Whiteboarding: Advantages and Benefits

For those of you that are interested in understanding how ‘whiteboarding’ can help you achieve your business goals, please consider the following three benefits:

Benefit No 1: By taking your position at the whiteboard (with pen in hand) you assume the positon of ‘subject matter expert’ and facilitator. From our earliest days in the classroom we all learned to defer to the person standing at the front of the classroom. Presenting at the whiteboard leverages this teacher/student or advisor/advisee relationship dynamic.

Benefit No 2: The whiteboard allows you to illustrate your ideas. Even complex concepts can be easily presented using a simple diagram, a model or an abstraction on a whiteboard. When you think of ‘Maslow’s hierarchy of needs’ – what do you see? A pyramid structure to help explain the hierarchy (although Maslow himself never used a diagram). ‘Gartner’s Magic Quadrant’? A Boston matrix model. ‘Flux capacitor?’…. 😉

Benefit 3: When the projector and the laptop shine their light-of-love to show the most corporate looking PowerPoint title slide imaginable, most people feel something curl up and die inside of them. Urggghh… Watching and reading from a slide deck is conducted in a very perfunctory, sometimes stressful way. Brows get furrowed. Feet tap. Barriers go up. People want to get through the slides as quickly as possible. However, when people look to a whiteboard they are hard-wired to ‘open’ their minds (as when they brainstorm at a whiteboard), they mentally engage with the subject matter and the presenter in a way that really enables discussion, honesty and open participation. The whiteboard has an authentic, creative and positive association for most of us – whereas the slide deck has the exact opposite for many.

Need I say more? To me it really is a ‘no-brainer’.

What do you think? If you have an opinion (and I know you do,,,) then make your thoughts known in the ‘comments’ box below – and please ‘like’ and ‘share’ this with your colleagues by hitting the little ‘LinkedIn’ icon at the top, or at the bottom of this post.

Let’s change the way we work – one whiteboard at a time.