Let’s See. Part 1. What’s Really Going On.

In 2001 Nobody Understood Us.

Nor why Structured Visualisation was an idea worth listening to. But we were stubborn. We’ve added a lot of learning since then. We are still stubborn.

We’ve seen how people remain blind to some powerful realities.

• Language and definition have become enemies to meaning, communication and collaboration.
• Systems have been compromised as the wrong problems have been continuously ‘solved’.
• Methods of change have actually enlarged the gap between the issue and the chance of solving it.
• We’ve become stupefied by ignorance and entitlement by those with no right to be.

But above all else we’ve been consciously aiming at the wrong outcome.

In society we see successive governments incapable of making change because of subversive and corrupt systems safeguarding a few. Systems creaking but no real method of wholesale change or intelligent overhaul.

In business instead of thinking how could its solutions, services, products, systems and people all work in a better – a more continuously resilient way – we have created concrete barriers to the very agility and innovation required to survive.

We did this because we could. Well meaning solutions (some not so) have been applied to the problem without really understanding the problem in the first place – then other solutions have been applied to the problem. Problem!

And we are pretty darned good at believing what we want to hear. Watch!

How come the thinking became so ad-hoc, unstructured and wrong?

We think that far too little attention was paid to the whole system coupled with a lack of whole system thinking. There are far too few people even practicing it. While it seems common sense – sense doesn’t appear that common.

I read some great insights from Kim Rees and Dino Citraro from Periscopic recently. We share a lot of their insights. They work to turn massively complex and rich data into things that are at the same time understandable and meaningful. These are also things of real beauty. Things that may have remained hidden were it not for their amazing ability to visualise it.

How come structured visualisation become so important?

“We we’re seeing more interest in large databases, but there was a lag in the sense-making part of it.” – Kim Rees.

Interestingly we do the very same not with data in digital storage systems but with human ones. The heads and hearts and minds of people. And our focus is typically strategy and transformative programs. We get brought in because other approaches have failed, the issues have remained hidden from view and no-one knows what to do – or with luck there is an enlightened leader who recognises that people need to see what’s really going on.

We each have a ton of stuff – bits of information in our heads – but we don’t seem to ever share a single picture of it between us. So in the context of a plan or strategy the absence of a picture creates the real risk of ending up in the wrong place – wasting huge cycles of time and money.