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:
- Makes the complex uniquely simple
- 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)
- 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
