As people who work with people we are often involved in making sense of a complex world in which we operate in. But how do we even begin to do that?
One technique is using visuals to help us make sense of stuff. It works. Take the way an author will use images to represent the key points of the words in a book to help us make sense of complex pieces of an unfolding plot. An image can help us connect with detail of the story, the environment, the character, the emotion, the plot.
I’ve experienced the benefit of visualising complex information recently. There was some information I need to explore, which was complex, detailed and confusing. I used a range of thinking, reflecting and writing techniques to get that out of my head onto pages and pages of my notebook. The next job was to then distil that thinking into ‘chunks’ that I could easily explain to people, but as a summary and without the hours of intricate detail contained in the process.
The end result was four images which represented the information in each chunk and jogged my memory as to what lay behind each.
Visualising information is something that’s no stranger to illustrator Simon Heath. A couple of years ago at the CIPD Annual Conference and Exhibition, I managed to catch up with him to find out more about visualsing in a complex world. Here’s what he had to say…
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