The Future Of Work Will Be Told In Pictures

I cannot predict the future, with one exception: the future is too complicated to imagine with words alone.

The older I get, and the more I learn, the greater my reliance on pictures to help my clients understand and act upon complex challenges.

To illustrate this point, I found the above image from a presentation developed by the Nordstrom Innovation Lab. It tackles what sounds like an impossible visual challenge: to explain three complex abstract concepts—Design Thinking, Lean Startup, and Agile Execution—at once, and to show how they relate to each other.

You could try to do this in words, and if you are extremely intelligent you might come close, but I bet that at the very least you would have to sketch an image simply to wrap your own brain around how these concepts might fit together. (I literally would not know how to do this without doodling on a piece of paper or my iPad.)

As Debarati Mukherjee explained, one key purpose of this diagram is to challenge the idea that you should use design thinking or lean or agile, and instead, suggest you might use design thinking AND lean AND agile.

By the way, the color coding at the bottom of the diagram—orange, yellow and blue—show which portions of the diagram apply to which concepts. For example, “explore the problem with empathy towards the customer” is part of a design thinking process.

To draw a picture, you have to master what you are trying to say

Here’s the thing: when leaders use only words, it’s easy to use a lot of words to communicate almost nothing of value. In many cases, the longer a leader talks, the less likely anyone will know how to act upon his or her words. That’s because, with words alone, it is possible to ramble on and on.

But when you draw a picture, you have to first figure out what message(s) you are trying to share, otherwise, almost anyone can look at your picture and instantly realize it makes no sense.

But when a picture reflects careful thought and analysis, it enlightens and informs. It simplifies without making an explanation too simplistic.

The future is tremendously hard to grasp

The further out into the future you look, the greater the uncertainty. When you try to do this with a group of people, some literally complain that this effort is making their brains hurt.

But a picture gives you a tool to chunk down a problem or predictive exercise. That’s one of the things I like about the example I shared with you above: it shows how in an effort to develop new solutions and offerings, a team must move back and forth between concrete directions and abstract concepts. The ability to do this, and to be facile with both, is absolutely essential when preparing your business to be competitive in the years ahead.

Developing and/or using pictures like this is vitally important if you are going to bring your team back and forth between two such extremes.

Two quick final points:

• This article originally appeared in my Forbes leadership column on Future of Work. 
• Join me at the Emory University, Goizueta Business School's Executive Education program in Atlanta, for Introduction to Strategy Visualization, July 30+31 to learn how to embrace the process of design thinking and visual storytelling in your own efforts.