Visualisation and Creative Thinking in Business

100 ways to use visualisation and creative thinking to identify, explore and resolve business issues, presented in a brilliant Periodic Table format. This is a must for anyone looking for new ways to communicate visually - whether its data, concepts, strategy or metaphors that you want to illustrate.



This is a fantastic tool - if you hover your mouse over the Table, examples of each type of illustration pop up to show you how to use it in context.

You can use and/or adapt a fair number of these in Coaching too e.g the Story Template. I loved the Iceberg (so many businesses attend only to the bits they can see and hear, and ignore the more important bits which they can't...), the Feedback Diagram (simple but effective) and Zwicky's Morphological Box (brownie points for the jargon). The Failure Tree is the only one I could see that focuses exclusively on the downsides - not something we advocate if you want to win people over, although it's a useful technique for analysing complex system problems.

And what about the Hype Cycle? I was considering its application to Coaching and Positive Psychology.WRT Coaching, I think we've survived the Trough of Disillusionment, and are travelling gently onwards and upwards through the Scope of Enlightenment to our destination which is the Plateau of
Productivity.

As for Positive Psychology, well in the UK at least, we're still programming the Tom-Tom to get us to the Start of Media Infatuation. Put your seat-belts on, it's going to be a bumpy ride...

With thanks to Sarah 'Intellagirl' Robbins, on whose blog I discovered the Periodic Table, and of course to the guys who invented it, Ralph Lengler and Dr. Martin J. Eppler from visual-literacy.org.