Benefits of Visual Thinking

• Expands learning, participation and creativity
• Builds a visual record that simplifies and clearly demonstrates relationships between elements
• Strengthens organizational culture and identity
• Promotes alignment and agreement
• Clarifies commitments and accountabilities
• Sustains group focus
• Saves time, money and resources
• Increases quality of decisions
• Improves productivity, diversity in thinking and memory retention
• Lessens misunderstanding

Visual Thinking Techniques

Improving the ability to apply visual thinking techniques translates into higher productivity and performance. It improves clarity, develops analytical depth and promotes creative problem solving. Visual thinking is intuitive and easy to learn and it works for anyone. The more complex the task or idea, the more useful this approach can be.

Metaphors:

Visual metaphors organize and structure information and give insights into the represented information through the key characteristics of the metaphor employed (visual facilitation, knowledge maps, cognitive mapping and infomurals).

Concepts:

Concepts elaborate upon qualitative ideas, plans and analyses (mind maps, force-field diagrams, decision trees, process event chains, PERT charts, GANTT charts, Venn diagrams and cause-effect chains).

Strategies:

Strategies use complementary visual representations to formulate, analyze, communicate and implement processes in organizations (Porter’s five forces, performance charting, strategy maps, magic quadrants, value chains and the BCG matrix).