Information Leadership, extending intuitive skills including thinking through drawing

It is no surprise that IT professionals have strong analytical and rational skills, but my recent experience of successfully devising and teaching a personal development module on the Cass Business School's Masters in Information Leadership, indicates there is a need to help them develop a wider repertoire of intuitive and reflective skills. These include further developing visual and observational skills, extending the range of written expression, and the importance of reflection (the habit of standing back from a project or challenge and reflecting on it on a deep level).
These professionals are engaged in systems of conveying complex information electronically, and yet the simple act of drawing is often overlooked as an effective additional tool in both exploring and persuasively communicating complex ideas. It can also be a powerful way of taking an idea for a walk and then communicating it, or as Matisse said “putting a line around an idea”. We can’t all be a Matisse! And my experience is that no special artistic skills are needed to use drawing effectively in our repertoire of communication.
Scientists, medical professionals, and engineers continue to use hand drawing to both explore ideas and communicate them. In his introduction to the book Lines of Enquiry: thinking through drawing, Barry Phipps quotes a man who teaches advanced computer graphics: Neil Dodgson, who uses “hand drawn sketches in a range of ways to explain concepts to each other, to test ideas, to teach students.”
And the myriad drawing applications now increasingly downloadable, opens up exciting possibilities concerning the relationship between the hand and the eye, the pen and the screen.