Introduction to Visual Explorer

Charles J. Palus
David Magellan Horth
Center for Creative Leadership

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Visual Explorer: A Pictorial Introduction

Visual Explorer (VE) is a tool for groups seeking to explore complex topics. It’s a way to make sense of complexity as the foundation of effective action. Visual Explorer is based on the insight that visual images can enhance thinking, relating, meaning-making, and communicating. Our own research has demonstrated the power of putting visual images in the middle of difficult conversations, as a way to create dialogue, and as a way to make shared sense of complex challenges.

The VE tool itself is a set of several hundred images, chosen for their ability to support constructive conversations in a wide variety of situations. The images are deliberately diverse and global in subject, context, and aesthetics, sampling the spectra of the human condition. Subjects range from food to space travel, from birth to death, from organization to complexity and chaos. The images invite examination—they are visually interesting in some way; and they invite connection—they carry ideas and relationships.

Visual Explorer is based on research at CCL done as part of the Leading Creatively Project. Insights from that project, and the deeper context for VE, are available in the book The Leader’s Edge (Palus & Horth, 2002). This research identified six creative leadership competencies—paying attention, personalizing, imaging, serious play, collaborative inquiry, and crafting—essential for facing and solving complex challenges. Thus Visual Explorer is a tool to enhance the whole suite of these competencies—for example, paying attention in service of inquiry—and to do creative, collective, effective work. A variety of articles are available that explore aspects of the theory and practice of what we generally refer to as mediated dialogue—putting images and artifacts in the middle of conversations and deeper dialogues (Palus & Drath, 2001).

In general VE is helpful in:

• Seeking patterns in complex issues and making connections
• Seeking a variety of perspectives
• Asking new questions
• Eliciting stories and creating metaphors
• Tapping into personal experiences and passions
• Articulating what has been unspoken
• Relating with each other through dialogue

What Does Visual Explorer Do?

The underlying objective in using VE is for group members to collectively explore a complex topic from a variety of perspectives. The goal is typically to build shared understanding and prepare for taking more effective action. VE is thus just one part of a larger process of addressing a challenge. It doesn’t by itself create decisions or actions, but rather helps groups understand the context and the perspectives that surround the decisions. One of the strengths of the tool is its versatility. Although its original applications were with groups of managers and leaders in organizational settings, it has also been effectively used in a wide variety of settings, for example in education (K – adult), marketing focus groups, and in one on one coaching.

This leads to several key points about what VE is, and what it is not.

• VE is not in itself a “team exercise,” game, or simulation. There is no single right way to use it. Rather it is a flexible tool most often used to facilitate (not replace) a good conversation.
• Much of the power of the tool lies in the images themselves, and the ways they support the projection and construction of meaning. The images in the VE set evoke human experience on a variety of dimensions, including cultural and other dimension of diversity, nature, design, emotions, systems, aesthetics, and so on. Thus the VE tool can be adapted (as experience has shown) to help people engage in settings across a variety of human experiences.
• VE does not typically require a trained facilitator. It is often self-facilitated by a leader or member of a team. Of course most situations can benefit from prior experience and skill at facilitation. VE is somewhat self-correcting and forgiving, such that the default process tends to be a positive one—a good conversation supported by meaningful imagery.