Beyond sticky notes: borrowing visual exercises from art therapy for team reflection
The best designers and design leaders don’t get stuck inside the screen, or even inside “design.” They draw from everywhere: urban planning, architecture, fashion, psychology, behavioral science, and yes, maybe even art therapy. The strongest design leaders are not only systems thinkers, they’re sense-makers. They help people navigate ambiguity and change. And these skills are just as much human skills as they are strategic.
One area I’ve been exploring lately is art therapy. Art therapy as a practice reminds us that creativity can often be a regulation skill, not a performance. It’s about how we process our thoughts and the world around us, not just about the results and outcomes we produce. And that’s a principle every design leader should understand.
My particular exploration into art therapy stems from having a varied background in both creative and performing arts. I also tend to cast a wide net in classes I take, books I read, and fields I explore (marine science, anyone?). I’ve long been interested in how creative, expressive, and performing arts can be used in a therapy setting. More immediately, I’m interested in how creative facilitation techniques that riff on techniques from art therapy (not copy them wholesale) can transform how design leaders run workshops, retros, and strategy sessions. I recently took an Intro to Art Therapy course here in Melbourne. It was incredibly interesting and expanded my thinking on the field.
Most design leaders know that our standard toolkits, like sticky notes, sketch sessions, and journey maps, were built for product outcomes, not team health. They help us visualize workflows and experiences, but rarely surface emotion, trust, or tension. They map what happens, not why it feels that way. Visual thinking methods drawn from art therapy can close that gap, turning reflection into a kind of feedback system for creative teams.
This isn’t about becoming a therapist, or expecting that of managers who are not trained to do this. Although, many a manager may have felt like a therapist at one point or another, this is a general disclaimer that art therapy is a regulated field with specific credentialed and educational requirements. That said, it doesn’t mean we can’t learn from it, and draw techniques from these orthogonal or tangential industries to use them in ways that help facilitate meaningful work and conversations.
What art therapy actually teaches
Art therapy isn’t merely about “painting your feelings.” It’s about helping people process complex thoughts and emotions by making them visible and tangible. The point of art therapy isn’t to produce stunning works of art, or to become a better artist. It’s to make and interpret meaning. Techniques range from collage and guided imagery to simple metaphor prompts, all aimed at unlocking reflection and communication.
It’s a structured discipline that helps people process experiences through accessible, creative mediums. That could mean writing, collage, painting, drawing, sculpting, or a variety of other mediums. There are also additional expressive arts therapies in music, theatre, and dance, but what I’m focusing on here is visual art.
The value I see here is in externalizing thoughts and emotions in a form to see and react to. And that’s what I think design organizations need more of, especially when teams are burned out, scaling fast, or trying to navigate identity shifts.
For design orgs in particular, these techniques can do a few things:
Lower the barrier for participation. Not everyone is comfortable sketching, but most people will happily arrange images or shapes, or make simple marks on a paper.
Change the channel. Visual prompts pull people out of “corporate script” mode and into something more real while not venturing into weird, pseudoscience territory.
Create shared understanding. Once the work is visible, on a wall, on a canvas, on the table, the group can literally see the connections and contradictions they’ve been trying to articulate.
Encourage “play.” Even adults can benefit from play. It helps shift mindsets and stimulate creativity. And sometimes, it’s really just pure fun, especially when engaging with others.
Activate different areas of the brain. Working with your hands stimulates different areas of the brain than typing or talking. It slows you down just enough to think more clearly. In workshops, that tactile engagement can unlock ideas and perspectives that pure conversation or digital tools may not reach.
To be clear, these kinds of exercises aren’t diagnostic, and that’s the point. They’re fluid, context-driven, and responsive to the people in the room. Sometimes, well-meaning managers reach for personality tests or “color frameworks” in the name of team building, hoping a tidy label will explain human behavior. But it really doesn’t. People change based on context, stress, safety, and trust, and those are the variables leaders actually need to see. Approaches rooted in visual thinking and art therapy reveal those dynamics in real time, without boxing anyone into longterm archetypes (or worse, stereotypes).
So in thinking about this as an idea, I wanted to explore a couple examples to put into practice. I came up with two, one is fairly short and simple, the other a bit more detailed and involved. Both can be done remotely, but require a little bit of different set up for each modality.
A few of my own process pieces from my Intro to Art Therapy course. This isn’t about polished art —it’s about thinking with your hands, unpacking reflection, and communication through making.Example 1: Before and After
This one is for a quick check-in before and after some kind of longer meeting, gathering, or session. Think: an annual team meeting or a remote “designer day” team building activity.
Art medium: can be anything, depending on how you have it set up. For example:
Construction paper, cookie cutters of various shapes, pens/pencils for tracing, and scissors
Paper and crayons or colored pencils. Could use freeform drawing or stencils here.
How to run it:
At the start, ask each participant to pick a color, shape, or image that represents the mindset in which they’re arriving. No words, just a visual.
Have everyone pin their visual on a board together. Have each person briefly explain their choice in a sentence or two — nothing too deep (this isn’t actual therapy), just a quick update.
At the end, repeat the exercise.
Compare the two. How did the overall group trend? How did things change?
For a remote version, use an online whiteboarding tool Iike Miro and ensure people have either construction paper or paper and crayons or markers along with scissors on hand ahead of time to make their shapes. Have them snap a photo and post them into Miro. (Yes, you COULD use the Miro shapes options, but the point of this is tactile, even if remote.)
You’ll see shifts in tone, palette, and openness that mirror the group’s actual mood. It’s a fast, non-verbal sentiment check that often surfaces truths verbal-only check-ins never reach.
Example 2: This Year, Next Year
This second example takes the form of a team retro and visioning session. Often we use the formats of start/stop/continue or rose/bud/thorn for this type of work. And these are all fine, and certainly serve a purpose, but what what if we got a little more visual and a little more creative? Because sometimes pictures say what words can’t.
I decided to call this This Year, Next Year, and it can be run with a group of managers at the organization level, or at the team level with a manager and their individual squad. This one is a little more complex than the first exercise, but also it’s going a bit deeper on the topic at hand as well.
Ideally this would be done in person, but you can certainly do this remotely as well. It just requires a little extra legwork to prep. I’ve included instructions for both.
Here’s the format:
Art medium: Collage
Time needed: 2.5-3 hours
I chose collage here because while art therapy isn’t about creating polished art, sometimes people can still be intimidated if forced to pick up a paintbrush or pencil. Collage has a very low barrier to entry, which makes it easier for everyone.
Materials you’ll need:
Glue/glue sticks and tape
Magazines, collage kits, stickers, printed paper, any other materials suitable for collage
Small posters or paper (A3 works well, though you can go slightly larger if you like)
If doing this remotely, you can send people a supply list and allow them to expense them
For in-person use large roles of butcher paper hung on the wall to pin up your collages; for remote, have team members take photos and upload them to an online whiteboarding tool like Miro
PHASE 1: THIS YEAR
Step 1: Brainstorm and collage (30 minutes)
To help structure this, you could break it down into categories that are relevant to your team. I personally like the idea of using overarching strategy categories or prompts like People, Process, and Product, but this is up to you and your team how to decide here.
Prompt participants to brainstorm words that capture their reflections on the past year. While this is overall a visual exercise, starting by “word storming” is often helpful to get brains moving.
Next, have them build a small collage that represents This Year using the materials provided.
Step 2: Discuss (30 minutes)
Put the collages on the walls and have each person explain theirs at a high level
Discuss as a group
Questions you might ask: What happened in the past year that contributed to this? What was good, what wasn’t so good?
PHASE 2: NEXT YEAR (30 minutes)
Repeat the above steps for Next Year:
Frame the collage step as: how they want to feel, what success should look like, how should it be different than this year, what should be kept, what kind of energy they want to bring, how they want culture to evolve, etc
For discussion, you might ask: Where’s the gap between the present and the desired state? What needs to shift in the org or in leadership habits to get there?
PHASE 3: MOVE FORWARD (30-60 minutes, depending on how many action items you need to discuss)
With both past and future visible, it’s time to translate reflection into direction. Focus solely on the Next Year collages for this portion. This Year is headed to the past.
Step 1: Word of the year
Take your themes, and challenge the group to synthesize the discussion into one guiding word or short phrase, which will serve as the team’s “guiding principle” for the year ahead.
Step 2: Actions and next steps
Once themes and words emerge, don’t let them just live on the wall. Translate insight into action. The goal isn’t group therapy. It’s to clarify direction and create alignment grounded in people’s real experiences and ideas. The outcome of this should be action-oriented, and the team should discuss takeaways and next steps.
Discuss key things to do, who should do them, and the timelines involved - ladder these up to the themes
Identify any further conversations needed
PHASE 4: FOLLOW-UP
This is a deceptively simple exercise, but it opens a different level of conversation than sticky notes on a whiteboard ever will. It also becomes more powerful over time. If you revisit these collages each year, or even each quarter, you can see how intentions evolved, what held true, and where new energy emerged. That ongoing reflection closes the loop between insight and action, turning a one-off workshop into an annual alignment ritual.
If you’re doing this in person, take a snapshot of your collages and save them for later
If remote, you’ve already got these stored digitally for your future work follow-ups
The bigger picture
If art therapy can help people work through grief and trauma, imagine what a light-touch version could do for a team trying to navigate growth, change, or ambiguity. Think of it as structured empathy and shared understanding, not actual therapy. And it’s the part of design leadership that moves beyond Figma boards and sprint decks and gets into the real human operating system underneath.
