Visual Meetings: How Graphics, Sticky Notes and Idea Mapping Can Transform Group Productivity

Chapter 1. Visualization Is Worth 80 IQ Points: Tapping Energy, Intelligence, & Creativity

Let's start understanding visual meetings by imagining what is possible when you use active visualization with groups, through the lens of a real story about one of the more creative companies in our times —Apple. I was part of a team that designed and led the Leadership Experience, a flagship program of the fledgling Apple University, in 1985. Inspired by the graphical nature of Apple's products, we applied many strategies you can easily repeat.

The Apple Leadership Expeditions

One warm afternoon in the summer of that year, some 35 young leaders from what was then called Apple Computer piled off buses at Pajaro Dunes, a conference and condo site on the coast of California south of Silicon Valley. "The Journey is the Reward," read their T-shirts. Guides were dressed in mountain gear. Inside the rustic main building at Pajaro participants found a basically empty room, two huge piles of furniture draped with white nylon parachutes to look a bit like mountains, and a wall of nine screens. Everyone was invited to sit on the floor and wait in the semidarkness. Their weeklong Leadership Expedition was about to begin. IBM's PC business was exploding. Apple was entering the fray with the first really graphic computers and they needed their middle managers to take risks and act like leaders. We were focused ...