Thirty years of work as a graphic facilitator listening visually to people in every kind of organization has convinced the author that visual intelligence is a key to navigating an information economy rich with multimedia. He also believes that theory and disciplines developed by practitioners in this new field hold special promise for educators and students learning the deeper grammar of visual language. This article shares conclusions drawn from the author's own extensive field experience, with links to work in process theory and cognitive science that have convinced him of the deeper potential of visualization as a path to building 21st-century cognitive skills. (Contains 6 figures.)