Part 12 (2/2)

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.

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