Visual Consulting: Designing & Leading Change, reviewed

By review of  Visual Consulting: Designing & Leading Change, by David Sibbet and Gisela Wending.

Visual Consulting demonstrates how visualisation and design thinking can combine with dialogue and change methods to get more creative and productive results. The practices that Sibbet and Wendling describe can be applied to organisational and diverse, cross-boundary consulting projects. The book helps professionals:

• Learn powerful visual tools for all key stages of the consulting process, including marketing your services
• Understand the predictable challenges of change and how to successfully guide organisations and communities through them
• Learn how to collaborate with clients to get sustainable change
• Find tools for working comprehensively to drive change
• Successfully guide change in both organisations and communities

Visual Consulting, the fourth book in Sibbet’s Visual Facilitation Series, follows the previously released books Visual Leaders, Visual Teams, and Visual Meetings. The latest installment combines the principles and practices from David and Gisela’s nearly 70 years of field experience and teaches readers how to activate a full range of visual, dialogue, and change tools and models to support successful consulting relationships.

We are visual creatures. Not all of us learn via text, and death by powerpoint is surely almost from a bygone time. At many conferences already there are people drawing visual mind maps of what the speakers are saying. It is good, colourful, visual and can help reinforce learning, as well as giving you a nice image to  tweet out too. This book aims to be an up todate guide to current schools of thought in terms of best practice and different methodologies to use.

Thankfully too they have also decided to eat their own dog food and the book is effectively and well illustrated with a series of images, to show that they are practising what they preach and visually illustrating their ideas. We may have a soft spot for the value of using good visuals to back up your ideas, if nothing else it gives the audience so inspiring eye candy, and at best it helps to increase the learning experience.

This book is useful, practical, relevant, and well worth reading if you want to ensure no DBPP (death by power point) in your talks or workshops.

David Sibbet, a widely recognised leader in visual facilitation and process leadership, has teamed up with Gisela Wendling, PhD., the Vice President of Global Learning at The Grove and co-director of the Global Learning & Exchange Network (GLEN), to release Visual Consulting: Designing & Leading Change. Published by Wiley, Visual Consulting is a tool for all consultants who want to use powerful visual tools and for visual practitioners moving into consulting.

If you would like to have your company featured in the Irish Tech News Business Showcase, get in contact with us at Simon@IrishTechNews.ie or on Twitter: @SimonCocking