Leadership Coaching: Helping Them Visualize

Tuesday, November 20, 2007


Three recent client situations reminded me that most of us find it very difficult to visualize something intangible like teamwork or a feedback-rich culture or a new business model. It’s difficult to verbally answer the question, “what would you hear people say or see them do that would indicate to you this organization values feedback?” when you don’t have a picture of that possible state in your mind.

So here are two products I’ve come across to help leaders visualize what they are trying to create in their organizations. I recently used the VisualsSpeak product with a team recently designated a “leadership team” as a way to help them describe who they are individually and what they bring to the team. VisualsSpeak co-founder Christine Martell was very helpful in getting me up to speed on how best to structure the exercise and facilitate the discussion. The 200 photos were visually engaging and stimulated some great insights from the individual leaders about their role and contribution to the team. The team indicated that the exercise was very helpful in communicating another dimension of each member’s personality and goals, all of which is going to help them continue to build trust with each other. I think this tool is very adaptable and would work great in any situation where a leadership team is trying to make a possible future as concrete as possible.

By the way, Christine is one of the facilitators who will be at the inaugural VizThink Conference scheduled for late January in San Francisco. I’m going to it to learn more about how I can use the visual world to make leadership and organization development come alive. And because you are fortunate to be a reader of this blog, here is a discount code (ACBT1 – that’s a number one at the end of the code) to use to get $100 off your registration price (it pays to know the right people.)

The second product is a video production company called Silver and Goldie that specialize in the production technique called “machinima.” As they describe it, machinima (a word combining "machine animation" and "cinema") is the art of making real movies in virtual worlds that exist as 3D computer-generated imagery (CGI). They have built a studio in Second Life (a virtual world that has gotten a fair amount of press over the past year or so) and create videos without a lot of the limitations the real world imposes and for a cost that is often much more cost-effective as well. Even if you’re not into the virtual world, I find Second Life fascinating because it is giving us a glimpse of what a 3-D Internet is going to look like. Here’s a sample of a video they did for Intel.

What’s great about this technology and product is that it can help leaders communicate a visual picture of what a future state of the company or its culture will look and sound like. So instead of individual employees needing to fill the usual “picture” vacuum (often a source of some very outrageous but creative rumors), they can instead react to a visualization of what the new business model or culture will look and sound like. And a key to motivating people to move forward into the future is to give them a clear picture of what it will look like. Technology now allows you to visually create the future for a very reasonable price. Very cool.