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A visual, hand-drawn method for representing complex systems, stakeholders and relationships to support problem understanding and stakeholder alignment.
Rich pictures are informal, hand-drawn representations that capture complex systems, stakeholders, and relationships visually and narratively. They support problem exploration, perspective alignment, and stakeholder engagement during early discovery. The method encourages shared understanding, hypothesis generation, and the surfacing of conflicts, boundaries, and hidden assumptions. They are easy to apply.
Counts core problems or open questions surfaced by rich pictures.
Participant feedback on session clarity and usefulness.
Share of actions derived from rich pictures that are implemented.
Team used rich pictures to visualize user journeys and affected systems and to clarify requirement boundaries.
Multiple departments created rich pictures to identify interface issues and redundant tasks.
Rich pictures helped make informal communication paths visible and align formal processes accordingly.
Define objective and participants; prepare materials.
Introduce method and rules; co-create the first drawing.
Discuss, iterate and document key insights.
Derive concrete next steps and assign responsibilities.