by Hilary Scarlett

---

Hilary’s work has spanned Europe, the US and Asia and concentrates on the development of people-focused change management programmes and employee communication.   She is a director of Scarlett Associates and has worked in communications for over 20 years. She holds an MA in Modern & Medieval languages and Oriental Studies from King’s College, Cambridge University.

---

 

 

Today’s communications professionals are constantly looking for methods which really engage employees in the business - a prerequisite for high-performance, and for employee and customer retention.  Developments in technology have become an area of focus and are providing new methods of communicating that quickly reach people around the globe.  However, one highly effective approach that is being used more and more is a method that is thousands of years old – the use of narrative pictures.  Pictures, metaphor and story-telling are being used by organisations as a way of encouraging dialogue and increasing understanding between managers and their teams.  At first glance they can seem very simple – a piece of paper with images, depicting a story.  However, they can be used to convey complex messages and to demonstrate, for example, the links between market context and business strategy, between organisation-wide initiatives, between activities of the organisation and its impact on the environment.

 

This chapter looks at how organisations, ranging from not-for-profit to manufacturing and to investment banks, have used the process of creating a picture to align leadership teams’ thinking and to help those leadership teams create understanding of their strategies and change programmes.

 

   

fig Scarlett 1                                                                              fig Scarlett 2

 

 

What are they?

 

Strategy maps, transformation maps, big pictures, rich pictures – there are lots of different names for them, but they are essentially large pictures (around A0 in size) used to convey information to audiences in an attractive and meaningful way.  When used to their full potential, they do much more than convey facts about the organisation – they generate real discussion between the groups who are using them.

 

Some use words, some rely solely on images to convey messages. Using words means that they have the advantage of being self-explanatory but creating a picture without words – relying on just the images – means that the picture is much more intriguing and demanding: the viewer has to look hard at the picture, think about what the images mean and interpret what they see.

 

Some organisations use them as part of team meetings, with the manager leading the discussion, others use them at conferences and workshops where they stimulate debates around the room.

 

Some pictures are complete in themselves, others need employees to add to them – either by ‘graffiti-ing’ on them or adding stickers.  Some organisations use pictures for a one-off discussion, others choose to return to them again and again to identify what progress is being made since the initial discussion.

 

 

Why use them?

 

There are at least ten good reasons for using them.

 

1.      They convey a lot of information quickly

 

As the saying goes, ‘a picture tells a thousand words’ and these big pictures do have the benefit of being able to contain a lot of information.  They can provide the context for change, what the future looks like and the steps that the organisation and every employee needs to go through to achieve the vision. They can home in on customer needs or environmental challenges, health and safety issues or personal development. 

 

 

One bank was particularly attracted to using a big picture as they had lengthy documents and word-based presentations that tried to inform employees about its change programme, the consequences of not changing, the elements of its change programme and what would be required of employees.  They knew that it would be hard, if not impossible, to expect employees to read these lengthy documents and take the messages to heart.  All these messages and documents and slides could be summarised in one big picture and, in addition, the layout of the picture could demonstrate the links between the external world and the company’s response to it, the company’s change programme and the ultimate goals.

 

 

2.      They are more visually attractive than word-based documents

 

From early cavemen to our own childhood, we are all drawn towards pictures.  We like to explore them and try to make sense of them.  Many big pictures use colour which makes them particularly vibrant and attractive.  One member of a diversity team who had created a big picture to raise awareness of the importance of diversity, put her big picture up on the wall and said colleagues were constantly walking up to it to have a closer look – attracted by the look of the picture and intrigued to know what was in the picture and why.  But colour is not essential: a skilful artist can make black and white pictures striking and attractive too as picture 1 (to be inserted) shows.

 

 

3.      They appeal to a wider range of senses and therefore learning styles

 

Because a picture appeals to people visually and aurally,  it appeals to a wider range of learning styles: visual learners think in terms of pictures and learn best from visual displays.  Auditory learners will benefit from listening to the story that accompanies the picture and from listening to the debate and dialogue amongst colleagues.

 

 

4.      They encourage debate and dialogue

 

One of the greatest benefits of using a picture is that they encourage discussion.  Whereas a slide-based presentation is often given in a darkened room with one person presenting while others listen, a picture needs to be put up on a wall in good light.  Employees are encouraged to gather around the picture and explore it with their manager or facilitator.  A manager using a picture well can draw people in, ask questions of the group and get them to talk about what they see in the picture and how it is relevant to them.  A major benefit that many managers experience is that employees feel much more comfortable challenging what they see in the picture, rather than directly confronting their manager.  This means that rather than tacitly disagreeing, employees are more likely to question openly what they see, raise the issues that concern them and therefore engage fully in the conversation.  A picture is therefore much more likely to bring out real discussion and debate.

 

 

5.      They enable co-creation

 

Because of the very process that needs to be gone through to create a picture (which we’ll look at later in this chapter), they encourage co-creation.  The initial development might be done by the Executive team with each contributing to what should be in the picture or by teams of employees who can look at early drafts, question what they see and suggest what the content should be and how it should be depicted. The important point is that employees at every level can be asked to contribute to the development of the picture.  This means that not only is the picture more likely to resonate across the hierarchy and geographies, but also that there will be a feeling of ownership for the picture and its messages across the organisation.

 

 

fig. Scarlett 3

 

6.      They make clear links between major themes or initiatives

 

Because the picture is set up over a large ‘canvas’, employees can see how initiatives fit together or are sequenced.  This is much more easily done on a large picture than in lots of pages of slides.  Some pictures depict their change programmes as a journey and the picture can then show at what stage on the journey certain initiatives will be introduced.  The black and white picture (fig Scarlett 3) depicts the reasons for change on the bottom disk and the consequences if the organisation does not change, what the organisation hopes to achieve on the upper disk (customer focus, better global sharing of knowledge etc) and is surrounded by four other disks which depict each of the four change streams.  You can see a person being pulled through a hole in the floor from the current world to the future.  The person doing the pulling represents a change agent as this was who the picture was initially designed for.

 

 

7.      They are open to all employees at every level and in every language to interpret and discuss

 

Pictures work particularly well in multi-lingual organisations, especially if no words are included.  One manufacturing organisation chose a picture as its vehicle to communicate: it was a recently-merged organisation and the fact of having one picture, the same picture, being used by every team across their 120 sites was an important symbolic message in itself.  With sites in many developing countries, having no words was also a great equaliser – the fact that some employees could not read was not an issue and they felt as able to discuss the picture as any other employee in any other country.

 

 

8.      They help leadership teams identify whether they are aligned in their thinking

 

One extremely valuable outcome of using pictures is that they test alignment of leadership thinking.  The development of pictures is usually based upon the input of leaders – each must input to the brief and this reveals whether they have the same understanding of the current situation and the same shared vision as each other.  The leadership team also needs to see the first draft of the picture and this creates an interesting discussion.  Before the next draft can be developed, the team needs to agree content (both what should be in the picture and what can or should be left out), emphasis, style, links between elements of the picture.  This in itself is a useful exercise, enabling them to identify how unified or not they are in their opinions.

 

 

9.      They help leaders and managers think through their story

 

Using a picture means that leaders and managers have to think through what they want to say and what messages they want to convey.  They cannot fall back on reading words from a slide, they have to think how they will structure the session and how they will use the picture, how they will make the story relevant to their team and where they want to get their team to discuss and debate.  Helping leaders and managers to think through their story increases their confidence and personal credibility.

 

 

10.  They are memorable

 

There probably are not many slide-based presentations that employees will remember but the chances are that they will remember a picture or elements of it.  In addition, to keep the picture and its messages front of mind, the picture can be used again: it can be left on the wall for a while to remind employees of its key messages.  One retail bank used elements of the picture in the in-house newsletter and on the intranet to act as a regular reminder of the discussion employees had had.

 

 

 

What are the key steps in developing them?

 

1.      Establish what is needed and create a clear brief

 

The first stage is to be clear about what the purpose of the picture is – what it is trying to achieve, which groups of employees (or external stakeholders) will be using it, what the key messages are.  Also part of this initial stage is identifying who should contribute to the brief and who should be involved in creating the picture.  Creating a clear and detailed brief helps the process immensely: the brief forces those involved in commissioning the picture to agree what the picture should depict – getting the brief right means that there should be far fewer drafts of the picture, saving time and money.

 

 

2.      Co-creation

 

 

The process of creating the picture is in many cases as important as the picture itself. This is what this second stage is all about.

 

 

Those who have commissioned the picture must feel comfortable with the content of the picture before consulting more widely.  This draft can then be taken to groups of employees for them to critique it – asking them to identify what works well and what needs to be changed.  It is essential to think through which and how many people are invited to contribute to this process: involving many people can be very important in ensuring that the content is right and can also be an important, symbolic act of involving people.  It also increases ‘ownership’ of the content and process.  However, the wider the consultation, the more time-consuming the process will be.   Consultation inevitably means lots of comments and many will be contradictory. It is important to be clear before embarking on consultation who will have the final say on what is amended in the picture. 

 

 

 

3.      Coach and equip leaders to use them

 

This is a crucial stage – few managers will have had the experience of running sessions using a big picture.  Some will feel nervous about running such a session, others might assume that the picture should be used in much the same way as a slide-based presentation.  Anyone using a picture needs to be coached in how to do this and in particular they need to be coached in how to use the picture as a means of generating discussion.  Part of this preparation will also be about getting managers to reflect on how they will tailor the content of the picture to their employees – what stories they can tell to illustrate the points and where they need to get employees to participate in the discussion and agree actions.  Using a picture does require preparation - there is no avoiding it - and managers need to recognise this.

 

 

4.      Use the picture to create dialogue; measure

 

The fourth stage is to use the picture.  Ideally every manager should be a participant in a session before they lead one so that they can experience what it feels like and what techniques work well in igniting the discussion.  As ever in the world of communications, it is important to think about how the impact of the sessions will be measured.  Conducting employee research before and after using the picture can help identify what shifts the discussions have created.

 

 

This is also the stage, if not earlier, at which to think about how the picture can be used in the long term: whether it is to be used as a reference point to which managers and their teams will constantly return and whether the images and messages can be conveyed via other internal media.

 

 

 

Mistakes to watch out for

 

Pictures and the process to create them can look disarmingly simple.  Some of the mistakes organisations make:

 

·         Not getting the right people to input: if leaders are not involved early in the process, they can be reluctant to use the picture.  If the right groups of employees are not consulted, the content might be wrong or might jar culturally.

 

 

·         Not training managers: a manager who has not prepared properly for the session will not reap the benefits of using a picture and nor will the team.

 

 

·         Choosing the wrong style of illustration for the audience: this is a very sensitive area.  There are many different styles to choose from and it is important to get the right fit so that employees are drawn to the picture and want to work with it.  Cartoon styles can be seen as very accessible or patronising, lots of words on the picture can mean that it is very simple to understand or that it lacks intrigue and might just as well be a slide-based presentation.

 

 

·         Taking too long to create them: it can happen that if the process of design and consultation takes too long, then the moment has gone.

 

 

·         Using them as a one-way monologue: as mentioned above, there is a danger if managers are not properly coached, that the manager uses it as a tool to talk at people – this undermines the very reason for using a picture.

 

How some organisations have used big pictures

 

·         An international bank created a picture to help their change team understand the overall objectives of the change programme and to look at how the team needed to work together.  The picture was created based on the input of the leaders of the four strands of the change programme. This in itself was an interesting process as the leaders were interviewed individually and the interviews therefore would expose how aligned the thinking of the four leaders was.  Fortunately, and unusually, the thinking was very consistent; when the four leaders each looked at the initial draft, there was just one small change to be made.  This in itself was a positive message to the leaders – they didn’t just need to think they were aligned in their thinking, they could be re-assured that they really were aligned.

 

The picture was then used as the basis of a workshop with the change team which consisted of 25 people ranging in experience and nationality.  The great advantage of this picture was that it did not use any words so that no matter what participants’ first language might be, they would not feel disadvantaged by the picture.

 

The first half of the workshop consisted of the four leaders using the picture to lead a discussion about their strand of the change programme, encouraging team members to question and challenge what they saw in the picture – was this right?  Were these really the challenges the company was facing?  Have we depicted our solutions appropriately and given them the right balance? What’s missing from the picture?

 

The second half was used to allow participants to get their pens out, study the picture hard and to amend the picture as they saw fit.  This meant that they had actively contributed to creating the picture and had thoroughly debated and questioned the purpose of the change programme, its implementation and their role within it. 

 

As a result of the workshop, the picture was re-drafted to reflect the comments of the team. All members of the change team said that they would be confident to talk about the change programme and to use the picture as a means of getting a discussion going with their internal stakeholders.

 

·         And some other examples:

 

o        A government department created a picture to set out their five-year change programme.

 

o        A charity used a picture to get each of their offices to think about diversity and to get employees thinking about whether every aspect of their office and their interactions would encourage people in need from all backgrounds to come to them for guidance.

 

o        A retail bank created a picture to equip thousands of managers to have conversations with their teams at every branch and in every call centre about the future direction of the bank and the role of every employee in achieving that future

 

o        A global manufacturing organisation created a picture to inform all its employees worldwide about health, safety and environmental issues.

 

o        A communication team created a picture to depict the potential impact of well-managed communication and to illustrate how they wanted to work in partnership with their internal stakeholders.

 

 

 “I was attracted to using a picture because we needed to do something different to engage our people.  We had had plenty of presentations and documents but we needed a method that was really going to get our people talking and discussing and thinking.  The picture as a tool to prompt debate did exactly this for us.” Julie Everitt, ABN AMRO

 

 

 

With thanks to Lindsay Seers, Julie Everitt, Mike Pounsford, Domna Lazidou and Sheila Hirst.

 

 

 

 

 

 Create your own business wiki!Support CommunityPublic, not yet premium Privacy Policy RSS