The Back of the Napkin Part 2

Flip back and forth between sheets and zero in on the important patterns that I saw right away.

Someone hands me a pen and asks me to sketch out a particular idea. I: Ask for more pens, preferably in at least three colors.

Just start sketching and see what emerges.

Say, "I can't draw but...," and then make a horrible stick figure.

Start by writing a few words, then putting boxes around them.

Put the pen on the table and start talking.

Say, "No, thanks, I can't draw," and leave it at that.

On my way home from a big conference, I run into a colleague at the airport bar, and he or she asks me to explain more precisely what my company does. I: Grab a napkin and ask the bartender for a pen.

Pick up three packs of Sweet'n Low, lay them on the bar, and say, "OK, this is me...."

Pull up a page from my PowerPoint-a really good page-and start describing it.

Explain that "there are three things we do...."

Buy another round because we're going to be talking for a while.

Say it's too complicated to explain well, but ask him/her the same question.

I see a b.u.mper sticker on a car that reads VISUALIZE WORLD PEACE. I: Try to imagine what peace must look like.

Imagine John Lennon's gla.s.ses.

Repeat those words to myself, kind of rolling them around: "World Peace."

Imagine what this tells me about the owner of the car.

Think: "Whirled peas."

Roll my eyes and murmur, "d.a.m.ned Californians."

If I were an astronaut floating in s.p.a.ce, the first thing I would do is: Take a deep breath, relax, and take in the whole view.

Try to spot my house... or at least my continent.

Start describing what I saw.

Wish I had a camera.

Close my eyes.

Find a way to get back into the s.p.a.cecraft.

Now add up your total score and divide it by 6. Here's how to rate yourself: SCORE CALCULATED PEN PREFERENCE.

1-2.5 Black Pen (Hand me the pen!) 2.6-4.5 Yellow Pen (I can't draw, but...) 4.6-6 Red Pen (I'm not visual.)

There are two important takeaways from this exercise. The first is that depending on your visual thinking preference, you may find the greatest value in different sections in this book. If you're a Black Pen person and already feel confident about your ability to draw, I suspect that part II, which describes how to improve our ability to look and see, will be the most interesting place to start. If you're a Red Pen person and not convinced of the a.n.a.lytic power of pictures, you might want to start with part III (The Visual Thinking MBA) in order to see pictures at work in solving a business problem. If you're a Yellow Pen person, excellent at identifying what is most important, you might most appreciate part IV, as it describes how to show a picture to someone else.

The second takeaway from this exercise is even more powerful.

Regardless of visual thinking confidence or pen-color preference, everybody already has good visual thinking skills, and everybody can easily improve those skills.

Visual thinking is not a talent unique to select individuals, or limited only to people with years of dedicated study. Although your results on the pen-color a.s.sessment will help you find the best way to use this book, the most important thing to note is that regardless of how you scored, visual thinking is an ability in which we are all innately gifted. The proof is in the physiological, neurological, and biological systems we are born with and the sight-dependent intellectual, physical, and social abilities we learn from the beginning of our lives: namely, our amazing abilities to look, see, imagine, and show.

How to Use This Book The essence of this book can be distilled down to one central idea.

Visual thinking is an extraordinarily powerful way to solve problems, and though it may appear to be something new, the fact is that we already know how to do it.

Although we are born with an amazing vision system, most of us rarely think about our visual abilities and even fewer have any idea how to improve them. It's as if we've been given a high-end desktop supercomputer as a gift, but we don't know where to find any new software. Even though sight is for most of us the most highly developed of all our senses, when it comes to visual thinking, we limit ourselves to what is available right out of the box. This is a shame, because by better understanding the vision tools that we already have (and then learning to use a few new ones) we can learn to solve problems with pictures in remarkable ways.

Think of this book as a guide rope that leads from here, where we have good but perhaps underutilized visual thinking skills, to there, where we have excellent visual thinking abilities that we can reliably call on whenever we need to. This guide rope is made up of three threads divided into strands, each a simple theme, each easy to explain, and each easy to understand. These three threads are the process (look, see, imagine, show), our built-in biological tools (eyes, mind's eye, hands/eyes), and the ways we see (who/what, how much, where, when, how, why).

1. A four-step process: There is a learnable, repeatable, and useful process to visual thinking.

The backbone of this book is a very simple process. It is composed of just four steps, and the beauty of these steps is that we already know how to do all of them. In fact, we're so good at them that we don't consciously think about them at all. But by calling attention to these steps and drawing out the distinctions between them, we can instantly improve our understanding of how visual thinking works. In addition, by introducing tools and insights on this step-by-step basis, we can improve our abilities in a gradual and coordinated way.

2. Three built-in tools to improve: In order to think visually, we rely on the interaction of our three "built-in" tools: our eyes, our mind's eye, and our hand-eye coordination. We can improve all three, and the better we get at one, the better we get at the others.

While our eyes serve as the tools by which we look at the world around us and see visual patterns within it, it is in our mind's eye where we manipulate those patterns, take them apart and rebuild them, hold them upside down and shake them in order to see what falls out. Then once we've rolled these patterns around and have something to explore, record, and share, we rely on coordination between our hands and our eyes to get those ideas down on paper for fine-tuning and sharing.

3. Six ways of seeing: There are six fundamental questions that guide how we see things and then how we show things-and these six are recognizable to anyone.

Regardless of business circ.u.mstance, project a.s.signment, or timetable, every problem eventually breaks down into the six fundamental questions we've already seen. We're all familiar with these questions. Known as the 6 W's, they were introduced to us way back in elementary school as the basis of good storytelling: who, what, when, where, how, why. What makes the six exceptionally powerful for visual thinking is that these questions align precisely with the ways we literally see the world around us.

As we follow this guide rope through the book, these three themes are going to come up again and again. So, with pens in hand, we're ready to walk through the visual thinking process. But first, let's adjourn for a moment to the game room, where playing a hand of poker is going to help get things started.

* All characters, companies, and projects in this book are real, but I have changed most of the personal names.

CHAPTER 3.

A GAMBLE WE CAN'T LOSE: THE FOUR STEPS OF VISUAL THINKING Texas Hold 'em: The Table Stakes of Visual Thinking One excellent way I've found to introduce people to visual thinking-especially to people who don't consider themselves visual-is to compare the process to playing a game of poker. In fact, I often begin visual thinking workshops by having everyone play a couple hands of Texas hold 'em. The game is simple enough that even people who have never played cards before can pick up the basics in a few minutes, and the lessons that the game teaches-how to look at a hand of cards and see patterns emerge, how to imagine what cards are necessary to complete the patterns, how to build the most effective hand to show other players-are textbook visual thinking.

Winning poker hands, most valuable to least valuable.

Let me show you what I mean by walking quickly through a hand of hold 'em. Like any game of poker, the goal is to create the best combination of five cards, as shown in the above table.

In Texas hold 'em, each player receives two cards facedown that only he or she gets to look at. The dealer will turn another five cards faceup on the table for all players to see. From these seven cards (two "secret" and five "shared"), each player will construct his or her best possible hand.

Let's say, for example, that when you looked at your secret cards, you saw a jack and king of hearts.

Because there are a lot of high-scoring combinations that could come your way, that's a great starting hand. So you place a good bet and the game keeps going. Step by step, the dealer then turns faceup the five shared cards on the table, and you see your hand getting better and better. You continue betting along the way since you imagine that the chances for someone else to have a better hand are becoming fewer and fewer.

As the dealer turns over the last shared card, you see that you've got a full house (a great hand in hold 'em), so you bet big. When those players still in the game show their cards, your full house is the winning hand, and you take the money.

Great. Now that you're feeling good about your poker skills, let's connect this game back to visual thinking. There are several reasons why the poker example works.

1. There is a process, and rules to govern it. Like any activity requiring a series of steps, poker has to be played in a specific order. The game wouldn't work if we first showed our entire hand, then placed our bets, and then dealt the cards. Similarly, visual thinking is also a process guided by rules.

2. We must make decisions with less-than-perfect information. In poker, we have to gamble at every step, guessing how things are going to play out long before we've seen all the cards. The same is true of visual thinking. We'll frequently have to make important decisions about which pictures to use before we have all the information.

3. A complete visual language is made up of a small number of elements. In poker, all the data is contained entirely within the fifty-two cards that make up the deck and the shared symbols on them. With nothing more than nine numbers (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10), four faces (A, K, Q, J), four suits (hearts, diamonds, aces, spades), and two colors (red and black), there is still an infinite variety of ways to play the game. Likewise in visual thinking, a small set of visual cues will represent an infinite number of problem-solving options.

And the most important of all: 4. The process of playing poker is a great a.n.a.logy to the process of visual thinking. First, we are handed a couple of cards and we look at them. Without looking at the cards, we have no ability to know what our chances of winning are, so without looking, there's no way for the game to begin.

But just looking at the cards isn't enough to know what they tell us. Next we have to see what is on them. What color are they? What number or face do they contain? What suit are they? Do we have all the cards we should? Is anything missing? If looking is the semipa.s.sive process of collecting visual inputs, then seeing is the active process of selecting those visual inputs that matter most, and then recognizing the pattern-making components within them.

Once we've seen what we have in our hands, we next have to imagine how the emerging patterns might fit together. We have to imagine how the cards we've been dealt might create patterns that will help us win. We also need to imagine what the other players might have, and then try to imagine whether we can beat them or not.

The final step of the game is to show. At the end, everyone still playing has to lay their cards on the table and show what they've got. Unless someone at the table is an incredible bluffer with an inscrutable poker face and has fooled everyone else into folding early, n.o.body can win until everybody shows. The same is true of visual thinking. We may have imagined fantastic ideas, but unless we have a way to show them to others, the value of our ideas will never be known.

There we have it: look, see, imagine, show. The four steps of poker correspond exactly to the four steps of visual thinking. And as playing the game ill.u.s.trates, there is nothing magic or secret about these steps. We complete these same steps in this same order every time we think visually.

The Process of Visual Thinking This process shouldn't come as a surprise. After all, we go through these steps thousands of times a day-like when we cross the street, for example. We look both ways and if we see a car nearby, we stop. If we see a car at a distance, we imagine whether we can make it across before it arrives, and if so, we show our decision by confidently striding across the street, or waiting until the car has safely pa.s.sed by.

The four-step visual thinking process when crossing a street.

Or when we prepare a business report: First we look at the materials we have to communicate; then we see what within them is most interesting, relevant, or useful; then we imagine the best way to convey our message; and then we show our report to our colleagues.

The four-step visual thinking process when creating a report.

Or when we need to explain a chart in a business presentation: We look at what the chart contains (the key, the coordinates, the data sets, the sources), then we see what patterns emerge in the data (perhaps the x-axis is rising faster than the y-axis, or maybe the blue part of the pie chart is much larger than the red part), then we imagine what those patterns mean (costs are rising faster than profits; the Southwest region is outpacing the Northeast region), then we stand up and confidently show all these insights to our audience by walking them through exactly the same process we just completed ourselves.

The four-step visual thinking process when presenting a chart.

Because we're so good at this whole process, we don't think about it much. But that's only because we've practiced it so much that the process has become second nature. But watch a cla.s.s of preschoolers holding hands on their way to the zoo, and we'll see that crossing the street safely isn't an intuitive process. Without the teachers as guides, many of the kids would walk right out into the street, in effect completing the show part of the process without having gone through the look, see, and imagine steps... with disastrous results. As we'll see later, that is exactly what most businesspeople do when creating a business graphic. And that's why it's worth spending a few more minutes learning the process.

The Visual Thinking Process, Step by Step Looking This is the semipa.s.sive process of taking in the visual information around us. Looking is about collecting inputs and making initial rough a.s.sessments of what's out there, so that we know how to respond. Looking involves scanning the environment in order to build an initial big picture sense of things, while simultaneously asking the rapid-fire questions that help our minds make a first-pa.s.s a.s.sessment of what is in front of us.

Looking questions: What is there? Is there a lot of it? What is not there?

How far am I able to look? What are the edges and limits of my vision in this situation?

What do I recognize right away, and what throws me off?

Are the things in front of me what I expected to see? Can I "get" them rapidly, or do I need to spend extra time figuring out what I'm looking at?

Looking activities: Scan across the whole landscape. Build a big picture; note that there are forests and trees... and leaves, as well.

Find the edges and determine which way is up. Establish the limits of our view and the fundamental coordinates of the data in front of us.

Make an initial pa.s.s at screening out the noise; separate the visual wheat from the chaff.

Seeing This is the other side of the visual input coin, and it is where our eyes get more consciously active. While we were just looking, we were scanning the whole scene and collecting initial inputs. Now that we're seeing, we are selecting which inputs are worth more detailed inspection. This is based on recognizing patterns-sometimes consciously, oftentimes not.

Seeing questions: Do I know what I'm seeing? Have I seen this before?

Are any patterns emerging? Does anything in particular stand out?

What can I take away from what I see-what patterns, what priorities, what interactions-to help me make enough sense of this environment in order to make decisions about it?

Do I have enough visual inputs collected to make sense of what I see, or do I need to go back and keep looking?

Seeing activities: Filter for relevance: Actively select those visual inputs worth another look and dismiss others. (Then later go back and check again.) Categorize and make distinctions: Separate the wheat into different categories by type.

Notice patterns and clump creatively; identify visual commonalities among inputs, and larger commonalities among categories.

Imagining Imagining is what happens after the visuals have been collected and selected, and the time comes to start manipulating them. Imagining can best be thought of in one of two ways: It is either the act of seeing with our eyes closed or the act of seeing something that isn't there.

Imagining questions: Where have I seen this before? Can I make any a.n.a.logies to things I've seen in the past?

Are there better ways to configure the patterns I see? Can I rearrange them to make more sense?

Can I manipulate the patterns so that something invisible becomes visible?

Is there a hidden framework connecting everything I saw? Can I use that framework as a place to put other things that I've seen?

Imagining activities: Close your eyes to see more: With all visual inputs fresh in the mind, look with your eyes closed and see if new connections emerge.

Find a.n.a.logies: Ask, "Where have I seen this before?" and then imagine how a.n.a.logous solutions might work in this new situation.

Manipulate the patterns: Turn pictures upside down, flop them left to right, switch coordinates to turn them inside out. See if something new becomes visible.

Alter the obvious: Push visual ideas by finding multiple ways to show the same thing.