Engaging your entire workforce with your purpose, strategy, and their role in delivering it.
What if we could inspire your colleagues to throw back the duvet, and race in to work, keen to contribute to the success of your organisation day in and day out?
The way forward is to put every single one of them ‘in the picture’ about your strategy and visual metaphors provide a powerful and proven methodology to do just that. But how do you create one?
Why visual metaphors work
Visual metaphors (or big pictures, rich images or learning maps as they are sometimes referred to) work because the majority of us prefer to process information visually. Most of us literally think in pictures. Pictures don’t rely on language skills either, so work well internationally.
Add Storytelling to create a super-channel
If you add in an element of storytelling, perhaps the most successful communication technique ever devised by man, you’ve got a ‘super-channel’ on your hands. As a species we are born storytellers and have been practicing the art for over 27,000 years! Storytelling is the universal currency of effective communication.
The importance of choosing the right metaphor
Get your visual metaphor right and it will stand you in good stead for years to come, providing a clear compelling and consistent narrative for your organisation. And not only in your purpose and strategy communications. Your ‘picture of success’ should feature in your induction activities, conferences and town halls, your objective setting process, you can even use it to build collaboration with your supplier partners. Get the metaphor wrong and the cynics in your business will have a field day and sink your attempts to engage.
Creating alternative metaphors to choose from
Your visual metaphor must really resonate with as many of your workforce as possible, so create some options to choose from. First, identify the 8 to 10 main messages you want to get across to the organisation, certainly no more. Then brainstorm some potential visual metaphors. Journey metaphors often work well, so do evolution, exploration and sporting metaphors. Next create a pen portrait for every one of your options, highlighting how each of your main messages will be brought to life through that metaphor.
Pressure test your options
Given the critical importance of getting your metaphor right we recommend you pressure test your ideas with a representative group of employees. Their task is threefold:
- First try to tear your metaphors to pieces and be as cynical as possible
- Then tell you which metaphors they liked, perhaps even found inspiring
- Finally, contribute their ideas to make the chosen metaphor work even more effectively
It should be noted there is not a picture in sight at this stage. Illustration is a time-consuming process with attendant costs, so we only start building the house when the foundations are complete and signed off.
Less is more
Every visual element that you include in your potential ‘Big Picture’ needs to earn its place and trigger a conversation among colleagues about your purpose, your main messages and the role of colleagues in delivering success. Deciding what you leave out of your visual metaphor is harder than deciding what to include. Keeping your visual metaphor as simple as possible will help ensure its eventual success, as a communication tool.
Taking the next steps
Following the steps above will help you identify the key elements to include in your visual metaphor. Now you are ready to engage a creative partner, like Axiom, to turn these elements into an actual image, which could take the form of an old fashioned marker pen illustration, photo realistic graphics, or these days 3D interactive experiences more usually associated with video games.
Once evolved and signed off, this image then forms the basis of a highly participative briefing tool, the Big Picture for your business, with guidance notes for briefing leaders, a wealth of interactive exercises and even competitions.
The final step is to roll that briefing out globally, and put everyone in the picture, literally, showing them where their contribution fits in.
Make that Big Picture briefing compelling enough and you might just get your workforce throwing back the duvet and racing in to work.
For more information on how we can assist, please contact our team of experts today.
