Seeing the Unseen Part 3: Emotions

The Art of Applied Visual Thinking

We've been talking about visual thinking and invisible things. Pictures surface assumptions, the hidden beliefs that steer us before we start. Drawings of our habitual thinking patterns and systems reveal opportunities for praise and improvement. Both of those live largely in the domain of ideas. If you missed either of these, you can find them here: Part 1 and Part 2.

Before we can expect to have a conversation about ideas, there are a few essential needs that need to be satisfied. People need to have their physical and emotional needs met before they can access their higher thinking skills.

I’ve seen and felt this principle firsthand. I’ve had my own inner turmoil interrupt what could have been a good conversation, and I’ve seen well-designed meetings implode because emotions like mistrust, fear and insecurity shrouded productivity. Reading and calibrating the emotional climate in a room is sticky. Read on to learn how visual thinking can clear the air for you and your group. 

WHAT EMOTIONS LOOK LIKE (WHEN YOU DRAW THEM)

Emotions are, in many ways, already visual. We feel them in space and color and texture before we find language for them. Ask someone how they're doing and they might struggle. Ask them to draw how they're doing, give them sixty seconds and a marker, and most people will surprise themselves with what appears on the page.

Some common forms are:

Weather maps. The classic check-in tool: draw the weather inside you right now. Thunderstorm. Partly cloudy with patches of sun. A fog so thick you can't see the next step. Strikingly accurate, immediately communicative, and gentle enough to feel safe.

Energy maps. Where does your energy go in a typical week? What drains you and what fills you? Drawing this as a landscape, with valleys and hills and a river that runs fast or slow, surfaces things that a verbal answer rarely reaches.

Journey maps with emotional texture. Any customer journey, learning journey, or change journey has an emotional dimension. Drawing the feeling alongside the steps, a graph of highs and lows, a color track that shifts from red to orange to gold, makes the human experience of the process visible.

THE COURAGE TO DRAW – FOR YOU AND THE TEAM

Drawing emotions takes a particular kind of courage. If naming emotions sounds scary to you, bear with me. It's the courage to say: this is what's happening inside me, and I'm willing to put it somewhere we can both see it.

You and many of the people you work with, likely, have learned very well how to keep the inner experience out of the professional conversation. Sometimes you or the whole group, however, have an off day emotionally, and whole conversation is affected. When the room is freezing, lunch is delayed or there have been rumors of layoffs, it is impossible to expect people to bring their best selves to work.

Visual thinking doesn't demand that people express emotions. It creates permission, a low-stakes, non-verbal invitation. The drawn weather map is less threatening than the direct question "how are you really doing?" precisely because drawing gives people a little bit of distance. They're describing their picture, not their wounds. That distance is the gift. The drawing is the bridge.

YOU KNOW…

Facts matter. Make yours heard AND seen through visuals.

The emotional facts of a room are among the most important facts there are. Research on psychological safety, most notably the years-long Google study known as Project Aristotle, found that one of the biggest predictors of team performance was not intelligence, experience, or strategy. It was whether team members felt safe to take interpersonal risks.

Visual check-ins and emotional mapping are, among other things, tools for building that safety. They are how teams learn to see each other. 

The drawing is the fact; the conversation it opens is the impact.