Our Approach
We structure experiences with art that generate collaboration, empathic communication, and individual cognitive and behavioral growth.
We teach you to do the same using your work within your professional context.
Rigorous, Tested Methods
Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) is a facilitation and discussion methodology developed for art museums that we adapted for the professional world. VTS was co-created by Philip Yenawine, a founding consultant to Hailey Group, and Abigail Housen, a cognitive psychologist. They designed VTS for museums and schools and achieved global impact.
Peer reviewed research shows that engagement with VTS improves observation, communication, and listening skills; hones empathic capacities and reflective practices that promote self awareness about one’s own thinking patterns, assumptions and biases; helps both leaders and teams navigate ambiguity and uncertainty, and supports understanding across difference and inclusivity.
Hailey Group brought VTS to the business world. We connect the leader-team dynamics and cognitive growth enabled by VTS to scholarship and best practices within organizational behavior, executive education, human-centered design, healthcare, and higher education. Our team includes experts from across these arenas.
This illustration captures key techniques and outcomes of a Hailey Group facilitative leadership workshop in an executive education program at a renowned business school. Click to enlarge.
What happens during a Visual Thinking Strategies discussion?
A VTS DISCUSSION: THE FACILITATOR
During a VTS discussion, the facilitator stewards group discussion about a common focus (i.e., a work of art, a business stimulus, a medical image) by employing research-based techniques such as asking carefully worded open-ended questions, listening to understand, paraphrasing responses to share that understanding, rigorously seeking evidence for unsupported statements, maintaining a non-judgmental attitude, linking ideas across the conversation, recognizing various lenses being applied by individual comments, refraining from inserting their own opinions and ideas, and prompting continued inquiry.
VTS training develops each of these skills and helps facilitators cultivate a curious, appreciative, rigorous stance. VTS facilitators intentionally cultivate a culture in which work is experienced as an engaged, respectful process of learning in real time.
A VTS DISCUSSION: THE PARTICIPANTS
The VTS process enables discussion participants to listen deeply as well as speak, move beyond initial assumptions and impressions, anchor their perspectives in evidence, consider multiple interpretations simultaneously, build on each other’s ideas, respectfully disagree, change their minds, and experiment. They are attentive to their own thinking and the thinking of others. Participants develop comfort with uncertainty by staying in a process of continued exploration.
VTS creates a brave space in which performative, fear-based participation (or non-participation) dissipates; instead, everyone becomes deeply engaged in the material at hand and each other’s thinking and meaning-making. Participants experience a culture of learning and growth in real time.
In Addition…
RESTORATIVE PRACTICES
Stressed and exhausted teams need space for group experiences that can help them experience wonder, get recentered in their professional values, and be mindful and empathetic together. We deploy a number of art and meditative techniques using personal responses, poetry, some VTS and more to help teams and individuals recenter and restore.
SKETCHING
Sketching techniques—no experience required!—can be layered into many of our learning experiences to deepen observation, generate insights, and help participants rewire their visual focus and build on each other’s ideas.
“Very productive, informative, and eye-opening for our team–the techniques we learned ensured opinions are heard and clarity is captured. All members of our team gained confidence and tools for how to facilitate going forward. Using art as a vehicle to team build was incredibly creative.”