I don’t know if this happens to you, but for me, the need to take paper and pen when I’m going to explain something is innate. Even to understand a process, I need to make drawings to clarify my ideas. A few boxes, a couple of arrows and titles and voila.
Does it happen to you? Well, that is one more way to use Visual Thinking.
What happens is that it is easier to describe complex concepts with drawings and relationships than with words. Explaining with words is sometimes tricky and you lose the thread easily, so leaning on a drawing makes things easier. This does not mean that the words are no longer needed, but I would add always an image that, at a glance, gives me the general information.
On the other hand, by drawing and relating our processes, we managed to detect conflicting points that we would not have seen with words: the need of someone or something to be able to move on to the next step, see relationships that we were not aware of and even define who is responsible of tasks or steps.
Nothing better than some examples to understand it better. I will start with a daily one:
Example 1. Put a washing machine
I could define the steps as:
When creating these steps, I realized that I need to consider a number of things to be able to carry them out:
So the final process would be:
- Do I have space to hang clothes
- If hanging clothes outside, will it rain?
- Check that there is enough detergent and softener
- Separate clothes by colors
- Select the right amount of clothes for the washing machine
- Put clothes in the washing machine
- Add detergent and softener
- Choose proper washing program
- Do not forget the clothes and hang it when the washing machine finishes
Example 2. Incorporation of a new member to the company
We could only think about what to do on the day of the new incorporation, but we would be risking certain things were not prepared, so when I did this scheme, once I had the steps on the right, I thought that those on the left were needed to be done first.
You might think these processes are simple, yes I know. However, if we think about a bigger process, where many people, teams, enterprises, …. take part, we can use this to specify relations without needing tricky and big texts.