Learning visual thinking: why one workshop is not enough

A couple of weeks ago, two very different learning formats around visual thinking were happening at the same time in our office.

In one room, a group training was underway. Participants were working with flipcharts, testing visual vocabulary, structuring ideas, and practicing how to draw live in front of others. The atmosphere was active and collective. People were learning from the trainer, but just as much from each other—observing, trying, adjusting.

In another room, a one-to-one mentoring session was taking place. The pace was slower, more focused. One person, working through her own material, supported by a mentor.

Both were about visual thinking and visual communication, but the learning that was happening in each space was of a very different nature.

In our group training on visual harvesting, the first barrier is often confidence.

Participants are introduced to the basics of visual communication: how to build a simple visual vocabulary, how to structure information, how to use drawings to support explanation. The group dynamic plays an important role here. Seeing others try, hesitate, and improve creates permission to experiment.

What shifts quickly is not mastery, but willingness. People move from “I can’t draw” to “I can use this.”

In a mentoring trajectory, the focus is different.

The work becomes more specific and more closely connected to the person’s own context. In this case, the mentee was a copywriter looking to expand her practice with visual language. The question was not how to draw in general, but how to integrate visuals into her way of working with clients.

Between sessions, she kept a visual diary. Not as an output, but as a working space: capturing thoughts, questions, fragments of conversations. During the sessions, these materials were reviewed and developed further.

What evolves in this setting is not only skill, but a relationship to the practice. Drawings are no longer treated as something to “add”, but as a way to think, explore, and test ideas.

Alongside these longer formats, there are also smaller moments of learning.

In a recent lunch session, one of our colleagues shared techniques for working with visual metaphors. It was informal and short, but it added something important. With a few targeted exercises, participants explored how simple visual shifts can carry more complex meaning.

These moments do not replace training or mentoring, but they extend the practice. They introduce new elements, keep the work alive, and invite continued experimentation.

Seen together, these formats point to a broader pattern.

Visual thinking is not a skill that is acquired in a single step. It develops over time, through different types of learning experiences that each serve a distinct role:

• group settings help people get started and lower the threshold
• mentoring supports integration into real work
• shorter learning moments expand and refine the practice

The format shapes what kind of learning becomes possible. It influences how far people go, how they apply what they learn, and whether the practice sustains over time.

Visual thinking is often introduced as a way to improve clarity in communication. And there is strong evidence supporting this.

Cognitive research shows that combining verbal and visual information activates different processing systems in the brain, which improves both understanding and recall (Paivio, 1971). In addition, when people actively create visuals—through sketchnoting, mindmapping, or doodling, they engage more deeply with the material. This is described in learning science as generative learning: understanding increases when learners actively structure and represent information themselves (Fiorella & Mayer, 2015).

This explains why practices like sketchnoting or visual harvesting are effective in helping people grasp and retain complex information.

Do you have patience for one more layer? The value of visual thinking often goes further!

In this phase, useful teambuilding helps the team discover that disagreement is not the problem. The real problem is not knowing how to work with disagreement.

In more in-depth work, visual language usually does more than supporting clarity. It also changes how people engage with their own thinking. Moving from “what are we thinking about” to “how are we thinking about it” is a crucial step in building layered understanding.

In the mentoring example, the shift was not simply that the mentee became more skilled at drawing. What changed was how she used visuals as a part of her thinking process. The visual diary created space to work with ideas that were not yet fully formed, ideas that might have been difficult to articulate directly in words.

Visual representations can hold relationships, ambiguities, and partial thoughts without forcing immediate resolution. This is particularly relevant in situations where language tends to either oversimplify or remain too abstract.