Visual Prioritizing for Kaleidoscopic Thinkers
Quick Summary:
Learn how to use visual communication as an aid for prioritizing challenges for yourself and with your people. Types of aids that help with prioritizing are the ones that allow someone to see all of the ideas and categorize them in a gamified way. Then providing a visual aid to remember the final decision is a helpful way to allow those with active brains to remember what was discussed. When in doubt, check in with yourself or your client.
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what’s the deal with prioritizing challenges?
The amazing thing about a lot of creative brain types is that our strength comes from our ability to blend ideas and mix together options in ways that no one else thinks of. That means our minds are constantly moving ideas around to help this blending take place.
Moving minds are FANTASTIC for innovative thinking, engineering new concepts and thinking outside of the box. The thing is that there are parts of life that need to be packed in a box.
So if you’re thinking of this analogy of packing up… imagine your client is getting ready to move to a new place. It’s time for them to pack up their items into boxes to take to a new location. Which of these thinking methods is better suited to packing…
1. Removing and stacking items in different piles. Throwing everything in to a box and forcing it closed.
-or-
2. Gathering items and placing them into the box in size order and leaving out what doesn’t fit?
The funny thing is that in real life packing a box to move can actually be a pretty daunting task for someone with a constantly moving mind (like ADHDers for example) because so many of the items spark new ideas or make us think of another item that might “blend” well with it, then we are in some other room - no longer packing.
This does mean that kaleidoscopic minded people are really stellar at “unpacking.” If you’re a coach or therapist, you have probably noticed this and really enjoyed the insights that come out of your clients.
Does this mean they should never learn to pack or prioritize? No. Does this mean they are worthless? Absolutely not! What this does mean, is that quickly prioritizing isn’t the best suited task for movement-oriented visual thinkers and that it will require some blending of other strengths to make it a task that gets finished.
These clients are like continuous idea machines. We can’t get mad at an apple tree for constantly producing new fruit. In fact, that would be a miracle! So let’s enjoy the fact that they create new things constantly and help them do that with even more capacity by including visual aids that support prioritizing.
This analogy can help you as you plan how to best support your client with whatever they need to pack.
types of visual aids that are great for prioritizing support.
Take a look again at the 2 options in the analogy above. Removing and stacking items in different piles is a strength of kaleidoscopic thinkers. You may even see tons of seemingly random piles in their workspaces… these all have a purpose actually. So what if we run with their love of sorting and their visual intelligence and get this how on the road!
Here are the things to look for with you clients when deciding what visual aids to offer:
How do they currently organize things? Ask them.
Do they like color coding, buying nice containers, working to music, etc. Find out what works well for them environmentally.
Now what are other common problems that make it hard for them to stick with an organization method? Could it be that new ideas come up (they are constantly generating those after all)
What do they create? This will help us coming up with playful visual aids that match their creative style.
Then take a look at this list of visual aids that you could offer. See if any of these fit with what you’ve discovered above:
Visual categorizing: Have them brain dump all of their ideas onto sticky notes and sort them. Help them categorize them on the wall by time/deadline, team process, order of steps/operations, etc. Sit with them (in person or virtually) and take visual notes with them of what tasks they have and what category they fit into. You can use sticky notes, white boards, paper, etc. Tools like Canva whiteboard work great for this too!
Working within an analogy: Create an analogy around their goal. Now place all of the tasks into the journey/story. Where do they fit to make the story make sense? What can be dropped? What’s missing?
Performing the task: Create a vlog or record yourself. Work with a buddy. Get an accountability partner. Put a mirror out near you so you can see yourself working. Create a way to document the process so that others can learn from it. This automatically allows creative minds to simplify because they want it to look cool and me understandable. Obviously check with the client first. Bringing out a mirror for someone who struggled with body image challenges would not work, but maybe they love screen recording their process.
Making it beautiful: Create an activity around the task. Add one sticker to a sticker by number for each completed task. Rip off rings on a paper countdown. Put out beads for all the tasks and have them put one in a cup for each completed piece. Gamification is a powerful way to make a systems and numbers based task feel more like a fluid journey.
Let them feel it out and document it: Just create space in your process to let them unpack and admire things as they pack. Give them space to spend time collecting and remembering items and expanding on tasks. Set reminders/deadlines for them to check back in with the task with no shame of going off task. This option is best for tasks that are still unknown and need to be tested first. Like finding a new routine or planning to their business. Give them permission to test something out and then report back to you what they discover. Then use one of the other options to make it happen if they want to move forward with it.
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how to offer visual support for prioritizing
For those of you who may be thinking, “Isn’t this babying them? Aren’t they going to feel belittled or like we don’t trust them.” No. Actually completely the opposite is true if these accommodations are offered from a place of equity.
The first thing we need to do when offering visual aids to others or ourselves is to remember that we/they are not broken. They are an entirely different but also very much the same human being as you. When we validate that something is hard and we come in with other ways to accommodate those challenges we are telling them that they matter enough for us to try something different.
When you notice something isn’t working, get curious, ask the questions above and then ask if you can brainstorm some fun ways to try something different.
Helping it stick
These aids stick if they work, for as long as they need to. It’s okay to drop an aid and move on to something else if it’s no longer working. It’s also okay to use multiple types. Just do what you need to do to stay organized with what you’ve provided.
Be an observer. Look at what’s working and how clients react. What feedback are your receiving?
With that information you can make tweaks to the prioritizing activities/aids. Document it in your client portal or somewhere else where you collect client project information. Weave it into your process and remind them of the option when they fall back into more comfortable habits again.
For example, if they love using Canva whiteboard to work through an analogy… use it everywhere! Use the analogy in all of your project presentations, add the analogy to your messages, use GIFs that relate to the analogy. If you’d like to see an example of how I use analogies in Canva whiteboard as my own visual aid watch this 5-min video.
when in doubt, check-in
Whenever you’re wondering if something is helpful, check in with your client. Ask them if it’s helpful. Ask them if any part of it isn’t working well. Then work together to come up with a solution based on what they already intuitively do for themselves. After all, they’ve been living their whole life with their brain, so they know a thing or two about it even if they don’t have the words yet. <3
You’re doing awesome! I’m so proud of you and stoked that you care this much about your own brain and the thinking processes of your clients. Keep it up! And as always if you need support you can email me or hop into the O.I.C. to learn more about using visual aids alongside other amazing leaders like yourself.
the illustrative shop has a tool that’s great for visual prioritizing!
Meet the Idea Harvesting Kit. This workbook is interactive and guides you or your client through the process of organizing all of the ideas running around in their head.
I’d love to hear what you learned from the article! If you have questions or want to share about your work you can leave a comment below or email me at laura@illustrative.us.
AUTHOR | LAURA MATTESON
Laura is a neurodivergent artist, mother, wife, founder of Illustrative with fancy drawing skills and a huge bucket-full of hope and love for humanity.
