The Power Of Visual Thinking?

If you look at how our brains are wired, an enormous amount of capacity is dedicated to visual processing: recognition, pattern detection, etc.  While everyone's preferred thinking modes may differ, there's no arguing the appeal of a powerful visual image when you're trying to communicate -- hence the absurd popularity of infographics et. al.

Similarly, there's also a certain appeal to board games that involve journeys.  I spent a lot of time doing that when I was a young sprout, as maybe you did too.  Both notions are applicable here.

As some who spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about more efficient communication of complex ideas, I was immediately struck by this graphic, which came my way via Mark Lawson of EMC's Global Services group.

It's an interesting representation of the "IT transformation journey".  Mark's particular practice involves conducting workshops for transforming IT teams.  He needed some better tools, and here you have it.

While there are those out there who might quibble on the details, there's no argument about its communicative power.

In one simple graphic, it appears to be a very efficient tool to get a large number of stakeholders to conceptualize a shared set of concepts and sequences.  And, when it comes to IT transformation, job #1 appears to be getting everyone on the same page on what lies ahead :)

I wanted to share it (here in full PDF glory) as I've met many customers who are looking to communicate their vision more effectively to progressively wider audiences.  And I think this is defintely worth sharing.

And, of course, if you have any questions, we'd be more than happy to have a chat :)

Comments

[David Rifkind]

Hi Chuck,

How do you see using this tool as a guide for IT organizational transformation. In my particular case I'm pushing for an organization change from consultants to full time hires.

If you have any thoughts I'm listening and definitely would appreciate it.

David

[Facebook Application Development]

Very interesting article, and a stimulating one. Also the comments!
Two ideas here:1) How people think about problems and comunicate: methods, thinking style, common teaching, learning path, preference, socially accepted procedures.
2) intefaces to hep us do things (mentally) and comunicate: from paper (or even talk and rupestre art) to actual technology and the ones to come.

[Keith Armonaitis]

The beauty of visualization is that it doesn't have to only be the end point in the discussion, but can also be a tool to elucidate institutional knowledge into these diagrams. By combining visualization along with several other toolsets (gamification, strategic visioneering, story mapping) you can gather a more complete picture of the enterprise needs and risks than through more traditional methods. This is truly a paradigm shift in how we need to approach our clients before we sell them solutions - plus it allows us to communicate their needs at multiple org levels without having to worry that the message is getting lost in techspeak.

[fga]

It's published by Parallelogram Books, which is me :)
http://www.superiorpaper.net/professional-writing-services/