What Are Visual Thinking Tools?

As my consulting practice started taking off about twenty years ago, I started reading everything I could by Fred Nickols, who blogged regularly for the software vendor, SmartDraw. Fred"s articles were short, to the point, and always included a simple visual framework that was easy to comprehend. I ultimately read every post on that blog. Fred is a long-time consultant who calls himself a solutions engineer. In this conversation, we talk about his favorite frameworks and the origins of those mental models.