Entries RSS · Visual Thinking : a conference with Dan Roam
Hello, Fidji here. I remember that, for one of my first articles on Tech It Easy, I spoke about it with Jeremy and he told me “that’s interesting, but there is no way you are going to make your point if you don’t draw something to show it”. And I didn’t, because I couldn’t find a way of summarizing it all in a simple picture. I thought it was better with words only, but truly it wasn’t. That’s the point that Dan Roam is trying to make in his book “The back of the napkin”.
Dan was today’s speaker at the eBay Speaker Series conference, so I had the chance to enjoy hearing him explain his theory. He is convinced that any business problem can be solved by a simple picture, that anybody has the ability to draw. But we often believe that we are not able to draw anything because the current educational system doesn’t give us many opportunities to use our visual thinking – even if it is an innate form of thinking as a child.
He shared a funny anecdote with us: he was advising Microsoft on a UI type of problem, and to foster the discussion, he showed them some handmade drawings. The people in the room were enthusiastic about this new support for their discussion, and at the end of the meeting some exec went to see Dan and asked him: “what software did you use to make the UI seem as if it is handmade?”.
And I definitely agree with Dan when he says that some software help and stimulate our thinking whereas others (and a lot of them) just block us: as a strategic analyst, I personally thinks about a problem only in terms of “what is it possible to show about it in a PowerPoint?”. I know it sounds kind of pathetic, but it is clear that my brain is now used to think about solutions in terms of slides.
So Dan’s solution (which can of course be summarized in a picture drawn on a napkin as you can see in this article) is to use the swiss knife of visual thinking:
- Use our built-in tools: eyes, mind, hands.
- Use the “look, see, imagine, show” process when approaching a problem, like we would do in poker game (we look at the cards, we see the patterns, we imagine what we could have, whe show our cards).
- When you arrive at the “show” step, use the SQVID framework: try to understand wether you need, for your audience to understand, to make you picture Simple or elaborate, Qualitative or quantitative, to focus on the Vision or the execution, to adopt an Individual or a comparative view, and finally to show your problem as a Delta (change) or as a status quo.
- Match your picture with one of the way we see the world: to answer a What? question, draw a portrait; to answer a How many? question, draw a chart; to answer a Where? question, draw a map, to answer a When? question, draw a timeline, to answer a How? question, draw a flow chart, and finally to answer the Why? question, draw a multidimensional picture, often a combination of the previous questions.
What I also find interesting is his classification of people into 3 categories regarding visual thinking: the black pen guys, who are the ones that can’t help jumping from their chair during a meeting and drawing things everywhere on the white board; the yellow pen guys, who are the ones good at highlighting the important areas in a picture and improving what’s be drawn; and the red pen guys, who hate drawing but who usually think that what the black pen guys are writing is bullshit and feel so exasperated that they end up amending the whole thing. I took Dan’s test and it happens that I fall into the second bucket; and I’m really curious to know where you think you fit the most to see if it confirms the repartition that we had within the eBay audience!
Tags: dan roam, visual thinking
Art, Books, Business strategy, Consulting, Education, Microsoft, Review, Silicon Valley, Software, eBay, image, innovation, photo
Hi Fidji, nice to see you again!
Interesting categorisation of visual methods and personalities. I’m definitely a black-pen guy, always drawing/dreaming away, until some yellow-/red-pen people come and correct me
And Visio is my favourite software on the computer, so I guess I like talking about the “How”.
In any case, I guess this is another book on my wishlist!
I attended a course on Systems Thinking and the course focused on more soft ways to solve problems instead of using hard systems sciences, which usually fail miserably when dealing with complex, group problems.
I saw a huge benefit in drawing the problems as “rich pictures”. Some frameworks like viable system model (VSM) are also mostly graphical.
I find that especially technical oriented IT people should be tought some of this stuff, because I believe that many IT failures are caused by lack of understanding (communication, values, …). Somehow these are missing when the problem is modeled and drawn in PowerPoint slides, but are there when just using coloured pens and napkins.
@Kari: I agree, many IT-based solutions fall short when it comes to “right-brained” expressions. Even tech-tools like Wacom-tablet doesn’t accurately convey a quick drawing well.
For remote brainstorming, I generally prefer to make a quick drawing, take a picture, and send it to whomever, as it’s much richer (and quicker) than linear text or graphics-tools, and far cheaper then most (tablet-based, etc.) hardware that may come close to producing similar results, but also gives the occasional headache where compatibility & processing is concerned.
What is kind of ironic is that a tool like PowerPoint has been a great tool to present clearly problems and solutions for a while, but, since it is always a question of habits, now a simple drawing becomes more surprising and therefore potentially more likely to generate ideas that PowerPoint.
But what I appreciated in Dan’s presentation is that he is not the type of guy who always puts creativity first on his list of prority, and he definitely acknowledges the need to adapt a picture to differents purposes and audiences. Which is why he describes is “SQVID” framework as a compromise between the right and left brain.
Dan Roam is amazing. I didn’t know about him until I read your post, and I find his cosmo-vision thrilling.
I’m definitely a black-pen guy, exactly like Vincent.
Thanks for the fish Fidji, extremely valuable.
Fidji this post really puts me in comfort : I agree that if you cannot explain your vision to a child (through a drawing eventually) you have no idea what your problem is.
Comfort also comes from the fact that the exostracism of pwp power comes from a corporate environment: aligning boxes to pwp is to creativity what bureaucracy is to entrepreneurship.
however,unless you are an architect, visual thinking is so personal that carries a great deal of anarchy and risk of misinterpretation. Isn’t this why we abandoned it in the first place and passed on to ultrasegmented syntaxed symbolic language? Well, not quite abandoned : I haven’t met anyone yet who writes down “the guy’s face seating infront of me is funny, frowning, has spots, curly hair” for fun and pleasure ….
I see me as a dark red guy, almost black, almost 70 years old.
Thanks for this great post!
There is definitely an emerging discipline which is all about exploring and conveying ideas visually. We have focused strongly on reading, writing and arithmetic in our school systems, and visual literacy skills have been neglected — just at the moment when we need to process more complex, non-linear information than ever before.
This is why we have so many bad PowerPoints — our schools don’t teach the basic skills needed to communicate well visually.
Dan’s book is a great contribution to this field.
Thanks for the great post Fidji — and thanks for your encouraging comments about my presentation yesterday: its always enjoyable to share these ideas about visual thinking since *everybody* — and this includes the “red pen people” as well — just plain ‘gets’ it right away.
Georgia — to your fascinating comment that visual language is personal and chaotic, I would suggest that you’re right… But to ok greater degree than verbal thinking us equally personal and chaotic. We’ve just spent a lot more time creating and enforcing rules.
There are also an infinite number of ‘rules’ about how we think visually, they just haven’t been codified yet to the same degree. Then again, ancient Egypt — far and away the most advanced civilization of its time — did perfect a rigorous grammar in their written language of pictures (heiroglyphics).
Lots to think about. Glad to be part of the discussion!
Dan Roam
author of Thd Back of the Napkin
Dan, this is an honor to have you on this blog. Thank you so much for your insights, and for your great conference. As a visual artist in my spare time (I know this might seem weird considering that I’m not a black pen girl!), your thoughts about codification made me think that it is the same thing about art, since each new way of representing the world generates so much interrogation, which basically creates art trends, with new rules and codifications. Anyway, I’m glad I could contribute to have Tech IT Easy readers discover your book, since I couldn’t stop reading it yesterday evening!
PS: There was a problem of bullet points in the article, which is now fixed so that readers can understand better the 4 elements of the swiss knife.
Merci Fidji,
Your company has long been a great client for me, and it’s nice to hear that people outside the UED group are getting the “solving problems with pictures” message.
Keep spreading the good word!
- Dan
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