Benefits of Sketchnotes and Visual Thinking for Business Leaders and Teams

I started sketchnoting as a personal learning project in 2015. Over the years, sketchnoting has grown from a personal tool for recording my learning/reflections into a powerful medium for thinking, storytelling, problem-solving, and connection.

What began as a tiny experiment – drawing ideas to better understand them – has transformed the way I learn, facilitate groups, coach others, collaborate, and build my personal brand. Along the way, sketchnotes connected me to a wonderful community of creative visual practitioners, enabled me to train 4000+ people in visual thinking practices, led to meaningful professional connections, and brought in many consulting opportunities.

As I reflect on this journey, here is a quick look on how sketchnotes have become an integral part of my leadership and consulting practice and how it can help leaders, organizations, and teams in making sense of an ever-evolving reality.

• Learning that Sticks: When you combine words and visuals, you activate both sides of the brain. This dual-coding deepens understanding and improves memory. Going by Austin Kleon’s maxim of “Read with a pencil”, I take raw notes of my interpretation of whatever I consume. It is a rich process of sense-making that connects ideas and synthesizes them. When I consume with a pencil, it takes away the anxiety of seeing what’s next in the feed. Finally, when I write by hand, I make those ideas my own, increasing the chances of bringing them to life. Having a hand-drawn repository of timeless ideas is a huge bonus of this pursuit.

• Clearer Thinking: I use visuals as a tool to help leadership teams think. When ideas are still forming, especially in groups, visual facilitation and graphical recording can harvest collective intelligence and surface shared understanding. Sometimes, even simple Venn diagram can reveal intersections that answer the question “Where to Play” while other visual frameworks (e.g. 2×2 matrices) help answer the question “How to Win?” Visual templates can also be great companions in building one’s self-awareness.

• Making Sense of Complexity: When the Russia-Ukraine war began, I visually facilitated a group of senior leaders in systems thinking exercise with a causal loop diagram. End of that exercise, the team was clearly able to see direct and indirect effects of the war on their business risks. Muddy problems require more than linear solutions. They need systems thinking, and visuals are a great way to visualize the components of the system that are otherwise easier to miss.

• Fuel for Creativity: For me, creating sketchnotes and visual maps is an act of play. It forces me to pause, reflect, and explore ideas mindfully. When I draw visuals based on ideas, they help me co-create meaning of the ideas, bringing out alternative meanings. This playful engagement opens doors to innovation that structured note-taking often misses.

• Storytelling that Resonates: Visual metaphors don’t just inform people. They build emotional resonance with people who consume them. Drawing a simple human figure in your visual notes helps people see themselves in those figures. It is a powerful way to connect ideas with people.

• Navigating Change: As a facilitator of large sale change programs, I always rely on visual metaphors and narratives because they connect emotionally. I believe that there cannot be any meaningful leadership, learning, or change without emotional involvement of people around you. Visual metaphors make complex transitions easier to grasp. They align people by showing the journey and the big picture, not just stating the goal—especially valuable in change communication and facilitation.

• Boosting Recall: Many years ago, I shared mountain metaphor with a mentee who was looking for career growth. He still remembers that rough diagram I drew on whiteboard to recall the idea of climbing the career mountain through cross-functional exposure. According to Brain Rules by John Medina, we remember 65% of what we both read and see. That’s a big win for learning, teaching, coaching, and communication.

• Reflective Backtalk: The act of drawing ideas and seeing them evolve reveal what you truly understand, and what you don’t. As we slow down to draw, we uncover patterns, biases, connections with other ideas and hidden insights.

A Sketchnote on Sketchnotes

Bottomline?

Visual Thinking helps you see your thinking. Whether you are building a new product, learning, facilitating, coaching, strategizing, or leading through change, visual thinking is a superpower that enhances clarity, creativity, and connection. Visuals help you see what truly matters.

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