When I saw the coverage of Amy Herman’s work in the NYT this morning, I stopped what I was doing. I even stopped my kids from what they were doing, which was a good thing because my one-year-old was putting some pretty interesting things into the toilet at the time.

Amy, who helps law enforcement officers improve crime scene investigation with an art-viewing approach, has a new book out on visual intelligence. I’m intrigued to check it out.

I first learned about Amy’s work in 2005 from my then-boss at a certain Boston-area museum. “Amy Herman at the Frick. She just has a thing for cops. And you! You just have a thing for doctors.” (My boss. A woman. I know.)

I have followed her work ever since. Even though we haven’t met personally, I think of her as a kindred spirit because we both left art museum jobs (coincidentally around the same time) to start consultancies striving to make for better seeing in this world. We hold some differences in goals and approach, but we both saw a big fat there there when it comes to learning in art and professional performance. I’m excited to learn more about how she sees it and teaches about it.

And given that this stuff is categorized as a stuffy museum thing, or an art-in-medicine thing, or a visual details thing, or a thing-for-doctors-or-cops thing (what the?), I’m glad she’s taken on educating the general public about visual intelligence.

It is an outlook-on-the-world thing.

It is a humility-into-success thing.

It is about the real enterprise, undergirding success in work and relationships and spirit and science: inquiry.

And at the same time, because visual inquiry is non-verbal, it can be challenging to capture and describe this power. But Amy Herman’s given it a swing. I can’t wait to see how she connects the dots between visual thinking and the bigger picture, and I have high hopes that we will all be—and see—the better for it.