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Large, complex organizations have large, complex problems. When leading organizations like Motorola, AT&T, Novartis, IBM and the United Nations need help improving teamwork, building communication, setting strategy and resolving complex issues, they turn to visual languages consulting tools. And now you can, too. Visual Languages (also known as Metaphor Languages) allow you to connect with your team at an emotional level, freeing up creativity and unblocking communication channels. Unlike traditional consulting and workshop models, visual language tools don't just rely on “talking it out” or brainstorming. Instead, they use our emotional brain to get total commitment from participants and achieve breakthrough results. Metaphor Languages are Workshop Facilitation Tools that can be used to: - Determine the current state of the business from intellectual and emotional perspectives
- Create future states based on collective vision of the team
- Build action plans that the whole team can commit to
- Review processes and find areas for improvement
- Overcome organizational design challenges
- Improve the results of culture change and change management programs Adding Metaphor Languages to your workshop or consulting session guarantees participants will be active, engaged and ready to listen to others, relate their own experiences, come up with new ideas, build on the ideas of colleagues, make sure the whole fits together and commit to make ideas become reality. Process Improvement Tools help in clearing your views and gives more visibility of the work and uniteemotion and logic in both thinking and communication. And we know these tools work! Hundreds of workshops conducted over the last twenty years have produced millions of dollars of savings by bringing the passion and skills of groups to bear on their toughest problems. Just as naming things with words allows us to work with them and recall them, when working with Metaphor Languages we name things with images. Visual symbols and metaphors give meaning and an emotional content more deeply understood than verbal language. They also cross cultural barriers allowing better communication among international teams. A symbol or visual image is much easier to process than a word. It’s designed to be intuitively obvious on its face, so that it requires no extra intellectual processing. By using images, we increase efficiency for an individual person. When working with groups the impact is even greater because it forces their internal models to become immediately visible to the others. This allows us to see the pre-thought or emotional bias for the logical statement or supposedly logical statement and get to the root of the problems. These tools used to only be available to large companies with big budgets, but they are now affordable and can be used by companies of all sizes. Metaphor Languages are also a great way for independent and freelance consultants to generate revenue and stand out from the crowd. If you want to learn more, the top resources for visual language consulting is the Metaphor Language Research Center in Boulder, Colorado.
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workshop facilitation tools, process improvement tools,
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