Why seemingly trivial conversations around visualizations may be the key for strategic clarity
Building a strategy is a messy organizational activity. It is abstract, complex and collaborative. In this challenging task, visualizations play a meaningful, yet often overlooked, role.
At a management team meeting, participants are looking at a visualization of the key ideas in the new strategy:
“I thought we wanted sustainability and creativity to cut across all of our development areas. But now the arrow with those items is underneath the development area boxes. They look like separate ideas.”
“I think the orange highlight around the development areas brings too much emphasis on change. It makes it look like our core mission and values don’t matter that much anymore.”
“I agree. The visualization in which our values were at the bottom made more sense. Then they are sort of the foundation upon which everything is built.”
The above dialogue may seem trivial. And yet, it is a pertinent example of a single meeting in a longer strategy process.
Today, strategic ideas are not only developed through conversation and writing. Managers, consultants and anyone participating in strategy work often rely upon an array of visualizations and material: ideas are explored by grouping sticky notes, assessed by placing strategic options onto a matrix, and established by summarizing key actions onto a PowerPoint slide.
Thus, strategy making is closely tied with creating and editing some form of visual material.
Although it may be easy to dismiss visualizations as mere facilitators of the process, a closer look at strategy making reveals that visualizations can play a meaningful role in the strategic sensemaking process itself.
Building a strategy is a messy organizational activity. It is abstract, complex and collaborative. Strategy work requires engaging with ideas that do not yet exist, but could potentially form the direction of the organization in the future. Predicting the future has also become increasingly challenging in our ever-evolving world. Finally, no strategy is built alone. Today, strategy work often means collaborating with several different groups and experts within — and often also outside — the organization. Thus, strategy making can be seen as a collective attempt to create a credible and relevant narrative of a potential future. In this challenging task, visualizations play a meaningful, yet often overlooked, role.
Visualizations can support strategic sensemaking for two main reasons: they are simultaneously concrete and ambiguous.
On the one hand, ideas become more tangible when they are depicted through a visual representation. For example, a strategic idea on a PowerPoint slide can be explored by changing the composition of the slide and adding or removing elements. The PowerPoint slide also allows others to participate in the strategic sensemaking process: People involved in the strategy process can easily comment on the idea, identify missing items, or even test their own ideas by editing the slide directly.
On the other hand, visualizations leave room for interpretation. The PowerPoint slide is not a complete or only possible representation of a strategic idea. Ambiguity is beneficial for the individual exploring different ways of constructing the slide, but it is especially relevant in group settings. People are very unlikely to interpret the PowerPoint slide similarly to each other. Consequently, the visualization may evoke conversation when team members express their opinions or ask for a clarification. These conversations may shed light on previously unexplored aspects of the strategy.
By being both concrete and ambiguous, visualizations encourage people to engage in sensemaking. As the example at the beginning of this article illustrates, when we talk about a visualization, we rarely only talk about the visualization. The collection of sticky notes, the strategic matrix or the PowerPoint slide becomes an external manifestation of our thinking — in this case the strategy or its component.
Karl E. Weick, an organizational theorist who has studied sensemaking, once wrote:
“One cannot really know what one thinks, until one sees what one says”.
Presumably, he was trying to explain that verbalizing our ideas is an essential part of making sense of our thinking: Before voicing our ideas, we might not even be sure what we actually think of an issue. However, instead of saying “before hearing what one says”, the quote says “before seeing what one says”. The quote implies that visual modes of communication can be essential for sensemaking. Expressing our thinking through visualizations, material and text — which in a broad sense can be understood as a visual form of communication — can be excellent means for clarifying our ideas.
Without creating tangible manifestations of our ideas, we may be left with abstract, unclear or undeveloped strategies. We may miss out on other people’s points of view and important conversations. As a result, lots of organizational potential is left untapped. By visualizing our ideas, we can see what we say and know what we think, which brings us one step closer to a shared narrative of a desired future.
Riikka Iivanainen
Riikka Iivanainen is a designer in Aalto University’s strategy team. She believes in purpose-driven organizations and teamwork built upon clear objectives, complementary talent and trust.
