Are you an internal consultant?
It may not be your official title, but if you find yourself working on projects that guide your organization’s strategic direction, chances are you’re applying the methods of an internal consultant.
An internal consultant’s job requires a wide variety of skills and tools. From management expertise to organizational knowledge and much more, internal consultants have to be flexible. Visual thinking can be an important addition to this toolset. But what is visual thinking, and how can it enhance your ability to guide your organization forward?
What does an internal consultant do?
Much like external consultants, internal consultants work with teams as an advisor. They create strategic vision and planning, lead change, improve the performance of the company, and tackle major initiatives.
All of these roles come with unique challenges. Wrangling information from colleagues, managing diverse expectations, gaining the trust of the teams they work with—all of these can be incredibly difficult for someone working internally. Additionally, internal consultants must help define roles, coordinate the efforts of different teams, and hold them accountable. After all of this, they have to disengage from an initiative at the right time to let it stand on its own.
Why Visual Thinking?
Visual thinking is a valuable problem-solving tool. It helps you uncover insights, reach internal alignment, and quickly establish buy-in from key stakeholders.
If you’re not familiar with visual thinking, don’t be afraid. Visual thinking is simply another way of organizing, evaluating, and communicating your ideas. Don’t worry if you don’t feel you have drawing skills. Visual thinking isn’t about quality drawing; stick figure sketches and simple shapes work just fine. It’s about bringing clarity to an idea using more than just words. When you’re facilitating a group, visual tools like whiteboarding, card exercises, canvases, and collaging are often the best ways to bring visual thinking into the room.
Rian Johnson, director of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, talked about the power of visual thinking in a recent interview. He said that although he’s not an artist, he always creates rough storyboard sketches for his director of photography and other collaborators.
My drawings look like stick figures—ridiculous little chicken-scratch drawings. But my director of photography really likes them because it boils shots down to absolute basics. My storyboards are a wire hanger on which to hang a conversation that actually describes a shot.
In the same way, visual thinking can help internal consultants and project teams to cut through organizational noise and create a “wire hanger” for the conversation they really need to have.
Visual Thinking: A Case Study
When ThoughtForm teams up with an organization to facilitate change, we use design thinking in a variety of ways.
Take for instance a recent project we undertook to create and launch an organizational design strategy. In this project, we used a five-step process. At each step, visual thinking helped the team arrive at a better solution, faster. Internal consultants can follow these steps to improve processes within their own organizations.
Step 1: Team Kick-off
We began with a two-day workshop, involving 20+ stakeholders from across the organization. During the workshop, we discussed and debated different aspects of organizational design. Throughout, the ThoughtForm team took careful notes and asked probing questions to better understand the team’s thoughts. As the session progressed, we put the key elements of the plan into a single view and used them to create a rough visual of the team’s vision.
Using visual thinking enabled us to:
- Think through the process from beginning to end.
- Address the “what” and the “why” right away.
- Spot the differences in our vocabulary and arrive at a common language.
Step 2: Team Alignment
Over the following weeks, we reviewed these preliminary sketches with the core team over conference calls and continued to refine the vision. ThoughtForm captured the team’s suggestions and incorporated them into revised drawings.
Using visual thinking enabled us to:
- Discover gaps and inconsistencies to correct.
- Align the team to a shared vision of goals, outputs, and roles.
- Envision a path forward, and use defined outcomes to inspire the team.
Step 3: Leadership review
Once the project team was satisfied with their plan, we took this visual explanation and used it to create communication materials. These materials were designed to share the organizational design strategy and process with leadership. Using these visual explanations in communication materials enabled the project teams to spend less time explaining, and more time discussing.
Using visual thinking enabled us to:
- Bring clarity without oversimplifying the message.
- Make the future state tangible.
- Differentiate our effort from others.
Step 4: Client orientation
Once leaders signed off on the approach, it was time to begin implementing the organizational design strategy. ThoughtForm took this visualization and translated it into a detailed playbook. The playbook helped to orient staff from each business area to the project.
Using visual thinking enabled us to:
- Create a single, easy-to-understand focal point for orientation.
- Build staff confidence.
- Enable staff to envision their roles.
Step 5: Project session
After orienting the key leaders in each business area, the organization team began evaluating and restructuring teams.
Using visual thinking enabled us to:
- Keep teams oriented and focused on process.
- Empowered teams to participate fully and co-create the outcomes they wanted.
- Define a clear beginning and end for the process.
In the past, these kinds of organization design efforts struggled with enterprise-wide alignment and participation. Visual thinking allowed this effort to move quickly and cause less disruption than previous efforts, which made it much easier to bring key stakeholders on board.
To learn more about how you can apply visual thinking in your organization. Watch this video on using visual thinking in meetings.