About
Dr. Stefan Schaefer
I help leadership teams decide faster, align better, and work smarter – especially when the stakes are high.
As a design-centric facilitator, illustrator/designer, and analyst, I have designed and led more than a hundred collaborative strategy sessions across 36 industries on 5 continents, working with leadership teams from Fortune 500 companies worldwide.
Overall, the term „Visual Pathfinder“ describes the role of a facilitator in helping management teams navigate toward a common goal. By using visual tools and techniques to simplify complex ideas and facilitate collaboration, Visual Pathfinders enable management teams to achieve alignment and work toward a common vision.
I know firsthand how frustrating traditional meetings can be – slow, unfocused, and unable to drive real alignment.
That changed for me at Hewlett Packard, where I helped establish a design-led, strategic customer-facing team targeting the company’s most strategic customers. We started at HP’s Executive Briefing Center in Silicon Valley, and soon established a global Practice.
Over time, this work continued through its successor organizations, HPE and DXC, and facilitated high-stakes conversations for Fortune 500 companies and regional innovators across 36 industries and five continents.
Working with account, sales, portfolio and marketing teams, I saw how structured conversation frameworks, visuals and collaborative design could transform outcomes.
Clients felt the difference immediately:
- “What we accomplished in one day with your facilitation would have taken us at least a year of discussions in our standard way of doing business.”
- “It was a cathartic experience – you forced us to have the honest and truly relevant discussions we had actively avoided for a very long time.”
Since then, I’ve facilitated over 100 strategy engagements, helping leadership teams build trust, align around a shared vision, and co-create strategies they are committed to implementing.
Through Structured Visual Thinking and Strategic Co-creation, I help teams to activate the collective intelligence to create the clarity, trust, and shared commitment needed to move from discussion to decisive action.
Clients often highlight the visuals, but for me, the real magic is in the collaboration – and the time a team carves out to be in a room together to finally have the conversations they may have missed or avoided. I enjoy the challenge of identifying the real problem to be solved and then designing the right structure to address it.
In many ways, I’m a bit of a “company therapist”: the solution is almost always in the room – my role is to help participants surface it, guide the dialogue, and keep discussions focused so teams can co-create solutions they believe in.