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Visual Planning Planning, Management ement and Transformation ormation

by Russell Giesbrecht

The problem with most organizational thinking is that it is needlessly underpowered. Planning and decision making are done by a small group of people who tend to see things the same way and use the same filters in their thinking. The format for thinking together depends mostly on sitting around tables talking, with the occasional flip chart used to record the results of the talking and PowerPoint presentations in which someone talks and everyone else pretends to listen. A lot of words and many of them go in one ear and out the other. This makes it very difficult for organizations to overcome the inertia of their history (we tried that once; it didnt work), culture (weve always done it this way) and structure (so and so would never go for that) in bringing about necessary changes. So instead of bold vision, creative thinking and purposeful action, they get a slightly modified version of an inadequate present and increased cynicism (the more things change, the more they stay the same). It doesnt have to be this way. Its possible for change to happen, but it really helps if people can see it happening. Thats the piece thats usually missing. Very often the most important information can only be expressed through pictures: visual and verbal pictures.

See the change, Be the change


The problem with relying on words for your planning and problem-solving is that because language is rooted in the left side of the brain the more you rely on it the more youre forced to rely on the rest of the attributes of the left side of the brain as well: linear thinking, analysis, quantitative measurements, binary judgments, simplistic perceptions and so forth. This really narrows down your options. The good news is that theres another whole half of the brain on the right side waiting to be used and its designed to complement the left side. One of the most important ways it does this is through its tendency to look at the big picture, to see how things are related to each other rather than what they are all by themselves. This is called systems thinking and its a good thing to know how to do because the best insights and solutions usually come from this frame of mind, also known as solution space. The left side of the brain is really good at digging into problem space, defining a problem and breaking it down but it cant dig itself out of that hole on its own. Another valuable aspect of the right side of the brain is that it is more visually oriented than the left. It thinks in pictures and even uses words in a visual way through metaphor and analogy. Visual thinking is tied to systems thinking because very often the big picture can best be grasped through an image, metaphor, analogy or mental model that doesnt get bogged down with details. Its

like having a telescope and a microscope. Each provides a different view of reality and if you want to operate with a complete view of your universe you youll want to include both. The two sides of the brain arent t mutually exclusive, so even for more left-brained activities its it often helpful to incorporate a visual approach in order to make room for the worth. It can be counted on to think of right brain to put in its two cents things that wouldnt occur to the left side of the brain on its own. Visual group memory. Its easy for the group to thinking is also helpful in facilitating forget important stuff even when its s written down in everyones everyon notes or covered in a PowerPoint that everyone has copies of. Putting the important things on a wall graphic where everyone can see them creates a shared memory space.

Part 1: Visual Planning


Over the past thirty five years or so a solid platform of visual thinking for planners and decision makers has been developed, tested and refine refined by people such as David Sibbet and a global community of visual facilitators. The result is a comprehensive set of tools and processes that also reflects the most progressive thinking about management itself, an intelligent system that understands how organizations work -- and often dont work -- and provides an effective alternative better suited to twenty-first twenty century organizations than the nineteenth century concepts and practices many people are still using. These tools and processes support the most common activities that comprise planning and management and can be mixed and matched as the user sees fit. The following are a few examples of common tools and templates that can be used by a group to support planning and decision making making:

Graphic Histories
Those who dont study history are doomed to repeat it is a wise saying that most groups disregard. Particularly on organizational scale projects or projects that bring together a multi multi-disciplinary team with different backgrounds, it is critical to estab establish a common frame of reference and to relate each individuals personal history to that of the organization and the work at hand. Having a single, visual record makes it possible to achieve and maintain a shared sense of identity in the group. This can be e done either on a small scale or a very large scale, depending on the situation.

Context Maps
Context is vital to understanding a situation, so many groups dont do it. Instead, they assume that everyone understands the context, is in agreement and the only question is what to do about it. Having a simple visual format with predefined categories such as customer needs, economic climate, trends and so forth makes it easier to engage in a robust scan of the landscape and doing so visually results in an easily accessible artifact that can be reviewed at any time.

Story Visions
Another thing the right side of the brain is really tuned into is story, one of the most powerful and often overlooked tools in the thinking toolbox. The fact is, everyones a storyteller, everyones living a story in which theyre the star, but when they sit down at the boardroom table theyre all supposed to become robots. Doesnt happen. The best thing to do is to consciously script the story the group wants to tell about itself: elf: the characters, the plot, the reviews. You can do it as a movie, a novel, a magazine, even a comic book. This also activates a very powerful device called the completion backwards principle by imagining the outcome in the beginning. And it its s fun! fun

Visioneering
Many organizations have vision and mission statements and most of them suck. They suck because they theyre meant to appear to say something without actually saying anything for fear of offending someone or setting up challenging expectations. (Think committed to quality and service.) Visual visioneering can break this limitation by making room for the right brain to get in on the action and to help design a vision that is truly engaging while being grounded in the reality of the work being done. done This applies to projects as well as organizations, any time you need to get a group of people aligned and committed to a common objective.

Affinity Maps and Mind Maps


Data mining is a popular c concept that some organizations spend a lot of money on, sifting through mountains of information in search of meaningful patterns. You can do the same thing with a blank wall, some markers and piles of Post Post-It notes. Its called affinity m mapping and its a very powerful way to play with information in a collaborative, non non-destructive destructive way. It gives the group a way to develop different views of the information theyre working with and find the ones that makes the most sense. . Affinity maps are similar to m mind maps, , except that the latter uses drawing instead of PostPost Its. However, the more exploratory a affinity maps can be used to lay the groundwork for a more polished mind map.

Business Model Canvas


Business models used to be very stable stable, and successful organizations ons could sleepwalk from one decade to the next. Now the rule is that business models are made to be disrupted and successful organizations are the ones that are the best at adapting to changing circumstances. The Business Model Canvas is a powerful visual tool for understanding how your organization works and envisioning new forms it might adopt in its ongoing evolution.

Part 2: Managing Visually


The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, Gang aft agley, An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, For promis'd joy! When projects fail, one of the most common reasons lies in the simple imple mechanics of coordination and communication. . A group of smart people working hard at things theyre good at can still fail because they get swamped in details, lose focus, and find themselves unable to deal with information that is well w known but somehow falls through the cracks cracks. Internal dissension can also cripple the most earnest effort if there is no system to identify and addres address s challenges that face the team itself. And then there are the external challenges that come from those who are outside the project but have a stake in its success or failure. Managing factors such as these visually puts them on the table or wall where everyone can get a handle on them and helps maintain a resourceful attitude towards challenges that arise. The following is a selection of templates that can be useful in managing the project itself:

Graphic Gameplans and Roadmaps


Lest you think this visual thinking is just for the conceptual stages of planning and strategy, working visually is also very helpful when it comes down to deciding what needs to be done, how it will get done and very importantly making it easy for people to remember and stay focused on the key points that have been agreed upon. Group memory is a very important aspect to thinking visually. Otherwise, its easy for people to become swamped by the torrent of information they have to deal with every day and lose sight of the ultimate goal.

Stakeholder Management
If youre planning on changing something, chances are youre planning on messing with someones life, so its good to know whose lives youre going to be messing with and be prepared for their response. A visual Stakeholder Map can help identify key groups and how they relate to any proposed change and to each other. The visual, right-brain brained approach makes it easier to elicit the nuances of each group groups interests than simply entering them into a spreadsheet or making a list. This can be paired with personas, a tool commonly used in software development to foster empathy with and understanding of end users as people and not just abstractions.

Managing Team Dynamics


Teamwork k is like the weather: everyone talks about it but no one does anything about it. Any junior sports team is probably better coached and managed than most organizational project teams because every sports team has a system into which every individual player fits according to their skills and the situation on the ice/field at any given time. In contrast, most organizational teams have a bunch of platitudes about teamwork and the vague Forming/Storming/Norming/Performing framework that doesnt t really help on once youre in the game. The Drexler/Sibbet Team Performance Model (TPM) is a robust visual system that charts the stages of a teams progress through a project project, the different requirements of each stage and the particular challenges expected to emerge in moving from one to the next. The TPM also recognizes that projects are dynamic and can circle back to previous stages at any point in response to new information, a reality that the standard Gantt charts used for project management are incapable of addressing. add

Managing Organizational Dynamics


When we talk about context, one of the most important aspects is that everything that happens at work happens within a unique organization with its own quirks and habits. A project team ignores this fact at its peril, but its hard to get on top of the sit situation just based on the anecdotal evidence of how things are done and what people think will and wont work. Visually mapping the organizations key processes gets this information out front where people can deal with it. The Groves Organizational Proces Processes template identifies as the six key categories People, Public Image, Performance, Planning, Prioritization and Production and breaks them into three Top Line and three Bottom Line processes. It then adds a further level of analysis with the very Jungian distinction between each processs inward-focused focused and outward outward-focused focused aspects. The result is a deep understanding of the organization that helps a project team move forward with its eyes wide open.

Part 3: Transforming Visually


Making changes to an organizations structure, systems, processes and culture is a massive, challenging undertaking and once youre used to the idea of working visually its hard to conceive of tackling it without employing pictures and stories. Visual thinking provides an extensive assortment of concepts, tools and processes that can make an organizational change project come to life and give it a much better chance at success than the 75% failure rate that is commonly ascribed to change initiatives. One of the fatal flaws in the conventional approach to what is commonly referred to as change management is the notion that it is a relatively simple process carried out on a large scale. Its true that change is simple, no matter the scale, but what organizations are often actually attempting is more accurately called transformation and unlike change, transformation is complex, regardless of the scale. (In brief, change is what happens when you alter individual elements of a system without changing the system itself, also referred to as improvements, tweaks, modifications, efficiencies, upgrades and so forth. Transformation is when you make changes that affect different facets of the organization at the same time in a related way, which results in a change to the system itself. For instance, a change to a process that requires a change in how people think about the process is transformational. It might even require them to change how they think about the organization and their relationship to it. Very complex. Its hard to know or control where the change ends and its effects can reverberate throughout the organization in unexpected ways.) The ADKAR methodology is the most common approach to change management but it doesnt distinguish between change and transformation. It recognizes the individual as the basic unit of change and that in order to achieve their support to a change you have to win their hearts and minds. To do this, it recommends appealing to each individuals self-interest: finding out what motivates them and guiding them to see whats in it for them. Its a reductionist approach, which is classically left-brained. The left side of the brain is analytical, it thinks in terms of parts. The problem is that this approach can be like herding cats: very difficult and inefficient. The level of buy-in you achieve might be adequate for a simple change but not enough to power a significant transformation that requires a higher level of engagement. Achieving this requires a shift to the right side of the brain, where you will find the notion that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. While its great to be sensitive to the fact that everyone has their own perspective, its equally important to work from a holistic point of view to invite individuals to participate in the process of transformation and recognize that they are part of it. The little picture of self-interest needs to be balanced with the big picture of organizational destiny, and as weve already seen, big picture thinking tends to be visual thinking.

Heres an example of what an organizations destiny can look like when captured and expressed visually. This is called a Storymap and this particular one was created during National Semiconductors turnaround in the 1990s under CEO Louis Gerstner:

A Storymap is generally created in a very large format (i.e., covering an entire wall) for obvious reasons but can also be reproduced in smaller versions that can be posted in individual offices. It combines elements from several of the visual tools weve looked at so far such as history, vision and strategy. All the tools weve looked at so far and many more that we havent support change no matter what methodology youre using (or not using) and whether its change or transformation that youre doing. But heres a model of how some of the most basic tools can be employed in the service of a strategic visioning exercise that most organizations carry out at some point in their life: Youll notice that it recognizes the importance of the past, present and the future to the process. What is less obvious are the four icons down the left hand side. These represent the four flows that must be part of any comprehensive planning exercise: attention, energy, information and operations. Similar to ADKARs Awareness/Desire/Knowledge/Action/Reinforcement schema, this approach says that thought follows a particular order from the abstract to the concrete. It also recognizes that different people are more attuned to different stages and by laying them out visually makes room for everyone to shine in their own time. This also helps avoid the temptation to go straight to implementation without fully understanding the situation and its possible solutions first. Organizational transformation also requires we elevate our game when it comes to how we think about the organization itself. Beyond what we think of the organization its helpful to be aware of how we think about it, since that influences the how in ways we may not be aware of. For instance, its important to understand that we are all naturally visual thinkers and that we use a trick called metaphor without even realizing what were doing. This is important to consider when it comes to the organization because we tend to think of the places we work in metaphorically and its important that everyone agree on what the most appropriate metaphor is. If you feel like youre just a cog in the machine, then thats a metaphor of the organization as a machine. If you talk about it in terms of adaptation and growth, then youre using the metaphor of a living organism. If you like to think of it as a family, thats another metaphor. (Whether its a happy family is another matter) If you work in IT, you

may tend to view the organization as a cybernetic system. With this wide range of options, you can see how important it is for people to agree what it is theyre working on before they start working on it. Heres an array of mental models that can posted on a wall in large format as a focus for group discussion:

Its also important to take into account what stage of its lifecycle the organization is in, particularly because the need to undertake a transformative change is a strong indication that its being pulled/pushed from one stage to another.

Note that the use of the term lifecycle implies a particular perspective as per the preceding chart. The next graphic shows how that lifecycle looks when displayed visually. The theory behind this framework is that an organization naturally evolves from a state of maximum freedom to one of increasing constraint. When the amount of constraint represented by its systems, procedures, history and culture reach their maximum, this puts a strain on the organization that requires it to return to a state of greater freedom or die.

Incidentally, the movement from freedom to constraint and back to freedom is the same one that underlies the TPM we looked at previously. (Its based on Arthur Youngs Theory of Process, if youre interested.) Its also related to the Four Flows we mentioned. So you see how this visual thinking is more than just pretty pictures. Its an entire system of thought and practice that unlocks powerful, natural sources of insight and inspiration that conventional approaches cant access. Want to talk further? I look forward to hearing from you: Russell Giesbrecht 403-970-8353 russellg@wholebrainedthinking.com

Copyright 2014 Russell Giesbrecht

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