I’d like to invite you to do something new, right now. Take whatever you have to hand: a sheet of paper, the back of an envelope, or even the notes app on your phone, and draw how you feel about your work at this moment. Not a simple smiley face, but something metaphorical, such as a staircase leading upwards, a maze or a slightly rough sea.
Whatever you have chosen, you have just put visual thinking into practice.
In all likelihood, you realised something about yourself in the very moment you made that drawing that would probably have taken you longer—and with less depth—to express in words
Whatever you have chosen, you have just put visual thinking into practice.
In all likelihood, you realised something about yourself in the very moment you made that drawing that would probably have taken you longer—and with less depth—to express in words
The Fog and the Map
Imagine your thoughts as a fog. They are there, you can sense them, you know something is worrying you or exciting you, but as long as they remain inside your head they stay vague, shifting and elusive. You try to grasp one of them and three others slip away.
Drawing a thought means turning that fog into a map of a city, one that you can look at from the outside and point to with your finger. You can even notice whether one road leads to a dead end or not. You have not changed the territory: you have changed your ability to move through it. That is the whole secret of visual thinking, and it is far less mysterious than it seems.
“But I Can’t Draw”
It is the first thing people always say to me. My answer is always the same: good, because you don’t need to.
Visual thinking does not ask you to draw a horse that actually looks like a horse. It asks you to make a relationship, a sequence or a tension visible. To do that, all you need is a visual vocabulary made up of a few simple elements: a square, a circle, an arrow and a stick figure. With these four symbols you can represent almost any workplace dynamic, for example who depends on whom, where the priorities lie or where a process starts to break apart.
Artistic talent has nothing to do with it. In fact, sometimes it even gets in the way: people who draw well tend to worry about how the drawing looks, whereas visual thinking works precisely when you stop focusing on aesthetics and pay attention only to meaning. The most useful sketchnote you will ever see will almost certainly be an ugly one. And that is perfectly fine.
Why Seeing a Thought Changes It
There is a very practical reason why all this works, and it has to do with the limits of our minds.
Working memory, which allows us to hold information in mind, has limited capacity and can keep only a few elements together at any one time. When a problem becomes complex, we fill that capacity almost immediately and begin to lose pieces: we concentrate on one aspect and forget another, go back, become tangled up.
Putting a thought onto an external surface frees up that space. The sheet of paper becomes an additional memory: you no longer need to keep everything in your head because everything is there in front of you. Once an idea is outside your head and in front of your eyes, something even more interesting happens: it stops being you. It becomes an object that you can observe from a little distance, move around and question. It is much easier to evaluate an idea that has been drawn, something you can look at, than an idea that still feels attached to you and intertwined with so many other thoughts.
From the Page to the Table: When a Group Sees Together
All of this is powerful for one person, and it becomes transformative when a group is involved.
In a meeting, everyone brings their own private fog. We believe we are talking about the same thing, when in fact each of us has a slightly different map in our mind, and a large proportion of conflicts begin precisely there: not because of genuine disagreement, but because two mental images do not match and nobody has ever placed them on the table.
When a group’s thoughts become visible on a shared surface and are connected according to their chronology or the hierarchy of their content, the Visual Psychology® Method is at work. People stop defending “my idea against yours” and begin looking together at the reflections, reorganised so they become easier to understand. During this process, the issues move away from individuals and settle in the centre, where everyone can see them and work on them together. A shared language emerges, something rare and precious, and misunderstandings simply have fewer places to hide.
Go Back to That Sheet of Paper
Pick up the drawing you made at the beginning, the one showing how you feel about your work, and look at it again for a moment. Other people might not understand what it means without your explanation, but it told you something true, and it did so quickly. This is visual thinking: not a talent reserved for artists, but a tool for thinking more clearly, on your own and, above all, together with others.
The next time a problem feels too tangled to put into words, try drawing it first: it may turn out to be the quickest way to discover what you were really thinking.