Part 3 (1/2)
Showing Once we've found patterns, made sense of them, and figured out a way to manipulate them to discover something new, we've got to show it all to others. We need to summarize all that we've seen, find the best framework for visually representing our ideas, nail things down on paper, point out what we imagined, and then answer our audience's questions.
Showing questions: Of all I've imagined, what are the three most important pictures that emerged-both for me and for my audience?
What is the best way to visually convey my idea? Which visual framework will be most appropriate for sharing what I've seen?
When I go back to what I originally looked at, does what I'm now showing still make sense?
Say, ”This is what I saw.” Then ask your audience, ”Does it make sense to you? Do you see the same things, or do you see something different?”
Showing activities: Clarify your best ideas: Prioritize all visual ideas so that the most relevant come to the top.
Nail things down: Pick the appropriate visual framework and get your ideas down on paper or up on the board.
Cover all the W's: Make sure that who/what, how much, where, and when are always visible; let how and why emerge as the visual punch line.
It's Not Always Linear, Actually For the rest of this book, these are the four steps that we're going to take every time we solve a problem with a picture. In fact, the rest of this book is built around these steps. But there's one more nuance to be aware of that will help us as we apply the process. Looking back to poker, we can see one place in particular where the game diverges from visual thinking: namely, forgiveness. In poker, rules are rules, and once you've laid your money down, you can never go back. But when solving problems with pictures, going back and making changes is one of the most valuable parts of the whole approach.
The visual thinking process, as it really happens.
Here's a useful process secret. Although the four steps will always naturally flow in order, we don't have to march through them in a straight 1-2-3-4 line. In fact, the whole process plays out more like a series of loops, something like the drawing above.
Notice how looking and seeing go around and around, feeding off each other? These two steps that bring in visual information are so closely linked that one simply can't happen without the other. But that doesn't mean we can't take advantage of their differences as we improve our visual thinking skills-on the contrary, in the next two chapters we're going to see how this loop actually helps us.
In a very different way, imagining-taking everything that we've collected and selected and then seeing it all with our eyes closed-is the bridge that leads us from having visual information come in to helping us get our visuals out. We're going to talk a lot about this almost magical step, and provide a new tool to help make imagining a more reliable and less mysterious activity.
Last comment on the process: Did you see that big dotted-line arrow connecting show back to look/see? The point is this: If we've done our job right, the moment we start to show our work to other people, they will start their own visual thinking process, looking at our pictures, seeing what is interesting to them, and imagining how they could manipulate and alter what we're showing. So the visual thinking loop continues again and again.
CHAPTER 4.
NO THANKS, JUST LOOKING.
One reason that most people are uncertain about how to approach problem solving with pictures is that most people are unsure of their ability to draw. Red Pen and Yellow Pen people in particular may believe that since they can't draw, they can't rely on visual thinking as a way to approach complex challenges. It's unfortunate, because this belief stops many of the most potentially insightful visual thinkers from ever getting started.
Let's turn this thinking around. Instead of believing that we first need to be able to draw (show), let's imagine for the moment that being able to draw well is largely an outcome of being able to see well, and being able to see well comes directly from being able to look well. In other words: Understanding visual thinking as a complete process means that the starting point isn't learning to draw better, it's learning to look better. That's why the process is valuable: It puts looking-something we're all innately good at-back at the front of the line.
Viewed from this perspective, the best way to start thinking visually is to become better acquainted with how our internal vision system looks at the world.
How We Look Every second that our eyes are open, millions of visual signals enter as photons of light, are converted into electrical impulses by our retinas, and then get pa.s.sed along our optic nerves into various regions of our brains where the signals are pa.r.s.ed, filtered, compared, categorized, and recombined-so that they emerge as the complete pictures that we see inside our heads.
This entire process takes place hundreds of times every second, completely unconsciously, and neuroscientists and vision specialists are only now beginning to comprehend how it all works. The more they learn, the more fantastic and almost magical the mechanisms of vision appear. Yet as amazing as our automatic looking system is, it is only part of the looking involved in visual thinking. When we talk about visual thinking, we're talking about hijacking this automatic system in order to consciously take advantage of its strengths. When we talk about visual thinking, we're first talking about active looking.
Which Way Is Up?
Although the basic neurological pathways of vision* remain the same whether we're looking at the stars in a night sky, a child's face, or a spreadsheet of numbers, what our eyes look at and how we make sense of it depends on the visual problem that we're trying to solve at any given time.
How we look depends on the problem we need to solve.
Imagine that we're going to meet some friends for bowling. What's the first thing that we look at when we walk into the bowling alley? The placement of the number-six pin in the twelfth lane? The numbers printed on the back of the bowling shoes behind the desk? No, the first problem that we face is simply understanding where we are, so our eyes scan the width of the whole bowling alley, establis.h.i.+ng the limits of the s.p.a.ce and in a split second creating a three-dimensional mental model of which way is up, where the walls are, and where we are located. Before we've even had a chance to think about it, our automatic looking process has already established that the bowling alley is this wide, that deep, so tall, and-thankfully-not upside down. In other words, our visual autopilot has established our orientation and position.
When we first enter an environment, our eyes make a quick three-dimensional model to establish the s.p.a.ce's orientation and our position within it.
With this 3-D bowling alley model in our heads, our looking system gets to work on the job at hand, namely finding our friends. Our eyes automatically scan for telltale signs: a familiar face, a distinctive profile, a telling movement, etc. Bingo! There they are: three lanes over, just past the soda machine. Through unconscious identification and recognition-matching what we're looking at with what we've expected to see-we've found our friends.
When we've got a rough idea of where we are, we start looking for people or things that we recognize (that match our expectations of who or what should be there).
Only later-once we've got our bowling shoes on, have our ball in hand, and are standing at the top of the lane-are our eyes really interested in looking in the precise direction of the pins down at the far end.
Only when we're finally ready to roll the ball do we really look in the precise direction of the pins.
It's worth emphasizing these orientation, position, identification, and direction steps because they are just four of the key tasks that our looking system automatically takes care of for us. These four are particularly important because if they are not completed instantly-if we have to spend a lot of time and effort figuring out which way is up-we will never have the chance to move on with rolling our strike.
Four of the automatic looking tasks-things our vision system takes care of without any conscious thought from us-include orientation, position, identification, and direction.
What's important here is that these same four looking tasks define whether we immediately ”get” a business picture or not. To ill.u.s.trate what I mean, let's start with a basic visual thinking task, like reviewing a simple chart.
With just a couple seconds' review, it should be obvious that this chart compares the price of tea across a set of countries. But what makes that obvious? What is it about this chart that allows us to understand quickly what it shows? Using what we've learned about looking, let's find out.
First off, the chart follows a set of generally accepted standards on how we present data with a picture: It is based on a horizontal and vertical two-axis coordinate system.
Let's start with this basic business chart.
Just like the ceiling, walls, and floor that our eyes noted the instant that we entered the bowling alley, this chart gives us the visual cues to immediately understand which way is up. In this chart, these cues come in the form of the two-axis coordinate system indicated by the main vertical and horizontal lines. Of course, up isn't really ”up” at all (here, it's how much), and right isn't really ”right” (it's where), but our eyes still recognize the simple coordinate system.
The chart allows us to quickly establish orientation by providing us with a horizontal and vertical coordinate system.
Are there any other ways this chart is ”obvious”? Yes. The labels allow us to find our position relative to the coordinates and to the other countries. If we're in the United States, for example, we can find ourselves near the center of the chart.
Finally, the relative positions of the countries and prices and the various heights of the price measurement bars all work to give us a sense of direction, in this case, where countries' tea prices are relative to one another. For example, we see that tea is much more expensive in the United States than in China, but slightly less than in France.
By providing labels, the chart allows us to determine our own position relative to the coordinates and to the other listed countries.
The relative heights of the vertical bars tell us the direction-up, down, the same, etc.-of one price to another.