The Back of the Napkin Part 1

The back of the napkin : solving problems and selling ideas with pictures.

Dan Roam.

Foreword.

One Day on the MTA.

One day in the fall of 2006 I boarded the New York City subway heading downtown. Ted Weinstein, a literary agent who thought I had a good idea for a business book, had arranged for me to meet the publisher and several other important people at Penguin, the world's largest publishing house. Ted thought I was ready to pitch my idea and agreed to meet me at the Penguin offices to make the introductions.

On the train I ran through my pitch one more time. "The name of my book is The Million-Dollar Chart: The Consultant's Guide to Visual Thinking. It is about how business consultants can be more effective in discovering, developing, and sharing innovative ideas by using pictures."

I thought the pitch sounded good, but I was worried about one critical part. The book revolved around a series of questions I thought businesspeople should ask themselves when they wanted to express an idea visually. The questions varied from "Should I show a numeric view of my idea or an intuitive view?" to "Should I show my idea by itself or compared to something else?"

All told, there were five sets of these questions, and I'd been refining them for years. I knew the questions were effective and comprehensive for visual brainstorming, but I also knew that I was going to forget half of them once I got in the meeting. I needed some way to remember them all.

I pulled out my notebook and, as the subway train swayed along the tracks, wrote down all five: Vision or Execution?

Change or Status Quo?

Simple or Elaborate?

Qualitative or Quant.i.tative?

Individual or Comparison?

Then I started combining the first letters of each question to see if I could make up some kind of acronym or mnemonic to help me remember them all: VCSQI.

Yuck. What a horrible Scrabble hand: only one skinny vowel among a set of sharp consonants. Try as I might, I couldn't find an arrangement that made any sense.

SCIVQ VISCQ.

The train was now three stops away from Penguin. I stared at the meaningless letters.

QVISC ISQCV SICQV.

Two stops to go. The best I could come up with was SQVIC; if I imagined the V as a U (in the way that stonemasons used to carve letters on the pediments of important government buildings), I at least had something semi-p.r.o.nounceable: SQUIC. (Skwik? Skweek?) One stop to go.

Then it dawned on me. "Change" is often represented by the Greek symbol for "delta" or D. If I swapped D for that final C, I could get SQVID.

SQVID.

"SQUID!" I yelled to myself, "That's it! I can remember that!" Plus, a squid is a slippery animal with lots of arms-frighteningly similar to my list of questions, frankly.

"Squid" it was. The train stopped and I got off.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Meet the Squid In the meeting I pitched my book. People seemed intrigued. Using pictures as a business tool was new, and I had lots of good example drawings that I handed around the table. After a few minutes I noticed a big whiteboard behind me. I picked up a marker and said, "If you don't mind, I'd like to show you exactly what I'm talking about."

I turned to the whiteboard and started drawing a really ugly picture of a five-armed squid. "Imagine the book being based around a series of simple questions we can ask ourselves in order to clarify our visual thinking." I drew an S on one of the arms.

"Do we want to show a simple view of our idea, or a complex view?"

I drew Q on another arm. "Do we want to show a qualitative view or a quant.i.tative view?"

V. "Do we want to show our vision or how we think we need to execute to achieve it?"

I. "Do we want to show our idea's individual traits or compare it to something else?"

D. "Do we want to show change (delta), or do we want to show the way things are right now?"

I put down the marker. "This set of questions, this 'SQVID,' is one of the central tools of the book. Simple tools like this that will make sure everyone in business sees how they can use pictures to solve problems, even if they can't draw."

Too Many Colors Going to the whiteboard and drawing that squid changed the meeting. Before, everyone had listened politely to my pitch, nodding at the appropriate times, but mine had been the only voice in the room. Now everyone started talking. "That's so cool!" "I get it!" "What a nice model-say, you could use that squid for all kinds of problem solving, couldn't you?"

After a moment, the publisher spoke up. "Dan, we really like your idea."

Ted and I beamed.

"But..." the publisher continued, "we need to be realistic."

Crash.

"You're asking us to back a high-concept book aimed at the consulting market-a very small market, by the way-and you want us to print it in large format and in color. That is an expensive proposition for a small market. And frankly-not to be rude, but again, we need to be realistic-n.o.body has ever heard of you. Much as we like it, The Million-Dollar Chart doesn't make financial sense. Have you got anything else?"

I entered an instant state of denial. A year earlier, I'd quit my day job in order to focus full time on this book. My wife and I had refinanced our house twice to stay cash flow positive and keep our kids in school. I was finally sitting across the table from the most successful business publisher in the world. "Have you got anything else?" was not going to be the end of the story.

"I do." I looked at Ted. He nodded.

"Imagine the same book but smaller and in one color. We call it The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures."

The publisher smiled. "I imagine we'd buy that book."

The Best Part of Writing a Book Since The Back of the Napkin appeared in bookstores two years ago, I've been on the road introducing the concept of visual problem solving to audiences around the country. From Google to Microsoft, from Boeing to Frito-Lay, from Stanford University to the United States Senate, it has been a tour of words and pictures.

The best part has been the ideas and feedback from the groups I talk with. Every time I draw a picture, someone (usually many people) draws something back. Every time I cite an example of a business launched on the back of a napkin, someone (usually many people) cite an example back.

This tremendous response has shown me two things: First, visual problem solving is ready to explode across business. We're talking about a latent, innate way of looking at problems and seeing solutions that most people in business have either unintentionally overlooked or blatantly quashed.

Either way, that's a huge mistake: There is no more powerful way to prove that we know something well than to draw a simple picture of it. And there is no more powerful way to see hidden solutions than to pick up a pen and draw out the pieces of our problem.

The second thing this response shows me is that the ideas in The Back of the Napkin work not only for consultants but also for hundreds of thousands of other businesspeople. Teachers, project managers, doctors, engineers, prison guards, a.s.sembly line workers, pilots, football coaches, Marine Corps drill instructors, financial a.n.a.lysts, housewives, lawyers; you name the profession, and they're discovering the power of solving problems with pictures.

And it's not only in the United States. In the past few months, I've received copies of the Russian, Chinese, Korean, German, and j.a.panese editions of The Back of the Napkin. In every case, whether I speak the language or not, I can understand every single picture. This year will see the publication of further editions in Spanish, Portuguese, Indonesian, Turkish, French, Romanian, Finnish, Polish, and Czech-and again, the pictures will be equally understandable no matter which copy we pick up.

That's the reason I know visual problem solving is going to get bigger and bigger: The problems we face today are global. To solve them we need a global language. Simple pictures that align with basic human perception will be that language. Those are the kinds of pictures this book will help you create.

The Director's Cut Two years of sharing The Back of the Napkin have also led me to see more clearly which ideas in this book mean the most for which people. If you're new to visual thinking, the opening section on the simple process of look, see, imagine, show is the place to start. Because it relates the unfamiliar realm of visual problem solving to the everyday world, it firmly plants our feet in that new world.

If you're a confident business thinker and presenter but unsure about how pictures will help you clarify your ideas even more, the still-ugly and still-useful SQVID (chapter 6) should be your starting point. Remember how well it worked at Penguin? It gives a solid basis for thinking through any problem in creative new ways.

If you're an accomplished visual thinker, jump straight to the <6><6> model (chapter 7). This is where neurobiology and art meet, shake hands, and then begin to dance. My experience is that even the best artists can't believe how easy it can be to create pictures that activate and engage all corners of the mind.

And if you're a seasoned designer or architect, comfortable with using pictures constantly in your business life, I'd like you to do me a favor: Go straight to chapter 8, the visual thinking MBA, and work your way through that long business case study. It will be hard because it will force you to think about your pictures far more a.n.a.lytically than you've been taught in design school, but it will show you a completely new way to use your talents when sharing ideas with businesspeople.

I've also added back in an entire section that I cut in the first edition of the book. "The Ten (and a Half) Commandments of Visual Thinking" appeared in my original ma.n.u.script, but in final review we all agreed it was just too much material for a first book. For this edition, I picked it up off the cutting room floor and put it back in its original place as the first appendix.

Last, I want to thank Adrian Zackheim, publisher of Portfolio, for saying, "I imagine we'd buy that book" the first time. And even more for saying, "Now let's publish it again, and this time let's do it big and in color."

Here it is: The Back of the Napkin the way I imagined it that day on the MTA, SQVID (in color) and all.

-Dan Roam, July 2009, San Francisco.

Chapter 1.

A WHOLE NEW WAY OF LOOKING AT BUSINESS.

What's the most daunting business problem you can picture? Is it global and expansive, or small and personal? Is it political, technical, or emotional? Is it about money, process, or people? Is it rooted in the day-to-day operations of your company, or is it floating high off in the conceptual ether? Is the problem you see one you know well, or one you've never looked at before?

I'll bet you can come up with a problem that meets every one of these criteria. I know I can: managing businesses in San Francisco, Moscow, Zurich, and New York, I've dealt with problems across this spectrum myself-and seen many more dealt with by colleagues, bosses, employees, and clients. It's true: The heart of business is the art of problem solving.

What if there was a way to more quickly look at problems, more intuitively understand them, more confidently address them, and more rapidly convey to others what we've discovered? What if there was a way to make business problem solving more efficient, more effective, and-as much as I hate to say it-perhaps even a bit more fun? There is. It's called visual thinking, and it's what this book is all about: solving problems with pictures.

Here's my elevator pitch: Visual thinking means taking advantage of our innate ability to see-both with our eyes and with our mind's eye-in order to discover ideas that are otherwise invisible, develop those ideas quickly and intuitively, and then share those ideas with other people in a way that they simply "get."

That's it. Welcome to a whole new way of looking at business.

"I'm Not a Visual Person"

Before I quickly share with you an overview of this book, let me start with the most important idea of all: Solving problems with pictures has nothing to do with artistic training or talent. That's right-nothing. I emphasize this because every time I'm invited to help a company solve a problem with pictures or talk to a group of businesspeople about visual thinking, somebody always says, "Wait. This isn't for me-I'm not a visual person."

To which I say, "OK, that's fine, but let me put it this way: If you were able to walk into this room this morning without falling down, I guarantee that you're enough of a visual person to understand everything that we're going to talk about and to get something useful out of it."

In fact (for lots of reasons we'll explore throughout this book), the people who start out by saying, "I can't draw, but...," almost always end up creating some of the most insightful pictures. So if you're not convinced of your drawing skills, please don't put this book down yet. Instead, jump straight to page 20-if you can draw the box, arrow, and stick figure you'll find there, this book is for you.

Visual Thinking in Four Lessons Here's how this book works. The Back of the Napkin is divided into four parts-this introduction and then one part each for discovering ideas, developing ideas, and selling ideas, all using nothing but our eyes, our mind's eye, our hands, a pen, and a sc.r.a.p of paper. (Whiteboards are good, too.) In this introduction, we're going to define which problems we're talking about (all of them), which pictures we're talking about (very simple ones), and who can do this (all of us). We'll then talk about how-though our innate visual thinking skills vary-we can all do this, and we'll even run through a short checklist to help us better understand what kind of visual thinkers we are. Then, we'll talk about how simple the process of visual thinking really is, and how we already know how to do every step.

In part II, Discovering Ideas, we'll run through the foundations of good visual thinking: learning how to look better, how to see sharper, and how to imagine further. Then we'll familiarize ourselves with the basic tool kit of visual thinking: the SQVID (which forces our brain into visual action whether we want it to or not), the <6><6> framework (which helps us map what we've seen to what we want to show), and then the Visual Thinking Codex (which provides a cheat sheet for starting any picture we can think up).

In part III, Developing Ideas, we're going to take a page from a typical MBA program and walk step-by-step through a business case study-and we're going to draw on that page. By the time we're done, we'll have road tested the six fundamental frameworks of problem-solving pictures-and saved a business along the way.

Finally, we'll come to the last part, Selling Ideas, where we'll pull everything together to create and deliver a sales presentation that requires no computers, no software, no projector, and no color handouts-just us, our client, a big whiteboard, and a lot of well-focused ideas.

Where All This Came From: English Breakfast (aka How Visual Thinking Saved My Bacon) When I asked you a moment ago to conjure up the most daunting business problem you could, I was myself thinking of a specific challenge that I faced several years ago, an incident that prompted me to start thinking in detail about everything that you'll find in this book.

Perhaps you've been in a similar situation: Asked at the last moment to cover for a colleague, you say yes only to realize that you've stepped into your worst nightmare. In this case, my colleague had to leave the office on a medical emergency and pleaded with me to cover for a speech he had to deliver the following day. I said yes, only to learn later that the speech was to take place in Sheffield, England (we were in New York), to an audience of educational experts appointed by the then-new British prime minister, Tony Blair. My colleague hadn't told me what the topic was-something about the Internet-or where his materials (if there were any) were buried.

So I found myself the next morning on a train departing from London's St. Pancras Station for Sheffield, jet-lagged from a transatlantic flight, surrounded by a group of British colleagues I'd never met before, all thanking me profusely for coming to "save their sales pitch." Save the pitch? I didn't even know what time it was.

But then came along a most marvelous discovery: English breakfast on British Rail. As the train sped through the British Midlands, white-jacketed waiters served us a feast: scrambled eggs, poached eggs, boiled potatoes, fried potatoes, potato pancakes, blood sausages, white sausages, grilled sausages, white sauce, and Tabasco; toast, rolls, rye bread, rice pudding; coffee, tea, milk, orange juice, apricot juice, and ice water. It was a revelation.

But by the time we'd made it through breakfast, I was feeling human again. That's when Freddie (the British team leader) asked me to walk him through my PowerPoint presentation. Wait-my PowerPoint presentation? But I didn't have a presentation, I explained; I wasn't even sure what we were supposed to be talking about.

"Uh... the role of the Internet in American education," Freddie said as a look of panic crossed his face. "You do know something about that, don't you?" he pleaded.

"Actually... no," I replied, as I turned to the window and contemplated how best to jump off the train. But then another idea began to resolve itself in my mind's eye, so I pulled a pen from my suit pocket and grabbed a stack of napkins from the table.

"I don't know much about educational Web sites specifically, but I do know a lot about creating communications-oriented Web sites," I said, pen poised over napkin. "Can I show you something that your education experts might find interesting? I have an idea."

Before Freddie could answer, my pen was already moving. And this is what I drew: a circle with the word "brand" in the middle of it.

"You see, Freddie," I said, "lots of people these days are very confused about how to create a useful Web site-and I imagine the same is true of our audience today. But the way I think about it, there are really only three things that we need to worry about. The first is the brand itself. The other two are the content and the function." I drew in two more circles and labeled them appropriately, then continued. "If we can determine what to put in these three circles, then we can build any site to serve any audience, including your educators.

"The question is, How do we know what these three should contain? The answer is this." I drew a little smiley face next to each circle and wrote a caption for each. "What people want to do (or what we want them to do) determines function; what people want to KNOW (or what we want them to know) determines content; and what we want them to REMEMBER determines the brand.

"We can determine all these things through our client's business vision, market studies, and basic educational research. We don't have to know all these answers today; the point of this picture is that it gives us a good starting point for knowing who and what we should be looking for."

Next I drew in three more smiley faces and captions, this time connecting the three circles together. "If our research tells us what to put in those three circles, then it's our own Web site team who will create it. Our engineers build the functional components; our writers define, write, and edit the content; and our designers create an experience that will be memorable.

"Simple as it seems, that's pretty much it."

I then summarized the napkin with a t.i.tle and a key.

"What do you think, Freddie? Could I walk our audience through something like that?" My napkin wasn't beautiful by any stretch, but it struck me as clear, comprehensive, and comprehensible-and simple as it was, it gave me about a dozen starting places to talk in more detail about any aspect of creating a useful Web site.

Freddie tore the napkin out of my hands. "That's brilliant! That's not part of our presentation-that's the whole thing! Think about who we're talking to." Freddie explained. "Our audience is a group of highly educated government bureaucrats, all new to the Internet. A lot of public money is going to be spent on their online education project, and their necks are on the line. Their greatest concern is that there is a solid framework under their feet to give them confidence to move forward. Your napkin provides the structure they're looking for. This is perfect"-Freddie leaned back and looked at me-"but do you think you can talk about it for forty-five minutes?"

"We'll find out soon enough," I replied.

It turns out that the cla.s.sic lecture halls of Sheffield University have the biggest blackboards I'd ever seen. So I redrew the napkin step-by-step before the audience of fifty experts, walking them through it just as I had with Freddie over breakfast. We didn't just talk about it for forty-five minutes; they so enjoyed the process that we ended up talking for nearly two hours. Freddie's team won the engagement, and thus began the longest-running project of the London office.

And me? Sharing that simple napkin in that grand university hall was my watershed moment in understanding the power of pictures. I thought about all the problems that that simple napkin sketch had helped solve: First, simply by drawing it, I had clarified in my own mind a previously vague idea. Second, I was able to create the picture almost instantly, without the need to rely on any technology other than paper and pen. Third, I was able to share the picture with my audiences in an open way that invited comments and inspired discussion. Finally, speaking directly from the picture meant I could focus on any topic without having to rely on notes, bullet points, or a written script.

The lesson for me was clear. We can use the simplicity and immediacy of pictures to discover and clarify our own ideas, and use those same pictures to clarify our ideas for other people, helping them discover something new for themselves along the way.

After the eye-opening success of that English breakfast, I returned home inspired to learn all I could about the use of pictures as a problem-solving approach. Back in New York, I focused my attention on seeing how far I could push the use of images in discovering, developing, and sharing business ideas. I read everything I could find about business visualization, I attended workshops led by the gurus of information visualization, and I searched for and collected all the visual explanations I could find in the business press.

Two things surprised me. First, I was shocked at how few materials I could find on visual thinking as a problem-solving approach-and of those, how few offered practical advice for the day-to-day world of business-and second, what initially appeared to be a wildly divergent set of materials in fact masked a small set of common themes. This last point struck me as particularly compelling. If visual thinking could usefully be broken down into a set of common tools, perhaps it could become a recognized way of approaching all sorts of business challenges, from idea discovery to concept development to communications to sales.