I can’t quite picture what you’re telling me.  What does it look like?  Why don’t we stop talking about it and do it?

When we draw it, make it, or enact it, we make something visible, and more real to others – so less likely someone will get it wrong: “I thought that’s what you wanted me to do!”

What we find ourselves doing is prototyping: trying something out to see if it actually works, or maybe how we can make it work.

Another benefit of making something visible is we find out what we can really do and how much we really have.

We sometimes make things visible to ourselves first.

I’m part of an organisation which can still be talking about things decades later – not giving itself the chance of knowing whether something will work or not.

“If you want everyone to have the same mental model of a problem, the fastest way to do it is with a picture.”*

Try doodling it: here’s a visual alphabet which makes it possible for everyone to illustrate what they’re talking about:

(*Visualisation expert David Siebert, quoted in Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.  I don’t know there were visualisation experts!)
(**From Sunni Brown’s The Doodle Revolution.)