Our Approach
Thinking together is a key component of innovative, productive workplaces, yet discussion often defaults to shortcut communication, leaves out out crucial perspectives, and results in missed opportunities and low employee engagement.
Through experiential learning, we teach a set of research-based strategies to help leaders and teams structure open, rigorous, meaningful discussion. These techniques are applicable across workplace communication, stimulating cognitive and behavioral growth.
We begin in the rich ambiguity of art, then apply the strategies directly in your work.
Our approach is grounded in a dynamic, research-based approach to facilitation, cognition, and discussion called Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), originally developed for art museums. We adapted these strategies for learning and application in the professional world. VTS was co-created by Philip Yenawine, a founding consultant to Hailey Group, and Abigail Housen, a cognitive psychologist. They designed VTS for museums and schools. In the early 2000s, physicians at Harvard medical School began teaching using this method, and it is now deployed at more than thirty medical schools.
There is a growing body of research into the efficacy of VTS, particularly within healthcare. Engagement with VTS improves observation, communication, critical thinking, and listening skills; hones empathic capacities and reflective practices that promote self awareness about one’s own thinking patterns, assumptions and biases; helps both leaders and teams navigate ambiguity and uncertainty; and supports understanding across differing perspectives. All of these capacities are crucial to accurate diagnosis and positive patient outcomes.
Hailey Group brought VTS to the business world. We connect the leader-team dynamics and cognitive growth enabled by VTS to scholarship and best practices within organizational behavior, executive education, human-centered design, healthcare, and higher education. Our team includes experts from across these arenas.
What happens during a Visual Thinking Strategies discussion?
The VTS Facilitator
The VTS leader structures a space of curiosity and rigorous inquiry by:
asking carefully worded questions
listening to understand
paraphrasing responses to share that understanding
seeking evidence for unsupported statements
maintaining a nonjudgmental attitude
linking ideas across the conversation
recognizing various lenses being applied
refraining from adding their own opinions/ideas
prompting continued inquiry
VTS facilitators hold a curious, open, attentive stance. We take responsibility for structuring a respectful process of learning in real time, one that is rooted in evidence-based reasoning, deep thinking, and holding multiple perspectives as possible.
VTS Participants
The VTS process creates a space in which discussion participants are:
listening deeply as well as speaking
attentive to their own thinking and that of others
moving beyond initial assumptions and impressions
anchoring perspectives in evidence
considering multiple perspectives simultaneously
building on each other’s ideas
respectfully disagreeing and experimenting
developing comfort with uncertainty
reaching deeper insights
Participants experience a brave space without fear-based contributions in which everyone engages. We become engrossed by the material at hand and each other’s thinking and meaning-making.
The Learning Journey
Hailey Group experiences, workshops, and courses are designed to meet learners where they are at every step. During shorter learning interventions, we focus on self-awareness, the dynamics between leader and team, and how each individual can concretely apply some VTS techniques in their work going forward.
Longer and scaled trainings focus on deeper leadership development, facilitation training, integrating a shared language of analysis and inquiry across teams, and weaving the strategies across workflow to generate a healthier, more productive and engaging workplace culture.
Read more about custom designs for organizations—we co-design with you for your context—and our VTS@Work Program for individual enrollees.
In Addition…
RESTORATIVE PRACTICES
Stressed and exhausted teams need space for group experiences that can help them experience wonder, get recentered in their professional values, and be mindful and empathetic together. We deploy a number of art and meditative techniques using personal responses, poetry, some VTS and more to help teams and individuals recenter and restore.
SKETCHING
Sketching techniques—no experience required!—can be layered into many of our learning experiences to deepen observation, generate insights, and help participants rewire their visual focus and build on each other’s ideas.
Converse
“It was very productive, informative, and eye-opening for our team–the techniques we learned ensured opinions were heard and clarity was captured. All members of our team gained confidence and tools to facilitate going forward. Using art as a vehicle for team building was incredibly creative.”
LEAD LEARNING ARCHITECT, IDEO