Visual thinking is a powerful way to enhance your team's creativity and collaboration. It involves using images, symbols, diagrams, and sketches to communicate and generate ideas, rather than relying on words alone. In this article, you will learn how to use visual thinking to promote team creativity in six steps.
The first step is to choose a visual tool that suits your team's purpose and preferences. There are many options available, such as mind maps, storyboards, flowcharts, icons, and sticky notes. You can use a physical or digital tool, depending on your team's location and access. The main criteria are that the tool is easy to use, flexible, and engaging.
Visual thinking can be a powerful tool to foster team creativity by providing a tangible medium for ideas. Encourage doodling, mind mapping, or using whiteboards during brainstorming sessions to visually represent concepts. This stimulates diverse perspectives and sparks innovative thinking. Visual aids can clarify complex ideas, making them more accessible to team members and facilitating collaboration. Additionally, incorporating colors and imagery can evoke emotions and inspire new connections. By leveraging visual thinking techniques, teams can unlock their collective creativity and generate fresh solutions to challenges.
Visual tools and techniques help one to be more creative in his/her ability to solve problem and decision making skills. visual tool creates good clarity for the team to understand what is the expected outcome.
Before choosing and/or using a visual tool, the team/user needs to determine the reason for using the visual tool in the first place. Then, determine the types of data (the what) that will be used for the visual tool, so that you can choose the right visual tool (the how) for the data that needs to be presented. Here, the 5W1H - what, where, when, why, who and how - remains a good framework to think through the concept before using the visual tool.
The second step is to set a clear goal for your team's visual thinking session. What problem are you trying to solve, or what opportunity are you trying to explore? How will you measure your success? Having a clear goal will help you focus your team's attention and energy, and avoid getting sidetracked or overwhelmed by irrelevant details.
It is very important to understand the purpose of the team formation and the team goal, Your goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound and most importantly align with team goal.
Setting boundaries - items/topics you will NOT be discussing in that particular meeting - is also helpful to ensure that the meeting and the visual tool becomes fruitful and clear for its purpose. Things that come up which don't fall into the session's agenda, can be noted down separately so it won't be missed out either.
The third step is to invite participation from your team members. Visual thinking is a collaborative process, and everyone should have a chance to contribute and express their views. You can encourage participation by asking open-ended questions, inviting feedback, and acknowledging different perspectives. You can also use visual cues, such as colors, shapes, and symbols, to highlight connections, contrasts, and patterns among your team's ideas.
It is very important to involve team in thinking process, it brings in belongingness for everyone in team to achieve common goal as they feel they are part of the vision to achieve the goal. I am a visual person so in my opinion visual cues add lot of value to team's ideas and creativity.
The most crucial aspect of collaborative visual thinking is inviting as many perspectives as you can in order to iterate and improve. The cross-examination usually refines the work created, and eventually helps the land on the finished article collectively. So, the two things the team would benefit from is: (1) Refined output (2) Collective buy-in
The fourth step is to experiment and iterate with your team's visual thinking. Don't be afraid to try different approaches, tools, and formats, and see what works best for your team. You can also modify, combine, or discard ideas as you go along, and test them against your goal and criteria. Visual thinking is a dynamic and iterative process, and you can learn from your failures as well as your successes.
Visual thinking builds new ideas and concepts, mind mapping is worth trying in teams to be creative and innovative idea generation.
There are so many different visual tools out there - try them out and have fun! Thinking through and noting down what worked and what didn't work about a specific visual tool is also good to further analyze the effectiveness of the tool and can also further enhance the relevancy of the data being presented.
The fifth step is to synthesize and share your team's visual thinking. After you have generated and tested enough ideas, you need to summarize and communicate your key insights and outcomes. You can use visual tools, such as charts, graphs, and infographics, to present your data and findings in a clear and compelling way. You can also use stories, metaphors, and analogies to convey your message and emotions.
Visual thinking can be messy and only understandable by the people involved in the visual thinking sessions, which is why synthesis and sharing in an understandable format after the visual thinking sessions is also a crucial step in the entire visual thinking process. Without proper synthesizing and/or sharing it in an understandable format, the visual thinking is only understood by the select few. With that, it is important to choose the right tool to present the findings from the visual thinking session in ways that make it not only easily understandable, but also in a way that is effective in the sharing of your insights.
The sixth and final step is to reflect and improve your team's visual thinking. You can ask yourself and your team members some questions, such as: What did you learn from the process? What worked well and what didn't? How can you apply your ideas to your project or situation? How can you improve your visual thinking skills and tools for the future? By reflecting and improving, you can enhance your team's creativity and collaboration in the long run.
Encouraging people to draw their own pictures and maps can be very productive, whether on physical flip charts etc or online whiteboards. Using visuals can help bring complex and intangible ideas to life and the choices people make about how to illustrate an issue can help spark new thinking. However, I find many delegates are nervous about drawing, so it's important to emphasise that it's not an exercise in art ability. As a facilitator, you can lead by example by sharing your own imperfect illustrations rather than giving delegates lots of very polished examples.
Who in your team is visual and who is not? Do they need literal examples or other ways to 'visualize' change. Move past your way of learning to engage others or be ready to fail.