Drawing on strategy

When words fail you, let pictures take you there...

Does everyone in your organisation understand your strategy and what it means? Do your words really do justice to your strategy? Smart visuals give tangible benefits and real outcomes.

It’s amazing how often a simple little word like ‘strategy’ can generate confusion and misunderstanding, when all along its purpose is to give clarity and direction towards an ultimate goal. Trying to describe your organisational strategy in words alone often lacks the tangible element you need to close the door on a million and one possible interpretations. Storytelling through design, diagrams, images, drawing concepts or even movies helps people to live and breathe that ‘emotional experience’ and find the connection. You need the ‘relative factor’, the additive that your strategy’s words fall short on, that special
snapshot that neatly summarises what you’re trying to achieve. Turning the intangible to the tangible. Whatever definition you give the word strategy, it will in most cases mean a plan by which objectives are pursued and obtained over time, where choices and risks are identified and opportunities taken. It’s big picture planning, supported by smaller goals called objectives, in turn underpinned by bite size tactics to fullfil those objectives. It’s about being three steps ahead of the game and delivering success as an end result. By defining strategy through design you can achieve a set of motivating visuals that can focus and inspire your entire organisation, and your clients. The process of ‘thinking’ visually is fundamental with any conceptual building, and it helps navigate the direction of the strategy through collaborative input.

Pictures enable people to be a more valuable part of the strategy process.

When people are asked to engage with visual concepts to define a product or service, they reflect and feedback and let you know whether you’re heading in the right direction or not. Building those thoughts into visuals in turn helps form the architecture of the strategy itself.

Portgroup’s visual strategy expertise supports our clients’ strategy development. Most of our clients, one way or another, are innovators. Visual strategy is an essential component in delivering results.