One of the biggest challenges all leaders face is getting others to “see” what they’re saying. And one of the most powerful and effective ways of successfully achieving this objective is by leveraging the power of visual thinking and visual communication.
In my corporate leadership programs and in my NYU and Columbia University leadership graduate classes, when I ask participants to shout out the first word that comes to mind when they hear the words “leadership, leading or leader” the most common response — by far — tends to be “vision.”
But what does it mean to have a leadership vision? Or to call someone a “visionary leader” — or a “leadership visionary?”
In a nutshell, it’s about having a picture — an image — in one’s mind’s eye of a future state that is different from and better than the current reality. For example, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the king of visual communication, did not have a lengthy operational plan filled with details and deadlines. He simply had a dream.
Similarly, how can you get your dream or vision out of your head and into the heads of others in your organization so as to turn that mental picture of a better future into a reality?
One incredibly powerful and effective way of doing so is by leveraging the power of visual thinking and visual communication.
What is visual thinking?
What do I mean by “visual thinking?” In short, it’s about thinking in pictures — as opposed to words or numbers.
Similarly, if “visual thinking” is about thinking in pictures, then “visual communication” is about communicating with pictures. Again, if your goal is to get others to “see” what you’re saying, using visual imagery and visual language is one of the most effective ways of getting your message across.
For example, how many times have you had an idea that was crystal clear in your own mind, only to find that you were unable to successfully translate and transmit this idea into the minds of others? Or, as a learning professional, how many times have you faced challenges, barriers, and obstacles when it came to creating understanding and recall in the minds of your learners?
In my book, “VisuaLeadership: Leveraging the Power of Visual Thinking in Leadership and in Life” and in my TEDx talk on “The Power of Visual Thinking,” as well as in my teaching and my leadership consulting, training and executive coaching work, my “focus” is on helping people to better be able to get others to “see” what they’re saying — as well as to more effectively be able to see the world through the “lens” of others with understanding, empathy, and compassion, and in a spirit of diversity, inclusion, and belonging. In so doing, you, as a leader, can not only turn your visions into reality, but help others to do so, too.
Four ways to think and communicate more visually
It’s one thing to talk in theory about taking a more visual thinking-based approach, but what does it actually look like in reality? How can you apply these methodologies in your own day-to-day work?
In short, I tend to break it down into these four methods:
- Visual imagery and/or drawing.
- Mental models and frameworks.
- Metaphor and analogy.
- Visual storytelling and humor (if/when appropriate).
Whether you use visual imagery or visual language — or, most impactfully, both in combination — using these visually-oriented techniques helps to enhance your overall effectiveness in terms of attention, comprehension and retention. Communicating visually helps you to get people to focus (attention), enables them to better understand (comprehension) and enhances their ability to remember (retention).
Science backs this up. For example, the principle known as the “picture superiority effect” has shown that when words or numbers compete with visual images, the pictures always win in terms of the listeners’ or readers’ focus, understanding, and recall. For example, would you buy a product online just from the description if there was no photo of the item? Would you accept a LinkedIn invitation from someone you don’t know if there was no headshot attached to their profile? Are you more likely to read a blog post that has a photo, or one that doesn’t? In all of these cases, incorporating an image — and adding a little “color” to the conversation — dramatically enhances the effectiveness of the messaging.
Similarly, “dual-coding theory” states that when you combine both words or numbers AND pictures, it is far more effective than either on their own.
In today’s world of information overload, never-ending distractions and ever-shortening attention spans — whether in the office, the training room or the classroom, and whether in-person or online – being able to more effectively cut through the clutter is essential for getting your message across.
A real-life example
One of my executive coaching clients, the CFO of a tech start-up, began his 30-minute portion of the company’s Town Hall meeting by saying, “This first part will be a little boring, but it gets more interesting later on — I just have to get through all the numbers. So just bear with me until we get to the good stuff.”
Um, no. Your people are not going to bear with you. They are going to mentally check out in a matter of minutes (if not seconds) as their eyes glaze over, zone out and battle to stay awake, or start looking at their phones just to get a little mental stimulation. And if you’re presenting online, don’t blink or you’ll miss people’s cameras clicking off one by one, as happened in this sad case. By the time this CFO finally got to his graphs, metaphors and stories halfway through his boring presentation, the attention (and interest level) of his audience was a distant memory.
So, why do so many leaders — and many learning and development professionals –– despite knowing better — continue to get up there and bore people with their “death by bullet point” presentations, rather than engaging and inspiring them with their vision for the future? Why do they lecture at people rather than interact with them? And why are they not leveraging the power of visual imagery and visual language, when it is so obviously a more effective way to get one’s message across, to motivate and inspire people and to turn ideas into actions, and actions into results?
Putting the four ways into action
Just as with the above CFO example, my recommendation for the C-suite, including chief learning officers, as well as everyone else, is to seek to incorporate the four visual thinking and visual communication approaches into your work at every opportunity,either in isolation or in combination.
For example:
- Visual imagery and drawing. Instead of the same boring text-based PowerPoint slides, look to incorporate more images to represent your ideas. As humans, we are wired visually. And when we “show” rather than “tell,” we engage people in our message. Go to YouTube to see how Steve Jobs used to do it: big, bold images with very little text, along with visual demonstrations, color, movement, and sound. Rather than delivering a presentation, he created an experience. And if, as the classic saying goes, “He (or She) who wields the pen, wields the power,” then grab a marker. Even if you suffer from “I Can’t Draw” syndrome, if you are skilled enough to play Pictionary with your friends and family, you are skilled enough to stick-figure your way through explaining your ideas. Or you can incorporate numerous other visual methods — from videos to props to live demonstrations in order to “illustrate” your points and bring them to life in a more compelling, exciting and memorable way.
- Mental models and frameworks. Again, rather than just using text or bullet point lists, seek to translate your ideas into a visual model or framework — e.g., a four-box matrix, a pie chart, a pyramid, a diagram, a process map, a mind map, a storyboard, etc. Doing so will serve the dual purpose of thinking through your idea, as well as getting others to envision and understand it. Think about some of the concepts you can recreate from memory simply because you carry the picture around in your mind, such as Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs” pyramid or theEisenhower “Time Management Matrix.”You’ll find that sometimes it helps — when trying to “think outside the box” — to begin by placing your ideas inside a box. And, in doing so, it forces you to think things through, simplify complexity, see possible new solutions and communicate to others.
- Metaphors and analogies. Comparing something intangible, unfamiliar, complex or abstract to something tangible, familiar, simple or concrete is an effective and memorable way to create understanding and make the invisible visible. But it’s important to use metaphors that your audience will understand and relate to, lest you confuse and alienate rather than clarify and connect. For example, I’ve learned the hard way that my baseball analogies and Seinfeld references don’t always translate to, or resonate with, audiences from diverse geographical, generational or cultural backgrounds. So, we need to remember to meet our audiences not where we live, but where they live. And to remember — as L&D professionals — that when we are talking about the difference between teaching someone to fish versus giving them a fish, we may need to explain that this statement has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with fishing, but everything to do with learning.
- Storytelling and humor (if/when appropriate). Telling stories makes us personable, vulnerable, interesting and, yes, human. They allow us to share something of ourselves in an engaging way and enable us to connect with others in a more memorable way. It is valuable to remember that it is not facts and figures, but feelings that motivate and inspire others to think, to change and to act. But, just as with metaphors, the examples you use and the stories you choose to tell should be both relevant and relatable to your topic and to your audience. A CEO who tells a story to their employees about “a funny incident that happened to me while playing golf at the yacht and country club last weekend” (as one recent CEO did) will serve to alienate and turn off your audience, rather than connect to and with them. Similarly, for me personally, when discussing the subject of teams in my leadership course, a great story I told about Simon and Garfunkel failed to resonate with my young graduate students, as they assumed this pairing I was referencing to be the name of a management consulting firm rather than that of a famous musical duo from the 1960s/70s. My reference to the fact that some managers still want their employees to punch a timeclock “as if it were ‘The Flintstones’” prompted one of my students to ask, “Professor Cherches…what is a “flin stone’?” Unfortunately, I’ve found that the longer I’ve been around, the more of my pop culture references have gone the way of the dinosaur.
The ability to see the world through the lens of others — as well as the ability to enable others to understand what’s going on in our mind — is among the greatest challenges that leaders face. As Bernard Baruch said, “The ability to communicate an idea is as important as the idea itself.” So, if you want to be more effective at getting others to see what you’re saying, my suggestion is that you try to make your messaging more visual, and see what happens.
