What If Colorful Images Become More Important than Words? Visual Representations as the Basic Building Blocks of Human Communication and Dynamic Storytelling

Abstract

Pre-historic communication included doing cave paintings, for example, of wild animals. Today, we continue to use images when communicating, most notably with videos and other such recordings. The advent and popularity of social networks on the Internet is based on the exchange of messages but for the most part on the sharing of images and videos. Although we are still generally very geared toward communication using words (and numbers) rather than visual representations, we foresee that a specific language that produces movement in the brain will soon be developed. The Business Narrative Modelling Language (BNML) has been used in various research contexts. BNML is based on pictorial representations, while incorporating business ontologies, which are studies of words and language to create a vocabulary that best represents relevant meanings in the business context to optimize information exchange. Do you prefer the narrative or do you prefer visual representations or would you rather have both? Providing examples of BNML, about servant leadership, we maintain that text without figures leads to incomplete communication, and vice versa—especially true for the “Millennium generation.” Leaders in business should strive to communicate more visually and diagrammatically, encouraging such communication among their employees, as much of knowledge today is tacit, and so difficult to communicate solely with the written word. Furthermore, words should be chosen carefully, to avoid overload and lack of comprehension, and using pre-defined ontologies is a good way of achieving this.