When you wake up in the morning and remember a dream that you had while sleeping, or flash back to something you forgot to do yesterday, that’s visual thinking.
When you look at your alarm clock, mentally decide on your wardrobe, imagine how you are going to get to work, and look at your calendar to envision how your day might unfold, that’s visual thinking.
If, before you leave for work, you decide to meditate, or you jump in the shower only to find your mind wandering off to daydream about your upcoming vacation, that’s visual thinking.
If, while listening to a song on Spotify, you visualize the singer or the band or the album cover in your mind, that’s visual thinking.
If you are listening to a ballgame on the radio, and picturing in your “mind’s eye” what’s happening on the field, that’s visual thinking.
If you think of your significant other and picture what they might be doing right now, that’s visual thinking.
If you text someone an emoji, click a thumbs-up or a heart on their social media post, use Google Maps to navigate your route, or put together a piece of Ikea furniture using one of their diagrams, those are all examples of visual thinking.
You get the point. When you are thinking visually, it’s almost as though you’re looking at mental “snapshots” or watching a mental “movie” in your mind’s eye. In fact, the word, “movie” is short for “moving pictures”…which is, basically, what visual thoughts are. They could involve a vision from the past (as in recalling a memory or a dream), from the present (as when you are focused on the moment), or of the future (as when you envision upcoming possibilities).
Think about it, what percentage of your day—even when you are out there in the world with other people—are you spending alone in your head, starring in your own mental “motion picture”? If you’re like most people, the answer is “a lot.” And the powerful thing about visual thinking is that it happens anywhere and everywhere. We all have our favorite places to visually think. In fact, the worst place, when trying to innovate, is probably at your desk. The best place—for many people—tends to be anywhere else: walking the treadmill or walking the dog, sitting in a park or at the water’s edge. Not to get too personal, but—as many people do—I tend to get most of my best ideas while in the shower. In fact, to be honest, that’s where much of this book was written. So, my apologies if some of the pages are still wet.
Translating the concept of visual thinking to the workplace: Before heading to a meeting, you may look at the Outlook invite and picture in your mind: where am I going, how am I getting there, who else is going to be there, and what’s going to happen? You may project in your mind how you are going to feel while in that meeting: Bored? Excited? Fearful? Anxious, curious, or inspired?
When you know you have an upcoming performance review with your boss, don’t you picture what you should wear, what you need to bring, how you should act, what you should and shouldn’t say, and how you think it will go in advance? As a manager, when you communicate to your team, do you paint a picture with words and images—that is, communicate your “vision”—of what the future is expected to look like…so that they will have that same vision in their heads?
As mentioned, when you use visual methods of thinking and communicating, it dramatically enhances your effectiveness in three key areas: Attention, Comprehension, and Retention. When you see a visual image, such as the VisuaLeadership Venn diagram from Chapter 1, or the graphic recording above, it captures and holds your attention and gets you to focus; it increases your understanding, and it enables you to remember…in a way that is more powerful and effective than words alone.
In fact, the importance of developing one’s visual intelligence and visual literacy was considered so important to one of the great visual thinkers of all time, Leonardo da Vinci, that he coined the Latin phrase, sapere vedere, which translates to “knowing how to see”—a skill that he deemed essential to understanding the world around us.
Author Scott Berinato, in his Harvard Business Review article “Visualizations That Really Work” (June 2016), points out that from a management and leadership perspective “visual communication is a must-have skill for all managers, because more and more often, it’s the only way to make sense of the work they do.”
For instance, Visual Project Management is a new and growing field that incorporates visual models (including data visualization) and other visually-oriented techniques into traditional project management tools and methodologies to maximize efficiency and effectiveness. Similarly, more and more organizations are embracing digital technologies that harness a visual component (for example, “dashboards”) that make them more dynamic, engaging, and user-friendly. (More on this later when we discuss the future of work.)
So, why is this? What is it about using visuals and visual techniques—including visual imagery, mental models, metaphors, and stories—that can make business professionals more productive, more efficient, and more effective?
Without getting into all the brain science behind it, I just want to very briefly and simply introduce two fairly complex, though fundamental, concepts to help answer the question, “Why visuals?” These two foundational concepts are: The Picture Superiority Effect and Dual Coding theory.
In brief, the Picture Superiority Effect (PSE) states that when it comes to the understanding and recall of information, the use of images is superior to the use of text alone. From our own personal experience, this principle is fairly obvious, and the science backs it up. Yet how often do we still sit through tedious and torturous PowerPoint presentations composed of slide after slide of text-based bullet points as the presenter drones on and reads off the screen? As I’ll discuss later, visual images, models, metaphors, and stories—especially when used in combination—can dramatically increase our effectiveness in a wide variety of ways.
As for Dual Coding theory (originated by psychology professor Allan Paivio), this concept is in many ways similar to the Picture Superiority Effect. Without getting into the complexities of the brain science behind it, this theory states that when you take factual information and add a visual component to it, the information gets encoded in our brains in two ways rather than just one (hence, “dual” coding): verbally (the words) and visually (the pictures). This dual coding, therefore, takes advantage of both the left (language) and right (visual) sides of our brain (metaphorically speaking), thereby dramatically enhancing learning, and increasing recall, by getting your message across more effectively…and helping to make it stick.
For example: Research has shown that blog posts accompanied by a visual image get read—and recalled—twice as much as those that are composed of text alone. People are more likely to accept a stranger’s LinkedIn request if there is a headshot vs. when there is not. Would you buy a product on Amazon or eBay if there wasn’t a photo included with the description? Would you rather watch an unboxing video…or listen to an unboxing audio?
The visual factor also explains why the use of video (both prerecorded and live) has taken off on all social media platforms, from Instagram and YouTube to Facebook and LinkedIn. Very simply, visuals capture people’s attention, enhance understanding, and increase retention in a way that words, alone, simply cannot and do not. And in this increasingly fast-paced, digital world wherein everyone is battling for limited time and attention spans, the use of visuals in all areas of work and life will, no doubt, continue to rise.
Let’s do an experiment: Take a second and thumb through this book, stopping at any random page. Stare at that page for three to five seconds, and then come right back here. Go ahead…I’ll wait.
OK…welcome back!
When thumbing, did you happen to stop upon a page containing a visual image (that is, a picture or model)…or one with just plain text? My guess is that there’s an 80—100 percent chance that you stopped on a page containing an image. And that your eyes—and your attention—were immediately, intuitively, almost magnetically, drawn to the visual image.
Why was that? Because it’s human nature. We are visual creatures, and it is how our brains are wired. We are instinctively and unconsciously attracted to (and, sometimes, distracted by!) visuals like flies to a light bulb. If you had to describe one of your stumbled-upon visuals to someone, could you? Probably. What about the content of the text on the page? Probably not.
Research has shown that not only are we instinctively drawn to visuals, but that our brains process them thousands of times faster than we can process text. That’s why billboards on a highway are designed differently than an ad in a magazine: it needs to get its message across to people traveling at 60–80 miles per hour. That’s why blog posts containing a visual image get almost twice as many views as those that don’t. And why color images get almost twice as many views as those in black-and-white.
And that’s why we should, primarily, be using images rather than text when designing our PowerPoint presentations. And why both the Picture Superiority Effect and Dual Coding Theory tell us that when there’s a battle between text and visuals, the visual image will win out every time.
You know who recognized these principles long before all this recent scientific research?
Give up?
Well, one of the key proponents was the Confucian philosopher Xunzi, who wrote, in around the third century BC: “Hearing something a hundred times isn’t better than seeing it once.” Which was, basically, his way of saying, “A picture is worth a hundred words.” (If I’m not mistaken, I believe the perceived value of a picture eventually increased from “a hundred words” to “a thousand words” over the past five thousand years due to inflation.)
Similarly, most of us are familiar with the proverb (of which there are many variations, with attributions to everyone from Confucius to Benjamin Franklin): “Tell me and I’ll forget. Show me, and I may remember. Involve me, and I’ll understand.” This saying reinforces the various ways in which we take in information and learn, paralleling the well-known Auditory, Visual, and Kinesthetic sensory learning modalities. Known, collectively, as the “VAK” model, this concept has, more recently, been expanded to add “Reading/Writing,” leading to its current iteration as “VARK” (Visual, Auditory, Reading/Writing, Kinesthetic).
While the first three sensory approaches are fairly self-explanatory, for those who may not know, Kinesthetic has to do with movement, and “learning through doing” (that is, experiential learning). And as Sir Ken Robinson cleverly states in his top-ranked TED Talk, the opposite of kinesthetic is…what? Anesthetic. And what does an anesthetic do? It puts us to sleep. Which further supports the contention that using multisensory approaches is more powerful than using any one of them alone.
All that to say, while the focus of this book is primarily on the use of visuals, I did not want to ignore or in any way disregard the other sensory modalities, and the various ways in which our brains receive, process, store, and communicate information. When used appropriately, especially in combination, we can dramatically increase people’s attention, comprehension, and retention and get them to see what we’re saying. The use of images, models, metaphors, and stories helps to make the abstract concrete, the intangible tangible, the unfamiliar familiar, and the invisible visible.
And, speaking of making the invisible visible….