Crackerjack Visual Thinking

Tag: People

  • THE THREE KEY ACTIVITIES REQUIRED TO SUCCESSFULLY ACHIEVE YOUR VISION ACROSS YOUR ORGANISATION

    THE THREE KEY ACTIVITIES REQUIRED TO SUCCESSFULLY ACHIEVE YOUR VISION ACROSS YOUR ORGANISATION

    Having a Vision and successfully achieving it requires three key activities: Communicating, Enabling and Embedding. In these short videos, I share my thoughts on the importance of having a joined-up approach to these key activities and the 3 Steps to successfully achieving your Vision.

    A joined-up approach is vital to achieving your Vision!

    In this introductory blog episode, I share my thoughts on the importance of having a joined-up approach to these key activities – and what can happen if you don’t!

    Step #1: Develop your Vision

    In this blog episode, I talk about how visualising your organisations Vision can improve communication, understanding and business performance. This is the all important first step to embedding your Vision!

    #2: Develop your People!

    In this blog episode, I talk about how aligning the skills, knowledge and behaviours of your people to your Vision is vital in enabling your Vision to be achieved.

    Step #3: Develop your Organisation

    In this blog episode, I talk about the importance of alining your systems, processes and organisational behaviours with your Vision to deliver a great customer experience and build trust in your organisation.

    COMING SOON – We will shortly be launching our new Achieving Your Vision members area on our website which will provide you with support, resources and guidance to help you successfully implement your Vision across your organisation. Click on the subscribe button below to keep up to date!

    If you would like to discuss how to successfully implement your Vision across your organisation, please call +44 (0)115 6483381 or contact us to discuss your requirements in more detail.

    John Ashton – Crackerjack Visual Thinking

  • Can your business tick all the boxes in this SIMPLE business health check?

    Can your business tick all the boxes in this SIMPLE business health check?

    It can be easy to lose track of the big picture and get lost in the complexity of running your business. To help with this, here’s a simple template I’ve developed to help you check the health of your business.

    The health check uses the SIMPLE mnemonic to focus on 6 key areas of running a business:

    Systems
    Innovation
    Metrics
    People
    Leadership
    Experience (i.e. customer experience)

    Simply work your way around the template and see if you can tick all the boxes against each of the statements shown.

    If you can tick all the boxes then great! Although don’t be complacent and regularly use the health check to ensure this continues to be the case.

    If you can’t tick all the boxes, take time to examine the reasons for this and plan the actions you need to take to enable you to tick the box.

    Click on the button below to download the SIMPLE business health check:

    simple-checklist-2Download

    If you’d like to talk more about the health check, please do get in contact.

    Regards,

    John

    John Ashton | Crackerjack Visual Thinking

  • Achieving your organisation’s Vision: Develop your People

    In this blog episode, I talk about how aligning the skills, knowledge and behaviours of your people to your Vision is vital in enabling your Vision to be achieved.

    To discuss achieving your organisations vision in more detail, please do get in touch using the options below.

    Get in touch…

    Phone: +44 (0)115 6483381

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    Thank you for your response. ✨

  • #Visualising Interflora’s #strategy, developing an aerospace #explainer #animation and #graphicrecording an NHS event: all in a weeks work for www.crackerjackvisualthinking.com

    Using visual thinking approaches to share complex information is increasingly recognised as an really effective element of organisational engagement initiatives across many sectors. The last week has proved this!

    I’ve been working at an event to visualise Interflora’s strategy, created a whiteboard style explainer video for a major aerospace organisation and graphic recorded at an NHS Neuro-Rehabilitation workshop (take a look at my Twitter feed @johnashtonuk to read some of the feedback about this).

    Neuro Rehab Graphic Recording
    Graphic recording created live at NHS Neuro-Rehabilition event

    In all cases, visual thinking approaches have helped to turn ideas and thoughts into tangible visual reality across this broad range of organisations.

    To find more about how Crackerjack can help you engage your people through visual thinking approaches, please Contact Us.

    All the best,

    John

    John Ashton – Director

  • #Engage people, increase #understanding and improve #communication by embedding #visualthinking into the way your #organisation works

    If a picture speaks a thousand words, just imagine how enabling your people to think visually can help improve communication and creativity in your organisation!

    Helping your people to communicate more effectively and share ideas more easily can be a key method of increasing creativity and productivity in your organisation. Put simply, the quicker your people can generate great ideas and share them with others, the quicker these ideas can be turned into (profitable) reality.

    Developing your people’s visual thinking skills…

    Providing your people with the skills to enable them to share their thinking visually using drawings and sketches can supercharge this ability in your organisation. A single picture could replace a multi-page report or a bullet-pointed multi-page slide show. 10 minutes around a whiteboard could develop a new product idea or find a way to save time in your production process.

    Interflora 9th Nov 17

    Our Scribble Labs provide you with options for developing these visual thinking skills. We offer a range of workshops ranging from simply developing drawings skills through to helping people facilitate meetings using visual approaches.

    Visual thinking support when your organisation needs it…

    In addition to developing the visual thinking skills of your people, it can be helpful to call in additional visual thinking support to facilitate creative collaboration and visualisation of more complex ideas. This leaves your people free to get involved in the ideation and productive discussions that visually facilitated meetings can generate.

    Header Nov 2017 v2

    Crackerjack offers visual collaboration support for meetings along with a number of approaches to visualising ideas.

    Embedding visual thinking into your organisation…

    Developing the visual thinking skills of your people alongside calling in visual thinking support when you need it will allow visual thinking approaches to begin to permeate your organisation. The more people experience the visual way of working, the more they will engage with it and begin to see it as ‘the way we share ideas around here’.

    Crackerjack can work with you to embed visual thinking into your organisation. In addition to the approaches detailed above, we can also help to embed visual approaches into areas such as learning and development interventions and induction programmes.

    To find our more about how Crackerjack can help you embed visual thinking into your organisation, please CONTACT US.

    In addition, please take a look at our 1 minute guide below to find the right visual thinking approach for your needs and use the menu above to explore the different visual thinking approaches available from Crackerjack.

  • Visual thinking: a key element of the people engagement and change process

    It’s been a busy few months for Crackerjack Visual Thinking since the start of 2016!

    Crackerjack’s work has included:

    • Designing and developing hand-drawn animations
    • Designing rich pictures for clients including Westmill Foods
    • Live scribing (graphic recording) for the NHS and Google UK
    • Creating an interactive PDF improvement guide for one of Crackerjack’s key clients

    The common theme amongst all this work has been that clients are wanting to really engage people (whether it’s their own team members, their own client’s or their customer’s) and see visualising all or some elements of what they are trying to communicate as key to this engagement.

    I see visual thinking as way to enhance people engagement and change initiatives by shortcutting the time it takes people to take in and process important and sometimes complex information. Looking at the ‘Resistance to Change Model’ below, it can been seen that ‘understanding the change’ is a vital part of people being able to move towards ‘new beginnings’:

    Resistance to Change.png

    So, if you are wanting to engage people or introduce a change in your organisation, think about how you can visualise the important information you need your people to understand. And don’t forget, you can also encourage your people to visualise how they feel and what they do and don’t understand about the change.

    Things you could do include:

    • Creating a one page image of what the future will look like…
    • Create an ideas and thoughts wall where people can draw or write their feedback, thinking and ideas about the change…
    • Create a board game that helps people understand the journey they will be going on…
    • Capture the conversations as they happen in meetings about the change as visual notes and encourage people to photograph them with their smartphones as an immediate easy to understand record of the event…

    For more ideas and support with using visual thinking approaches in your organisation, feel free to contact us, call us on 0775 282 6227 or visit our website at www.crackerjackvisualthinking.com.

    John Ashton
    Crackerjack Visual Thinking

  • Small details = Big Conversations #visualthinking #engagement

    I’ve just completed a rich picture for a client to help them communicate some important ideas to one of their key customers. As with all of our visual thinking work, the images we create are there to facilitate the right conversations between people.

    To do this we ensure each element of the image serves a purpose and communicates a key message. It’s often the small details included in the images that can create the biggest conversations!

    The example below shows just a few small elements of a much larger image we created for the client:

    To find out how Crackerjack Visual Thinking can help you visualise the small details you need to facilitate the ‘big conversations’ in your organisation, visit www.crackerjackvisualthinking.com or email info@crackerjackvisualthinking.com

  • Seeing the ‘big picture’ #visualthinking #engagement

    One of Crackerjack’s clients sent through a picture of the rich picture we created of their organisations past and future journey. It was great to see it in pride of place in their office!

    A Crackerjack rich picture
    A Crackerjack rich picture visualising an organisations journey in one of our clients offices

    We created the rich picture using a collaborative approach with the organisations team members, using their initial thoughts and ideas as the basis for the final image.

    The rich picture is used to by existing team members to keep the organisations mission and objectives at the front of their minds in the work they are doing. The rich picture is also used as part of the induction process for new team members and as an introduction for visitors to the organisation and its work.

    To find our more about our work visit http://www.crackerjackvisualthinking.com or email info@crackerjackvisualthinking.com

  • Use the power of the doodle to engage your people! #e4s #engagement #communication

    This week, why not ask people in your organisation to spend 5 minutes creating a quick doodle of what they think the purpose of your organisation is. Display the completed doodles (either virtually on your intranet or on a wall in your workplace) and encourage people to have a look at them. Then start listening out for the insightful, challenging and sometimes revelatory ideas that will be driven out by this organisational conversation!!!

    The key question to ask yourself following this activity is:

    “Is our organisational story (i.e.why we do what we do) clear to all of our people?”

    If so, great!

    If not, think of the effect this may have on your organisation and how you can go about ensuring that you are telling your organisational story more clearly.

    www.crackerjackvisualthinking.com