The most valuable insight from a visioning workshop often appears after the workshop.
During the session, ideas connect, assumptions get challenged, and the emerging model becomes clearer. But something interesting happens when the thinking from the workshop is turned into a strategic visual artefact — often a rich picture.
Creating a future-proof power generation system for the UK is a hugely complex and costly task (as todays announcement of the UK Governments £14.2bn investment in Sizewell C shows).
Here at Crackerjack, I’ve been working with a client to help them simplify complexity and visualise how they can help increase the speed and efficiency of three of these major infrastructure construction projects: Sizewell C, Hinkley Point C and the STEP fusion energy project.
In each case, I’ve been able to create visual rich pictures that have facilitated a deeper and clearer understanding of my clients work for the project teams from each of these construction projects. This also works in reverse, with the creation of the rich pictures enhancing my clients understanding of how they can best support these vital construction projects.
In one case, the rich picture I originally produced for my client is now being used by a senior exec member of one of the infrastructure construction project teams as a key element of their keynote presentations to key stakeholders (including to the UK Government).
The more complex a project becomes, the more important it is to simplify complexity in order to engage people with your work and ensure they understand the role you can play in it. Visual thinking and rich pictures can be the bridge between complexity, and simplicity and understanding.
Find out more about my work here on our website or contact me to explore simplifying your complex project.
Organisations like SAP, Siemens, and PTC offer comprehensive solution ecosystems that span multiple domains—PLM, simulation, digital twins, IoT, and more. While these solutions are powerful, they are also complex. As a result, many customers struggle to understand how the various tools relate to one another and, more importantly, how they align with their own operational challenges and transformation goals.
The Communication Gap
Customers often focus on immediate problems and can’t always see how a broader platform approach addresses their needs.
Sales and product teams may describe capabilities from different angles, leading to inconsistent messaging.
Internal stakeholders may lack a shared view of how the offer is positioned for different markets or maturity levels.
A Visual Thinking Approach
Using a facilitated visual method—such as the creation of a rich picture—can help bridge the gap between technical solutions and customer understanding. A rich picture is a large, illustrative diagram that captures:
The customer’s operational environment and key challenges.
How different products or tools contribute to solving those challenges.
The broader transformation journey and how solutions align to that trajectory.
Dependencies, touchpoints, and contextual factors that are difficult to convey in text or slide decks.
Benefits of this Approach
Customer Understanding: Provides a visual narrative that helps customers see where they fit and how the solution supports their goals.
Sales and Marketing Alignment: Offers a consistent, reusable asset that can guide strategic conversations and value positioning.
Internal Clarity: Acts as a reference point across teams—helping product, sales, and delivery functions align on message and intent.
Adaptability: Can be tailored by sector, persona, or maturity level to suit different engagement scenarios.
Common Use Cases
Industry-specific product overviews.
Executive briefings and stakeholder workshops.
Onboarding tools for new clients or internal teams.
Strategic planning, partner enablement, or bid development.
If you would like to explore how visual thinking can help you engage clients with your product, please contact us.
Really pleased to receive the following feedback from Mathew Scoines, Programme Director at Domestic & General, about a rich picture project recently completed for him:
Crackerjack was brought into Domestic and General to help us visually represent an extremely complex new platform via an easily consumable and readable ‘rich picture’. The process was led by John from Crackerjack who achieved this remit and delivered a service and outcome beyond our expectations. The method by which Crackerjack engaged with us and elicited the information required to shape this visual output was extremely well crafted and fascinating to be part of.
John guided us patiently and professionally throughout the process and helped us articulate and break down the key aspects of our new platform solution supporting stakeholder and subject matter expert discussions to elicit the right information at the right level of detail. John listened carefully and focussed on genuinely understanding our business and the context for this task. This resulted in a rich picture which skilfully encapsulates a very complex solution and presents it in a format which is easily consumable by and useful to both seasoned experts in our business as well as the layperson.
I would recommend both the use of a rich picture to convey complexity in a form which is easy to read and understand and most certainly recommend Crackerjack as the organisation to help achieve this.
We have commissioned Crackerjack now to take the rich picture and build a story based animation and narration around it – this is going extremely well and I have no doubt will turn out great with John’s guidance and expertise.
Over the last couple of years, Crackerjack Visual Thinking has been working with clients to support their sales processes by creating bespoke rich pictures showing how their products and services align with their existing and potential customers needs.
Rich pictures help customers ‘see’ how our clients products and services fit into their customers world (with its complexity, challenges and opportunities) and will help them achieve their aims and objectives. This results in:
Customers understanding how my clients products and services will benefit their business.
More effective conversations between my clients and their customers due to having a rich picture image to talk through and explore together.
Customers appreciating the investment and time my clients have taken in preparing the bespoke rich picture for the sales meeting. It demonstrates my clients commitment to wanting to understand their customers needs on a deeper level.
Following successful sales outcomes with their customers, the multiple benefits of rich pictures during the sales process have led clients to adapt this visual thinking approach into their sales processes. We look forward to continuing to support them in achieving successful sales over the coming years.
John Ashton – Crackerjack Visual Thinking
We’d love to talk about your ideas and see if we can help you visualise them!
Click on the button below and let’s start a conversation…
Based on my previous experience in L&D (working for Boots the Chemists and The Nottingham Building Society), one of the crucial elements of engaging people during onboarding is providing them with a sense of purpose and place in the organisation.
We can help people have a sense of purpose and place by:
Helping them have direct line of sight from their role to the customer.
Understanding how their role ‘fits’ into the organisation.
Understanding the impact of the organisation on the wider world (including environmental impact).
Getting a sense of the culture/values/ethos of the organisation they have joined.
It’s a lot to cover!
Throughout my career (both as an employee being onboarded myself and as an L&D manager doing the same for others), the most effective tool for growing understanding, driving discussion and generating insightful questions about an organisation has been (in my opinion) the effective use of rich pictures as part of the onboarding process. So much so in fact that I now spend most of my time creating these for organisations!
Nursing and Midwifery at NUH Rich Picture
Rich pictures are images that share complex organisational stories and messages in easy to understand and impactful ways. They can be static images or evolving images that build to create a complete story over the course of the onboarding process.
Used standalone or as part of planned onboarding and induction programme, rich pictures can be shared on-line or in print formats including posters, murals, large format displays and interactive business games.
Rich pictures can be shared before an employee joins an organisation as a pre-orientation tool or during the onboarding process itself once they have joined the organisation.
RICH PICTURES ARE ALSO IDEAL FOR VISUALISING, COMMUNICATING AND ENGAGING PEOPLE WITH THE FOLLOWING SUBJECTS:
Organisational / Business Vision
Organisational / Business Strategy
Culture and Values
Transformation and Change
Health & Safety and Regulatory Compliance
I’m very happy to have a further conversation about the use of rich pictures in the onboarding process if that would be helpful. Feel free tocontact me or visitwww.crackerjackvisualthinking.com to find out more about our work.
The success of your Leadership Development programme is often dependent on helping leaders see how investing time in their development will help them progress towards their professional and life goals.
Visualising the development journey they need to take to achieve their professional and life goals and ambitions can be extremely helpful for a number of reasons including:
A Personal Vision acts as a leadership development compass…
Visualising a leaders personal vision as an image provides them with a quick reference map as they progress along their leadership development journey. It helps them see the skills they need to develop, the relationships they need to build, the decisions they need to make and the behaviours they need to grow. It acts as the leadership development compass to keep them on course.
The process of creating a Personal Vision is as important as the vision image itself!
The very act of creating their personal vision can also be as educational to your leaders as the end vision image itself. Going through the process can reveal new ideas, things they hadn’t thought about, new pathways to their goals – or even completely new leadership opportunities they hadn’t considered before!
How to integrate Personal Visions into your leadership development programme…
The ideal time to help your leaders to create their personal vision is at the beginning of your leadership development programme – as a compass setting exercise. However, creating a personal vision at any point during the development programme will also be beneficial for the reasons described above.
Feel free to use the questions in the image above as a catalyst to help your leaders create their own vision. If you would like some additional help with the process of helping your leaders create their own personal vision, do get in touch using the contact us button below and find out more about our Personal Vision service here.
John Ashton – Crackerjack Visual Thinking
We’d love to talk about your ideas and see if we can help you visualise them!
Click on the button below and let’s start a conversation…
Here at Crackerjack, I’ve been working with a client to help them simplify complexity and visualise how they can help increase the speed and efficiency of three of these major infrastructure construction projects: Sizewell C, Hinkley Point C and the STEP fusion energy project.
In each case, I’ve been able to create visual rich pictures that have facilitated a deeper and clearer understanding of my clients work for the project teams from each of these construction projects. This also works in reverse, with the creation of the rich pictures enhancing my clients understanding of how they can best support these vital construction projects.
In one case, the rich picture I originally produced for my client is now being used by a senior exec member of one of the infrastructure construction project teams as a key element of their keynote presentations to key stakeholders (including to the UK Government).
The more complex a project becomes, the more important it is to simplify complexity in order to engage people with your work and ensure they understand the role you can play in it. Visual thinking and rich pictures can be the bridge between complexity, and simplicity and understanding.
Find out more about my work here on our website or contact me to explore simplifying your complex project.
John
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