Communication affects each and every part of our life and it’s key to express yourself clearly and to make your audience understand your perspective. Structured thinking in MBA essay writing is the first step to set the framework and background for any essay or a question. Once you have done that well, it’s important to work on your blocks and parts of the essays in order to make them clearly understood. Perspective is a very subjective thing and a slight variation can alter your story. Hence you need to be very careful to convey your thoughts when the stakes are high. Sometimes, it’s hard to make your story consistent and in a way that everyone sees it through the same lens.
MBA essay writing can be arduous and you can be short of words to explain your stories. Sometimes, it’s just hard to put things on paper. Although everything is set in your head and is clearly laid out, when it comes to bringing that to life, not everyone can make it consistent enough for anyone to read and understand it the way it’s intended.
There are multiple unknowns here like who is going to read your essay, what would be his background, experience, age, ethnicity, etc. You don’t know your audience clearly but you have to convey your story in a convincing way. This is a classic case when Visualization comes in handy for MBA essay writing. Visualization helps to create that lens which allows any reader to see your picture in a way that you intended. Visualization helps to convey your story right and helps you to build that lens and deliver it along with your story. Think about it like this, when you go to watch a 3D movie, the theatre provides the necessary 3D glasses right? Without that, it’s impossible to see what the creator wants you to see. In the same way, a visualization is a tool that helps you to create those glasses for your story.
Visualization: What it means?
It’s just a simple term which means a way to communicate or deliver your message by using images, diagrams, animations, charts, tables, etc. What it does mainly is that it makes it easier for the person to understand and follow what you are trying to say. Now, it’s hard to use all these things in your MBA essays, though some of the essays nowadays are asking to be in different creative formats like PowerPoints, portfolio documents, video essays, etc. Visualization can help in all these formats. Let’s dig deeper and see how we can learn this art and implement it.
When you are writing your essays, you would follow the approach of structured thinking to give a framework and structure to your essay. Now, the next step is to build the blocks which are your stories or examples. Before you even write a story, you need to follow two steps
- Write down all the points that you are going to cover in the story
- Make a picture/storyboard on a piece of paper which tells your story
The first step of writing down points seems straightforward and not so hard to achieve. In the second step, which is very crucial, you may argue that one picture cannot tell the whole story. Well, in that case, you can take multiple pictures or create a flow diagram with steps. You can be creative here and use any format that comes to your mind. The idea is to make a storyboard that pre-visualizes your essay. It’s a standard technique used in making movies, design thinking, innovation, and ideation settings. There is more to storyboards though but for our reference and understanding, getting to know at a high level would be enough.
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Best way to create a good storyboard and achieve good results is like this:
From the points that you listed in step 1, try to carve out some categories or things that are big and important. Lay them out on a sheet and then try to create the associations or flow through them. You would have seen from various crime dramas or movies like they put the pictures of the suspects and then create the links and write points about them and on the links as well. It’s exactly the same technique. Visualization helps to make a consistent big picture for everyone and when anyone sees it, they get the same meaning. Well, not 100%, but mostly.
A small sanity check can be done with some people, in case you are working with mentors or any friends, family, or colleagues who are supporting you in your MBA essay writing. Just show your big picture to them and ask them what they feel, are they able to see the same picture that you are seeing? If not, try to gain their perspective and feedback and see how you can revise.
Also, it’s the main reason why people nowadays use more pictures, videos, and graphics in their presentations because it helps to deliver a consistent message across the audience. Once you have the picture done, just re-visit it a couple of times and see if you missed something or there is something more to add. Once you feel that the picture seems complete, you can move to the next step about writing it out. When you start writing about it, just follow your picture and the flow that you created. In case the flow is not in one direction and there are cross-links, you need to do a small validation check. What it means is that one point can be connecting two things, so you need to validate which place is more suitable to bring that up. It would not be very difficult since you clearly have the big picture now.
This similar technique can be followed not just for one part of the essay but for the whole essay or even for your whole application as well. You can create a visual backdrop for your whole application and see what message it’s conveying and what story it’s telling. Most of the MBA mentors follow this technique to understand different profiles and try to understand the applicants in a deeper way. I usually build storyboards for the students that I have helped in the past 5–6 years. It helped me a lot to understand more about their profiles and give them succinct recommendations. You can create your own storyboard for each application or one common storyboard for your profile depending on what works best in your case. Different options can be
- One common storyboard for your profile and then create subsets for different applications
- Different storyboards for different applications
- Different storyboards for essays or questions as needed
All approaches are fine and work well. It’s a matter of your style, some people prefer a more structured approach by spending more time in the beginning phase of their applications to create an overall storyboard and then modify it as needed, while some prefer to create on the need basis as their applications are intended towards quite a different type of schools or programs. Your storyboard gives you the visualization lens for your essays and the story that would be built based on this approach will provide your intended perspective to the admissions committee.
Storytelling naturally follows this step and is yet another key aspect of MBA essay writing and it helps to build the right message by effectively utilizing your arsenal. Storytelling and Visualization are quite inter-mingled together and each needs to be understood and implemented in your essays.
Apply structured thinking to build the framework of your MBA essay writing and then for each block of your essay, use the visualization approach. This will help you to build the right content and then storytelling and personalization will help to showcase the content and make the essay unique and personal. Learning the art of Visualization will help you communicate effectively to the diverse and unknown audience or readers.
By DJ (Dhiraj Jha)
Strategy & Innovation – Samsung (S.Korea) | MBA Mentor | Tech Enthusiast | Thinker
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