Job Requirement: Ability To Communicate Visually
Have you noticed that job postings for organizational change management (OCM) roles are changing? There is often a new requirement, something along the lines of: “Ability to create great, simple graphics; must be able to communicate messages visually.” What about those of us who consider ourselves to be uncreative and may be intimidated by the requirement, should we pass on the role and only seek out more “traditional” roles? Heck no! We should leverage our existing OCM skills and begin to look for and recreate great design in order to develop our own new modern communication capabilities.
1. Start Looking for Great Design!
Look at things, anything and everywhere, that have been created well and presented in a nice way. Look at your coffee mug, hand cream, the back of a cereal box, a magazine ad, or a TC commercial. Look at the fonts. Look at the colors. Look at the shapes. Look at how they are constructed and try to deconstruct them. Begin by simply looking at the graphic designs done by creative and talented people who get paid high dollar to do this professionally.
An ad for a yoga retreat may use a curly font or a different color text for emphasis: “Mindfulness, Relaxation, Freedom.” It may have a catch phrase on top of a picture: “Leave the City Behind.”
An article about pandemic employment may have a call out with larger text in a box with an important fact or statistic: “Two times as many women have fallen out of the workforce.”
The front of a magazine cover may have cropped off the head or arms of its subject to focus on the face with a few descriptive words over the image.
Critique the school newsletter!
Once you start to notice great design, you will see it everywhere. The next step is to try to recreate great design in your OCM work leveraging the tools that you already have such as PowerPoint.
2. Learn About Great Design
So, you have started looking and your reticular activating system is on high alert (your friend told you that they are shopping for a yellow car and now you see yellow cars everywhere). Now it’s time to learn more about the underlying theories and principles of great design.
There are heaps of free resources to learn from:
Take a LinkedIn Learning courses
Google it: Top 10 Tips for Graphic Design
Watch YouTube videos
Flip through books
Before & After magazine by John Wade is a fantastic resource. Using everything from newsletters to brochures to business cards, he shows the before and after, explaining and educating along the way, how to apply basic design concepts to transform mediocre into amazing content.
You’ll find that applying little things, such as the rule of thirds (Google it!), has a big impact on the design of the content you produce. And once you start seeking information about design, it will keep popping up in your online feed and your learning process will continue naturally!
3. Leverage the Technology that You Have
The interesting thing about technology, is that in regard to much of the content we create in an office environment, the technology that we use today is really the same old Microsoft buffet from the 1990s. What has changed is the application of that technology. The way information is displayed in a newspaper from 1990 is quite different than that of today’s newspaper, as is the way this information is consumed.
Today stakeholders not only consume information from their computers at the office, but also from their phones and other smart devices whilst away from the office. Content is often created in PowerPoint and published as a PDF allowing people to stretch it, look at it, anywhere, from any device. Just like we first learned to use a mouse in the 90s, we need to take the time to learn how to apply the bells and whistles of our technology to our communication content, enabling us to serve information in a way that incorporates beautiful design as well as the intended message to our audience no matter what device they are using to consume it.
4. A Little Great Design Goes a Long Way
Still intimated by great design? The best thing about design is that you don’t have to know that much in order to improve your communication content so much!
Instead of using five bullets on a PowerPoint slide, use five rectangles. Next time use six or use circles instead. Create a great slide, duplicate, and reuse it. So, you developed a fantastic slide for your client’s 12-month customer journey; now you can take that 12-month journey and easily change it to a nine-month or a six-month journey for your next project. The key is reuse and avoiding the reinvention the wheel whilst starting to develop your own personal design style.
Back to the cereal box and the commercials on TV. Look at the great design that is out there and find out what resonates with you. Do you like icons or photographs? What colors do you like? Do you like white text on a dark background? Even within the corporate brand standards within which we often work, find the design style that is you.
As change practitioners, we know how to get change done…key messages, stakeholder engagement, impact assessment, and all the rest. However, rather than just get change done, why not also get it done beautifully. Start by looking for great design and then try a few new things and learn from them. You will then continue to see new things and continue to learn from them. You will begin to slowly build your design knowledge and increase your communication capability.
Contact ChangeStaffing for consultants who get change done, and get it done beautifully.
A very special thanks to Sharon Connolly, accomplished change management and training professional by day and Change Super Hero by night, delivering awesome courses to help change and project professionals learn how to create infographics, videos and other great artifacts.