Visually exploring burn out

Cathy M. writes about her experience of Visual Explorer cards as introduced to her by her CCL feedback coach.This is a great illustration of using VE for one on one coaching, and also suggests a self-coaching process, in this case on the topic of burn out.

During my attendance at CCL for the Leadership Development Program, I was blessed to have TZiPi Radonsky as my feedback coach. Prior to attending CCL, I was going through a bit of professional and personal “burn out”. During my feedback session, TZiPi offered me a deck of cards that had a photograph on each card. My assignment was to file through the deck and pull out any cards with pictures that spoke to me in some way. I flipped through the deck and pulled out 7 cards that contained scenes that evoked peace, tranquility and joy in me and 1 card that represented destruction and burn out.

Two interesting things came from the experience:

1) My initial reaction to the burn out card revealed a picture of a bridge embankment that had been destroyed by a tornado or bomb. This demonstrated how I was feeling at that moment. After the empowering, feedback session with TZiPi that followed, I looked at the cards one more time and I couldn’t find the card with the destroyed embankment. I realized that the picture I originally saw as destruction was actually a beautiful bridge crossing a canal leading to a forested area. I was stunned at how being in a more peaceful, clear thinking place completely transformed the picture into something of beauty. Additionally, I never could get the picture back to the original view.

2) The second awareness I had from the card experience came about 4 weeks later. I had been working hard on my CCL goals which included getting back to a state of peace. I began noticing a sense of calm and tranquility in the following weeks and enjoyed recognizing things around me that previously gave me joy. These included:

a. Snow skiing - so I began planning a ski trip with friends this winter.
b. Music - so I purchased tickets for a Christmas concert with the symphony.
c. Nature - so I made a point to notice the sky through the Fall leaves above me on a lunchtime walk through the woods.
d. The beach – so I gathered several girlfriends and went to the beach for the weekend.

A few weeks later, I revisited the cards that I had chosen at CCL (TZiPi sent e-files of them to me) and I was amazed to discover that all of the activities I had planned and accomplished were depicted on the cards I had chosen with TZiPi.

This was quite remarkable. I was pleased to see that the things that evoke peace and joy for me are true even in times when I am in a non-positive place. And, I was impressed that visualizing things I enjoy motivated me to make them happen.

This was an exciting activity!

Cathy M.
CCL attendee, September 2008

What do you see? Using Visual Explorer for admissions essays at the New York University Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service

click through to the New York Times article
more on Dean Schall's address
more at the NYU site
more at Leading Effectively CCL blog

reposted from the New York Times, EducationLife section, Sunday, November 1, 2009

Below is the online application page with the instructions for the essay (click image to enlarge).

More from Dean Ellen Schall:

Excerpt from Dean Ellen Schall's Convocation Remarks
Presented to 2009 graduates of the
NYU Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service
May 15, 2009

“In the Wall Street Journal last week, 10 college presidents were asked to answer a question from their own schools’ applications. They all found it harder than they imagined. We have always understood at Wagner that it mattered how we started to engage you, even as prospective students, that we were beginning a conversation, perhaps a relationship - one that could last for years.

"Two years ago, when many of you applied, we decided to add a particular twist to our application - in part to get your attention, in part to signal we were after a different level of engagement. We gave you the possibility of responding to a photo, a visual image, from a collection of images developed by colleagues at the Center for Creative Leadership. As you may remember, we use Visual Explorer, which is what CCL calls this approach, at orientation as well. The basic idea is that it’s easier to get the conversation started when you have an object in the middle. And we wanted to get a conversation started. more>> and more>>

Strategy as a Learning Process

Hughes, R.L., & Beatty, K.C. (2005). Becoming a strategic leader. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass

An important part of strategic thinking is visual, imaginative, and intuitive. Visual Explorer is a tool for supporting this often neglected part of strategic thinking. VE supports strategy as a learning process, and can help clarify shared strategic understanding of who we are, where we are, and where we want to go, as well as discerning key strategic drivers.

The benefits of Visual Explorer ™ for strategic leadership & strategy creation include:

• Help assess “who we are” and “where we are” as a company in a marketplace
• Scan your environment and your organization with fresh eyes
• Explore, clarify and communicate mission, vision, and values
• Helping identify key strategic drivers
• Surface ideas, intuitions, and new perspectives
• Get people out of their “stuck” perspectives
• Engage emotional undercurrents

Rich Hughes and Kate Beatty (2005) describe strategy as a learning process. Their book Becoming a Strategic Leader shows the importance of both R-mode (“right brain”) and L-mode (“left brain”) processes for this type of learning, and describes how to use VE as a tool for strategic thinking.

Visual Explorer is useful for the front and middle of this learning process: assessing where we are, and, understanding who we are and where we want to go, and focusing on key strategic drivers.

VE is also useful in “clearing the lens” of the strategic learning process—clarifying mission, vision and values.

Facilitation

The five basic steps for a Visual Explorer session apply here, as well as the further measures suggested for fostering dialogue. It can be quite useful to capture the key images, metaphors, and language from the VE session as a means of engaging others in the strategic learning process.

Example

Bruce Byington, CCL Senior Faculty, teaches a process of strategic driver identification using Visual Explorer. Strategic drivers are those relatively few determinants of sustainable competitive advantage for a particular organization in a particular industry or competitive environment (Hughes & Beatty, 2005, p. 27). Visual Explorer’s R-mode processing can bring out new ideas and help to "unstick" people and groups.

1. Use VE to explore some of the following framing questions:

• What industry or business are we in?
• What is our vision?
• What would real success look like?
• What are we missing that might surprise us?
• What is the key organizational capability we need to drive our strategy?

2. Brainstorm potential strategic drivers, as informed by the VE dialogue.

3. Sort, classify, and prioritize potential drivers.

Further Reading

Hughes, R.L., & Beatty, K.C. (2005). Becoming a strategic leader. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Mintzberg, H. (1989). Mintzberg on management: Inside our strange world of organizations. New York: The Free Press.

Palus, C.J. & Horth, D.M. (2002). The leader’s edge: Six creative competencies for navigating complex challenges. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Powerful moves in Visual Explorer™ facilitation

Here are reflections from our partner Hamish Taylor, outlining some powerful yet simple ways of using Visual Explorer, including digital collages.
"In the first instance, the challenge was to look at new ways of working in Global Virtual Teams. You can probably tell from the commonality of the images that the consensus view (i.e., the subset of common images that were selected by more than one syndicate group) was:

• International – the stamps.
• Required concerted involvement – the many hands.
• Was currently fragile and to thrive would always need nurturing – the cradled feet.
• Recognised the need for strong networking – rowing boat, interlinked and overlapped hands.
• Acknowledged the need to pull in one direction whilst strengthening the interconnecting bonds from a diversity of thought.
• Longed for the opportunity to celebrate and were seeking a new dawn!

Now when we look at the combination of factors, we start to see that hands is a common feature, linkages and connectivity are prominent. It is an organisation which thankfully is 100% equal opportunity, multi-cultural and practises strong gender-equality principles. It is actually a group that is not scared to be soft and understands Emotional Intelligence.

Now let’s look at a different use in which the CCL VE was used to understand the pillars of a leading brand.

Here the most obvious commonality was the craftsmanship, illustrated by the attention to hands and indeed craftsmen. There is also sensuality, taste and texture, all supported by a natural complexity and studied beauty.

Interestingly the brand also has a certain abstract quality and a subtlety that required that the respondents to this exercise, both very talented and experienced marketers, explained the hidden depths of their brand and its unique personality. I was later to discover, from a separate visit, that the depth of painstaking attention to detail was very much part of the company philosophy and indeed lay at the very heart of the brand.

In both instances, the exercise took less than 15 minutes to reveal a roadmap for me to explore later and it served to open up the eyes of the participants to new development pathways and opportunities for discussion. The second example only involved two people, the first had around 16 participants.

Elaborating further on the use of Visual Explorer as a one-on-one before progressing to workshop usage: Group leaders often have fears of what a new coach / consultant will reveal about their organisation and how it is functioning. Using the VE tool on a completely different question from that which will be later used with the group as a whole removes some of those fears. That step gives the group leaders an early insight that allows them to take fresh perspectives when they come to work with the tool properly in the workshop environment. The early exposure has indeed started them thinking. They recall the first round of one-to-one discussions and they engage more with the “live effort” without feeling threatened by what people “might say”.

I have really enjoyed the ease with which you can do a cut and paste from the image bank in order to make a single summary slide on PowerPoint - when you then have the images either on laptop screen or indeed on the big screen, you immediately see another degree of depth to them. Psychologically I think that this is because in daily business, we have become accustomed to taking things into account via the filter of our PC screen dimensions - therefore when you have several VE pictures together on the one screen, you start to identify patterns in terms of predominant colours, predominant moods, presence or absence of movement (some people tend to think in terms of still life, whereas others are more attracted to the images of movement) and the overall number of people in any given collage. I have found it quite compelling when you come across a particular syndicate group whose image selection is dominated by a selection of single people shots - this is very telling and as a coach, you start to probe on that point. Interestingly most often the collection of single people is the "current" and the "ideal" is the groups and team shots. I strongly believe that this is partially driven by the e-mail driven, teleconference facilitated virtual team environment in which more and more organisations are having to operate.

I've also found that by taking the images into the single composite, you get two bites at the feedback cherry - the first when people are talking through their selection of images (still the most powerful) and the second when as the coach/facilitator you run the review of the different syndicate groups on screen. This then leads to the wider audience commenting on each other's groups and I have found that you could almost vote on the composite of composites at that point. Both interactive stages are powerful, the composite exercise allows you to progress extremely rapidly.

As a coach, I have also found it useful to refer back to "representative images" later in the Workshop and use VE both as an energising ice-breaker and a powerful insights anchor. Moreover this use of the tool is something that I feel that CCL should teach as otherwise people will not be able to make full use of it (perhaps not everyone will be able to do so, however everyone could improve their EMPATHY skills through actively using VE).

Final feedback point before I head for bed on this side of the Pond - I get great value from playing the "numbers game" with Visual Explorer. I deliberately start by setting no limits - the syndicates almost always ask for a limiting number, I still don't give them one. You then get some groups who self-limit themselves (most often to 4 or 5 images) but for all groups, I then ask them to cut them down progressively - if they have gone for 7 or 8, I ask for 3; once they have done 3, I ask for 1 image only. This editing process helps distill out the values that are inherent to their image selection. The forced choice allows you to ask not only about the "Why that ONE?" but also the "Why did you cut out those ones at the first editing stage?". You can only do this if you do not force the groups to pick a limited number of images - once they have done their first selection and talked about them, you know that each image selected has a particular value to the overall task; therefore the editing process to 2nd Stage and 3rd Stage are effectively value-based prioritisations.

From: Hamish Taylor
www.shinergise.com

Visual Explorer applications: Ethnography, innovation, and market research

Because we represent the outcome of thoughts verbally, it's easy to think that thought occurs in the form of words. That's just not the case. ...

Gerald Zaltman

Figure 1: “Comfort” can mean many things, even when used to describe something as simple as a sock.

A growing number of people are using Visual Explorer for various kinds of ethnography and cultural anthropology, including market research, generational studies, focus groups, innovation deep dives, interviews, and face-to-face and online surveys.

Why use Visual Explorer for ethnography?

People know a lot more than they can put into words. Cognitive scientists have learned that knowledge, including self-knowledge, is often unconscious, intuitive, emotional, imaginal, and visceral. Imagery and metaphor form the deeper languages of the mind. This is a problem for survey research and focus groups. When people respond to a question in a group or survey they are often unable to articulate what they really know. Also, traditional focus groups tend to explore what is rather than what might be.
Visual Explorer is a tool for evoking and processing knowledge at deeper levels of knowing and desires, and bringing it into a conversation for sharper focus. The selected VE images can then be used to make collages or storyboards of the topic at hand, as a series of linked metaphors, scenes, sequences, stories, future desires, and so on.

Benefits of VE for ethnography

• Tapping into personal experiences and passions
• Surface and engage emotional undercurrents
• Putting something tangible in the middle of an otherwise abstract conversation
• People frame and illustrate their thoughts with each other
• Make the invisible visible, and the unconscious conscious
• Surfaces individual and shared assumptions
• Images bridge differing context and cultures
• Fun and playful, yet at the same time serious dialogue
• Create new metaphors and images
• Fresh, memorable metaphors and stories
• Self-disclosure and vulnerability in a safe context.
• Tangible images that can be reused in paper and digital forms

Background

Much of our thinking occurs in images and metaphors. Visual imagery can improve the efficacy of surveys and assessments. Gerald Zaltman at the Harvard Business School has developed an image and metaphor technique for marketing research called the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET). The ZMET technique employs images to understand consumers underlying relationships with products.

Marketers using ZMET get people to describe their experiences with a product by having them cut pictures out of magazines that represent their intuitions, thoughts, and feelings about the product. Groups of subjects are brought to the lab to for interviews about the product, using the images to elicit metaphors. Collaging of the images with the help of a graphic artist, and exploring the collage in dialogue reveals deeper connections and emotions. The interviews and conversations are highly metaphoric and revealing, illuminating associations that would otherwise lie far beneath the surface.

Market research at Quixote Group

Chuck Mattina, president of Quixote Group, uses VE as a tool in focus groups to help consumers articulate the emotional connection they have with a product, service or company. Gaining insights into the emotional connection allows clients to understand how to create preference and loyalty to their brands, and can create meaningful differentiation among commodity oriented products or services.

There are many unique applications for Visual Explorer in the area of focus group research. Quixote Group has combined Visual Explorer with mind mapping techniques to help clients better understand the rational (mind mapping) and emotional (Visual Explorer) benefits of a concept. The result of these combined exercises is a visual depiction of a concept that helps everyone within the client company “see” what the concept means to the target audience.

Visual Explorer also allows researchers to better understand the meaning of words that may be multi-dimensional. For example, “comfort” can mean many things, even when used to describe something as simple as a sock (figure 1, above). Using Visual Explorer, one not only discovers that "comfort creates confidence," but one can also better understand the different dimensions and meanings of confidence (figure 2, below).

Figure 2: The dimensions and meanings of "comfort = confidence"

Visual Explorer can also help focus group respondents summarize their feelings toward a product or service in ways that allow them to verbalize their emotions in a safe and effective way. For example, in exploring the emotional benefits of a product that helps or minimize the appearance of scars, Quixote Group asked respondents to select a picture that described how they would feel if their scars were reduced or minimized. Several images were consistently selected throughout multiple focus group sessions.
The chick and egg represented a feeling of rebirth and renewal, and related to the idea that the only time women consider their skin to be perfect is when they were born. The exercise also allowed women to verbalize how they feel when their child gets their first scar, as they realize that their children’s skin is no longer perfect.

This dove being released expressed the sense of freedom that respondents would feel they were no longer controlled by their scars. The exercise allowed women to talk about the steps they take when dressing to hide certain scars, and how free they would feel if they no longer had to worry about it any longer.

Visual Explorer can also help researchers go beyond language and cultural barriers by using the common language of photos. In conducting research for a line of cookware designed for Hispanic families, Quixote Group used Visual Explorer to gain insights into what family means to first generation Hispanic Americans. The exercise allowed women to convey the role they play in the family, as well as the importance of nutrition, family values, traditions and education.

Quixote Group also uses Visual Explorer to help understand the emotional benefit of rational concepts and ideas. Focus group respondents can easily talk about the perceived benefits offered by the ability to customize their own furniture, but will have difficulty in articulating how a concept such as this would make them feel. Visual Explorer helps bridge the gap by providing respondents with a range of interesting visual stimuli that allows them to express their feelings about even the most rational of ideas. The keys to using Visual Explorer effectively in a focus group are knowing when to introduce the exercise and how to properly phrase the selection criteria.

Quixote Group also culls down the number of photos prior to a focus group to avoid overwhelming respondents, and will often eliminate photos that may be too literal or obvious based on the topic.

Understanding the worldviews of Generation Y in Argentina

Visual Explorer is about sculpting knowledge.
Alvaro Rolon, Neelus

Neelus Business Innovation is a consulting company in Argentina who wanted to understand the worldviews and preferences of Generation Y (age 17 to 25). These young people face great social uncertainties and challenges, and are the first generation to fully experience a globalized economy. Companies had come to Neelus with their problems in understanding this generation and in dealing with differences from prior generations. They had several key questions:

1- How might we segment the new so-called Generation Y in Argentina?
2- How do those young people relate to the future? What there are their dreams for the future?
3- How does Generation Y understand relationships between themselves and significant others?
4- What are their expectations for jobs and careers? What should companies do to gain acceptance and raise motivation among those young people?
5- What are the implications for their behaviors and attitudes toward brands?

Neelus addressed these questions through three linked research methodologies:

A-Ethnographic observation: visiting universities, public places, jobs, etc. in order to observe how they move, what they do, what they use, etc.
B-Quantitative surveys: Responding to specific questions about preferences etc. on numerical scales.
C-Metaphoric exploration: Visual Explorer, collage, and dialogue.

Neelus understood that what people say, and even what they do, are not sufficient for the deeper kinds of understanding they sought: It is critical to understand what people mean, underneath their actions and words. According to Alvaro Rolon and Juan Ordoñez, Neelus co-founders, they used VE to understand “what they think and feel in a subtler way about what they expect, their dreams, and their fantasies.”

Neelus sampled a total of 63 young people, ages 17 to 25, some studying at university, and some working people. 14 small groups were formed, each focusing their deeper exploration on one of five broad areas: Life (the most general), Work, Relationships, and Leisure/Fun. Because the key questions are mainly future-oriented (expectations, dreams, careers), each group had a framing question of the form “What will Life [or Work, Relationships, Leisure] be like in the year 2020?”

Neelus used VE in a innovative way, such that the group dialogue was separated from the image selection and description. Each group was led by a psychologist trained in the process. First, each person chose an image in response to the group’s framing question (and it worked well to add the suggestion “… or let the image choose you.”) Each person then filled out a worksheet about their perceptions and interpretations of the image in light of the question. Each person then spoke to the group about their image.

After the VE step, the group together built a collage, as a representation of their collective answer to the framing questions, with images from magazines (using up VE images in that way proved to be too expensive). The final step in the two-hour process was a dialogue about metaphors. The group was asked: “Forget the images … what metaphor would you use in response to this statement: For me living [working, etc.] in the future is like … .”

According to Alvaro: "The conversation around the metaphors, that’s when the subtle content came out. People crying … that’s when the deep stuff came up, like therapy.”

Finally, Neelus convened an interdisciplinary group of experts to put all the results on the table and interpret themes. Eight main themes were discerned. The slides illustrating the first theme of depersonalization are shown below:

Insights and advice for using Visual Explorer for ethnography

Alvaro Rolon of Neelus offers some insights and advice about using Visual Explorer for this kind of ethnography:

• VE is about sculpting knowledge. We use it in all our projects.
  
• If I want to put myself in the universe—mind, spirit, body—of the other person, what tools do I have? Language itself does not do it all. VE helped us to find a third language, where the personal and social universes meets, but in a language that makes more sense, and it reveals and discovers new things. VE is close to the spirit or heart, to the language people have inside. The three languages are:
  1. What I SAY (survey. I speak in words and numbers.)
  2. What I DO (ethnographic; I speak by actions.)
  3. What I MEAN (symbolic, visual, imaginal. I speak in images.)
  
• With any group, I see them be empowered by Visual Explorer, because they have to choose the image. In other circumstances, you put them in a powerless place, because you only ask them questions. Here, they feel empowered by seeing the images to choose, they become artists, they sculpt things. You become artists with these images.

What advice do you have for others using VE for a similar purpose?

• Have fun! I mean it.
  
• Don’t put your universe straight in their universe. First, before any sessions, you use the tool and get to know it. Try to understand the language behind the tool yourself.
  
• For some of them, entering the symbolic level is quite difficult. When you say “Choose an image that represents …” they look at you funny. For them the process feels like a jumbo jet landing in 10 seconds—but when it lands they are good.
  
• We needed to make them feel comfortable, and build trust. We spent 2 hours with each group.
  
• Build good questions. We spent a week thinking of the questions. Einstein said: 59 min asking the question, one minute answering.

Further reading

Davenport, T.H., and Beck, J.C. The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2001.

Palus, C.J., & Horth, D.M. (2002). The leader’s edge: Six creative competencies for navigating complex challenges. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Palus, C.J., & Drath, W.H. (2001). Putting something in the middle: An approach to dialogue. Reflections. 3(2), 28-39.
Pink, D.H. Metaphor Marketing. Fast Company, 14, 1998, p. 214.
Suri, Jane Fulton & Suzanne Gibbs Howard. Going Deeper, Seeing Further: Enhancing Ethnographic Interpretations to Reveal More Meaningful Opportunities for Design. Journal of Advertising Research, September 2006. more at IDEO>>

Zaltman, J. and Coulter, R.H. Seeing the Voice of the Customer: Metaphor-Based Advertising Research. Journal of Advertising Research, 35 (4), 1995.

VE cards used in one-one-one interviews to assess an organization's leadership culture

Jon Abeles (Senior Vice President, Talent Management & Diversity) used the small-size Visual Explorer Cards during interviews and focus groups, with the goal of assessing the effectiveness of senior leaderhip within a region. In one-on-one interviews dealing with sensitive corporate issues, the cards help establish rapport at a deeper level. Jon then combined the images with notes from his interviews into a Powerpoint show for the feedback and discussion of the findings with the CEO and his leadership team. Here are some of his thoughts on this approach:

I used the small card deck for my personal interviews with the leadership team, the Board of Directors, and the Physicians. The goal of the assessment was to see how effective the senior leadership was. I liked using the poker sized deck with the individuals I met with 1 on 1. They were more personal, and easier to handle in a quick fashion. Leaders at this level and Board members do not want to be encumbered by size: the smaller the better. It was an intimate setting, and the poker-size cards worked well. There were enough cards. If there were more, it might have made the task a bit tougher for the participants, and would have reduced my time with them. There is great variety among the cards to get at any issue that I was interested in hearing about.

The cards were an excellent mediator of dialogue. This was a situation that was one of vulnerability for the leader, and also for subordinates and board as they disclosed sensitive persectives to me—a member of the Corporate entity. The cards helped break through this barrier, and were helpful in getting at the affective domain, as well as the cognitive domain when describing their circumstances.

Afterward, in a session with the President, I projected the images and personally read the related text about each image to the Divisional President. It took over 3 hours, and prompted great conversation.The cards will become as significant part of my tool bag. They were excellent, and really helped us with this audit.

Here are some excerpts from Jon's work, in the words and images of the people he interviewed:

Fire. This organization. This picture could signify a burning platform. Things need to be second guessed and transformed. Must burn out things that are history. We must pull together key people, examine key facts, and collectively come together to design the short term and the long term. Give this challenge back to the staff to solve. Don't cut your muscle. Expense reduction will not sustain us. Focus on growth and net revenue. We are in a defensive routine. ...

I'm trying to go in a direction. Don't know where the line will stop. Budget changes may affect our direction, depending on the day. … I feel that I am free falling, and wonder when it will be over. ...

The team that understands a crisis is at hand. Everyone is working together in what they have been trained to do to alleviate that situation. ...