How Visual Thinking can help in being more Agile

As I have said many times, agile is not about following a process but it is a mindset. It is a mindset that makes us aware of our thoughts and actions helping us to take the right decisions and work on them for our organization's betterment. It embraces every positive concept that can help in improving the process and individuals helping them grow. One of the trending concepts that are blooming in agile now a day is of using visual thinking. Let’s see in detail how it’s helping agile.

How will you feel when you can visualize your ideas, and solve the problem? It will make your work a lot easier, right?

When concepts or processes is presented in visuals we as human are more tend to understand them quickly and work out the solution more easily compared to written content or imagination. It is because we are attracted to visuals more easily than anything else.

What is Visual Thinking?

It is a cognitive phenomenon through visual processing; this helps in visualizing words in a series of pictures. Our brain is designed to think visually which is discovers in the late 1980s. Whether it be verbal or thought humans generally create a picture with it in mind. Visual thinking is carried out by mostly two third of the population of the world. Visual thinking helps in organizing thoughts, forming ideas, and remembering important details. Visual thinking helps in;

·       Organize ideas graphically

·       Recall and remember data as images

·       Estimate physical attributes based on numbers

·       Creates a connection between two data or information through pictures for better understanding

·       Quickly learn new processes and concepts connecting them with images

·       Understand complex concepts easily with pictures

When it comes to agile, being an agile coach, product manager, or executive they have many daily tasks which require a lot of problem-solving and decision-making based on the ideas and concepts they are working on or have to work on in the future. If we see, as an agile coach one has to go through participating in meetings, facilitating events, training some team members, brainstorming, problem-solving, and also guide and mentoring sessions for team members.

Let’s see how visual thinking helps agile leaders and executives

Taking Visual notes

While meetings and events everyone is at a certain amount and needs to take notes for the thinking is an important point, as everything cannot be remembered. In such cases when that individual takes notes in a form of visuals whether in a writing pad or digital format or even in a less artistic way helps them to;

·       Stay engaged and attentive in meeting

·       Connect in-depth with information

·       Easy to share artifacts as it shows images of notes

·       An enjoyable activity that can also inspire others

Problem Solving Activities

Being a leader of the team, product managers, or executives problem solving is the main part of their job whether working on it or supporting others to overcome it. This with visual thinking and creating a series of processes with images on a whiteboard or paper will provide;

·       Provide a clear view of the issue

·       Related required data can be easily explained around

·       Provides flexibility with various colors and stick notes

·       Provides an opportunity to be creative

Presentations

In larger organizations presentations are a vital part but it gets boring with increasing time as bombarding with data continuously makes your mental fatigue and avoids taking in more. But with visual thinking and inserting images whether digitally created or hand-made snaps, gives;

·       Gives a twist to boring presentations

·       Better understanding

·       Decreases presentation times as a lot can be explained easily with images

Communication and Facilitation

In agile, communication and facilitation of events is an important aspect that gives a lot of benefits, with visual thinking agile coaches, product managers, and executives communication becomes easy as;

·       This helps to introduce new ideas which attract team members and encourage them to provide other

·       Help team members visualize thinking that helps the project succeed

In facilitation, it helps in

·       Visualize agenda and proceed easily

·       Makes tougher questions and concepts easier during events with images

·       Provides flexibility for the organization of tasks

Training

When used in training it helps in a lot of things making the task easy for leaders and trainers.

·       Visual thinking helps explain new concepts easily with images

·       Prepare fun activity material for training

·       Helping easily planning with helping in organizing thoughts of trainers

·       Provides participants full attention and immersion in the process throughout the sessions

There are various ways visual thinking can help in agile. Some of the examples we have seen above. There are many more examples in every process and task carried out in agile that have the benefits of visual thinking. With the above example, you must have got the idea of how introducing visual thinking in your agile working will help you be more agile. 

About Advance Agility

We, at Advance Agility, are the new-age Agile Coaching, Consulting and IT services company. We enable end-to-end Digital Transformation. Agile execution is integral to our being. We are doing SAFe implementation with small, medium and large organization across the globe. Our vision is to be the leading Agile execution player globally. To keep adding value at every process stage. We are on a mission to empower our clients, move from concept to cash in the shortest sustainable lead time by adopting human centric approach to business agility. Embracing the change is in our DNA. Things that keep us apart are Quicker and Seamless execution with End-to-end gamut of services. Our Global presence and Stellar Track Record give us an edge over our competitor.

Connect with us at advanceagility.com to learn about SAFe and SAFe Implementation. We provide various SAFe certification courses along with DevOps, Scrum, Agile Coaching and more trainings. Write to us at contact@advanceagilty.com for any agile training or consulting needs. We are always looking for competent agile trainers as well. So if you are a good trainer or want to become one, do get in touch with us to that we can learn, grow and achieve together.