Unleash Your Creativity Through Visual Thinking!

Having presented at a Tech event in Birmingham (England) in 2019, on a fine sunny morning, a conversation started between one of the attendees and one of the presenters, “I love your slides, they’re so engaging, did you draw those by hand?” The presenter replied “Yes I’ve always had a passion for art and creativity, but never had the opportunity to use those skills at work, so thought I would give it a go.” That was the moment Grant and Paddy met for the first time and discovered a shared passion for Visual Thinking.

There are a few definitions, but one that we like to use comes from the amazing Brandy Agerbeck “Visual Thinking is making a drawing to help yourself or the people you work with make meaning of your life, work, and the world around you.” Within the field of business analysis, we are surrounded by visual models, frameworks and techniques that are designed for this exact purpose. A few that come to mind include, process flows, sequence diagrams, use cases, organisational charts and many more. But many of these representations make it difficult to create empathy and memorable messages. It’s a bit like drinking tea from a white mug everyday - it’s certainly functional and does the job, but wouldn’t it be better if it displayed an element of our personality so that the next time a colleague sees you they’ve remembered you are a Star Wars nerd. We like to call this missing element creativity.

Creativity is particularly important in the current fast paced world of digital disruption, it is essential to the process of innovation and the generation of new ideas. In fact it has been named as the 5th must have skill for the future according to the World Economic Forum. Humans have been using creative skills to communicate with each other for thousands of years - the first known cave paintings date back 65,000 years.

However, we shouldn’t get creativity confused with artistic ability. We are definitely not looking to become the next Leonardo DaVinci. Mike Rohde puts it perfectly, it's about “Ideas not Art!”

The science behind Visual Thinking

Dual-Coding Theory was hypothesised by Allan Paivio of the University of Western Ontario in 1971. Paivio found that visuals and verbal associations are stored in two separate channels of the brain. By learning concepts that have been communicated both verbally and visually, our brains have a much greater chance of recalling that information from two channels as opposed to one. Thus verbal associations combined with visual imagery creates that ‘sweet spot’ that enables us to retain learning more effectively.

Visual Communication

Visual Thinking can also be applied to the way we communicate, present and explain information to one another. Using visual metaphors and hand-drawn imagery (no more stock photos please!) can help to make our message more engaging and accessible to others, creating better empathy and offering a more human touch.

We applied this principle when working with the BA Conference Europe 2021 partners at IRM UK, Assist KD, BCS and IIBA UK to devise a visual poster and animated video to help promote awareness of the conference. When discussing the themes of the conference we remarked upon the breadth of topics and the range of speakers at this year’s conference. Someone mentioned that we were covering everything within the ‘BA Universe’ and the theme for the conference poster was born! We then brainstormed some metaphors and sketched out the rough concepts and layout before fine tuning the finished visual. This was a great example where working digitally (we used Procreate on the iPad Pro for those who are interested) was invaluable as it allowed us to play around with colour, layout and font sizes and remove elements that we we unsure about.

Visual Learning

As well as running a workshop at this year’s conference (entitled ‘Crafty Ice Breakers & Energisers - create engagement using visual games and other fun stuff!) we also sponsored the event and agreed to live sketchnote some of the talks. This is where visual learning comes in, producing graphic recordings that combine text and visuals to tap into that Dual-Coding Theory, thereby activating the whole of our brain and increasing our ability to retain and recall information at a later date.

Now live sketchnoting can be challenging, most people focus on the drawing side of things, but it is equally important to hone your listening skills. You will not be able to capture every point that is made, so you need to actively listen and filter the message to get to the essence of what is being said. The other important thing is preparation - could you pre-draw the title or prepare a key image? What colour scheme will you use? What pens and font styles will you use for titles, sub-heading and other text? Are there any icons that you can practice in advance that may come up in the talk?

Above are some of the talks that we graphically recorded this year - some of these were created in real-time, some needed colour adding later and a couple needed a bigger restructure to accommodate all of the information that we captured. These were all produced digitally, which can be both a help and a hindrance when working live. Working digitally means you can rearrange and resize things so you can focus more on capturing each point without being wed to the choice as to where you have placed that content on the page. The downside being that having that choice means that you can be tempted to move things around and lose track of what is being said, so whilst analogue graphic recording is less forgiving, in some ways it is easier because you don’t get distracted with choices and digital switching pens and layers etc.

How can I find out more about Visual Thinking?

Just over a year ago, we set up a Meetup group named ‘The Visual Jam.’ It was started with the intention of bringing together a local community of Visual Thinkers, centred around Birmingham ‘the city of the Peaky Blinders’! Fast forward 13 months and it has grown beyond our expectations to a community of over 1500 Visual Jammers. Our members span the entire globe, including Japan, Australia, USA, Europe, Africa and beyond. We see that Visual Thinking is being used by many diverse professions, everyone from Business Analysts to Doctors.