It’s easy enough to make a visual device—or borrow an idea for one from something you saw in a book or at another workplace. Reproducing other people’s ideas (as long as you say thank you) is a positive, and it can keep you going for a while. But not for very long.

Unless you are a natural-born visual thinker (and they are rare), you are going to run out of ideas—yours and everyone else’s. And when you do, you will probably give up on the goal of creating a highly functioning visual workplace simply because you can’t think of any more ideas for devices. Tsk.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Not if you become a scientist of visuality and learn how to think visually. To do that, you have to be able to spot information deficits—missing information from the workplace. But that is often a challenge because the workplace gets so overrun with missing information that it looks like business as usual. You are busy chasing down info, but you time it, and the reason is clear: Work means moving and adding value.

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