Free Visual Thinking Workshop
Your customers, your (internal) stakeholders get to deal with large chunks of information that are hard to process on a daily basis.
Information overload is real; sense-making is hard.
Join us now for a free 30-minute workshop that will leave you with the means to communicate your most pressing issues in a visual manner.
Doing so will make your communication easier to process so get to reap the benefits for your organisation.
Written language has its limitations
You know the story: the world is becoming more complicated, more competitive, things move faster. Information overload is real, sense-making is hard.
Your customers have too much information and too little attention. Most businesses and concepts are too textual and abstract.
And it doesn’t matter if something is big or small, if it is personal or business related, if it is tactical or strategic, most of the time we try to solve all of our problems with language. By talking and writing about what we think and what actions we plan to do.
Although language is a great tool in itself, it has its limitations: It’s linear, it can be quite abstract and it can hold a fair bit of ambiguity.
This is where Visual Thinking comes in.
You see, when you visualize your thoughts, you’re forced to explore what the concepts in your mind, the concepts that you talk about actually mean. How all the different pieces of information relate to each other.
It becomes possible to literally see the bigger picture, identify patterns, spot gaps and make the (missing) connections.
When you use visuals you can bring clarity to a wide variety of content: We can think through and communicate systems, processes, experiences, user journeys, stories, strategy or company vision.
And the simplest and most immediate way to visualise something is to simply sketch it – on a white-board, a post-it or the back of a napkin.
That’s why we want to invite you to our free visual thinking workshop, where we take one of your existing communication issues and help you to communicate it better. Communicate it in a visual way.
What Will You Do?
The workshop itself will take around 30-45 minutes of your time. And the best part, it is fully COVID-19 proof as we can do this fully online!
The format of this workshop is as follows:
- First a warm welcome and some introduction on the tool that we’re going to use.
- We then try to identify some of the issues you and your fellow team members might have around a problem that you’re trying to communicate to your “customers”.
- We put “customers in little quotes here as these can be both internal and external customers.
- An introduction into storytelling
- Trying to identify the tone of voice that fits best with your organisation.
- And we end up prototyping an actual version of a visual that you can use after the workshop to explain your problem better.
- After these steps we can have a little chat about how it went and how you can use your prototype directly for your business.
No worries, this workshop is aimed both at absolute beginners (you don’t need any sketching skills) as well as people who had previous exposure to sketching and visual thinking and want to get more practice and learn a structured approach to sketching out complex problems.
So no matter your skill level you will feel right at home.
Frequently Asked Questions
Visual thinking, which some may refer to it as “picture learning,” is a phenomenon through which you learn things by visually processing them. It is a proven technique of arranging ideas graphically.
In other words, visual thinking can be defined as the ability to see words like a series of pictures. Roughly, 60-65% of the general population are visual thinkers and maybe you are one of them. Most of us are. Knowing that you are a visual thinker does not affect the way you learn thereafter; it is just to feed your curiosity.
Plus, you can manage your learning processes better from now on. You can convey information, process them, and remember them more smoothly if you ultimately find yourself a visual thinker.
Visual Thinking is an important process. When people use visual thinking skills, it helps them learn about complex systems. In many cases, visualizations convey more meaning than verbal descriptions alone. Visual diagrams, graphic organizers, and concept maps help people problem-solve, and support group work.
Benefits for an individual
- To grasp complexity better than reading a linear text
- Open your mind to other perspectives
- Stimulate your imagination and creativity
- Help better retain information and learning
- Being more present and focussed
- Have more fun working on serious, tedious, complex topics
Benefits for a group or a team
- Brings a new energy to the room that boosts collaboration and engagement (people realise this is not an ordinary event)
- The large format graphic helps participants to work together more effectively because:
- they can “see” their ideas and what others are saying too
- everyone can contribute, feel heard
- the process and its progress is visible
- The large format graphic creates also a neutral space that encourages the debate about ideas while it reduces interpersonal conflicts
- Helps the participants stay focussed on the discussion (less distracted)
- An individual can isolate himself from the group and think in front of the large format graphic
- Brings more clarity and less ambiguity
- Generates collective intelligence, creative and emotional intelligence
- Improves collective understanding of concepts and sharing of agreements. The group can get on the same page
- Allows to achieve emotional and deeply relevant results
- The meeting report is created on the go.
- It will hold the participants accountable for what they have said and decided
- It will help them to remember and share their work with others
Benefits for managers and the organisation
- Powerful and effective tool
- Gives the image of a modern and positive leadership
- Better decision making and better shared decision making, both achieved much more effectively
- Enables to tap into the collective, creative and emotional intelligences of a group in order to:
- Deal with complex issues
- Collect information to make informed decisions
- Meetings with fewer interpersonal conflicts and more debate about ideas
- Greater buy-in for visions, strategies, actions plans, decisions; better commitment to theseand better appropriation for a sustainable change
- Greater accountability for what is said and decided
- Promotion of a transparent communication
- Recognition to individual contributions and group consensus
- More motivated teams
- Brings fun into otherwise boring jobs, tasks, and meetings
As it is an online workshop, it is best to bring your laptop, tablet or other devices you can connect to the internet too to your place of work. No need to bring anything else except for your curiosity, energy and an open mind. 🙂
Not a lot really, we will send you over a questionnaire beforehand with some questions so you are prepared a little bit, but since we do most of the heavy lifting the rest will be up to us.
As the offices of cartoonbase are perfectly trilingual we can offer these workshops in English, French and Dutch.
Since 2000, we’ve helped XXX companies with their creative content
Meet your instructors
Martin Saive
Creative Director
Louise Beaumond
Project Manager
Elsa Mersayeva
Illustrator