Visual strategy: A tool to help you navigate through complexity

A lot of businesses have to deal with wicked problems and a complex environment. How to get a clear overview to elaborate an efficient strategy? Visual strategies enable you to tackle the challenges you may stumble upon.

Business model canvas, Value Proposition canvas and many more tools are available to get a clear view on the state of your business. But it still appears hard to have an overview of the whole environment. The big picture.

A visual strategy enables you to zoom in the last important details, and zoom out to see if our actions are still on track with our objectives. It gives you a clear process and helps you navigate through complexity.

The strength of a visual tool? Most of the time, if you can’t visualise something it is because you have not understood it. A visual helps you explain the problem better. As Holger Nils Pohl, visual strategist and pathfinder, explains to me in this video, visuals helps you focus on the important things through the action of drawing.

 

In business, we want to solve a problem, this implies focus. Unlike in a conversation where you jump back and forth on some points, visual strategy help you focus on the problem in order to find an efficient solution to it. Visual strategy and visual thinking gives you a focus point that you can relate to.

How does it work?

1. Just start. Start sketching. You will then easily build upon your first draft.

2. Keep it simple. The goal is to enable clarity.

Don’t be hard with yourself and try to compete with Picasso! The point of visual strategy is to use visual thinking to help you focus, explore some ideas and get a simple overview of your business state.  

Want to know more?

To discover the secrets of visual strategy, contact us!

And if you’re eager to discover the role of visualisation in design thinking, head here.