Rich Pictures: Making sense of Complex situations

Making Sense of Complex Problems

ICYMI hear from the brilliant Mark Forsyth on the latest podcast episode about the hidden rules of English we don’t know we know, and his latest book Rhyme & Reason:

🎧 Listen here

Here’s a systems thinking tool for you this week:

Tip: You have more influence if you pick up a pen than sit in a chair with a coffee. Prints of this

Sometimes, when faced with a new challenge, you just don’t know where to start. One good way to get going is with a rich picture.

What is a Rich Picture?

A rich picture diagram is a systems thinking tool used to make sense of complicated or unclear situations. It helps you visualise everything you know or think about a problem space — without needing a strict method, structure, or artistic skill.

I love it because the format is deliberately flexible: you can include people, processes, relationships, emotions, metaphors, and connections. It does not have to look good. In fact, it’s probably better if it doesn’t so you’re more likely to get stuck in and edit it.

The act of drawing it out helps you clarify your thinking and see how different parts of the situation connect.

It’s not just getting what you know onto a page; it’s actually thinking and making connections as you go. It makes your thinking visible, allowing you to create and discover more connections. It’s part analysis, part reflection, and part creative exploration.

Why Use them?

Rich picture diagramming is widely used in business analysis, systems design, and problem-solving because it:

• Reveals hidden assumptions

• Encourages collaboration and shared understanding

• Highlights conflicts or misunderstandings early

• Supports creative and divergent thinking

• Provides a low-pressure, inclusive way to explore ideas

You don’t need a template — just a large piece of paper (or whiteboard) and the freedom to draw.

Creating them in a group

Even more powerful than creating one alone is creating a rich picture in a group. The magic of doing an activity like this together is making team members’ implicit understanding visible and differences in opinions and assumptions apparent. By making mental models visible, the rich picture helps uncover where people’s views differ and where they align — a critical step for building shared understanding in teams.

When these implicit understandings and assumptions are in conflict, the team can work together to build a shared understanding or determine what data they need to gather.

Shared understanding is critical for high-performing teams to solve problems and create new products or services.

Example: Planning a Group Holiday

Here’s an example: imagine a team designing a product to help people plan group holidays. People arrange group holidays all the time, but if you’ve been involved, you probably know that it’s not straightforward.

The team could start by sketching a rich picture that captures everything involved:

• Initial interest

• Preferences of types of holidays coordinated between the group

• Ways of sharing options

• Filtering and decision-making processes

• Tools to gather practical options

• Constraints like budget, dates, baggage limits, length, language, and travel times

• Coordinating payment

• Meal planning

• Logistics

• Individual preferences in comfort, luxury, food, activities, sleeping arrangements

• Travel means, distances and time

• Tools to communicate and plan

There’s so much!

While any team wanting to improve this process should speak with people who have gone on, or want to do, group holidays, drawing a rich picture is a great way to start. You will quickly find out, for example, that different team members have different views of which are the difficult parts, which parts are easy, past experiences that worked or didn’t, and more. By mapping these visually, the team can quickly see pain points, hidden complexity, and different perspectives — insights they can later validate through user research.

As an aside, a rich picture in this sort of situation is a great example of the framing cycle from my PhD thesis: Effective Framing in Design (pdf).

Rich Pictures are Just the Start

A rich picture diagram doesn’t solve things by itself. It’s a way to get into a problem space, to unblock a team, to give avenues to explore, and to uncover hidden conflicts and assumptions.

Once created, a team can start to dive into any aspect of the picture, refine it, or just put it to one side. It can be a starting point for more formal models like process maps, user journeys, or systems diagrams.

Rich pictures are great when:

• You don’t know where to start

• The problem is complex, cross-disciplinary, or wicked

• People have different views

• Everyone has lots of thoughts to get out

• There’s some knowledge, but it’s incomplete

I love them because:

• they are very low pressure artifacts to create

• they don’t require any special skills

• everyone can contribute

• they mix words, and simple visuals

• they can be structured or unstructured

• they’re useful to look back on

• it’s so releasing to get everything out of your head where it can be interrogated and understood

• they are inclusive for all thinking styles

• they spark great conversations

A mind map—which I also love—is similar to a rich picture, but, in its traditional forms, has a more prescribed structure. Still, as in a mind map travel journal, it has a lot of similarities.

Not sure where to start? Lots going on? Multiple perspectives? If you give a rich picture a try this week, let me know!

Jono

Related Ideas to Rich Pictures

Also see:

Related Ideas to Rich Pictures

• Don’t let your thinking be limited by your tools

• Six Thinking Hats

• Information Radiator

• Roger Martin’s Knowledge Funnel: Mystery, Heuristic, Algorithm

• Build a mind map

• Mind map Travel Journal

• 6 Simple Sketch People

I created this rich picture illustration and example as one of a series of visuals for Kaine Ugwu about Systems Thinking. Lots of good visual techniques in there that I’ll share here over time.