The work you do with others is serious.

You also know there must be ways to bring more humanity to the way you work; to infuse more fun and lightness into conversations to stimulate new ways of thinking and spark curiosity.

Creating engaging and inviting spaces and working effectively is possible when you learn how to take a strategic approach to capturing information and have foundational skills at hand to dip into your creativity. It also helps to have templates and principles to fall back on when you’re unsure how to structure what you’re writing. 

Your next meeting could be one where people leave the room snapping a picture of your visual notes, the visual storyboard you co-created or  the amazing flip chart that explains a process in a compelling and memorable way. These outcomes are all possible with a little help.

With confidence in your visualization skills, you can transform the way you meet and work with others. You can discover how a marker can become a strategic tool for you and for others to do your best thinking. With visualization, making information visible and available to everyone can become a default way of working, not the exception. Ideas and information will no longer only be in people’s heads, you’ll have captured it in a clear way to help everyone instantly see.

Visual work helps you and others feel heard and understood in conversations because you can literally see ideas on the page.

The act of writing things down acknowledges everyone’s voice. Imagine the levels of engagement possible when the people you work with feel validated and that their contributions are valued. 

In the information age, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.

Visualization helps you distill information down to its essential elements, creating clarity on what’s most important. The right icon or a simple picture can replace paragraphs of text, and lessen the cognitive load everyone experiences daily. Information overload and decision fatigue are real and with a marker in hand you can provide a solution.

With visuals, you can create representations of ideas, solutions, and situations that can be easy to understand, help you and others solve problems more effectively and allow you to leave meetings feeling like you’ve accomplished something meaningful that have a tangible outcome you can share with others. 

Thinking about bigger projects, you’re excited to create visual summaries that highlight key information in a way that people remember.  

Now think about the fun and creative expression you could infuse into your work, how sketching and drawing can lighten the mood of a heavy conversation, and for a little while you can step away from your computer screen and still get “real” work done.