Over the past few months, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how I introduce bikablo and visual thinking to people in Canada.
When I first joined the bikablo Global Training Team as a trainer for Canada, the obvious question was: How do I introduce more people to visual thinking?
How do I get people interested in learning bikablo? How do I fill a two-day bikablo Basics course? How do I help people understand that you really don't need to be able to draw to use visual language?
Those are still worthwhile questions.
But I'm beginning to think there is a much more important one:
What are people actually trying to do better at work?
Because very few people arrive at work on Monday morning thinking, I really need to improve my visual thinking skills.
They are much more likely to be thinking:
We need to get everyone on the same page.
We have another planning meeting this afternoon and I really don't want it to go nowhere.
I need to explain this complicated process so people actually understand it.
How do I get more people participating in this workshop?
We had a fantastic conversation yesterday. How do we make sure we don't lose everything that came out of it?
There has to be a better way to explain this than another 30-slide PowerPoint deck.
Those are the problems.
Visual thinking is one of the tools we can use to solve them.
Most organizations aren't suffering from a shortage of information.
We have documents. Presentations. Dashboards. Teams messages. Emails. Meeting notes. Project plans. Reports.
We are swimming in information.
And yet teams still walk out of meetings with different understandings of what was decided.
Strategies that made perfect sense to the people who developed them can be surprisingly difficult to communicate to everyone else.
Processes become complicated because each person understands their own piece, but nobody can quite see the whole.
And some meetings produce pages and pages of notes without creating much shared understanding at all.
That's where making thinking visible becomes interesting.
Put an idea where everyone can see it and something changes.
People can point to it.
Question it.
Add to it.
Notice what's missing.
See relationships they hadn't noticed before.
And, perhaps most importantly, ask:
"Is this what we mean?"
This is probably the biggest misconception I encounter.
When people see the work we do in bikablo, they often tell me:
"But I can't draw."
That's okay.
This isn't art class.
You don't need to create beautiful illustrations. You need a practical visual vocabulary — simple shapes, containers, figures, arrows, colour and text — that helps you communicate an idea.
The drawing is not the outcome.
Understanding is the outcome.
The pen is simply another communication tool.
And once I started looking at bikablo that way, I began seeing possibilities everywhere.
Instead of asking an organization:
Would your team like to learn visual thinking?
What if we asked:
Would you like your meetings to be more productive?
Would you like people to participate more actively in your workshops?
Would it help if your team could see a complicated process on one wall instead of trying to understand it across six documents?
Could your trainers use a few simple visual tools to make learning more engaging and memorable?
Could your leaders communicate change more clearly?
Could your facilitators use another way of helping a group move from a messy conversation toward shared understanding?
Those are very different conversations.
And importantly, they don't all require the same solution.
This has been another shift in my thinking.
The traditional bikablo Basics training is an immersive two-day experience, and there is enormous value in having that time to build a genuine visual vocabulary and practise using it.
But not every organization needs to start there.
For one team, the right introduction might be a 90-minute hands-on session about using simple visuals in meetings.
For another, it could be a half-day workshop for facilitators.
A leadership team might want to explore visual tools for strategy and alignment.
A group of trainers might want techniques they can immediately incorporate into their own workshops.
Another organization may have a complicated process that would benefit from visual process mapping.
And some people will discover through those experiences that they want to go much deeper and build visual thinking into their professional toolkit.
That's where a full bikablo training becomes incredibly valuable.
The point is that we don't have to start with the course. We can start with the need.
I still love visual thinking.
I love putting a marker into someone's hand and watching the moment they realize, Oh. I actually can do this.
I love seeing a complicated conversation gradually become something everyone in the room can see.
And I love that bikablo gives people a learnable visual language rather than asking them to suddenly become artists.
But the more I work with it, the more convinced I become that visual thinking isn't really the thing I'm selling.
I'm interested in helping people communicate better.
Helping teams understand one another.
Helping facilitators create better conversations.
Helping organizations make complexity easier to navigate.
Helping good ideas survive the meeting where they were created.
Sometimes the answer to that might be a two-day bikablo course.
Sometimes it might be a marker, a flipchart and 90 minutes together.
And I think that's a much more interesting place to start the conversation.
So perhaps the question isn't: "Would you like to learn visual thinking?"
Perhaps it's:
"What would you like your people to be able to see, understand or do better?"
Then we can pick up the markers.