Thinking and Communicating with Pictures

Dan Roam is an expert in helping people think and communicate with pictures. His theory is that anyone with a pen and a piece of paper (for example, a napkin) can explain even the most complex business ideas as well as communicate better with customers, vendors, and employees.

I caught up with him just after he published his new book, The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures.

1. Question: What problems are you really talking about solving with pictures?
Answer: All of them: business strategy challenges, project management issues, resource allocation problems--even personal problems--can all be clarified, if not outright solved, through the use of pictures. And the pictures we're talking about are simple ones. If you can draw a circle, a square, an arrow, and a smiley face, you can draw any of the problem-solving pictures I talk about.


2. Question: If all of us have innate visual talent, why don't we see more pictures in business?
Answer: Wall Street dictates that business is a numbers game, and things like P&L, OPEX, and market cap are the obvious numbers to measure. Given this view, the business world believes that people who succeed are analytically driven, and that repeatable, measurable, and quantitative, "left-brain" skills are what make a great business person.

Because it feeds the beast, this model becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy--but one that is only half right. By neglecting the importance and development of innovative, synthetic, and creative "right-brain" skills, businesses often fail to account for their own breakthrough people, ideas, and strengths and in turn misunderstand their own success.

Vision, unlike spoken language, is not localized on one side of the brain. Visual thinking demands, and takes advantage of, everyone's innate "whole brain" abilities. In board rooms and business schools everywhere, people instinctively know this, but since "looking, seeing, imagining, and showing" have never been measured or taught, few business leaders recognize their own skills.


3. Question: What's the hardest part in getting businesspeople to take "visual thinking" seriously?

Answer: There's nothing hard about convincing businesspeople of the power of pictures once they see it in action. The hard part is convincing them that they can do it themselves. Most people are uncertain about solving problems with pictures because they are uncertain about their own ability to draw. I spend much of my time convincing the skeptical that even if they draw like a kindergartner, that's good enough. In fact, when we were kindergartners (before we could read and write) we were already accomplished visual thinkers.

My point isn't to patronize or belittle our advanced educations; it's just to point out that we already knew how to do this--how to discover ideas and share them through pictures--long before we developed our sophisticated verbal skills. Visual thinking in all its forms--looking, seeing, imagining, and showing--is an innate skill that we all share. And it's a crime that so few people, and effectively none in business, have been encouraged to develop these skills beyond what we were born with.

4. Question: What is the neuroscience behind this?

Answer: Recent breakthroughs in vision science have indicated that there are multiple "vision pathways" along which the signals from our eyes travel into and through our brains. Each pathway keys off different visual cues in the environment--one pathway looking to identify the objects around us, another understanding where they are, another determining how many there are, another watching for changes over time, etc. This process takes place in parallel, breaking the entire visual world down into discrete elements that we initially process independently, and then only later "see" in our mind's eye as a whole.

What's fascinating is that if we reverse the process and create pictures in the same way--breaking down any problem and its corresponding picture into distinct "who," "what," "how much," "where," and "when" elements, we can convey the "how" and "why" to anyone in a way they will understand.

5. Question: Why are some problems hard to see and others not?

Answer: Complexity is always the challeng-- especially when many aspects of the problem are masked by others. If we see a cup with a hole in the bottom, we can quickly deduce the cause of the puddle on the floor. The only trouble with "obvious" solutions is that the world is complex, and complex things tend to be “obvious” only after someone else shows them to us. That the earth rotates around the sun is obvious to us now, but it took tens of thousands of years for people to see it.

The reason is because we can't see everything. Our eyes are always right on the verge of being overwhelmed with visual stimulus, so our minds spend a lot of time keeping stuff out. That's why we gravitate towards the simple. If we can "get" something quickly, then we can move on to something else.

But we need to be careful with "simple." A simple idea can be just as bad as a complex one. We do ourselves a lot of harm when we confuse "clarity" with "simplicity." By taking the time to look at a problem, really see what's going on, imagine what might not be visible, and then show our discovery to someone else, we will see more clearly what's going on, and won't be fooled by the first "obvious" explanation.

6. Question: What is an example of how a business problem was solved with a sketch?

Answer: The most famous business napkin is the route map of Southwest Airlines. When businessman Rollin King and lawyer Herb Kelleher sat down in 1967 in the St. Anthony's Club in San Antonio, their intent was to drink to the successful closing of King's previous airline. Instead, King picked up a pen and--drawing a triangle on a bar napkin as he spoke--said, "Wait a minute. What would happen if we created an airline that only connected Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio?" The world's most profitable airline was born.

My personal favorite is still a work in progress. I've spent time with the senior executives of Peet's Coffee and Teas helping map out the company's growth and business operating strategies. In number of coffee retail stores, Peets is second after Starbucks, but it is still orders of magnitude behind: one hundred and sixty stores to Starbuck's fifteen thousand. Clearly there is the opportunity for Peets to grow, but Peets has long been known as the "best" coffee available. So the question remains, “How do you grow without giving in on quality?"

We're created a simple back of the napkin sketch that outlines Peet's approach to maintaining quality while growing, and it has been circulated around the company so that everybody “gets it” and sees exactly where they fit into the "quality chain."

7. Question: Why do you recommend that people throw away their PowerPoint presentations?

Answer: I'm not Edward Tufte: I don't say that using PowerPoint makes us retarded. What I do say is this: when it comes to PowerPoint--or Keynote or Open Office or Google Docs--don't throw away the software, but do throw away the mindset. PowerPoint is just a hammer, and in the same we don't blame the hammer if a building falls down, we shouldn't blame the software if our communications suck. When it comes to organizing and idea and structuring a storyline, PowerPoint is a fine tool as are mindmaps, Visio, and lots of other applications. But when it comes time to discover, develop, or share an idea, nothing is more powerful than a simple picture drawn live in front of--and ideally with the participation of-- our audience.

Aside from the cognitive and neurological science behind my statement, the fact is that when an audience sees an elaborate and polished presentation, they instinctively believe it is “done” and have a very hard time adding anything constructive to it. On the other hand, when they see the picture coming together in front of their eyes, regardless of how simple or ugly it may be, they emotionally respond and participate.

8. Question: Why do you recommend throwing the computers out of meeting rooms?

Answer: I love technology. I'm as much of a geek as you can find anywhere--in fact, as a hobby on weekends I use high-end 3D drawing programs to create super-detailed illustrations of spacecraft for the National Space Society. That said, we've gone completely overboard in relying on our computers in all aspects of our thinking and working processes, especially when the use of our machines actually inhibits our innate abilities.

I created every picture in my book with nothing but a Sharpie and a stack of blank paper. There is a time and a place for all the tools we have available to us, and a meeting of the minds is the last place we need a computer. Interacting with a keyboard and proscriptive software doesn't add anything to our ability to think, and in fact interferes with many of our baseline cognitive abilities especially when spontaneity, intuition, neurological connectivity, sharing, and instant communication are key.

9. Question: Aren't artistic people better at this than business people?

Answer: Some people are better at visual thinking than others just like some people are better singers, runners, or code-breakers. But that doesn't mean we don't all hum in the car, jog in the park, or play Suduko. For the average business person to neglect his or her innately remarkable visual skills simply because someone else might be even better is a terrible waste of ideas and ability.

I'm not saying visual thinking is the only way to think nor am I saying that it always the best way. What I am saying is that any problem can be made more clear through the use of a picture, and it is always worthwhile to sketch out a problem--if only for a minute--just to see what emerges.

10. Question: Why is it important for us to break down visual thinking into your process of "look, see, imagine, and show"?

Answer: Every time I walk into a business meeting, workshop, or seminar somebody always says, "I'm not visual; I can't draw." My response is that if that person is visual enough to walk into the room and find a place to sit down, they're visual enough to understand everything we are going to talk about and to find value in it. I've never been let down.

The importance of understanding the four steps of visual thinking--looking, seeing, imagining, and showing--is that it makes clear that drawing is only a tiny part of visual thinking, and it comes at thevery end of the process, not at the beginning. Visual thinking is like a game of poker: we look at our cards, we see the patterns, we imagine what our winning hand would look like, we show our winning hand, and we rake in all the money.


11. Question: How do you think visual thinking will transform business in the next decades?

Answer: We're just at the beginning of an enormous and inevitable trend that is going to take over business operations and communications and will have huge impact on the design of the tools we use for both. There are three mega-trends in the world of business: globalization, information overload, and staggering increases in complexity.

As globalized supply chains and emerging markets flatten the world, as information overload becomes the status quo, and as communication channels proliferate, the complexity of business problems is only going to increase. There's more data out there in more forms and languages than ever before, and there's a greater need for businesspeople to make good decisions quickly and communicate their thinking to others.

A recent issue of Fortune has an eye-opening article on Boeing's new 787 and how it is literally being built around the world. Here you have arguably the most sophisticated and complex machine ever created, and it is being assembled to tolerances of a millionth of an inch and fractions of a penny on thousands of assembly lines in dozens of countries by people speaking dozens of languages. All this is possible only because the whole thing--the plane, the processes, the project--is mapped out in countless pictures.

Becoming comfortable with and confident in our visual abilities--improving our ability to look at complex information, see important patterns emerge, imagine new possibilities, and clearly show those discoveries to others--is going to become our most valuable asset. Looking just a short time into the future, visual thinking will significantly alter how business gets done in three ways:

1. Help us make better decisions faster. Within the next few years we will see most business analytics delivered in immersive graphic formats that allow for simultaneous manipulation of individual numbers and visualization of complex interactions and outcomes. There are many companies out there now like Tableau and Business Objects building these tools, and even plain-Jane Excel has enormous potential given the graphics processing capabilities of even the most basic business personal computers.

2. Help us communicate our decisions and visions more effectively. As more businesspeople become more aware of the power of pictures as a communications tool, more tools will become available to help create meaningful charts, diagrams, timelines, maps, and flowcharts--both alone and as teams. The great issue here is to first understand what we want to show and what our audience is willing to see and only then boot-up the machines.

3. Help our teams execute those decisions more efficiently. Project managers have always known the power of a visual timeline to ensure everybody knows what they're supposed to be doing when. The problem is that the product manager was the only one who knew how to understand the chart they created--to the rest it looked like a wall of hieroglyphics. Several companies are now working on interactive, team-created timeline tools of infinite scalability. Such tools will allow for globally distributed groups to be in instant visual contact with their project and each other and to monitor whatever needs to be happening at the level of detail that matters most at that moment.