Non-Business Book: Visual Thinking

What are we missing out on, as a society, as organizations, as teams, when we miss out different perspectives? Innovative solutions, new approaches, and recognition of problems that can only be seen from some angles. This is ostensibly a book about education. But as a trained systems thinker, what is happening in education is below the surface of what is happening in society.

Dr. Grandin presents three fundamentally different ways of thinking:

• verbal thinking (words, paragraphs, sentences)
• visual spatial thinking (algebraic thinking, abstract mathematics, traditional engineering)
• visual object thinking (mechanical, tangible, movie-based).

She is a visual object thinker, which means she was terrible at higher math and excluded from engineering, but her gifts gave her insights that have advanced her field.

“Think of it this way: the object thinkers build the trains, and the spatial visualizers make them run.”

There is such a narrowing of the definition of normal and valuable brains and thinking styles that we are losing entire industries to countries with more welcoming educational systems. This is an important book for my friends in manufacturing in particular, but for all of us because the ways that visual object, visual spatial, and verbal thinkers solve problems and talk about problems are fundamentally different and valuable.

Without a good mixture of these thinking types in our conversations, we will have gaps in our solutions and innovations. We will not be able to create products locally when sustainability demands it. We will not be able to source talent effectively. And people with great minds will not be able to find their way into higher education because they will be kept out by tests that are inappropriate or irrelevant for their thinking style and contributions.

Visual thinkers, on the other hand, see images in their mind’s eye that allow them to make rapid-fire associations. Generally, visual thinkers like maps, art, and mazes, and often don’t need directions at all. Some visual thinkers can easily locate a place they’ve been to only once, their internal GPS having logged the visual landmarks. Visual thinkers tend to be late talkers who struggle with school and traditional teaching methods. Algebra is often their undoing, because the concepts are too abstract, with little or nothing concrete to visualize.

A few weeks ago, my dad and I watched Hitchcock’s “Rear Window.” He was, it turns out, a visual object thinker. He pictured the entire film in advance, scene by scene. He was uninterested in the screenplay or storyboard, or even the actual filming. By the time that happened, he was bored and spent the time playing pranks.

This is a book about diversity in unexpected ways. It is not an easy read, but it will surprise you and give you a lot to think about, no matter what kind of thinker you are.