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Thought leadership audiences rely on words, numbers, and visuals to get excited. Words and numbers can convey correct thoughts; visuals make them connect and stick! Dedicate effort and energy to making your visuals stand out.

What is new: Exceptional visualization skills are the key to turning complex market realities into memory maps that stick in people’s minds.

Why it matters: The complex contexts in which thought leadership operates require propositions that leverage all three inputs.

✉️ Back of a napkin sketches: Many brilliant ideas are born on an envelope or a napkin. Make an effort to find the initial sketch that enabled a specific idea to get traction.

The initial sketch is relevant and can become the base for a professional visual, or it has evolved into something better. Tracking down envelope/napkin sketches is often the most low-hanging fruit 🍒 in finding a relevant visual.

❓ When you find it, you want to understand the details behind it

• What does the visual describe?
• What is the meaning of each component?
• What relationships are important?
• Are there any alternative sketches that have been part of the ideation phase?

Establish visual concepts: A great source of inspiration comes from visuals that are well-established:

• Gartner’s hype cycle – for matting maturity of new technologies
• The BCG matrix – classifying businesses into stars, dogs, cash cows, and question marks
• Eisenhower matrix – decide what to prioritize based on urgency and importance.
• Ansoff matrix – a 2×2 matrix supporting growth planning for markets and products
• SWOT analysis – four fields for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

The advantage of these established formats is that audiences are already familiar with them and can focus on what you have populated them with.

Contrasts: The prime purpose of thought leadership is to drive change. Sometimes, it is enough to communicate what the bright and shiny future looks like, but in most cases, your message gets stronger when contrasting two views:

• current – future
• worst – best
• wrong (left) – right
• status quo – change  

When introducing contrast, you trigger thoughts on which camp your audience wants to be in and whether there are interim steps between the two extremes.

When using contrasts, you have created visuals followed by actions that take you from A to B or via interim steps.

📱📵Photos vs. iconography: To give your sketches life, you can use photos, icons, or a mix of both.

Avoid stock-like pictures that primarily work as wallpaper. Aim for pictures that elevate the story you want to tell.

Icons allow you to show relationships creatively through visuals delivered from a stage or in articles and blog posts where you outline the story.

In the past, we were limited to corporate photo and icon libraries complemented with stock or employee photos. With the introduction of generative AI, we can prompt the creation of visuals that very closely match our stories.

📷➡️📽 From still to moving visuals: We are at a point where visuals with slight movements can challenge pure stills. We see this daily in the news, where speakers are moving or super slo-mo videos appear in the background.

As a thought leader tasked with driving actions and movements, you can also consider movements part of your visual language.

Capture speakers with moving cameras, not just stable talking heads. Develop visual concepts where subtle movements take the audience from state A to state B. Opt for video combined with text assets in your digital content. Consider slow-motion backgrounds instead of stills for face-to-face deliveries on the big stages.

Bottom line: Words and numbers deliver correct thought leadership, and your visuals make it connect. Pay more attention to visuals that can elevate your stories to a lively where they inspire your audience to take action. You have succeeded when you make stories easier to deliver and engage your audience.

Additional reading suggestions

• The visualization technique all great leaders use [BLOGPOST] – by John Barrett
• Visualizations that really work [ARTICLE] – by Scott Berinato, Harvard Business Review
• 3 visualization techniques that actually work for business [ARTICLE] – by Stephanie Burns, Forbes
• The back of the napkin [BOOOK] – by Dan Roam
• The decision book: 50 models for strategic thinking [BOOK] – by Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschappeler
• Inspire your buyers: Go to market with a story that sizzles [BOOK] – by Bruce Scheer
• Data is beautiful: 10 of the best data visualization examples from history and today [BLOGPOST] – by Tableau