Visualisation tool

Challenge

I met with a client this week who wanted to improve her interview skills. She had a run of 11  interviews where the feedback was poor. She was unable to explain specifically why she had  performed poorly but agreed with feedback from interviewers that she appeared very nervous and  rambling. Working as a coach with clients it’s important I understand their world and experience so I  can ask good questions for their insight and self-awareness as much as I my own understanding.  Talking through the specific nature of her poor interview performance was proving difficult for her.

Selection

I decided to explore what was happening for her in a different way so I asked if she would like to try  something new. I thought if I could get her to move away from talking and towards representing her  experience visually, we might get somewhere. Given visualisation tools allow us to be able to see  what someone is thinking and can show us a process of thought or output, I thought this could be a  good tool to use. Visualisation tools help us move beyond words or language and also help us to see  patterns and themes and so I wanted to draw these out. I had a hypothesis of what was happening  for her – and I wanted to test the theory that had formed in my mind.

Application

After agreeing to try, I asked her to imagine she was now going into the last interview she’d had and  to re-present her experience of the interview in whatever way she wanted to; she could use  diagrams, pictures, lines, squiggles, whatever occurred to her as she drew on a whiteboard. She  drew herself in the top left corner as a very small stick figure. She drew the interviewers as larger  figures and started to draw in her words ‘word bubbles’. She drew a bubble with the words “I can’t  do this” and then another bubble “This career history I’m giving is too old”.

When she had finished she had a whiteboard with lots of imagery: bubbles filled with words, the  stick figures and some images – “The Scream” emoji , and also a box with a tick in it. To confirm

my understanding I asked if these were word bubbles or thought bubbles. She said some of her  bubbles were her interview answers, some her thoughts and some were the interviewers’ thoughts.  I asked her what “The Scream” was and she said it was representative of anxiety: her struggle with  thoughts and how she felt during the interview. The box with the tick represented her capability but  she felt she couldn’t get this across and was continually questioning herself as she progressed  through the interview. The small stick figure she said was how she felt the moment she walked in  the door: small and inept.

After my additional questions for clarity of what she had drawn, she started to circle in blue the  thoughts that she had about herself and circle in red, the thoughts she was having about what the  interviewers would think. She was able to see and track where her thoughts were self-limiting and  were making her nervous and feel small. She was going into interviews questioning everything about  herself and capability rather than articulating and focusing what she could do and communicating  this.

Insight and approach

At the end of the session we were both very clear on what had happened for her and she had gained  clarity about specific (self-damaging) parts of the process that otherwise had been missing when

trying to simply talk about it and, I now understood what was happening in her interviews. Having  her map out the process including the imagery allowed a creative outlet beyond words. In being able  to look at the whole of what she had drawn we were also both able to see patterns and themes and  importantly identify relevant tools and activities she could use to improve her interviews.

It showed us both that sometimes it’s better to see what’s happening than simply to say/hear it, to  enable better like-for-like understanding. I also recognise the cut-through and improved  communication and shared understanding achieved through using visualisation.

Design thinking is similar to coaching in its process of discovery and exploration (what is, what if),  iterations in concept and behaviour, finding what wows and what works; like coaching, design  thinking has the end user at its centre and also relies on the experience in the now versus the past,  something that drives me in all my coaching work: future focused solutions. This is why I tried to  take her mind back to imagining how the interview process unfolded rather than reporting what she  thinks happened: in imagining and casting her mind back to the interview she was in ‘the’ moment  as much as she could be.  A better way of using the tool might have been to have her draw what she  was currently experiencing when thinking about the interview and when talking to me about it.

Whilst visualisation tools as such are not primarily or necessarily a problem solving tool, it is a way of  getting through the problems that arise in communication and showcasing a clear representation of  what is being communicated; to that end I will continue to use it in my coaching practice.

