Thinking, Solving & Transformative Communication: Design + Visualization with Hazel White — DT101 E113

[Music] Welcome to Design Thinking 101, Learning, Leading and Applying Design Thinking. We help our listeners learn, lead, and apply design thinking to their goals and challenges. Our guest share stories, lessons, ideas, experience, and insights developed while practicing, leading, and teaching design thinking. They come to design thinking 101 from business, social innovation, education, design, government healthcare, and other fields to offer you what they've discovered about learning, leading, and applying design thinking. I'm Dewan Stantford, your design thinking 101 host. He's a white as a designer and visualizer. He's will create simple visuals to understand and communicate complex ideas. We talk about how design and visualization combine to facilitate thinking, fuel solving, and create transformative change. He's all welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be part of this. Now, quite often I ask people to go back and tell us an origin story about how they arrived, where they are doing what they're doing. And we're going to do that. But you sent me an amazing visualization of your path into now and what you do, how you do it, how people can get into it. It is fantastic. I have it up here in the booth while we're talking and recording. Coming into the show, you gave me so much to work with. Maybe talk a little bit about your journey into what you're doing, what you're doing, and then we can dive into that wonderful map you gave me for our conversation. Absolutely. I came into visualization through a kind of circuitous route in the, I trained as a designer and I've worked for the last 12, 13, 14 years in design thinking and in service design as a practitioner and as a teacher trainer. But I've always drawn. It's been a way of kind of understanding and pulling threads of things together. When I studied, I found that I couldn't follow lectures, taking notes and I found it hard to recall what was in books. But if I drew it, starting with mine maps and then with more detailed visualizations, I could really grasp and remember what I was seeing and what I was hearing. So I began to do it firstly for my own benefits so as I could remember interesting lectures, I'd been to a number of recently podcasts or talks or conferences that I attended. I shared my quite rough often sketch notes through Twitter and Instagram and people seem to like them. So that encouraged me to keep going and to keep doing it. And eventually my career has more often and this is what I do for my job now. I produce visualizations for organizations and for companies in a number of different ways. So for me, it seems to be a kind of like a realization of a childhood dream that actually you can you know, you can have a career drawing. So that's how I got here. But it's been a huge benefit to the work that I've done all along the way. And one of the things I realized was that I'm not alone in finding visuals really useful for helping me hold onto information. The reckon that we recall about 10% of information that is shared with this verbally, whereas if we use visuals and texts, we're able to recall around 65% of what we hear. So that's quite a significant difference. And here in the UK, the average reading age is nine years old. So anything that can help people recall information is going to help a wide range of the population, including those for whom the written word is not the easiest way for them to access and recall information. What are some of the ways that you have applied visualization in your work? And the impact and I'm not talking about impact in terms of the results. I mean, that's interesting too. But I'm thinking about the impact on the way people were thinking and creating because they were working with you and working with visuals. Yeah, well, I started to introduce visuals and a really simple method of drawing when I was doing service design training. And I used a method that Oli Chris Sorenson developed and you can see videos and read his books. And I've got some resources that I can share with people. But just using simple lines, squares, triangles, circles and stars to draw figures and to communicate things. And often we use them when we're producing either personas or user journey maps to understand services. And it was a bit of a light bulb moment for participants in the workshops we've done to actually realise that they could communicate visually really quickly after a five minute introduction to hear the way how you can use simple lines and shapes to communicate in a different way. And one of the things I think that was an early eye opener for me was when we were running a workshop with clinicians, physicians, patients, hospital managers to look at a new policy that had been introduced in Scotland. And we used journey mapping of a way of communicating what patients and their cares to communicate what their experience had been like through the health care service. And one particular participant was living with cancer. And he drew out his experience over time from his initial diagnosis to seeing the specialist for the first time to then a time where he had been ill during the night, so in out of our service and where things started to go wrong. And he was sharing this with a consultant physician who at the end of this part of the workshop stood up and held up this journey map and said this makes me see how we run services completely differently because I feel that when patients come into my clinic they get five star treatment and I realise now that I have no idea what happens when they walk out that door and yet for them the experience of living with cancer is all those things, it's not just coming to my clinic. So to turn, you know, a physician's way of actually seeing how they care for patients, they've seen that whole holistic journey, it was really really significant. And I've worked a lot with medical professional sense and that's the kind of enduring thing for them is actually being able to see and hear people's experiences over time, but also hearing it through an authentic voice, a voice is a kind of odd way of seeing it because we're talking about visuals here, but being able to say things in a way that the patient wants to see, say them rather than in the way the physician or the healthcare professional has asked them, is really, really powerful. It's a way of telling your story, not being asked questions that, you know, the question are kind of as assuming they know the answer to. So it's kind of, it's a change in power in some ways in the relationship and I think that's really, really significant. What are the some of the other types of projects you've worked on and how things played out there? Well, since the pandemic, I have worked a lot with health and care professionals and that really was a really significant shift for me because I've done a lot of service design and design thinking training with health professionals amongst others when the pandemic started immediately, some of those people had worked with in the past got in touch saying we need to get messages out really, really quickly. Can you help? And it started with a head of psychology, a health trust wanting to get messages about stress, coping and resilience to their staff and the two of us worked together, literally on phone calls. She would phone me, tell me what she was thinking, I would draw. She sketched things on the back of an envelope, she gave me an idea and I worked on them and gave them back to her and that was the start of us whole series of COVID related pieces of work that I did. Really significant one was working with specialists in medicine of the elderly because at the outbreak of COVID, you suddenly had doctors who weren't specialists in medicine for the elderly or in fact were not used to dealing with people who were dying, being shifted onto COVID boards and they were in the position where they were not only having to tell patients that they weren't going to make it but they were having to tell patients relatives over the phone and on iPads that the relative was dying and they weren't going to be able to see them and this was really, really difficult for doctors learning on the front line how to have these conversations. So Lara Mitchell, a specialist in geriatric medicine, asked me to help her produce visuals, so they were really quick aid memoirs for these doctors who were being put in this situation. For phrases they might use, for what were the signs that someone was deteriorating rapidly, things they might say to a patient or a relative when they got things wrong, things like, I'm sorry, can I try that again? Or phrases that you could use that were clear and genuine and let people know what the next steps were going to be. And we made that as a visual, which ended up in a lot of hospitals in Scotland and beyond. And then we made it into videos as well with Lara voicing it over and sharing her expertise. And that was shared and used by healthcare professionals throughout Europe. And again, that led on to work in the care home sector because care homes were disproportionately affected by Covid and working with the lead in Scotland for care homes and developing visuals about the guidance for staff in care homes. And that work ended up in the Scottish Government's palliative care guidelines. So really difficult things to be communicating, but in terms of visualising, a real challenge to get the tone of the visuals, right, but also to make sure the information is as concise as it can be, but also accurate because we're talking about things that are in really, really important situations. So it meant building a really good relationship with the medical professionals and them also taking out their teams and to tend and end users to check that the tone and the visuals were sensitive, were respectful, but were also accurate. So a real challenge, but yeah, something that I was very honoured to be able to do. And you've talked about those difficult conversations and how visuals can play a part in that and help with that. I'm wondering about how the people you've worked with just have experienced the value of working with visuals. Sure, it's been new for some people. It's been kind of like, wait, what? You're going to, why aren't, like, no, just, like, write a memo. Why are we using pictures? So can you talk a little bit about how people have valued or come to value visualisation in their work? Yeah, absolutely. And one of the key things people say is about getting people onto the same page, you know, because we can talk about different things and we can write things in a certain way, but there's something about visuals that creates a bit of a level playing field because you have to distill down to the essence of what you mean. And drawings, we can sometimes interpret words in slightly different ways, but drawings have to be fairly clear and if you've not got it right, then we'll change it. But that's what people feel is they can, getting people onto the same page, so as you can see how things relate to each other, what the relationship is, you can see things over time. And that's been a really, really useful thing. Also in terms of being able to adapt content for different audiences, so for example, I recently worked on the Scottish Government's framework for care for adults in care homes and it's a 72 page document. So some people will sit down and read it from beginning to end, many won't. So we did a one page A3 visual of that and also broke it down into smaller parts. So that somebody can just browse it, as it can be up on the wall in care homes or so you can look at it on your phone, etc. And it was also broken down into smaller parts to be shared on Twitter and on social media. So that people can access information in different ways to a depth that's appropriate to their needs. And again, what people have valued about it is it can help them have, you know, facilitate quite difficult conversations. So talking through, for example, the moment I'm working on palliative care guidelines, but actually just being able to talk through that visually, you know, and kind of point and have a conversation, but this is where we are and this is where we might be going can be, can be very helpful. But having something also that you can refer back to afterwards so you can shoot, you know, talk someone through some guidelines, but they can then go back and see a summarized visual version of it later can help them recall the key points. But the most important thing people say about visuals is just it helps them communicate better. And I think for the difficult conversations as well, the emotions of the moment might mean you're hearing less than you might usually hear. And to be able to go back in a more more reflective state of mind when you can take in some more of the information, I think that's another powerful piece. Absolutely. And you can convey something without having a lot of unnecessary detail in it, but it means someone can come back and ask for more detail if they like more detail, but they don't swamped by it initially. You know, it's just it's a summary that they're looking at and something to prompt conversation. Now we've talked about some of the ways people have effectively used visualizations and and where you've helped. What are some of the other sort of areas where visuals are really, really effective at helping people communicate, helping people learn, helping people do the complex things they need to do? One of the things I've been doing more and more of lately is live recording, so capturing themes from meetings or from workshops, both so as it can be played back in the meetings, but also afterwards. And what's been useful for that? I've been working with a sporting organisation over the last year or so as part of a transformation programme, both part of the tech team and also part of the wider team. So being able to record that visually on the walls as the meeting is happening and for people to be able to to look at it and question it as we're going through the meetings or to use it for playback afterwards has been really helpful and the lead of that piece of work has said it's been really, really useful to have somebody on the outside looking in because they just check back what's being said, you know, and allow room for questions to be asked or for things to be challenged. People have also, when they've been using visuals themselves, after we've done a visual training with them, have used them for the project planning. Again, that thing of being able to see things happening over time and see how things interrelate to each other is are useful. Very much got some really great feedback from some of my previous clients about how they use them and how they use visuals and presentations now. So cutting out a lot of the text and using visuals to explain things instead has been really, really valuable and again using them in information that they give out in a health and care setting. So information leaflets and videos can be a more effective way of communicating information and it also means that the professionals themselves have to simplify the material to make it more accessible and again going back to that point about the average reading age. Again, we all do within our specialisms, we use jargon and we forget that that specialist language that's not accessible to everyone else. So always checking, you know, am I saying, you know, things in a way that's A, understandable, is information that people will value and is in a way that people will be able to recall it afterwards. So that's been some ways that people have used it when they've done it themselves. They also find visuals are useful again for for sharing work, you know, whether it's in presentations, whether it's in posters, whether it's on social media, the visuals are something that people will remember. So they're helping them to explain things better, they're helping them to summarise the key points that they're trying to make and they're highlighting the really important parts of the information. And that helps engage people who also don't like written information, you know, have found it easier to recall things in different ways. Again, even within their own teams, a piece of work that I've been working on recently is within a healthcare team, a psychology team, looking at what their services are, how they relate to other services that are offered within their health board. And explaining them both internally and externally. And that's been really, really helpful as a team to help them think creatively about what we do, but also to realize that not everyone knows what they do. And again, it's that thing about being really, really explicit about this is what we do and seeing things in a different way. And it was someone from that team actually who, when I asked her what the value of visuals were, she said, "Murring back and interpreting and translating what we're seeing into a different medium helps us to see it in a different way, helps us see it in a fresh way, and also makes us think, are we communicating this in the right way? Or is there a simpler, more effective word we could use or image that we could use to convey that meaning?" A lot of the work you've done has helped people see things in different ways and explore ideas in different ways. And you've sort of affected how a lot of people live and work. But how is doing the work affected you? How is that affected? How you think and see the world? That's a really great question. I do use visuals in my own life all the time now. I mean, for me it's an absolute joy to be able to do this because trying to think about how you can be something visual is like a puzzle to me. So actually producing visuals for clients or whatever it is like actually sometimes it's quite difficult. You can't think how you're going to convey a message but you know that it's there somewhere you just have to find it. And in terms of how I work it's changed quite significantly how I work in terms of allow more space for things to yeah just be in the world and before I try and bring them together, you know, is that phrase of sleeping on something? I often will work on a piece of client work and spend a day on it just trying to get as much out of my head as I can. And then sleeping on it going for a walk, you know, going to do some exercise or something, coming back to a day later to then try and pull pieces of it together. And you don't often get that luxury when you're working but it's such an important part of how we process information, you know, and I've you know, I've read a lot about how we process all sorts of information and visual information. But that thing about allowing time for things to make connections and for it to actually get stored properly in your brain so as you can make the connections is a really really important part of this. And so that aspect of working fast and slow is something that I am really aware of most of the than I was, you know, a couple of years ago and make sure that I give myself time to do that to actually produce a bit of work stop, look at it reflect, come back to it and then see how it can be reconfigured and how the connections can be made better work clearly and what can be edited out. So yeah, it's changed the way I look at everything and the way I do things that editing process is so important. And the bit of giving yourself time to digest and distill information. And one of the things I'd like people to are listening to to think about is there are the the things that okay, like I can like play with this play with myself, but there are times when you should hire a professional. What are some of those times when like, hey, here is a moment where you should really think about finding someone who can help you create a visualisation. Yeah, I'm a great advocate for people actually, you know, having a goat visualisation themselves and getting their thoughts down on paper, but when they want to take it to the next level, let me be there using it for official guidelines for something. And they want it just taken to a next level of finish, then that can be a good time to get professional in. It can also be going back to the point that one of my clients had been making earlier about having somebody on the outside looking in. So someone that's, you know, just slightly distant can have, can be able to see the big picture more clearly. And I'm thinking of that in kind of visual recording of workshops and meetings that can be really, really valuable. Clients that I've worked with like to have someone who can deliver visuals that are on brand for them using their colours, etc. And other clients have said, well, it's a very specific skill, you know, that for them, they perhaps want to take it to a certain level where they can get their ideas down, but they'd like somebody else just to, you know, to get it over the line for them. So there's different ways. And I would always encourage people to have a goat at themselves because many of the clients have worked, have given me something on the back of an envelope, which has been the start of a really great way of interpreting the information that they want. They want to share with them with their audiences because they've thought about it a lot and they've had it in their head as to how this might be a good way of exploring it. And they just need somebody with, you know, visualisation, drawing skills, just to, as I say, take it to the next stage for them. And to them, that's why it's good to get professional in. And I think that we're going to put a visualisation of today's conversation in the show notes. And I think after looking at that, or maybe just after after listening to this, some people are going to want to say, hey, wait, I want to give this a try. I want to do some experiments at visualisation. What would you recommend for someone who is perhaps drawing phobic, who wants to, all right, let me give this a try. What would you say? I think of drawing as in just another way of communicating, not as a way of producing art. Someone much cleverer than me once made the point that actually, with writing, if we sit down to write an email, we don't think we have to be Jane Austen. So there's no need to think you have, you need to be my collangelo to draw. It's just a way of communicating. So just have a go at it. We all draw as children as one of our initial ways of communicating. And then as we go through the schooling system, we get told that that's not the best way of communicating. It's all about words and numbers. So kind of think back to that childlike curiosity, because we are all creative in certain ways. And drawings in the way that I'm talking about drawings are there to communicate. They're not there to frame and put up in the wall. So have a go, have fun. And also when you're beginning to think about doing it onto the next level, think about, you know, what's the message that you're trying to communicate, who's the audience that are going to be looking at the visualisations, check out what you're doing with them, the people that are going to be using it and possibly experts who might put into some of the information to make sure you've got the information right, get feedback from critical friends. And also if you're working with a professional, the things to think about might be about being clear about the message, think about who your audience is, talking to the people that are going to be looking and using the visuals. And also as you're producing something, whether it's by yourself or in conjunction with the visual professional, keep getting feedback along the way, because that will make the work so much stronger at the end, if you listen to feedback and make changes in response to what the end user audience want to see. Yeah, it's another one of those situations where they're kind of going to a small room and producing something on your own. It's a bad idea. Yeah, there's the, often the urge is like, no, no, we're going to be smart. We'll get our little community together and create something and throw it back out there. Like, no, no, listen to people open up the process, bring the people who'll be using and experts in large and small ways. Absolutely. Because otherwise you have that tada, reveal moment and it's not what people are looking for at all. So actually, the kind of hand drawn sketches that I do and also giving people roughs at a certain stage, often in just black and white or in grey's, let them into the process and let them know that they can be critical and suggest changes. And I say right at the very outset when I'm working with clients, I am quite thick skinned, so feel free to be critical. But one caveat of that, that one of my clients said, was to avoid committees. If you take visuals to committee, you will get all sorts of different viewpoints on it that are not necessarily relevant. But the people that are going to use it, the experts and the end users are absolutely key to have in throughout the process. And what are some of the ways people have responded after the work is done. And you have like, okay, it's as polished as it's going to be and it's stamped and it's out of the environment. How have people responded to the things you created? I mean, in terms of feedback that we've had going back to the difficult conversations, piece that I did during COVID, we had so much positive feedback over social media from people just saying that it'd been really, really helpful to have phrases that they could use in these difficult conversations. We'd lots of different people asking if they could use the resources, so people using them was just real evidence that it was working there was doing what we hoped it would do and making conversations easier for people. A client who's going through technology transformation said that one of the executive directors is the organisation when they saw the visuals that we produced just said, "I get it now." On the basis that they could see how all the changes that were happening in the organisation, how they were related to one another, how they were going to happen over time and what the impact they were going to have on each other were. Another colleague again in healthcare has been using visuals a lot to herself and had feedback from a doctor with dyslexia saying that the use of visuals in her presentations was just the best learning ever. It helped them be able to actually recall and deeply learn the information because of that balance between text and visuals. Also I've had people present academic conferences using their new visualisation skills and one of my recent clients has got by scientific poster at two national competitions which sheepets down to that balance and being able to communicate in a different way because you're having to think about what is the essence of what I'm trying to get across here. So yeah, lots of different things to do with how it's used by audiences right at the end, being very positive with your communication but also changing the way people who are using visuals themselves think. Lara who I spoke about earlier talked about using visuals as fundamentally changing how she thinks and how she communicates with student doctors and with patients themselves so that it's kind of resounding, just success of actually being able to change how a physician communicates both with patients and with trainee physicians and I think that's a fundamental change. So as we've been talking in the last couple of minutes I think I was thinking about a challenge to the audience and I would challenge everyone to for the next 30 days visualise one idea. Something tiny, it has to be tiny like the size of a piece of paper and folded into fourths. It has to be a fourth, it can't be any larger than that. So you have a little space and just try one day and give yourself a few minutes and sketch things out and see what you can come up with. What are some resources or tools that people might use to get on top of their 30 day challenge that we have just issued? It's such a great challenge. I mean the basics that you need are a pen and a piece of paper, I love drawing a post it notes actually because you can just scrunch them up and chuck them away if they're not any good or you can stick them on the wall and see your progress which is actually important. But yeah, the post it note is a really good size, I like the rectangular ones just for drawing and again if you use something like a sharpie pen then you can't get into a lot of detail. You can't rub things out, you've got to just kind of try and go quite confidently at it. There's some great videos and books that you can read. As I mentioned earlier, Oli Quesson and Loa Bassstrap have got a fantastic bit called Visual Collaboration which is, it might absolutely go to. And Oli Quesson has a great tab talk on visualization in which he introduces that method that I talked about earlier of simple lines, square tangles, circles and star shaped figures which is a really good start for thinking about how to convey ideas really, really simply. I actually now for a lot of what I do, I draw on an iPad Pro in Procreate using an Apple pencil but I also like the physicality of actually drawing and I like drawing on a big scale. So I use Magic Whiteboard which is just like a plastic film that sticks to the wall and is in A1 size and I love drawing on that with whiteboard markers and it also is like having a massive post-it note in that you can move them around. I don't know if you'll share that in the show notes, do I? Oh yeah. The visual that I said used just 1, 2, 3, 9 sheets of Magic Whiteboard which I drew actually in a different order than they put together but I moved them around to make more sense and it's great because if you make a mistake you can just wipe it out and start again and I use that a lot in workshops because it means I can draw at the front of the room or the back of the room and then I can move them around and make gallery walks around the space in a workshop. And then in terms of courses if you get really interested in doing this, scribearian or UK-based organisation, do fantastic courses. They do a short one called Think to Ink which is a couple of two or three hour course which is a really great introduction and then they do a diploma which is a really great investment if you're interested in this type of work. And then online as well, Eva Lotta Lam does a great domestic course on sketch noting which is the most comprehensive introduction to sketch noting that you could hope to have. When I watched it earlier this year it was only available in German but it was subtitled and I don't speak German but it was so fascinating, I stayed the course on it. It may have been translated in English now but it's still worth watching captioned if Germans are not your first language. It covers everything. I highly recommend that one. And where was that one? That's on Domestika. Okay. Which online course I can share the link for that for your show notes. Thank you so much. We'll get all of the links to everything in the show notes including a very important link to HazelwhiteDesign.co.uk so that people can go and find out more about your work. Yeah, and that has links to other courses and other kind of meetups that you can join as well and a bit of them. Yeah. And it should take you links to the courses and the books. Fantastic. Hazel, is there anything that has come to mind like all Dua and I wish you asked me about X or like wait a minute I just had this thought. One of the big questions for me actually throughout doing this kind of work recently has been well, is it accessible? You know, what happens if visuals aren't your thing or if you've got visual impairment? So what I also do with this work is I always produce, if I'm doing it for public clients, I always produce plain text versions. So you know, just a read through of what's on on the visual. Because not, you know, in the same way that written work isn't for everybody visuals aren't for everybody either. Some people would prefer just to have a bullet pointed list. And so I always make a point in producing that for public work as well because we're all different and we all navigate the world in different ways. For me and for many other people visuals are a great way of doing that, but just to be aware that we all do it differently. Oh, wonderful. Hazel, thank you so much for coming on the show and once again we'll get all of those links and resources in the show notes. I encourage people to check out the checkout your work. And if you decide that your organization would like to hire a pro, please talk to Hazel. And yeah, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. Thanks for having me. When you think about my conversation with Hazel, consider the impact of the visual explanations and stories she created in healthcare. What it's worth to design is helping people learn how to achieve what they want in the world by using your service. Visual and audio storytelling can create more ways for people to learn, explore and benefit from the services we create. Check out Hazel's website for opportunities to work with her or learn with her. There's information on that in the show notes. If you're investing in your visual communication skills, Fluid Hive Designing Facilitation course is a great way to add a Salt Facilitation Framework instead of tools for designing events that generate the outcomes you want and need. I hope to see you in a course and thanks for listening. Still like you out there.