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Multimedia Visualizations For Strategy and Impact

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Multimedia visualizations are powerful ways to convey a lot of information in a small space and with little time. The use of a visual — a map, a drawing, a picture, sketch, or collage — provides layers of information beyond words. When dealing with complex situations, visualizations provide clear communication pathways.

Unlike some of our other posts, this is not pointing us to a specific tool or technique, rather a general approach to thinking about and engaging with content.

Let’s look at the benefits of adding more visuals to your work to help your strategy, evaluation, and program design efforts.

1. Relationships. One visuals can help you with understanding proportions, distance, and other relative characteristics. It is useful to position things next to one another – whether that is choice alternatives, network connections, or even contrasts. Seeing things in relation to one another on a visual canvas provides our brains with new information that is difficult or impossible to gain from more abstract thinking without visuals.

2. Colour and Texture. How something looks and feels can tell us a lot about what it means. By adding colour to something we apply a simple lens that can convey meaning. Colours like green invoke environmental imagery, red is well-known to have many meanings in different cultures, while blue can be relaxing. Texture can do the same thing. To illustrate, consider New Zealand-based Icebreaker who makes wool-based clothing and uses texture-rich images of sheep’s wool to highlight how its products are natural in composition. Use of texture in the imagery gives a sense of integrity, warmth, and a feel to fabrics even when the buyer might only see them online.

3. Variety. As more people work remotely and digitally than ever before, the visual landscape for many of us has changed in most workdays. We lack contrast in our environments and also in our digital screens. By increasing the visual constraint and variety by diverging from text and boxes toward photographs, graphic images, videos, or some other form of visual media we draw attention. When so much feels the same, few things are more valuable than attention.

4. Abstraction and Narrative. Words offer us a restricted set of options due to the need for us to be linear in our the way we speak. With a visual we can better draw abstract themes from an object and use things like metaphor to describe scenarios that allow us to transcend words.

There are many ways to use visuals and software tools like online whiteboards such as Miro and Mural, visual organizing tools like Milanote, and tools such as Jamboard or Trello to showcase information in ways that extend beyond text.

Consider bringing more details into your next project and discover what visuals can do for creating richer, more vibrant ideas and creative opportunities to your work.

Systems Mapping Cautions

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A systems map is a useful means of visualizing connections between ideas, actors, institutions, and activities. Systems maps can be designed using many different conventions and methods, but the basics are the same. The point of mapping systems is to get a lot of information on a single page.

System maps can help generate insight into patterns that influence behaviour and outcomes. In short: they help us see things better.

A system map is also a potential trap. Maps can lead us into false beliefs about the subject of systems and what the real system is. It’s much like the Buddhist phrase about the finger pointing to the moon: we confuse the system map for the system itself.

Luke Craven, a designer and systems consultant, has remarked on the paradoxes found in system mapping. Among these paradoxes are the tendency toward generating a single, over-arching map. This article reminds us of many conventions we recommend in using system maps.

System Map Suggestions

  1. Diversity in Form. Systems Thinking has many different schools of thought and systems mapping often follows conventions generated from these schools. These forms or conventions are the visual languages of the system. For example, System Dynamics emphasizes causal loops and stocks-and-flows. Social Networks use nodes and links to represent a system.
  2. Awareness of Form. Merging forms together can be useful but must be done mindfully. When we deviate from a convention, we violate certain rules (while creating opportunities). A systems mapper needs to be aware of what is lost and gained when using multiple visual forms. Hybrid maps require coherence to be useful.
  3. Volume. Multiple maps using multiple forms can generate insights that can’t be found when using a singular approach. It’s important to create the time and space to generate multiple maps. Too often we find organizations fail to do this.
  4. Validation. Every map reflects the map-maker. Thus, the more map-makers involved the more the map reflects the diversity of the system and different realities. Show your maps – in any form – to others. Feedback is fuel for system diagrams.
  5. Continuation. A system map’s value changes over time. It’s important to recognize that as the context changes, so does the map’s utility. We recommend updating and revisiting a map over the life of the project.

Map-making can be a powerful way to learn, explore, and illuminate relationships and patterns in a system. It is because maps are so powerful that we must be cautious in making them.

Good map-making requires thoughtful consideration to what a map is and how it is to be used. When you have done this, you have a remarkable pathway for shaping change.

If you want to make system maps and see what they can do for your organization, contact us. We will help you chart a path toward insight and impact.

Surfacing Your Organization’s Identity

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Have you ever asked questions about your organization’s identity before?

Who are you?

What do you stand for?

What kind of things motivate you to action and direct your attention?

The answers to all of these questions shape what we do in our work. Organizations that have a clear sense of what they do, why they do it, and who they do it for tend to succeed. The reason? These organizations have greater alignment between purpose and strategy. In short: they have an identity.

Our identity — who we think we are — is a powerful guide for our behaviour. So how do we answer this question in our work?

Bulls Eye

A simple starting point for finding what matters and moves you is to use a Bull’s Eye diagram. A Bull’s Eye Diagram illustrates priorities through three layers of importance. All that is needed is a diagram of the ‘target’, sticky notes, and a space to organize the notes. The example below is done using the Mural tool and a pre-set template for ease of use..

A Bull’s Eye diagram can be used with individuals or groups. We often use this for a project when a client is struggling to identify what is both important and necessary for their work.

We also recommend that you use the Bull’s Eye diagram at the start of an engagement.

Once the items from the sticky notes are placed, it’s easier to see themes in the ‘data.’ This approach allows organizations to see what their members think are most important. It is the aggregate of these ideas that shape the culture of an organization and when you know what they are it’s easier to design with them.

With this knowledge in hand your organization can better design a purposeful strategy and make your identity aspirations a reality in practice.

We help organizations to design their culture for success. If you want help using this or other tools like it, contact us.

Bundles and Stacks

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Two powerful approaches to creating healthy habits are to bundle or stack behaviours together, by design. If we can learn to connect what we do in small ways to other things we can make big changes more easily.

For innovators seeking and making change, these two approaches can help break down a big goal into small, manageable actions.

Bundles

A bundle is a way of tying together two behaviours that don’t normally go together for positive benefit. It takes something you dislike and pairing it with something you like. For example, imagine doing uncomfortable rehab exercises while watching your favourite TV show. Maybe listen to your favourite music while doing your taxes.

There are many activities in our work that are tedious, unpleasant, or undesirable to do. By bundling those with something you do enjoy it can make those unpleasant tasks easier to do.

Consider the barriers to your service that might be unavoidable: how can you bundle those with something positive? How can you make the worst, but necessary, aspects of what you offer, better?

By considering a bundle, we can design for positive outcomes in spite of issues we cannot design around. This is particularly relevant for healthcare (e.g., dental visits, medication taking) or activities requiring paperwork or queuing.

Stacks

A stack is pairing small activities together to produce a larger effect. For example, consider listening to podcasts or e-books while running. This allows you to learn and exercise at the same time.

Another example is drinking a glass of water every time you check your email. This one accomplishes the goal of keeping you hydrated while ensuring you don’t check your email too often (preventing frequent trips to the bathroom).

We can design our ‘stacks’. Practically, this means creating an inventory of jobs to be done and pairing them together when possible. By simply knowing what has to be done we can create stacks that get tasks done together.

Design Considerations

The key to both activities is to break down what has to be done and mapping it out. This can be done using simple paper, sticky notes, a whiteboard, or tools like Miro or Mural. This activity has the added benefit of articulating what has to be done. It is a useful awareness-building exercise to reveal all the tasks and subtasks involved in our work.

Once completed, consider pairing tasks and activities together. What pairs might work? What systems can we put in place to help make things easier?

After pairing, the next step is to prototype and evaluate Try things out. If you wish to drink water with email, consider setting a glass or your favourite mug beside your computer. Create the prompts to remind you to try things out. These are new behaviours so it may take some time to get it right. If, after many attempts, the behaviour hasn’t changed (the bundle didn’t take, the stack didn’t work), try a different one.

The key is to keep trying. Whether this is for individuals or organizations, the key is to keep trying and learning. The more attempts you make, the more you will learn and the more likely you will succeed.

This behavioural strategy is both simple and easy to try and test even if changes are often difficult. If you need help in making these changes and designing for them, contact us – this is what we do.

The Art of Gathering

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Innovation work from identifying problems in need of solutions, generating ideas, creating things, and simply providing the inspiration and mutual support for doing the work often requires gathering.

Whether it is face-to-face, online, or some hybrid option the same general rules apply for what makes a good gathering when it comes to the up-front work.

Priya Parker has made the art of gathering a focus of her life’s mission and work and has pulled together some brilliant resources for those of us who are looking to bring people together.

These opening questions are the starting place by asking some fundamental questions about the purpose of gathering (something too often forgotten about).

Here are Priya’s recommended questions to help guide you in gathering:

  • Who is this for? What is it that this person loves to do? 
  • What are the various gifts or talents or skills of the people invited? 
  • How do you actually want to spend the time? 
  • How will you create a “moment of focus”? 
  • If this is a digital gathering, what are simple ways you can have guests bring something or wear something that connects them to the purpose, the person of honor and each other?  

Among the most valuable assets engaged in any innovation effort is time and attention and by asking these simple questions we can best use and respect both.