Does Everyone See the Same Picture?

Over the years, I’ve watched some very good leaders do something remarkably unsophisticated.

They walk over to a paperboard and pick up a pen. They draw boxes. Arrows. Circles. Cross things out. Usually, none of it is particularly beautiful.

But something changes in the meeting. People start pointing at the same things. They question the same assumptions. Someone moves an arrow. Someone else adds something that was missing. Eventually, they’re no longer discussing five different versions of the problem. They’re looking at one.

There’s an irony here. We talk constantly about getting people “on the same page”, yet one of the simplest ways of actually doing it — standing around a paperboard with a pen — seems to be disappearing.

Now, I’m not anti-PowerPoint. Slides can be excellent. I have long been an advocate and even designer of slides.

But used badly, they atomise information.

One idea appears. Then it disappears. Another replaces it. Twenty slides later, everyone has received the same information, but they may have assembled completely different pictures of what it means.

The information becomes fragmented and sometimes so does the audience.

A paperboard does something different.

The picture stays in the space where the minds are focused.

People can point at it. Challenge it. Add to it. Move things around. Most importantly, they can build it together.

Nobody cares that the arrows aren’t straight. They’re literally on the same page.

This is what I call the Framing Signal, one of the four signals in my ESC leadership communication model.

Its central question is simple:

Does everyone see the same picture?

Imagine a leadership team discussing customer retention.

One person sees a marketing problem. Another sees customer service. Someone else sees product quality. Finance sees churn.

Nobody misunderstood the words.

They constructed different pictures from them.

Now put a simple customer journey on a paperboard:

Purchase → Onboarding → First success → Habit → Renewal

And point to one part:

“This is where we’re losing them.”

Do you see my point? Something has changed.

The visual hasn’t simply made the communication prettier. It has externalised the mental model.

Everyone now has something they can see, question and modify.

And it doesn’t have to be a paperboard.

It could be a strategy map, a diagram on a slide, a whiteboard, some Post-it notes or a pen on the back of an envelope.

The medium isn’t the point.

Making the thinking visible is the point.

How we frame a problem influences what we subsequently do about it.

Frame something as a cost problem and people will look for efficiencies.

Frame it as a customer experience problem and they’ll look for friction.

Frame it as a capability problem and they’ll start looking at people, skills and resources.

Same organisation. Same evidence. Potentially very different decisions.

Which is why framing isn’t simply a presentation technique.

It’s an act of leadership.