The Visual Thinking Hourglass | Who These Tools Are Really For

After a live call in Loosetooth Studio, something emerged that I wanted to share. A shape that helps me explain what visual thinking actually is, who it's for, and why graphic facilitation is only one small part of the picture.

I call it the Visual Thinking Hourglass.

The shape

Picture an hourglass: wide at the top, narrow in the middle, wide again at the bottom.

The top is your past. For a lot of people in my world, that looks like being hands-on, physical, spatial. Loving labs over lectures. Thriving with a diorama assignment. Working with your whole body. Drawing. Building. Moving.

In other words: being wired for visual thinking long before you had a name for it.

Then comes the narrow part — the waist of the hourglass. For many people discovering my work, that narrow point is graphic facilitation or graphic recording. An aha moment. Watching someone draw at the front of a room and thinking: *oh. That connects to something in me.*

Maybe it was my first book. Maybe it was seeing a visual practitioner at a conference. However it happened, there was this bridge point — narrow, specific — where visual thinking had a name and a job title attached to it.

The problem is that a lot of people stop there.

They see the waist of the hourglass and think: *I don't want to do that for a living, so this isn't for me.*

That's the narrow thinking I want to bust open.

The bottom of the hourglass

Because once you move through that narrow point, the whole thing opens back up again.

On the other side is the gorgeous, wide bottom: all the personal and professional ways you can use visual thinking in your life. Tackling complexity. Finding clarity. Supporting group process. Working through decisions. Managing projects. Writing. Speaking. Teaching. Just thinking better.

So many of the people I teach aren't graphic facilitators and never will be. They're writers, evaluators, educators, consultants, leaders, learners. They came through the narrow waist — some discovery point around visual practice — and now they're using these tools in their own way, in their own work, in their own life.

That is the whole point.

Why the hourglass matters to me

I've had the job title of graphic facilitator since 1996. I don't mind continuing to do that work. But what I'm really teaching is how to get back to all the things you've always been — and forward into all the ways you can use those tools now.

The Idea Shapers was written for that. The Agerbeck Method was built for that. Not to create more graphic facilitators. To help you reconnect to how you've always worked and apply it everywhere.

You don't need to be Brandy when you grow up. Brandy is busy being Brandy.

But if you're somewhere in this hourglass — past or present or just starting to move through that narrow middle — there is a whole lot of gorgeous space on both sides waiting for you.