Here’s the scenario: You have a big idea—so big that it needs enterprise-wide support if it’s to succeed. Perhaps you want to develop a revolutionary product, build innovative technology, pioneer a new business model, or engineer a new process. You’ve spent countless hours researching, testing, and thinking the details through.
You want others in your organization to recognize it for what it is: bold and brilliant. You want this idea to transform the business, and you want the recognition that goes with that.
The challenge now is engaging leaders and allies. But if your plan is a world-changer, you face barriers. The complexity of your vision has eyes glazing over. The boldness of your idea raises a thousand questions before you can explain it. You’re faced with a burden of proof you simply can’t overcome.
There’s a paradox at work here. The more significant your vision, chances are the greater its complexity. And the greater the complexity your audience perceives—think of these as unfamiliar elements in complex relationships—the harder they must work to get a handle on your idea, and the briefer the attention span they can sustain. How do you overcome this dilemma?
What got you this far won’t get you where you’re headed. To get a really big idea over the finish line, you need more powerful tools. Here are three that ThoughtForm relies on.
One of our most potent tools is visual modeling. It’s a method for expressing the elements of a complex idea in visual, symbolic language. This visual language brings new opportunities. Visual models make ephemeral, hidden parts of the story tangible and visible. Because it is not strictly linear, it connects the dots in a way that words cannot. Perhaps most importantly, it gives the audience a holistic view of a new idea, system, or process. This allows them to build a mental model of their own that they can connect with.
Information architecture is another professional-grade technique—a way to organize a complex set of messages to achieve a specific purpose for a certain audience. A good architecture uses an organizing structure—for example, topical, alphabetical, or chronological—that fits the content. It presents information in a sequence that fits the audience, for example bridging from established ideas to new ones, or anticipating questions. It allows presenters to move flexibly from a 30,000-foot level to a detailed drill-down.
Finally, storytelling is a powerful lens that can give your audience a visceral, relatable view of your idea—one that’s hard to get through concepts and facts alone. At the end of the day, we are simply “show-me, tell-me” creatures. By making the abstract accessible through characters, a plot, and pictures—carefully selected to represent larger truths—a story can make an idea far more meaningful.
Rather than sell an idea, these techniques can make the idea’s value so clear that it sells itself. This clarity helps drive alignment and consensus, lends new credibility, and helps business leaders gain more executive support and funding than their competitors.
Take Jane, for instance. Jane is a senior vice president at a large company that sells widgets. The company is experiencing the usual troubles: increased competition, regulation, and thinning margins. Jane and her colleagues know that the company needs a big idea to move it forward. One of Jane’s colleagues wants to make improvements to their widgets, another thinks they should focus on operational efficiencies, and a third think they should try to open new markets. Jane thinks the company should explore selling services that complement their widgets like data analysis and enhanced service packages.
Jane and her fellow SVPs have spent hours in meetings with each other, the company executives, and even the board about which strategy is the right one to follow. Jane’s idea is the boldest and complex—and thus it’s been the hardest one to get traction around.
So, Jane and her team take a new approach. They want to communicate their idea differently, and in doing so, they start to think about it differently. Instead of endless decks, they decide to create a single-page view of the company ecosystem and how selling services would create value for their customers and revenue for the company. They start with messy napkin sketches, mapping out all the parts of the company and all their customer segments. They add all their current products to the map, and then layer the new service ideas on top, connecting them to the existing operational units, customers, and products. And they show how new customers could be attracted to the new services. Around their sketch, they use a few charts that clearly explain projected revenue and operational impact.
In creating this one-page view, Jane’s team not only finds an innovative way to explain their idea, but they also create “paper prototypes” of their system and offers, which allows them to enhance and refine it before sharing it with the executives. When they are ready to present, their one-page view makes their idea clear and easy to understand. The visual nature of the explanation allows the executives to take in a “big picture” view, but then dive in for details.
Jane and her team used visual communication and design to overcome the complexity/attention paradox. Their fresh approach to communication allowed their idea to be seen and understood completely for the first time—and selected as the company’s number one strategic initiative.
At ThoughtForm, we help teams unlock the potential of their ideas. We use collaborative workshops to shape and clarify valuable, innovative thinking, and use the techniques described here to give you fresh, intuitive, and highly visual ways to convey your ideas. We help you to build the understanding and support you need to realize your vision.