LEADERSHIP

People Remember What YouSay When You Paint a Pictureby Andrew M. Carton

JUNE 12, 2015

When leaders communicate a vision of their organization’s future, they tend to emphasize

ideals and ideology — the importance of “success,” “stewardship,” or “sustainability.” 

Leaders are likely to emphasize this type of abstract rhetoric more as businesses become

increasingly digital. Given that employees within the same organization increasingly

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possess distinct types of technical knowledge, it may appear that an abstract, general

vision is appropriate in order to gain traction and prevent alienating different

constituencies.

Yet this type of rhetoric undermines another core objective of vision communication:

providing clarity about the future. Leaders must communicate strategies for growth that

employees can clearly envision. Instead of invoking abstract ideals, the most effective

leaders communicate their visions using image-based words.

What, exactly, is a vision with image-based words? It’s one that describes people with well-

defined attributes (such as children) and observable actions (such as smiling and laughing).

Image-based words convey sensory information to paint a vivid picture of the future, one

that employees can easily imagine witnessing. Along these lines, visions with image-based

words are more consistent with the literal meaning of the word “vision.” When leaders

include vivid images in their communications, they’re transporting employees to the

future by telling snippets of a compelling story — a story that captures events that have yet

to unfold.

Visions with image-based words enhance

performance significantly more than visions

with abstract statements. Along with Chad

Murphy of Oregon State University and

Jonathan Clark of Penn State University, I

found that hospital leaders who

communicated visions with image-based

words triggered better patient outcomes than leaders who communicated visions

abstractly.

Moreover, in a second study in which teams were tasked with developing a toy prototype,

we determined that a vision communicated via image-laden words (“our toys…will make

wide-eyed kids laugh and proud parents smile”) triggered stronger performance than a

vision with similar content but without visual wording (“our toys…will be enjoyed by all of

our customers”). We found that image-based words have a galvanizing influence — they

inspire people to work together toward the same crystal-clear snapshot of the future.

Other research has demonstrated the benefits of image-based words. For instance, Purdue

University’s Cynthia Emrich and her colleagues found that U.S. presidents who used

image-based words in their speeches were considered to be more charismatic than those

who didn’t.

You’ve heard image-based phrases: Some of the most inspirational speeches during some

of the most critical junctures in history are united by their usage of imagery, from Winston

Churchill’s snapshot of a future in which the Allied forces would “fight in the fields and in

the streets” to John F. Kennedy’s vision of “landing a man on the moon” to Martin Luther

King Jr.’s dream in which “the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners

will be able to sit down together.”

Image-based words have also been used to spark revolutionary moments in business: think

of Bill Gates’s vision of a world with a “computer on every desk and in every home” and

Henry Ford’s dream of a car “large enough for the family” to enjoy “the blessing of hours of

pleasure in God’s great open spaces.” In more recent times, a British chemical engineer

named Paul Thomas pronounced a vision “that one day we will be able to detect a

previously undetectable tumour metabolising inside a human lung simply by asking a

patient to breathe into a device.”

As Chip and Dan Heath argue in their book Made to Stick, people find concrete messages

intuitive because life is concrete. Life involves sights, sounds, and smells, and image-based

words provide the best way to approximate this reality through language. My colleagues

and I argue that the usefulness of words that mimic reality is especially pronounced when

people are thinking about the long-term future because the future is typically so uncertain.

Since the future hasn’t happened yet, people respond favorably when they hear it

described not in terms of abstract aspirations such as “maximizing shareholder value” or

“promoting superior customer service,” but in terms of what it will look, feel, and sound

like.

But people aren’t well-equipped to craft vivid messages about the future. Nira Liberman of

Tel Aviv University and Yaacov Trope of NYU have found that as we mentally project into

the future, we tend to think more abstractly. For example, when people are asked to

imagine the action of “reading a book,” they are more likely to describe it as “gaining

knowledge” than “following lines of print” if they are asked to imagine doing it “next year”

rather than “tomorrow.” Due to this tendency, my co-authors and I have found that more

than 90% of leaders communicate visions without any image-based words.

When people are encouraged to counter this tendency by communicating more concretely

about the distant future, they often set a specific numeric performance target, such as an

increase in stock price, market share, or ROI. Of course, this type of quantification is

essential for business success. We use data to convert complex phenomena into a more

manageable form, compressing the messiness of reality into that which is measurable. We

quantify reality in order to track progress. And research on goal setting has established the

merits of specific numeric targets for increasing motivation, in large part because they

increase clarity about expectations. The importance of quantification has only grown in the

digital era.

Yet image-based words are likely to provide benefits that numeric targets cannot. In other

research settings, rhetoric with image-based words has been shown to be superior to

rhetoric with numbers in two key ways. Messages laced with data and statistics cannot be

easily understood in the absence of stories (which typically have image-based words). And

messages with vivid details are also more emotionally riveting than messages with

statistics. For instance, Deborah A. Small of Wharton and her colleagues found that a story

about a starving 7-year-old girl from Mali prompted people to donate more than twice as

much money as a message that “food shortages in Malawi are affecting more than three

million children in Zambia.”

These two principles are likely to translate to vision communication. First, consider

comprehensibility. A company’s goal of increasing renewable energy usage by 25%

requires that people understand the nuances of different forms of renewable energy and

People Remember What You Say When You Paint a Picture

how to take stock of current usage. But a vision to create “a city with solar panels on every

rooftop, biofuel in every car, and wind turbines on every hill” is instantly understandable

for all recipients—regardless of their background or technical expertise.

To illustrate the second principle (emotional impact), consider VisionZero, New York City’s

goal of reducing annual pedestrian fatalities from 200 to 0. The specificity of this target

certainly renders it an effective benchmark. But an image-based vision could capture how

life would be different if this goal were achieved, perhaps by referring to how 200 more

people a year would have many years left to watch sunsets with their loved ones and laugh

with their friends.

Numeric targets pose another problem. Since numbers are more specific than general

notions such as “maximizing shareholder value,” it may be tempting to believe that they

would bring to mind other forms of specific thinking, such as mental imagery. Yet

contemplating numeric targets is likely to undermine the ability to conjure mental images.

To understand why, briefly consider the anatomy of the brain. As explained by Seymour

Epstein and his colleagues, we have two cognitive systems — one that thinks logically (the

analytical system, or our “rational self”) and another that encodes sensory information

about the external environment (the experiential system, or our “mind’s eye”). Numbers

are processed in the analytical system. They do not trigger the formation of mental images.

Alternatively, image-based words are processed in the experiential system. When we read

or hear image-based words, they are instantly converted to verbal portraits in our mind’s

eye.

It is difficult to engage both brain systems at once. When one system is primed, the other

tends to lie dormant. Since quantitative information (data, statistics, metrics, and numeric

targets) triggers the analytical system, the part of the mind capable of generating a vibrant

snapshot of the future shuts off. Quantification is the imagination’s mortal enemy.

To convey an inspiring and memorable portrayal of an ideal world not yet realized, leaders

should not communicate exclusively with abstract language and numeric targets. They

should harness the power of image-based words.

Andrew M. Carton is an assistant professor of management at The Wharton

School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Related Topics: STRATEGY EXECUTION | STRATEGIC PLANNING

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3 COMMENTS

Jay Oza 7 days ago

Andrew,

I am little confused. I read an article that said that if you are vague, you come across more powerful. The

article was referring to the research "Using abstract language signals power" done by Cheryl Waslak and

her colleagues. In the Inc article Waslak is quoted as saying, "People see the abstract communicator as a

more 'big picture' kind of person, which makes them appear more powerful." What am I missing reading

this post and the Inc post?

Thanks.

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