It can be difficult to feel like a strategy session is beneficial for your business and moves your company forward. This disconnect between intent and results can be due to a myriad of possible matters in how meetings are run or preconceived notions before a strategy session begins. Strategic illustration can be a great way to stimulate a development meeting and grow new ideas.
Strategic illustration refers to images created to support any business strategy, regardless of models or approaches used to create the strategy. Typically strategic drawing focuses on three principles to create the illustrations.
- Picture the outcome.
- Capture the complexity.
- Illustrate the possibility.
The question often faced by meeting leaders is, how do I get started?
1. How Do You Draw?
Consider using templates to get you started. See: http://grovetools-inc.com/ or http://us.neuland.com/. There are also a number of good books on the subject, but an easy, straightforward approach that is geared towards non-artist is: Picture Your Business Strategy.
2. Which Simple Icons?
Drawings in the development meeting don’t need to be sophisticated, in fact the more sophisticated the drawing the more alienating it is. Imagine an artist gets up and draws something really nice on the board. If you are like more of us, not an artist, how likely will you be to get up and erase or change their work?
So, keep it simple. Be ok with throwing the drawing out and starting over. Here are some examples of simple illustrations and the use of icons that can get you started with Strategic Illustration in your next development meeting.
Simple pictures describe the problem/solutions.
