The Power of Visualization
One of the best parenting moves I’ve ever made was to put this painter’s tape at the bottom of our stairs.
The tape signifies the area that must be clear of toys. It was originally just a safety measure, but what stunned me was how easy it was for the kids to internalize the boundary. When it was violated, I just needed to ask, “What’s wrong with this picture?” and they would immediately know to clean up. There’s no other area of the house where they are this responsive to a request for tidiness.
I think the difference was the presence of a visual cue—what’s visible is actionable.
I started to think about the power of visualization when reading The Toyota Way by Jeffrey Liker. In the book, he writes about how one of the principles of the Toyota production system is “Use Visual Control to Support People in Decision-Making and Problem Solving.”
Part of that principle is keeping the work area tidy so that opportunities to improve the process are readily visible. Liker writes: “The ‘visual’ aspect means being able to look at a process, a piece of equipment, inventory, information, or a worker performing a job and immediately see the standard being used to perform the task and if there is a deviation from the standard. Ask this question: Can your manager walk through the shop floor, office, or any type of facility where work is being performed and recognize if standardized work or procedures are being followed?”
Liker goes on to describe how visuals that are accessible to everyone on a team are important enablers of information sharing and problem-solving. He writes about Ichiro Suzuki, the chief engineer of the first Lexus:
“Suzuki was a legend and was sometimes referred to as the “Michael Jordan” of chief engineers. He returned to the Toyota Technical Center just before retirement to teach one final lesson. He chose to teach “the secret to excellent engineering.” Not a shock, his focus on this trip was visual management. “He emphasized the importance of using visual management charts and graphs (showing schedule, cost, etc., on one sheet of paper). He also pointed out that ‘using an electronic monitor does not work if only one person uses that information. Visual management charts must allow for communication and sharing.’”
Once I recognized the pattern, it kept coming up. For example, in the book Outside In, Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine describe how stunning visuals helped influence executives at AAA.
They write: “Dann [Allen, an executive in charge of customer experience] could have documented his findings about AAA’s product renewal experience in a slide deck or spreadsheet. Instead, he pinned up each and every email, bill, reminder, outbound call script, and direct marketing piece that a high-value customer would receive come renewal time on a wall-sized timeline. Dann shared the visualization—which quickly became known as ‘the wall of shame’—with employees from the company’s call centers, branches, auto insurance, home insurance, IT, and marketing departments and asked them to verify the experience. “People were flabbergasted. They asked, ‘This is really what we do to our members?’” says Dann. It was this wall-sized visualization that helped his colleagues to understand the customer experience as they hadn’t been able to before.”
And in a completely different context, Hack Your Bureaucracy authors and Obama White House veterans Marina Nitze and Nick Sinai suggest that creating “visually compelling prototypes” is critical to influence people to take action. They write, “An often overlooked bureaucracy-hacking tactic is to make just about anything you write visually compelling. Beautiful design is persuasive. A captivating layout or even a distinct font can catch people’s attention and get them to read your report sooner or more thoroughly.”
As one last example, a couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the culinary concept of mise en place. Even in preparing food, part of the value of gathering everything before starting to cook is that one can visually inspect and verify that every ingredient and tool is indeed available.
It’s somewhat ironic to make this point in a mostly word-based format, but what’s common across all of those situations is that the visualization of information creates a faster and richer way of understanding.