Using visuals to build teams: here's an approach from the Center for Creative Leadership for breaking down barriers and addressing complex challenges Sometimes, a picture—or how a person interprets it—can capture the crux of the matter

T+D, Oct, 2003 by David Magellan Horth, Charles J. Palus

Business school students are taught to approach challenges through logic and analysis. But after nearly a decade of research, the Center for Creative Leadership believes that traditional analytical tools can be limited.

To solve complex problems, the CCL says businesspeople need to move below the kinds of surface discussions that typically take place. One approach for enhancing dialogue is through its Visual Explorer tool, which uses photographs to provoke discussion. Having an image represent a complex problem is similar to having a three dimensional version of it: It can be turned and examined so that each facet of the problem comes to light and is discussed.

In a typical session using Visual Explorer, participants study images and pick one that stands out to them. Then they share their thoughts about that image. Using the tool, groups can collectively explore a complex topic from a variety of perspectives and develop a shared understanding for better decision making. Individually, they can share insights about who they are and what's important.

Several organizations such as Verizon Communications and New York University have found the corporate-university partnership approach effective for breaking down personal barriers and building dialogue.

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These days, organizations and the people who lead them face seemingly insurmountable challenges: lingering economic uncertainties, accelerating technology and globalization trends, shifting demographics, mergers and acquisitions, and the overriding requirement to move with speed.

We are taught in business and engineering schools to approach such challenges through logic and analysis. But after nearly a decade of research with executives and leadership teams from companies around the globe, the Center for Creative Leadership has come to believe that traditional analytical tools are far too limited for this complex world. The kinds of issues that organizations now face don't yield to such approaches. New, creative, nontraditional ways are needed that will enable us to examine issues in a different way--helping a group to reach a shared understanding more quickly and aligning teams behind a common goal.

If there is one given, it's that when there's a complex problem or an opportunity to be exploited there are often as many perspectives on the subject as there are individuals involved. It's important to hear those points of view in order to get a full reading of the size and shape of the issue you face. But when the time comes to take urgently needed action, those same people need to be clear in their understanding of the issues and aligned in their purpose.

If our traditional tools don't help us do that, how do we go about gathering the information, knowledge, and experience we need and aligning groups? The answer, we believe, is found in dialogue.

Opening the dialogue

Dialogue gives us a way to uncover new information and new perspectives. It provides a way to share and explore, and to develop unexpected solutions and a shared point of view about how to proceed. In organizations nowadays, meaningful dialogue seldom just happens. To solve complex problems, we need new approaches for moving below the kinds of surface discussions that take place.

One seemingly unlikely approach for doing that is through photographs and other images. Here at CCL, we developed a tool called Visual Explorer to help break through barriers, build teams, and meet complex challenges. It's being used by educational institutions, not-for-profit organizations, and Fortune 500 firms.

Visual Explorer is an example of a nontraditional tool to stimulate dialogue. It was created in response to research that showed that effective leadership in the face of complex challenges demanded some way of paying closer attention to the nuances of those challenges and tapping the multiple perspectives of all stakeholders. Given the pressing nature of those challenges, some kind of tool was needed to facilitate reflective dialogue--at the drop of a hat--with protagonists who had no previous experience practicing and applying it.

In designing such a tool, we set about carefully selecting more than 200 photos and drawings as potential metaphors for the issues and complex topics that organizations and people face. The main criterion was that the image could be readily interpreted in many ways so that it would provoke discussion. We sought images that were diverse in many ways, including ethnic diversity and diversity in the content of the pictures and the media used. For example, we selected black-and-white images as well as color, facsimiles of paintings as well as photographs, and images of a contemporary nature, as well as those from ages gone by. That way, the pictures would have a wide range of appeal to diverse audiences with different backgrounds, knowledge, and life experiences and, therefore, different, often subtly different, interpretations of each image.

Having an image represent a complex problem is similar to having a three-dimensional version of it; it can be turned and examined so that each facet of the problem comes to light and can be explored more closely and discussed. The image leads to new ways of looking at a shared problem and, in doing so, facilitates a deepening dialogue about it.