This stage is about finding the core of the story. Making the critical concepts visible. Letting the story tell itself in images. Using pictures or diagrams to make the salient points impossible to miss. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a metaphor is worth a thousand pictures—whether it’s personal or organizational.
We’ve helped people accomplish this in many ways. We have often drawn on papered walls to capture ideas during meetings, charted the life stories of people and organizations as murals, or drawn various “timescapes” to help communicate an organization’s history to others.
First we listen, then we mirror, connect, and clarify. We storyboard essential elements, and then draw pictures, all as a collaborative process. We endeavor to tell real stories in more visual ways. The successful result is seeing the ideas come to life.
