How To Use Visual Communication To Align, Collaborate And Share Stories with Ben Crothers

Organisational change can be a complex beast involving many different perspectives, impacts and moving parts - so an important question for every change leader to ask themselves is:

How are you working with your stakeholders to help them make sense of complexity, collaborate, think better together and problem solve?

It can be tricky!

I reckon improving our visual communication capability is a big opportunity for change leaders and change managers - and in this episode, you’re going to see why.

Visual communication is a movement I’ve become more and more interested in, and that’s why I’m stoked to welcome Ben Crothers to the show today.

Ben is a visual thinker, facilitator, trainer, author of 3 books, and speaker. He helps teams solve problems and generate winning ideas for strategy, products and services, with workshops, training, and lots of sketching. Ben is the Principal Facilitator at Bright Pilots, his visual facilitation consultancy.

Bright Pilots helps build teams' innovation capabilities, for better idea generation, prototyping and business cases. Ben does this through facilitating all kinds of workshops and bringing conversations to life with sketching and visualisation.

In this episode Ben shares:

How employing visual communication can help clarify and align your team;
A great, practical visual communication technique you can easily use to help unlock stakeholder insights;
How to unleash creativity at work, in useful and non-awkward ways; and
The first 2 steps you must take to start building your visual communication skills (the first step Ben recommends is something I really need to work on myself!).

Get ready to discover the world of visual communication and how it can help you better lead and work with stakeholders to deliver organisational change.

This was such a fun chat and Ben shares so much gold. After listening in, I know you’re going to be as excited as I am to try out using visual communication techniques in your next meeting.

Listen in now!

TOPICS DISCUSSED AND WHERE TO FIND THEM:
[00:50]: Organisational change can be a complex beast - there are so many perspectives, impacts and moving parts. Improving our visual communication capability is a big opportunity for change leaders and change managers.
[1:33]: Ben is a visual thinker, facilitator, trainer and author of three books as well as a speaker. He is the Principal Facilitator at Bright Pilots, a visual facilitation consultancy.
[2:22]: In this conversation, we cover how employing visual communication can help clarify and align your team, how visual communication can unlock stakeholder insights and how to start building your visual communication skills.
[3:34]: We kick off our conversation by hearing about Ben’s background as a cartoonist for the Army.
[4:38]: Change Managers and Change Leaders, as facilitators are responsible for bringing people together, creating connections, and helping people to collaborate and conceptualize ideas which is why visual communication can be so helpful.
[6:02]: Ben shares how he defines and frames visual communication and how important it is for reaching a shared alignment and perspective.
[7:12]: Ben shares that roughly half of our brain is wired for visuals rather than verbal, which is why it makes so much sense to use visuals as well as words.
[7:35]: Ben shares what sketch noting is and how and when it can be helpful (also called scribing and graphic noting).
[9:09]: At work, how can visual communication help people come together, become aligned and make decisions? Ben shares how simple drawing can help understand where misalignments and misunderstanding exists and can help unlock what needs to be talked about.
[11:24]: Is visual communication also a way that we can share stories? Ben shares his insights on how drawing can help people compare different perspectives.
[13:47]: Often, we don't equip everyone else in an organisation to be part of the change. Ben is passionate about putting tools into the hands of people so that they can draw their own stories.
[14:25]: The whiteboard is often referred to as the third voice in the room. Ben reflects on how the whiteboard can assist in meetings, and help draw quieter voices out.
[16:42]: To carry out visual communication effectively, do you have to be good at drawing? Ben explains that you don’t need to be an artist to draw effectively.
[17:47]: Visual communication is about mapping a conversation in a 2D space. Visual communication helps empty out our brains so that there is more brain space for listening.
[19:24]: If someone wants to get started in building their capability with visual communication what should they do? Ben shares that you should start with being neat, and gives some practical examples.
[21:25]: Visual communication is such a huge opportunity, an area that can unlock so many things for change leaders when they're engaging with stakeholders.
[21:34]: Ben shares how we can connect with him, including information on his three books.