The Back of the Napkin Part 12

Imagine: How can we manipulate or take advantage of emerging patterns? Are there open opportunities? What is not visible here? Where have we seen this before?

Option one: We explain how spending a little on platform upgrades could likely reestablish our lead in feature offerings, but would have only partial impact on improving overall security, reliability, and flexibility.

Imagining aloud means talking through the options that our picture presents and making the empty s.p.a.ces come alive. As we introduce option one-the low-cost Band-Aid-we draw in exactly what we're describing, making it obvious that the potential impact of staying on the same platform will be slightly improved services and features-perhaps even enough to keep us ahead of SMS-Peridocs for a time.

Then we draw in option two, describing how a $9 million platform redesign will enable us to make real improvements in all offerings, and position us to stay ahead of the rising open platform crowd-beating them by joining them.

Option two: We explain how a $9-million rebuild, using open standards, will s.h.i.+ft us into leaders.h.i.+p on the fastest growing side of the picture.

Now the executives will have one more big question. "OK," they'll say to us, "you've spent a lot of time with this picture, what do you think we should do?"

Show: This is what we think it all means. Do you see the same things? This is what we think our options are. Do you agree?

And now we finally come to why we need to go with option two and spend the big money: Regardless of our market position today, there is no way we will be able to compete on flexibility, security, and reliability in the coming years on our present platform. Open platforms will simply beat us. We've led this industry for the past decade, and if we intend to keep our lead, there's only one way for us to go: Rebuild from the ground up using open standards. As far as we can see, it's not even a question.

If we want to stay in the lead in the industry we created, we've got no choice but to rebuild on a new open platform.

Our argument is made. The meeting is far from over, but our picture has served its purpose. It introduced more concepts more quickly than we ever could have done with words alone; it made those concepts easy to see, understand, and remember; and it provided a visual framework upon which we and the executives will be drawing more arrows and options for the next hour. Big decisions are about to be made. Let's hope that we've been honest with what we've drawn.

Sometimes a Pizza Is Enough, Sometimes It's Not The differences in style-and the a.s.sociated successes-between Lauren's approach to showing her picture during the big pitch and what we just saw in the SAX Inc. conference room are enormous. Still, they all boil down to just one thing: If we're going to use a picture to sell, we have to be prepared to talk about it.

This brings us to the last problem in this book, namely, Is a problem-solving picture "bad" if it requires an explanation? After all, doesn't the old adage "a picture is worth a thousand words" tell us that good pictures always stand on their own?

The answer is no. All good pictures do not need to be self-explanatory, but they do need to be explainable. It's a rare problem-solving picture of any sort that can carry a clear message, convey powerful meaning, and inspire deep insight without at least a caption. Certainly a basic portrait, bar chart, or simple timeline should be understood immediately, but when we think about the more elaborate and insightful pictures required to show complex interactions of when, where, how, and why, the point isn't to replace all the words; the point is to use a picture to replace those words that are more effectively conveyed, understood, and remembered visually.

The best way to think about this is to think about pizza. More to the point, what we really need to think about is when pizza is the ideal food to serve guests versus when a three-course sit-down meal is more appropriate. Here's what I mean. For most business meetings that take place on a day-to-day level, our expectations as partic.i.p.ants are usually pretty low. We've met all these people before, heard most of what everybody has to say, and have plenty of other things we could be doing. Those are what I call pizza meetings: They're more like having a bunch of neighbors over to watch a game on TV than having everybody get dressed up to share a gourmet meal. Either way, everybody needs to be fed, but at a pizza meeting the only expectations about the food are that it's filling, tastes pretty good, and doesn't require a lot of cleanup.

Most business pictures are pizza: They need to be simple, easy to digest, and contain few enough ingredients that they don't cause indigestion. These pizza pictures shouldn't need a lot of explanation. They're there to push the meeting forward and get everyone fed on the information as quickly and satisfyingly as possible. More customer data has been collected? Great. Give it to us as a bar chart. A new work stream and deadline have been added to the project? Fine. Where's the one-line timeline? That's it? Great, got it. Thanks. Later.

Then again, a lot of meetings involve a whole different set of expectations. Imagine that we're the new boss and we're meeting the board to relay the impressive results of our first ninety days. Imagine that we've just acquired a new company and we need to convey to senior staff how our business model is going to change; imagine we're meeting a client for the biggest pitch in our company's history. Guests at these meetings expect to be impressed, to learn something they didn't know, to see something they've never seen before... and pizza pictures aren't going to cut it.

These meetings are like full-blown sit-down dinners, and the pictures we show need to convey substantial insight, open up interesting conversation, and support important decision making. We're talking here about delivering more than just informational satisfaction. We need to provide the pictorial equivalent of a three-course meal. That's when our elaborate how and why pictures become the order of the day: They contain a lot, they show a lot, and-as we just saw in the SAX conference room-they require a lot of explanation.

Nothing wrong with that. At our metaphorical sit-down-dinner meeting, our guests not only have more time, they fully expect to be engaged in detailed conversation and are willing to make the commitment of time and energy necessary to ensure they're getting the most from what we've got to show them. You say we need to think about branching into new international markets? Interesting. What makes you say that? Investing in a new product development now? How could that be? You need nine million dollars? Show me why.

It's in these instances-when our guests' expectations are high but their willingness to partic.i.p.ate is equally high-that we should always pull out the big pictures. The elaborate maps, the comparative timelines, the quant.i.tative value chains, the visionary plots. These pictures serve as launching platforms from which ideas can grow, which is the whole point of problem solving. We don't show an insight-inspiring picture because it saves a thousand words; we show it because it elicits the thousand words that make the greatest difference.

CHAPTER 16.

DRAWING CONCLUSIONS.

Visual Thinking: The Take-Anywhere Problem-Solving Toolkit That morning on the train to Sheffield, I not only learned about the power of a napkin, I also learned that what we all really need is a reliable problem-solving toolkit that we can take with us anywhere; something that we can pull out of our pocket at a moment's notice to help us look at problems, see what makes them tick, imagine ways to solve them, and then show our solutions to somebody else. We need a universal visual thinking toolkit-and since we'll be using it at a moment's notice, above all it has to be memorable.

Three-Four-Five-Six: The Visual Thinking Swiss Army Knife One last visualization exercise. Imagine that you're sitting at the airport cafe waiting for your flight. You see a couple friends or business colleagues walking past and wave them down. As they join you, they ask what you've been up to lately.

"Solving problems with pictures," you say. "Learning to get better at visual thinking."

"Really?" they say. "What's that all about?"

"Let me show you," you answer as you pick up a napkin and pull a pen from your bag.

As you roughly sketch the outline of a Swiss Army knife, you say, "Picture visual thinking as the Swiss Army knife of problem solving. It has several different blades to help visually solve almost any kind of problem, but they follow a simple pattern so it's easy to remember what they all do."

"First are our three basic visual thinking tools: our eyes, our mind's eye, and our hand-eye coordination."

"Next come the four steps of the visual thinking process. Four steps we already know how to do: look, see, imagine, and show."

"Then we have the SQVID, the five questions that help us open our mind's eye: simple or elaborate, qualitative or quant.i.tative, vision or execution, individual or comparison, change or status quo?"

"Last come the six ways we see, and the six corresponding ways we show: who/what, how much, where, when, how, and why."

"That's my visual problem-solving toolkit. I don't have to remember any more than that, and I can use it to help with any problem, anytime, anywhere."

"That's pretty interesting," your first colleague says. "I've got a little time... can you show me more?"

"Of course," you say, as you reach for another napkin.

"That is interesting," says the other colleague. "I want to think about it some more, but I've got to run. Do you mind if I keep the napkin?"

"Not at all," you reply, handing it over with a smile.

In two minutes you've captured your own idea, shown it to others, and pa.s.sed it along. That's how visual thinking works, and that's how to solve problems and sell ideas with pictures.

Appendix A

THE TEN (AND A HALF) COMMANDMENTS OF VISUAL THINKING.

The "lost chapter" from The Back of the Napkin.

1. Solve Any Problem with a Picture.

Strategic, financial, operational, conceptual, personal, and emotional: It doesn't matter the nature of the problem we face-if we can imagine it, we can draw it. By drawing it we will see otherwise invisible aspects, and potential solutions will emerge. Drawing our problem is always worth a try: Even in the worst case-if no solution becomes visible-we'll still end up with an infinitely clearer view of our situation.

2. No Longer Say, "I Can't Draw."

If you think you can't draw, you're in good company. The only demographic group who really know they can draw is in kindergarten today. Wait a minute... Weren't you once in kindergarten, too? The fact is, we are all born excellent visual thinkers. If you're visual enough to walk into a room without falling down, you're visual enough to solve problems with pictures.

3. Avoid Drawing on the Linen.

The whole point of napkin sketching is that you never know when you might want to visually explore an idea. Any paper napkin will work as a drawing surface, which is why cafes and bars are great idea-sharing places. But when you're in a more proper establishment with fancy linens, you'll need to BYOP (bring your own paper). Best lesson: Always carry a little notebook and a pen. (Tip: While waiters in proper establishments are always willing to loan a pen, be sure to give it back.) 4. To Start, Draw a Circle and Give It a Name.

The hardest line to draw is the first one-so don't even think about it. Just draw a circle in the middle of your page and label it with the first name that comes to mind: "me," "you," "them," "today," "yesterday," "tomorrow," "profit," "loss," "our product," "our company," "our compet.i.tor," "the globe," "the weather"-whatever. It really doesn't matter what you select at this point; all that matters is that you get started.

5. Select the Best Picture Type from the "Basic Six" (Who/What, How Much, Where, When, How, Why).

Once we've got that first circle drawn, all we need to do to keep our sketch going is select which of the "basic six" frameworks best supports the type of problem we're solving: (1) a PORTRAIT for a "who" or "what" problem; (2) a CHART for a "how much" problem; (3) a MAP for a "where" problem; (4) a TIMELINE for a "when" problem; (5) a FLOWCHART for a "how" problem; or (6) a MULTIPLE-VARIABLE PLOT for a "why" problem. From just these six, we have the backbone framework for any problem-solving picture.

6. Anthropomorphize Everything.

People respond to people. Faces and stick figures, however crudely drawn, immediately elicit attention, understanding, and reaction. Whether to show relations.h.i.+ps and quant.i.ties, emphasize a point, or just provide a sense of scale, draw people in by drawing in people. (In a similar vein, the reason hand-drawn sketches are particularly powerful in sales and communications is that their visibly human imperfections-and their work-in-progress appearance-invite partic.i.p.atory input from the audience.) 7. Take Advantage of Every Mental Trigger You Can (aka Use "Precognitive" Attributes).

The human mind has evolved to process a wide range of visual cues instantly, even before we consciously see them-hence the term "precognitive." We recognize and apply meaning to size, shape, orientation, direction, and position-and make a.s.sociations and distinctions among these traits-long before we have time to think about them. Since we don't waste any higher-level cognitive cycles processing these basic attributes, the more information we convey through them the more we free up our minds (and those of our audience) to look for deeper meaning.

8. Doodle Aloud-and Erase Even Louder.

When the first person said, "A picture is worth a thousand words," he or she permanently warped our understanding of pictures. The point of a good picture isn't to eliminate words; it's to replace as many as possible so that the words we do use are the important ones. (Rather than spending time verbally describing coordinates, positions, percentages, qualities, and quant.i.ties, if we simply show them, we have more time to talk about what they mean.) So as you work through your picture, make a point of describing-even if it's only to yourself-what the pieces mean and why you're drawing them where you are. Even stream-of-consciousness babble makes sense when it supports an emerging picture. And when something looks wrong, go ahead and erase it, talking through that as well. The combination of simultaneous creation and narration is magic.

9. Don't Draw What's out There, Draw What's in Here (aka The Sky Is Blue, Except When I Think It Isn't).

Everybody has his or her own idea of what things "really look like," and we're all wrong. The point of problem-solving pictures isn't to create great art. We're not trying to show ourselves and others what things look like "out there" (in the real world); we're trying to show what things look like "in here" (what we see in our own heads). The human brain is a remarkable problem-solving device: More often than not, we already know the solution to our problem-usually because we've seen it somewhere before-but it's locked away just out of grasp. When we see our problem mapped out in front of us pictorially, the solution often jumps right off the page. Don't worry about what your picture looks like; concentrate on what it shows.

10. Draw a Conclusion.

The simple act of creating our picture is the most important part of visual problem solving: Drawing things out helps us look, see, imagine, and show ideas that would have remained hidden had we not picked up the pen. That said, it's always worth it to take our picture to the point where something new emerges. When you think you're done, push that pen one more time to write a t.i.tle, a conclusion, an insight, or a comment. Squeezing one last drop out of your visual thinking muscle almost always delivers a "eureka!"

10.5 Don't Lie (Not to Yourself, Not to Your Audience, and Most of All Not to Your Picture).

Pictures are powerful. Because processing images activates more corners of our minds than words alone, we have a greater tendency to believe what we see-and the images we create are far stickier than things we only hear. While any problem can be helped with a picture, the wrong picture can make any problem worse. So when you're done with your image, go back and take one more look, if only to make sure that you haven't gotten so caught up in the marvelous act of drawing that you've misled even yourself.

APPENDIX B.

THE SCIENCE OF VISUAL THINKING.

Russian Roulette This book is what scientists call empirically based. That is to say, I discovered and tested the ideas introduced here during real-world, on-the-job practice and observation, first by trying out visual problem-solving approaches that felt intuitively right, and then by validating that they really did work in solving daily business problems. If I found that a given approach "worked"-by providing either qualitatively better ideas and communications or quant.i.tatively measurable improvements in sales, productivity, or efficiency-I kept evolving it until the tools that appear in this book emerged. If the approaches didn't work, they don't appear here.

For me, there wasn't any alternative to this seat-of-the-pants, learning-by-doing introduction to visual problem solving. In early 1990, I found myself managing a marketing communications company in Russia, a country where I didn't even speak the language. If that sounds like a contradiction in terms (how can someone create communications when they can't speak the language?), it was, but it was also a unique situation that obligated me to start looking for new nonverbal ways of approaching business problems.

Those were busy years, and while I eventually learned to speak Russian, I found it more useful to keep using pictures to share ideas even after I'd pa.s.sed the language barrier. Again, pictures just worked. It never occurred to me to look for any scientific reason why one picture might immediately clarify a complex business issue while another picture would only make the situation worse. I just learned to go by "visual feel." By the time I returned to the United States in the late 1990s, I had seen enough consistently recurring visual themes in the more effective pictures that I learned to quickly create problem-clarifying sketches (like the English breakfast napkin) that other people also found useful-but I never really knew why any of those pictures worked.

It was only after I started fine-tuning my approach in order to help colleagues and clients create similar pictures themselves that it dawned on me to look for connections between what I intuitively saw working and what neuroscientists had to say about how human vision works.

Reading about vision in a series of science texts, I started to sense connections emerging, but my own undergraduate degree in biology was by then so dated that those connections remained just out of grasp. Then a client told me about a book called Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind by V. S. Ramachandran. I picked up a copy one day and opened it to a chapter on understanding vision. Suddenly I could sense the tumblers whirring in the lock and feel the click as a neurological key to visual thinking fell into place.

In his book, Ramachandran (the director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego) presented one fascinating tale after another illuminating the inner workings of the brain. But what caught my eye was a diagram ill.u.s.trating the vision pathways-the neurological routes that visual signals follow as they make their way from our eyes into our visual cortex. When Ramachandran published his book in 1998, several recent discoveries had been made delineating these pathways and the roles they appeared to play in breaking down incoming visual signals into the discrete components required for processing throughout the brain. This particular diagram ill.u.s.trated three of these pathways, and what I saw there was astonis.h.i.+ng: Their names matched three of the 6 W's.

I had long ago realized that by visually breaking a problem down into its 6 W's (who/ what, how much, where, when, how, and why) and then creating a single picture for each, it was possible to visually clarify almost any problem, and yet when faced with the names of these recently discovered visual pathways, I couldn't believe what I saw. The flow of the pathways was itself interesting, but what really took my breath away was their blessedly nonscientific names: the what pathway, the where pathway, and the how pathway. Here were the same "ways of seeing" that I'd always relied upon, but now they weren't abstract ideas to search for in the visual world, they were physical pathways leading directly into specific areas in our brains.

"Wait a minute," I told myself. "It can't be that simple. It can't be that we physically see according to the 6 W's-who, what, where, when, etc. That would be too easy. Those are just broad journalistic definitions we've made up in order to understand and convey the essence of complex stories, right?"

Wrong. Now intrigued enough to read everything I could find about how vision/ sight works, I soon discovered two things: One, there is enough scientific evidence to contemplate the truth of a visual thinking model that says that the 6 W's are the "ideal" way to look at the world because they correspond literally to the ways we see. Two, like anything in science, it's not completely true.

How We See, Part 1: The Vision Pathways Way back at the beginning of chapter 4, I described looking as the means by which we collect visual information through our eyes. We talked about how light enters our eyes and gets converted into electrical signals that are pa.s.sed along our optic nerves into various regions of our brains, where those signals somehow get processed into the pictures that we see inside our heads. That's an accurate and useful summary to the basics of our visual system, but it barely scratches the surface. Vision is an enigma, a process that becomes ever more remarkable the more neuroscientists learn about it, and yet to this day remains fundamentally a mystery.

What we do know is this: Every second that our eyes are open, millions of visual signals enter as photons of light, are instantly converted into electrical impulses by our retinas, and then get pa.s.sed along through the million strands of our optic nerves into our brains. After the right-side and left-side eye signals cross over in the optic chiasma, about 10 percent of the signals get shunted along a three-hundred-million-year-old pathway into the superior colliculus located atop the brain stem.