Storytelling at work?  Sounds elementary.  Using pictures to convey new strategies?  Sounds like pre-school, right?  Certainly not a powerful business tool that can transform a company almost overnight.

In fact, visualization is probably one of the strongest assets that any organization has in its arsenal of tools and is arguably a major competitive differentiator for those companies using it.  Why?

Visual imagery that uses metaphors to tell stories helps in three ways:

  1. Makes the complex uniquely simple
  2. Creates a common, shared meaning for everyone in an organization (there’s literally no room for interpretation – it’s all laid out in front of them)
  3. Lays out in a single, systems view an entire process or operation and shows how it all works towards a common goal, and most importantly, shows everyone each single person’s role and contributions to that system

But what does visualization mean to the bottom and top lines?  Quite a bit, actually!  Your entire organization will have a single view of where the company is going, how it’s going to get there, and how every single person at that organization is making a contribution.  You’ll have greater employee engagement, reduced turnover, higher levels of productivity, better customer experiences, and a stronger balance sheet.

Jim Haudan, CEO at Root, has seen this work hundreds of times from Fortune 500 companies with tens of thousands of employees down to organizations with just a few hundred people.

In this short video, he explains why visualization is a powerful learning tool.


Related

Learning Is a Journey – A Metaphor for Teaching
The Infancy of Visual Consulting

July 5, 2012

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