It is used by management teams, project leaders, teachers and students as a means of tapping the diversity of groups and enabling many people to participate in effective thinking processes.
[1] LVT evolved independently but in parallel with Tony Buzan's mindmapping, Edward de Bono's lateral thinking, Japanese affinity diagrams, Robert Horn's visual language, Gabriele Rico's 'clustering' and many other emergent trends from the 1960s onwards.
As a general concept it covers the region of learning and communication in which three modes of intelligence are combined for understanding: verbal, visual and haptic.
The technology extends verbal expression to visual arrangement and brings into play physical manipulation of 'meaning objects'.
The first entails the articulation of discrete units of meaning in words and icons while the second involves the identification and manipulation of patterns and connections.
LVT supports process of democracy because it enables people to think together[citation needed].
The capacity to insert, remove and rearrange MMs in organising is a totally new dimension of thinking technology.
The fourth stage of Integrating draws on structural insights into complex texts, in particular the principles of ring composition as discovered by the English anthropologist Mary Douglas.