Visual Thinking

While visual thinkers are not seers, enlisting our perspective can help avert not only small mishaps but larger catastrophes. We’ll look at studies that show how teams consisting of one kind of thinker underperform compared with mixed groups of visual and non-visual thinkers. Having a visual thinker on your team could make all the difference.

We’ll see how disasters such as the devastating failure of the Fukushima power plant in Japan and the twin Boeing 737 MAX crashes that took the lives of hundreds of people might have been averted by someone with a visual skill set.

These are our visual thinkers, many hiding in plain sight, and we have failed to understand, encourage, or appreciate their specific contributions. One reason I was driven to write this book is that the loss of skills in this country terrifies me. And it is entirely preventable, if only we stop screening out the very people who could save us.

The work of the researcher Maria Kozhevnikov showed that there are object visualizers like me, who think in pictures, and, as I suspected, a second group of mathematically inclined visual-spatial thinkers, an overlooked but essential subset of visual thinkers, who think in patterns.

People often confuse visual thinking with vision. We will see throughout this book that visual thinking is not about how we see but about how the brain processes information; how we think and we perceive.

language, specifically grammar, is innate.