Zsolt Viczián

Author of Sketch Your Mind

Visual thinker, developer, and author of Sketch Your Mind: Nurture a Playful and Creative Brain. He is the creator of the popular Excalidraw plugin for Obsidian and host of the Visual Thinking Workshop. With a background in engineering, IT, and knowledge systems, Zsolt has spent over 25 years exploring how visuals, space, and structure can transform the way we think, learn, and create.

Nicole van der Hoeven

Developer Advocate by day and YouTuber by night

Nicole is a Senior Developer Advocate at Grafana Labs and a former performance engineer. She’s also a YouTuber who writes, films, and speaks about PKM and tooling, learning in public along the way. She applies PKM to both engineering and everyday life, from performance work to language learning, therapy, and dream-logging in Obsidian.

Dave Gray

Possibilitarian

Dave Gray describes himself as a possibilitarian. He helps people and teams realize their creative potential through visual thinking, design, and facilitation. He founded XPLANE, a pioneering visual thinking company, and is the author of several influential books, including Gamestorming (with Sunni Brown), The Connected Company, and Liminal Thinking. After selling XPLANE in 2022, he turned his focus to big life questions—how to make a living while creating a life—through Visual Frameworks and his School of the Possible.

Jihyun 'Jilly' Lee

Researcher & Graphic Facilitator

Jihyun 'Jilly' Lee is a researcher, graphic facilitator, and a board member of the International Forum of Visual Practitioners (IFVP). With an M.A. in Human Resources Development, she founded her company, Visual Sharing, on the principle of using visuals to reveal the underlying logic and causality in complex systems. Drawing from her experience at the Korea Research Institute for Vocational Education & Training (KRIVET), Jilly bridges the worlds of data analysis and visual practice. Her work moves beyond aesthetics to advocate for a more rigorous, structured approach to sketchnoting. She is currently focused on the critical intersection of visual thinking and artificial intelligence, exploring how logically-formatted visuals can improve AI's understanding, help validate information, and create a shared language for global collaboration. She contributed to the book The World of Visual Facilitation: Unlock Your Power to Connect People & Ideas.

Stephen Anderson

Author of Figure It Out

Stephen P. Anderson is a bestselling author, speaker, and product leader who wants to make learning the hard stuff fun. He wrote the book on how we make sense of the world, Figure It Out, and founded The Mighty Minds Club, a community that shares ‘playful things to think with’. With a passion for “Visual SenseMaking,” Stephen explores the foundational grammar behind all visualizations, from the arrangement of objects on a canvas to the subtle encodings we use in everyday life. His work moves beyond simple drawing techniques to reveal the underlying patterns that allow us to wrangle complexity, interrogate ideas, and build shared understanding. Ultimately, Stephen wants to teach the world to think in more intentional, visual, and playful ways.

Jerry Michalski

Founder, Open Global Mind

Jerry Michalski (ma-CALL-ski) is the founder of Open Global Mind, a project to help humans make better decisions together. He is also an expert on trust. Jerry was on the front lines of the tech revolution for a dozen years as a tech-industry trends analyst during the dot-com boom, as Managing Editor of Esther Dyson’s monthly newsletter, Release 1.0. He also advised corporate advanced-technology groups on whether and where to deploy exponential technologies like machine intelligence. One of the 4,000-plus startups Jerry interviewed had a useful mind-mapping app called TheBrain. Intrigued, Jerry began curating his Brain then, over 27 years ago. Now it’s the world’s largest, with over 600,000 entries. You can consult that same Brain online, for free, here. In the mid-90s, Jerry realized the word “consumer” was a linchpin to understanding many of today’s dilemmas. Following “consumer” led him to the concept of trust, specifically the many ways that consumer capitalism has broken trust. More optimistically, he also found groups around the world rediscovering trust to solve thorny problems. From this mix of movements and ideas, Jerry is creating Design from Trust, a process that can be applied in many different domains. DfT’s home base is Open Global Mind.

Brandy Agerbeck

Author of The Graphic Facilitator's Guide and The Idea Shapers

Brandy Agerbeck is a visual thinking pioneer who writes, speaks, and teaches the power of drawing as your best thinking tool. For 20+ years as a graphic facilitator she has mapped complex, real-time conversations into large-scale visual clarity. She authored the foundational The Graphic Facilitator's Guide and followed it with The Idea Shapers, called “a new alphabet for the visual age.” Brandy’s 2013 TEDx talk Shape Your Thinking and her immersive workshop The Lab help people quiet their inner critic, organize thinking, communicate clearly, and erase overwhelm. A “triple threat” of expert, trainer, and facilitator, she blends rigor and encouragement to make sophisticated skills immediately usable. Based in Chicago, she also delights in travel, quilting, and spy movies.

Janis Ozolins

Creator of the Explain Ideas Visually Course & Community

Janis Ozolins helps people explain ideas visually. His simple but powerful visuals are seen by millions every month, shared by thought leaders and creators worldwide. Just a few years ago, Janis was an aspiring online creator struggling to find traction. Then he stumbled into visual communication, and everything changed. Six months later, he left his corporate job, and today his work has grown an audience of 220,000+, led to collaborations with Shaan Puri, Naval Ravikant, Ana Lorena Fabrega, Dharmesh Shah, Matt D'Avella, Julian Shapiro, and Steven Bartlett. Now Janis spends his time creating, freelancing, and teaching others how to turn complex thoughts into simple visuals that resonate. He also leads a course and community where he shows people how to explain their own ideas visually.

Lisa Rothstein

Business Storyteller & New Yorker Cartoonist

Business storyteller and New Yorker cartoonist, Lisa is a former Madison Avenue creative strategist for global brands like IBM and Hanes. A Brown University Semiotics grad and certified Design Sprint/Workshopper Master and Virtual Facilitator, she helps organizations communicate, collaborate, and get buy‑in with visual thinking. Clients include Bayer, RobRoy Industries, and Consumer Reports.

Ole Qvist-Sørensen

Founder of Bigger Picture

Ole Qvist-Sørensen is a Danish visual facilitator, founder of Bigger Picture, and co-author of "Visual Collaboration." With over 15 years' experience, he empowers people worldwide to harness visual thinking in their personal and professional lives, from learning and reflection to collaboration and transformation.

Jorge Arango

Information Architect, Author of Duly Noted

Jorge Arango is an information architect, author, and educator. For the past three decades, he has used architectural thinking to bring clarity and direction to UX design projects for clients ranging from non-profits to Fortune 500 companies. He’s the author of Duly Noted, Living in Information, and co-author of Information Architecture: for the Web and Beyond. Jorge also teaches in the graduate interaction design program at the California College of the Arts.

Jono Hey

Creator of Sketchplanations

Jono Hey is a visual storyteller, illustrator, and creator of Sketchplanations, a widely celebrated project that simplifies complex concepts through hand-drawn sketches. With a background spanning software development, education, and visual communication, Jono crafts visuals that help people understand and remember ideas more effectively. Over the past decade, he has built a vast visual encyclopedia of explanations that inspire curiosity and dialogue worldwide.

Oliver Caviglioli

Author & Visualiser of Educational Ideas

Oliver used to be a headteacher of a special school, wrote several books on visual teaching strategies and was a trainer in schools and colleges for nearly a decade. After an inspired visit to the 2008 Berlin VizThink conference, he invented the HOW2s — visual step-by-step guides to teaching techniques. Now, he designs and illustrates books, produces poster summaries of educational ideas, creates visual branding, visualises CPD packages, and makes the occasional presentation in the UK and Europe.

Nick Sousanis

Associate Professor San Francisco State University

Nick Sousanis is an Eisner-winning comics author and educator. He wrote and drew his dissertation, Unflattening, entirely in comic book form. Published by Harvard University Press, it argues for the power of visual thinking in learning and has won numerous awards, including the Lynd Ward Prize for Best Graphic Novel. At the heart of his practice, both as a creator and as the head of the Comics Studies program at San Francisco State University, is a deep belief in creating environments for discovery. He sees his role as a teacher not to provide a direct path, but to build the frameworks that encourage exploration.

Ingrid Lill

Visual Strategist

Hi fellow visionary, nice to meet you! I'm a visual artist turned business thinker, working with visionary founders, coaches and consultants all over the world – all from my beautiful studio in a remodeled barn in the Danish countryside.

Nick Milo

Creator of Linking Your Thinking

Creator of Linking Your Thinking. For 17+ years, Nick has used linked notes across film, fitness, and more to make sense of complexity—and now teaches flexible frameworks to think with your notes. He leads the Linking Your Thinking Workshop and teaches Writing Original Works and Note Making Mastery to help people turn information into insight and creative output. Nick recently signed a major book deal with Simon & Schuster; the forthcoming book distills these tested mindsets and methods—shaped with the LYT community—to help readers reclaim agency over information, with publication targeted for 2027.