In education, there’s ever deepening understanding of the importance of different learning styles—visual, auditory, reading, writing, and kinesthetic (hands-on). In the business world, marketers and HR professionals are catering to distinctive styles of learning and thinking. The boardroom would do well to take note. By intentionally hiring employees with diverse thinking styles, a company can improve its strategy, planning, problem solving, and outcomes.
Best-selling author and industrial product designer Temple Grandin recently wrote in a Forbes blog that disasters might have been averted if visual thinkers had had a more prominent role at Boeing and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
Grandin says many mathematical minds aren’t good at seeing how a system could break. The reason, she believes, is that they lack visual thinking.
People whose minds process information as visual representations tend to see the outcomes of certain design risks, Grandin notes, while those with more of a quantitative mindset tend to calculate risk rather than envision it.
During the design of the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan, Grandin says, visual thinkers might have stressed the value of placing electric cooling pumps well above the level of the sea wall and installing waterproof doors. For the Boeing 737 MAX, visual thinkers might have drawn more attention to the lack of redundant sensors as a possible single point of failure. The delicate nature of both designs becomes clear through visualizations that reveal vulnerabilities, according to Grandin.
Modern technologies such as a geographic information system (GIS) help bridge the two kinds of thinking. GIS provides a common operational picture that each type of thinker can use to explore and analyze visual and analytical outputs. The result is a more holistic understanding of potential problems.
The visual thinker can spot conditions that stand out when data appears in a spatial context—via GIS maps and dashboards. The quantitative thinker can explore attribute tables and apply data science to create models that quantify risks and prioritize actions. Together, these thinkers can map the best path forward for a business or project.
Grandin has encountered both quantitative and visual thinkers on all the projects she’s been involved in during her career. The most successful efforts, she says, incorporated a mix of these talents.
Ian McHarg, one of the pioneers of the concept of spatial thinking—a form of visual thinking—devised transparent overlays for various kinds of information (infrastructure, land use, vegetation, wildlife, hydrology, soils, and more).
