Strategic Expertise.
Creative Design.
Strategy Visualization
What if your next strategic initiative benefitted from a unique approach: strategic clarification and human-centered creative design to drive real and lasting organizational change?
In supporting over 100 global clients in the past decade, Nour has refined a unique process that activates people within the organization to understand better, internalize, and act on new strategies, innovative processes, and fundamental cultural shifts through a visual, co-created method.
Welcome to Strategy Visualization.
Unnecessarily Overcomplicated
Many strategic corporate initiatives lack alignment, resistance to change, inadequate planning, lack of key stakeholder engagement, organizational complexity, and even over-ambition.
When these ailments are combined with poor communication, it is no wonder why these initiatives struggle to cascade and become sustainable over time.
One question is paramount: How can you say more with greater clarity to increase your target audience's understanding, engagement, and commitment?
The Power and Promise of Visual Storytelling
Neuroimaging data proves that our brains process visuals 60,000 times faster than text (this is the "picture superiority effect"), yet most of our professional communication — from daily texts and email exchanges to memos, presentations, case studies, proposals, and descriptions of critical initiatives — is text-based.
Visual storytelling harnesses the power of custom illustrations to communicate narratives, evoke an emotional connection, and clarify complex information intuitively and effectively.
Here are just a few benefits the Nour's global clients have realized from this unique approach:
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Enhanced Retention - Visual stories help every audience remember and repeat information better than text alone. Studies have shown that people recall up to 65% of visual content even three days after seeing it versus 10-20% of written or spoken information.
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Emotional Engagement - Visual stories, because they are processed by our brains faster, often evoke an emotional connection to not just what is presented but also why more quickly than words. Any emotional connection to an initiative makes the story more compelling and memorable, heightening the viewer's engagement and empathy toward the material presented.
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Simplifying Complexity - Visual stories break down complex data, key concepts, and multi-threaded processes into digestible and understandable pieces. Visual frameworks convey relationships in what, how, and why something happens, making data insights more contextually relevant.
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Broader Accessibility - Visual stories transcend language barriers, making them more appealing to a broader audience. Only when you communicate essential messages to diverse audiences will you gain broader acceptance and compliance. Think of the airline safety cards in the seat back pocket: very few words, yet visuals everyone can understand.
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Increased Impact - Visual stories are the antithesis of the ever-shortening attention span propagated by the digital age. Not only can visuals attract viewers and encourage longer engagement with the content, but they can also extend the initial intrigue to a longer tail of remembrance and actions implemented.
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Media Versatility - Visual stories can be adapted to communicate the essence of your critical initiatives across a broad spectrum of platforms - social media, presentations, tradeshows, job aides, and even virtual and augmented reality - making them incredibly versatile across digital and physical spaces.
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Action Driver - Well-crafted visual stories motivate audiences to take action. From inspiring real and lasting change to influencing different behaviors or educating on critical new processes and capabilities, visual stories are powerful action drivers.
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Communication Clarity - Visual stories create a common language that is considerably easier for your target audience to understand, internalize, and act upon. Only when there is a certain level of communication clarity will others be able to articulate the same vision, direction, priorities, and next steps.
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Accelerated Cascading - In many organizations, the strategic importance of an initiative dramatically loses its potency, urgency, and potential impact as it cascades down the organization. Similar to the telephone game many of us played as children when the message is passed from one person to the next, it becomes diluted, altered, or even profoundly changed. Visual stories not only accelerate the cascading process but also ensure its integrity.
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Dramatic Adoption - If you stop and consider the fundamental purpose of many corporate initiatives, they are often intended to change human behavior. Visual stories embrace broad stakeholders and invoke a certain sense of ownership, which in turn elevates and amplifies the adoption of the desired outcomes.
Strategy Visualization Process
The Strategy Visualization process encompasses six (6) unique phases. Although this framework serves as a guide, we often customize our work to meet the unique needs of client executives. Overall, it is important to understand these phases in your planning efforts for the best possible outcome when working with our team.
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Due Diligence - In advance of our kickoff, we review background material, interview key stakeholders, and research key industry, company, and team dynamics. We can't help you visualize your story without understanding where you are today and your desired strategic outcomes.
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Strategize - Our role in this phase is to listen to your vision, approach to date, fundamental challenges, or opportunities you're trying to address. We ask clarifying questions to understand the key messages your target audience would most greatly value.
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Conceptualize - This phase involves a series of rough sketches, which become our first pass at visualizing three unique frameworks for telling your story. Through a relentless focus on your target audience and what you want them to feel, think, or do differently, we ensure your verbal messages match your visual story.
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Design - With an agreed-upon visual framework and an iterative process, we refine the rough sketches to become rough finals. We add texture, color, and brand guidelines to link the story to the desired outcome.
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Launch - Our role is to enable your vision to be delivered visually. We arm you with the resources to succinctly articulate the desired outcomes to your target audience. Here are our final, high-fidelity rendered visuals, which you can use as you deem appropriate. We have also practiced the art of delivery with past global clients to ensure they are best prepared for their big stage.
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Extend + Expand - Once the overarching message is finalized, there are often opportunities to extend the reach of your message to a broader audience. We work with partner agencies to create native multiple languages of the same visual story, incorporate data visualizations to reinforce the key ideas with your visual story, partner with voiceover and animation teams to bring your static visual stories to life, create compelling presentations and job aides to expand the impact throughout the organization and your market.
Live Visuals
A unique asset to any Nour engagement is our Live Visualization approach, when a creative team member joins in capturing the content presented live, on stage, on 6'-8' boards. These visuals not only help audiences internalize the content, but they also become an exceptional experience. They also become fantastic social media content to post about the event.
From keynote speeches to moderated panels and leadership/board retreats, the ability to capture the essence of the presented content in real-time visually amplifies the discussions. When the audience leaves any in-person or virtual gathering aligned on the desired outcomes, the process to get there, what success looks like, the key roles/realms of responsibilities, and the before/after of what we're embarking on, as just a few examples, you dramatically increase the success bridge between formulation and execution.
For very large events (annual conventions, global SKOs, multi-session breakouts), our team can bring multiple illustrators to capture your sessions over several days.
Formats
Agile Alignment
During the global pandemic, Nour found that a number of his global clients, amid continued uncertainties, were seeking to harmonize their strategic goals with a set of agile practices, processes, and ad hoc methodologies.
He introduced Agile Alignment to ensure that all levels of the organization, from the senior leadership team to individual contributors, are working cohesively towards a set of common objectives using agile principles.
These medium-fidelity/quick sketch custom illustrations are intended to create:
1. Strategic Alignment - Leadership in agile processes provides clear direction and priorities aligned with the overall business strategy and goals.
2. Cultural Alignment - Promoting a culture of collaboration, transparency, and continuous improvement. Encouraging a mindset shift towards valuing feedforward, iterative development, and adaptive planning.
3. Structural Alignment - Structure teams, roles, and immediate priorities to support agile processes, cross-functional teams, and empowered owners. Align organizational policies, procedures, and metrics with agile values and principles.
4. Process Alignment - Implementing agile frameworks (Scrum, Kanban, or SAFe) consistently across teams and standardizing agile ceremonies (sprints, standups, retrospectives) to ensure sync.
5. Skills Alignment - Training and coaching internal employees and external resources on agile methods. Developing competencies to support agile practices, such as collaboration, communication, and adaptability.
6. Tool Alignment - Ensuring the right tools facilitate visibility, communication, and collaboration across the organization to support agile practices, processes, and capabilities.
With a button-down story, Agile Alignment is intended to be an accelerated communication tool that can be captured quickly, communicated simply, and acted upon easily.
Agile Alignment
The Agile Alignment portfolio encompasses four (4) unique offerings:
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Alignment - Synthesize your process into a clearly accessible roadmap of priorities that can be implemented by all key stakeholders within hours. This offering encompasses a briefing, medium-fidelity visuals, and a story with compelling talking points.
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Execution - This is the fastest way to run innovation experiments. We deploy your hypothesis and provide actionable analysis to improve the next iteration. This offering encompasses rollout, analysis, and the necessary course corrections.
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Review - Close the gap between key initiatives by spotting patterns, identifying weaknesses, and acting on a clear set of improvements. This offering encompasses pattern recognition, capabilities gaps, and an optimized path forward.
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Learnings - Tie the process together by instilling agile practices into your team so their future innovation can drive intelligent and profitable growth. This offering is focused on insight compression and recommended learnings to balance your performance.
Who Do We Work With?
In short... companies, industry associations, and academic forums interested in relationship-centric growth strategies. We extensively customize each speaking engagement for our clients' event themes, unique audiences, and desired strategic outcomes.
