Updated July 13, 2020
Throughout the year, XPLANE offers immersive learning experiences for individuals called Visual Thinking Bootcamps (formerly known as Visual Thinking Workshops). Here’s what our bootcamps cover:
Visual Thinking 101: The Foundations
You’ll start by learning a brief history of visual thinking, how it works, and why it’s important. After that, there will be demonstrations, followed by learning expert techniques, frameworks, and approaches. You’ll end Visual Thinking 101 learning tactics and tools to use to effectively create alignment.
Visual Thinking 201: Applying it to your Org
Your 201 visual thinking journey will start by identifying a complex idea and finding the perfect visual to explain it. Following that exercise, you’ll learn how to apply visual thinking to your organization: prototyping, storyboarding, and mapping out a user experience, customer journey, or value proposition. By the end of the 201-course, you’ll walk away with numerous exercises, frameworks, tools, and tricks to engage and align your team, clients and/or co-workers.
Below we address who should attend our bootcamps (and who shouldn’t) and the skills you can expect to walk away with.
Who should attend our Visual Thinking Bootcamps?
- Professionals in large organizations who want to leverage visual communications. Use case examples include using visuals to ensure everyone on your team understands the process, testing new ideas, or having strategic conversations in less time by using diagrams instead of slide decks.
- Leaders who want to transform their day-to-day work and learn how to make their meetings more effective by using visuals to explain complicated ideas.
- Change management practitioners and independent consultants who want to incorporate more visuals into their communications and facilitation style.
- Seasoned visual thinking practitioners and designers who work as a visual facilitator professionally and want to level-up their skills.
- Visual Thinking School attendees who have attended our monthly VTS event and want more in-depth skills and hands-on training, this is for you.
Who should not attend our Visual Thinking Bootcamps?
- If you want to strengthen your facilitation skills, get live-practice, and learn to map which activities and exercises to lead for various types of problems and groups, this is not the event for you.
- If you want to become a Design Thinker and learn how to shape user insights into testable prototypes, this is not the event for you. Learn more about the differences between Visual Thinking vs. Design Thinking.
- If you are a visual facilitator who wants to practice live graphic capture by recording dialogue in real-time and improving your hand lettering for presentations, this is not the event for you.
- If you attended a Visual Thinking Bootcamp in the recent past and don’t want to repeat the course, this event is not for you.
What kind of skills can you expect to learn?
101: The Fundamentals
- Learn and understand the visual alphabet, and build your visual vocabulary
- Practice creating visuals of common scenarios, behaviors, and moments you experience in the workplace
- Learn how and when to use different visual frameworks to organize information and answer specific audience questions
- Leave with hands-on practice using a real-world scenario that combines the skills above to create a use case targeted to a specific audience
201: Applying It To Your Organization
- Complexity busting: the process of wrestling with a complex idea until landing upon the perfect visual to explain it
- Practice visualizing using cases from within your organization
- Understand visual tools and techniques to create a storyboard for a user experience, customer journey, value proposition, or vision statement, all using… you guessed it, visuals!
- Build assessment skills to determine what types of meetings can be re-designed to incorporate visuals and how to apply visuals in meetings for greater engagement and impact
- Learn which visual frameworks XPLANE uses with Fortune 500 clients to gain alignment, make decisions, and uncover gaps in understanding
Which Visual Thinking Bootcamp is Right For Me?
Is there a certification offered at the end of the bootcamp?
Yes! While XPLANE is not an accredited educational institution, we will provide you with a certificate upon the successful completion of the course. This can be helpful in acquiring professional development funds to cover the cost of the course.