How Visual Tools Transform Collaboration

Visual methods enable groups to move from endless talking to real collaboration

We spend much of our work time together, interacting with others or dealing with things others have made or we make for them. This is most likely how you spend most of your day.

However, in group settings, we often don't actually collaborate. We usually only talk to each other and randomly follow what's coming spontaneously into people's heads without concrete results. Or one or two people present a prepared thought, and everybody else reacts spontaneously. We quickly fall back into a situation where we leave a meeting without shared understanding or clear next steps.

Free-flowing discussions and presentations have their place, but these approaches are often the only way groups communicate and are not a great way to collaborate.

To better collaborate, a group needs an artifact they can manipulate together. One way to do this is to use a visual artifact to show your mental model. This artifact can be a visualized journey, tree, flow, system, matrix, map, etc., represented on a whiteboard, a wall with stickies, or in a digital equivalent like Miro, Mural, etc.

A few things I discovered that make the difference in collaboration with visual tools:

Get specific

Putting a thought on the wall forces everybody to get specific. Thoughts and spoken words are fluffy. They are directly gone in the moment. If a thought is written down, condensed, and connected, it forces harder thinking and stays there to be revisited.

Criticize "the thing" instead of each other

It is easy to take a discussion personally when one reacts to a statement. Thoughts like "He said I'm wrong" are a natural reaction. We tend to go into a defensive mode and counter the person instead of criticizing the statement. As soon as the visual "thing" gets criticized, we stop feeling attacked and can criticize together what we have in front of us.

Unearth disagreement by making it visible

Having a model of the content to discuss in front of the group helps the group unearth disagreements. Everybody automatically forms a mental model. As long as it is not expressed, everybody only agrees to their individual mental model, unaware of the others. The disagreement would be there if the group only spoke but stayed hidden until it surfaced too late.

Unify on one perspective

By building out a model of a topic, the group gets encouraged to unify their perspectives. A compromise is directly visible by changing words, order, and connections. The discussion shapes the visual representation.

Compare alternatives

If there are different perspectives, they can be expressed as alternatives. It is challenging for us alone to compare various options in our heads. In a group, it becomes impossible. There is just too much fuzziness in what people understand differently. If you have several alternatives, you can discuss the differences and approaches that seem more agreeable.

Keep the context

By having a visual representation of your subject to discuss, you can point to a specific detail and explain your arguments while everybody can see the context. The spatial reference helps to remind everybody about the former discussions. It is a simple memory aid.

Select one thing to dive deeper into

Our brains are association constructs. In conversations, we quickly jump from one topic to another, deviating easily into something that wasn't the topic. I'm sure we all know these meetings where you come out and wonder why you concentrated on a topic that shouldn't have been the core. A visual artifact enables you to walk these paths more consciously and allows the group to stay on topic. Mapping while discussing enables the group to see where the discussion is heading and makes it easier to get back to the discussion subject if you deviate too much.

See not obvious connections and patterns

Our visual interpretation is based on pattern matching and comparing. This is why a graph is much easier to read than a table representation. Data visualization has a long history of finding connections that are not obvious by only looking at the raw data in a table. Visualizing a complicated topic makes spotting connections, patterns, and highlights easier. Just staring at the whole thing might unearth unexpected ideas and possibilities. We get easily lost in the details, but we need the details and the entire picture in one view to make informed decisions.

Keep it and work further

Conversations are quickly fading from our memory. Nobody remembers what was said and discussed, and nobody has time to revisit recordings of every conversation around a topic. A visual artifact can capture a discussion and be brought to the following conversation or be the basis for further solo reflection.

I hope these observations inspire you to visualize more in your following group conversations. Start simple and small. You don’t need to start with fancy methods. If unsure, try taking notes for yourself visually as a test.

I would love to hear about your experience to add to these observations.