In a previous post, I asked if visual literacy wasn’t a key work literacy skill. I was thinking of it in terms of presenting information visually, but there’s another way to consider the roles of visual literacy–how can visual thinking skills help us develop other important work literacy skills and additional knowledge?

One of my favorite and most knowledgeable experts in the area of visual thinking is Christine Martell of VisualsSpeak. Today she has a really thought-provoking post on using visuals to explore deep metaphors, elaborating on some of the thinking in the book Marketing Metaphoria: What Deep Metaphors Reveal About the Minds of Consumer.

Says Christine:

One of the more interesting articles coming from the publicity for the book was published by the Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge Newsletter, Why Don’t Managers Think Deeply?.

In decrying the lack of what they call “deep thinking” among managers and especially those responsible for marketing, they suggest some things that get in its way. Among them are:

1. reluctance to take risk, especially when short-term performance is at stake,
2. the fear of disruption resulting from “thinking differently and deeply,”
3. the potential psychological cost of changing one’s mind resulting from deep thinking,
4. the lack of information providing deep insights on which to base deep thinking.

Christine goes on to suggest that another reasons that managers might not be able to engage in this kind of metaphorical deep thinking is because they lack the visual skills to do so. I tend to agree. Not many of us have learned how to use visual thinking as a way to develop our creativity, problem-solving and other kinds of skills, although there may be changes on the horizon around this, with the advent of organizations like VizThink.

Check out Christine’s post for some great links to visual thinking resources. I’d also love to hear more about your thoughts regarding how visual thinking and visual literacy skills might be a pathway to developing other kinds of work literacy skills.