In addition to waste, there are gaps. A heavy workload compounds our blind spots, and it’s difficult to imagine adding something new or changing directions. 

In 2021, we already see that there are businesses of all types that have to pivot to succeed. Pivoting is an inevitable part of a business and businesses die when they fail to do so. A thorough exploration of “WE DO” creates space to be intentional about everything your business is doing, SO THAT you can achieve your vision.

WE HAVE includes PASSION, SKILLS, and FUNDS

Your business doesn’t run without resources. At the highest level, WE HAVE helps businesses highlight their unique strengths — the advantage you have in your market. 

People are a huge part of many businesses; their skills, the culture, how engaged they are with clients. More and more businesses are recognizing that people are driving the value above and beyond the product or service itself. 

Given your goals, and the work ahead, asking if you have the resources to achieve your goals before you commit leads to higher success.

HOW DO WE USE the constellation FRAMEWORK

When we facilitate business conversations, this framework is an invisible guide for filtering the conversations and visualizing them on a (digital) whiteboard or notepad. Rather than asking, “What do WE DO?,” or “What do WE HAVE?,” Relumed facilitators can ask important questions and allow our clients to simply share their thoughts and visualize key information on the fly.

Sometimes putting the Constellation framework front and center can be helpful to guide conversations. For instance, SO THAT is a good framing for imaging the ideal state of the world you want to contribute to, exploring your company’s purpose, vision statements, etc. Simon Sinek is a big influence for businesses and his “Why” fits nicely into SO THAT conversations. This holds true for WE HAVE and WE DO conversations as well.

You can use the statement as an elevator pitch, describing what makes you unique (WE HAVE), what work you do (WE DO), and the outcome or value you produce (SO THAT).

You can use the statement in project planning as well. SO THAT these goals can be met, WE DO these activities over this given time, use the specific resources WE HAVE. 

HOW the framework HELPS YOUr business

We want you to consider the value in exploring your business through WE HAVE, WE DO, SO THAT, and here’s why.

This framework is robust.

These three spaces can be used to explore almost every part of your business, including leadership, strategy, and execution. It’s like having a Swiss Army knife or multi-tool in reach at all times. 

This framework is simple.

Business can be complex because people and problems can be complex. That doesn’t mean that the systems used to explore, evaluate, and execute your business should be. 

This framework is sticky.

It will be easy to remember and learn how to use. Whatever you discover, develop, and plan becomes easier to share and is more likely to find adoption amongst your teams.

This framework is easy to learn and we look forward to sharing more about WE HAVE, WE DO, SO THAT, and our Constellation System in future blog posts, videos, and through conversations on social. 

If you want to learn more, schedule a conversation with us today. 

MAKING VISION VISIBLE

After 2020, businesses are ready to reinvest and innovate

It might be time to innovate and reinvest. You may have a lot of ideas but are uncertain about which path to choose. You are ready to take on new challenges, but exactly which challenge lies ahead? Or maybe the path is very clear to you but your team needs reassurance of that path.

You need focus, direction, alignment, and strategy. You need to decide how to use your resources. You need to choose the path that is most aligned with your mission. Your team can adapt to change but needs clear guidance from you to do so.

We all have a lot of work to do this year!

How visualization can help

Visualized Conversations will help you find a bold path forward. We’ve leveraged creativity and visualization in every business we’ve created and consulted with and we know how powerful they can be in times like this.

Visualization brings clarity for leaders, whose job it is to synthesize the external and internal forces influencing the business and imagine what might be next. Through visualized conversations you will synthesize faster and see farther, constructing a clear vision out of the total possible futures, guided by purpose. 

The resulting visualizations and images let you bring confidence to your team, who want to see where you’re leading them, and what success looks like. 

MAKING GAPS VISIBLE

There are many ways to find support for growing your business if you know where to look. You can join organizations, go to networking events, find a business coach, or engage a consultant for whatever problem is top of mind. Every one of those sources of support is important. We encourage you to invest in yourself in any way you are able because you are truly your best asset in growing your business.

MAKING STRATEGY VISIBLE

Where we come in is in making your strategy visible.

Live Visuals Help Us Connect

The first part of making strategy visible is obvious. We use visuals. We draw during our sessions. And we offer guidance on creating your own visuals through our courses and workshops. But we don’t do this because of the wow factor of visuals (although they do look cool!). We do this because visuals allow us to see things in new ways.

We see this through the ubiquitousness of emojis in texting and social media. There are even apps being used in education that use emojis to collect social-emotional data on students. Why? Because you can quickly connect to an emoji.

Using visuals to explore, understand, and communicate in your business can do the same thing as emojis. They become shorthand for complex ideas, common language, and shared experiences.

All of our Constellation sessions include live visualization. During remote sessions, our visualizers draw the conversation on the screen in real time. The visuals become part of the conversation, ensuring we’re talking about the same thing, and tracking them like milestones making them easy to reference later in the conversation.

We offer guidance on creating your own visuals through our courses and workshops with visual templates and guidance on creating your own visuals.

The Constellation System Puts Order to Possibility

The second way we make your strategy visible is through our innovative Constellation system. 

Our Constellation system is a framework for our strategy sessions. It can be used to plan a new business, a new product or service, to explore the alignment of a department to its goals, and more.

Here is a version of a Constellation system:

How We will Show Up in 2021

In 2021, Eric and I are making a bold commitment to you. We want to make our Constellation system available to every entrepreneur, leader, and changemaker who is ready to take creative action, to see their organization and strategy in new ways, and who wants to align what they are doing with their vision and purpose.

We are building our courses as a low-cost, high-value way to see your business strategy and alignment in a new way.

We will offer a group series for leaders to collaborate with and peers over 6 weeks to create their unique Constellation.

We will work with coaches and consultants to support their work using the Constellation system, mapping their client businesses, and to reference and support their work ahead.

We will work directly with organizations, leaders, and teams through guided Constellation sessions to align their strategy, purpose, and vision.

And we will work with entrepreneurial ecosystem builders to offer our Constellation courses and sessions to their communities.

We can work together to make 2021 a year of rebirth and reinvention. A year of growth with intention. A year of integration.

This year will be a year of transformation for you. And we are here, ready to enthusiastically support you through it. 

To see how visualization can give you and your team clarity and confidence in 2021, sign up for our newsletter or schedule a free consultation today.