The Story of Visual Insight = The Story of Our People
Founder Eileen Clegg is a speaker, author, and master trainer in human interaction, specializing in meeting facilitation and live visual storytelling. After a successful career as a news journalist, she was invited to work with futures research firms, including Institute for the Future. This is where she discovered the power of large history murals and visual stories to help people innovate and problem solve together. After several years, she developed her own advanced approach to visual storytelling and founded Visual Insight to bring this capability into organizations. Leaders of fortune 100 companies, nonprofits and government agencies have utilized her unique skills to support global transformation, futures forecasting, and strategic visioning. LinkedIn. Wikipedia.
Our innovation lead, Joy Mountford, is an iconic Silicon Valley inventor and world leader in interaction design who pioneered the discipline of Computer-Human Interaction (CHI). As founder of the Human Interface Group at Apple, she led the team that launched the realization of multi-media on computers, pioneering the creation of core applications that became the foundation for iLife and QuickTime. She led innovation teams in many other high tech companies, was an original TED speaker, and has more than 23 patents. Wikipedia.
Business Manager Lorie Lease worked with Eileen to develop Visual Insight as a successful consultancy. Friends since childhood, Lorie always liked numbers and Eileen liked words but they both liked art. Lorie immediately understood the value of visual communication, and helped shape and focus the business. She also supported our deep investments in R+D and community: Pro bono work in learning technology, history documentation and gender equality; scholarship on the subject of symbols, imagination, and group work; and developing our Visual Insight meeting processes. Lorie keeps our feet on the ground as we reach to the sky for innovation.
Graphic artist Gary Newman, a colleague of Eileen’s from their newspaper days, began helping shape Visual Insight’s digital offerings in 2002. How could people take collective learnings from their meeting or conference experience back to work? We began digitizing the murals for visual journals so that meeting participants could look back at their experience. People said they were much more likely to look back at pictures than read lengthy reports from meetings. Then Gary helped us develop our digital capabilities, pulling complex ideas together in a single graphic for posters or online posting. His background in newspaper infographics provided the foundation for ongoing innovation in digital storytelling to serve our clients.
Writer Justin Klineman joined us in 2009 as we were developing materials about our approach to enlivening meetings and supporting organizational transformation. Justin was the first to articulate Visual Insight’s capability to unleash the power of diversity through co-creative meeting methodologies. As we’ve discovered the need to provide written materials to support leaders, Justin has helped us develop our training materials. He launched Visual Insight Press by co-writing and editing our first book, working with Gary to create our unique, densely illustrated Visual Insight book style. He somehow finds words to explain the most subtle and powerful aspects of the visual.
Visual journalist Ellen Lovelidge has expanded our practice and our reach, combining her gift for visual communication with her technology acumen and her passion for making the world a better place. A member of the team since 2012, Ellen has become a evangelist for visual journalism, bringing the power of the visual into day-to-day organizational culture to leverage diversity and enhance people’s experience so they are more effective. At the same time, she is developing ways to create more meaningful visuals—the kind that touch the heart as well as the mind–on the Web to support virtual relationships. Ellen’s contributions to our ambitious history/future murals have helped bring these information-rich visual documents into interactive online environments.
Blanca Cervantes Alonso is the newest member of our team. She is our translator and office manager. She brings her intuitive sense for design, organizational capabilities and artwork to support our in-house organizational planning. Blanca keeps us organized with existing projects while helping corral new ideas into tangible seeds we can grow into new offerings for clients and books for Visual Insight Press. She is the mother of a four-year-old, and is helping us branch out to support children with visual thinking. Blanca is translating many of our materials into Spanish.
Our treasured new talent Jaden Rao is a multi-media artist and visual journalist accomplished in both live and virtual graphic facilitation of meetings. She has been immersed in art education from her early years including study at Parsons School of Design. Jaden has a gift for focusing on the essence of a conversation. She captures deeper meanings in words that are contained in unique and compelling artistic imagery.