I was facilitating a leadership team offsite a few years ago. The team had been discussing their culture — what it was, what they wanted it to be, etc — for the better part of a morning. The conversation was earnest and substantive, but something wasn't landing. Everyone was agreeing in words and disagreeing in tone.

On a whim, I stopped the discussion and asked each person to draw — literally, on a piece of paper — what the current culture felt like to them. No artistic skill required. Just an image that captured the experience.

When we shared the drawings, the room shifted. A dam that had been holding back a much more honest conversation gave way. One leader had drawn a series of silos, isolated columns with no connections between them. Another had drawn a river with a rock in the middle, splitting the current. A third had drawn a storm.

None of them had been willing to say these things out loud. But drawn on paper, in front of colleagues, the images opened a conversation that hours of verbal discussion hadn't.

Why Words Alone Fail

Language is powerful. It's also deeply familiar , meaning we have sophisticated ways of managing what we say. We choose words that are defensible. We hedge when we sense risk. We translate our experience into professional register before we share it.

Images don't allow that kind of management in the same way. They're faster, messier, and more revealing. They often surface what someone actually thinks before the editing process can intervene.

This is one reason that visual methods — metaphor work, image mapping, journey mapping, drawing exercises — have become a meaningful part of my facilitation toolkit. They're not about making things more creative or fun (though they often do both). They're about accessing information that the usual conversational formats don't reach.

Practical Applications for Leadership Teams

You don't need a professional facilitator to experiment with visual thinking. Here are a few approaches that work in leadership settings:

  • The current state / future state drawing. Ask individuals to draw what the organization feels like today and what they hope it could feel like. The gap between the two drawings is the beginning of a real strategic conversation.
  • Metaphor generation. Ask 'If our team culture were a vehicle, what kind of vehicle would it be, and why?' The answers reveal assumptions and experiences that rarely surface in direct questioning.
  • Journey mapping. For culture change initiatives, mapping the employee experience visually — from first awareness to deep engagement — surfaces friction points that surveys often miss.
  • The 'draw the system' exercise. For complex organizational problems, asking a team to draw the system they're trying to change often reveals interdependencies and assumptions that verbal analysis misses.

The goal of all of these isn't art, but honesty. It's finding a way past the familiar conversational patterns that keep leadership teams in their heads and out of genuine contact with what's actually true.

What would your team draw if you asked them to picture your current culture?