Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS)

VTS is a terrific technique I met last year. It develops soft skills all of us use every day:

• Observing
• Speculating
• Reasoning with evidence
• Teamwork
• Cultivating point of view

To shed light on VTS, I have two interesting stories for you.

VTS in a geeky software development conference

Alex West, the creative director in Nerd/Noir, made an amazing VTS session during BuildStuff Kyiv conference. Just imagine: around 100 geeky people (typical programmers) sitting in the same room, some even standing, and everybody looking at pictures. Alex was working miracles with such specific visitors for the whole hour.

We had three VTS sessions with photos and paintings involved. During each of them, Alex as a facilitator was repeatedly asking people three following questions:

• What’s going on in this picture?
• What do you see that makes you say that?
• What more can we find?

She was also paraphrasing each person’s response and linking thoughts. It turned into an experience of learning, collaboration, going deeper, becoming more attentive to details while looking onto pictures like the one below:

Despite being a non-high-tech topic, it was the best experience for the whole two-day BuildStuff conference at all. Moreover, I had a short conversation with Alex West and promised her to try the technique out in my company (Atola).

VTS session with Atola team

Everything was ready for kick off. A half of our team came and were curious about the technique. Anna Krasilnik, co-founder and head coach of Learn English coaching center, kindly agreed to play a facilitator role in VTS for us.

As a result, we managed to succeed in discussions of all pictures. Brainstorming, ideas improvement, no quarrels, going more and more mindful in picture analysis… It was effective and the team had a really nice time. Nevertheless, we had a discussion afterwards based on our impressions, and a half of participators did not see much sense to make it a permanent exercise. QA lead even said: “Why don’t we discuss our dev tasks in so many details instead?” :) I had nothing concrete to answer :)

So we got diverse yet non-neutral opinions. However, it was an enjoyable experience anyway. There is one personal insight I got after all: I never thought I could understand a painting that deep. In particular, cooperative thinking and teamwork helped much in an interpretation of The Perception of Memory by Salvador Dali. It is now not that surreal for me as it had been before.

A little bit more about Visual Thinking Strategies

Visual Thinking Strategies is a rather young technique so far and frequently adopted for children. Here is more information at vtshome.org

There are different success stories of schools and museums using VTS. On top of that, CIA and Harvard medical school have also been taking advantage of the technique. So maybe it is something that you might try in your company? For instance, during some break at work. One session with a single picture takes 15–20 minutes giving an unusual experience, improving various skills and, finally, creating a relaxation.

Take a look at VTS in action: