How Can You Build Visual Thinking Into Your Practice?

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Nora Herting, Founder and CEO of ImageThink and Author of the new book, Draw Your Big Idea. Nora and I talk about the benefits of visual thinking, some of the myths surrounding art and business, and some of the exercises anyone can use to think and work more creatively using visualization tools. Let's get started.

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Interview Transcript of Nora Herting, Founder and CEO of ImageThink and Author of Draw Your Big Idea

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Nora Herting. She is Founder and CEO at the visual strategy firm ImageThink, and Author of the new book called Draw Your Big Idea: The Ultimate Creativity Tool for Turning Thoughts into Action and Dreams into Reality. Welcome to the show, Nora. 

Nora Herting: Hi, Brian. Great to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: I am so excited to have you on this show. Because I've been a big proponent, whether I'm working with startups or corporate innovation teams about using visual tools to help you think through new ideas and launch new projects and that. And when I came upon you and the stuff that you're doing in this space, I wanted to have you on the show to dig in deeper about what it all takes to make this happen.

So, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? How you went from becoming an artist and a photographer to working your way to work with some of the biggest companies in the world, Google and IBM and NASA on this idea of visual strategy. 

Nora Herting: Basically, I had started my career off in academia as an artist, going into academia, sort of the most sure-fire fit. You get the tenure track and the health insurance and whatnot. And I was 27. Managed to get a position. And then had this terrible realization that my goal was really just a failure of imagination. That I hadn't really thought or tested what else I could do with my skill set, outside of sort of this academic world.

So, I left my position, moved to New York with no job. And found myself at a division of Cap Gemini that we would call now like their design thinking solution. But this was the early 2000s. And that wasn't really a term we even used there. But it was a network of facilitators that we would put huge corporate projects through these innovative incubators for three days and tell them in three days we could get three months of work out of their team. 

And I learned the skill of graphic recording while I was there because they knew I, besides having a Masters, I had also for a little while been an elementary school art teacher, which was actually kind of a great qualification for this particular work. And saw the power of visuals to help business people really clarify their thinking.

Get people on the same page. Sort out a lot of complexity. And in time, my first client, when we started ImageThink was NASA. And I had this real moment there where they had brought in someone to talk about the space glove. They had not been able to innovate a better space glove for several decades. They opened it up to a public contest. 

All these teams in turn, but it was actually one solo engineer that designed a better space glove than all of the NASA scientists in a couple of decades. And they were fascinated about how this worked, and they described this guy's process. And while I was there, I'm visualizing the story. And I realized that they're really just describing a series of iterative process.

Things that are really intuitive to tinkers to artists. And that it was just this moment where I thought these things that I've learned that seems so innate to the creative process were mysteries to corporations. So that's one of the joys of ImageThink is not just using the visual tools, but really helping. Tried to demystify that for business leaders so that they can take some of those same mindsets and techniques and apply them to innovation in larger companies. 

Brian Ardinger: I think a lot of folks do have that misperception, that businesses over here and art is over here. What are some of the myths that you've seen of how people and innovators should be doubling down on art in the business world?

Nora Herting: Great question. I love this question. You know one big myth is if you don't have the title Creative on your business card and then you don't have an opportunity to think creatively. Just don't believe that that's true. At ImageThink I think that we believe that everybody who has a job that requires complexity or problem solving has a huge creative opportunity in front of them.

So that's one thing is people will think, oh, because I'm in engineering or because I'm in HR, what I don't get to be creative. I forgot how to be creative. Another one is just this narrow idea that, you know, you're only creative if you can paint or write or play the guitar. Right. 

So, expanding that idea to things that are more broad and then, you know, just kind of a lack of creative confidence in people, kind of around those ideas. And, you know, we have different ways of trying to break that down and expose people, show people, that they can exercise that muscle. And really, they have that opportunity every time. 

Brian Ardinger: Walk me through some of the benefits that you've seen firsthand about getting people unstuck or what really happens when you move into that art visual mode to tackle problems that you couldn't track before.

Nora Herting: One example or one benefit of it is first off is to remember it's a very, very old technology. We've been drawing and using pictures to communicate before, you know, as a species before we had written language. You know, some of the earliest cave paintings are 30,000 BC. And they're basically instructions for hunting.

So, this is something that we've been hard-wired neurologically for a long time to process things and pictures. And when you do that, you're using multiple facets of your brain, including the prefrontal cortex. I like to tell people if they want to look at a problem differently, or they want to use a different set of neurons to fire, ask people to illustrate, or at least use visuals of some aspect of it to really get people just literally to think a little bit differently. 

So, one way we do that is first to just have people practice on really low stakes things. We'll do something called like a visual bio. We'll ask everyone to tell us about themselves, really mundane things like their name, their role, but using only pictures to convey that.

And what happens is there's a lot of laughing, people feel a little awkward. But people realize pretty quickly that there's a lot more nuance that gets conveyed when someone is illustrating, let's say their role, than just say, you know, I'm a Director of Innovation at X company. Right. So how they think about that?

So that immediately gets peopl...