The Back of the Napkin Part 3

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, establishing 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.

When we enter any "data landscape" (a spreadsheet, table, chart, diagram, etc.), our eyes go through the same looking process as when we entered the bowling alley.

The point here is to ill.u.s.trate that even though this chart and the bowling alley have nothing in common, our eyes still look at them the same way. We have exactly the same number of incoming visual signals, the same kind of electrical impulses to a.n.a.lyze and collate, and the same pathways along which to pa.s.s those impulses. From our eyes' perspective, we've even got the same set of problems to solve-orientation, position, identification, and direction.

How to Look Better: Four Rules to Live By To develop good looking skills-and build a good foundation for visual thinking-there are four basic rules to apply every time we look at something new: Collect everything we can to look at-the more the better (at least at first).

Have a place where we can lay out everything and really look at it all, side by side.

Always define a basic coordinate system to give us clear orientation and position.

Find ways to cut ruthlessly from everything our eyes bring in-we need to practice visual triage.

THE FOUR CARDINAL RULES FOR BETTER LOOKING.

Looking is collecting, just like any other kind of collecting. Once we've started, we're immediately faced with one of two problems-either having too much to collect or not enough. The first situation we've already seen in chapter 2: When Daphne needed to make a decision about her publishing company's brand, she collected all kinds of data about the industry, so much, in fact, that she couldn't quickly make sense of the results.

These days, Daphne's problem is shared by everyone, everywhere, in every business context: Information overload is today's standard operating condition, and we're just going to have to learn to deal with it. Given that reality, active looking serves as a useful approach for figuring out what's important and making sense of it. After all, our eyes have too much information coming in all the time, and yet we can still see very well. There's a lesson there.

Too Much to Look At When Daphne e-mailed all her survey materials to our team, it was as if we were suddenly teleported into the middle of the bowling alley, bypa.s.sing the front door and finding ourselves plopped down in the middle of a lane, with data sailing past us right and left. Without knowing where we'd come in-or even what we were supposed to be looking for-we didn't know where to look first.

But our vision system is flexible and resilient, and it really wants to figure things out. So we put our active looking process to work. First order of business? Figure out which way is up. We needed to find a coordinate system to get us pointed upright, so we define d a model that mapped who/what (compet.i.tors) versus how much (revenue).

Next up: position. We looked for measures that showed where Daphne's company sat in the s.p.a.ce defined by our coordinate system. Next: identification. We looked through the data to locate where other companies were located within the same s.p.a.ce. Eventually, the picture that became Daphne's chart emerged. Information overload is here to stay, but active looking gives us a way to get through the worst of it.

Choosing a who/what versus a how much coordinate system gave us a context in which to look at other detailed data, such as where and when.

Not Enough to Look At A year after completing Daphne's publishing brand strategy picture, I was contacted by Ken, the communications director at a well-known scientific research center, with what appeared to be a problem similar to Daphne's, namely how to position his inst.i.tution's "name brand" for maximum financial impact. The scientific inst.i.tution that Ken worked for also needed to raise awareness among potential investors-not because it was going to list on the stock exchange, but because changes in the federal funding landscape prompted it to look into possible alternative sources of scientific funding outside of the federal government.

But it quickly became clear that Ken's challenge was actually the precise opposite of Daphne's: She had too much to look at; he did not have enough. It came down to the ways the two organizations looked at themselves. Daphne's company saw itself as a moneymaking business, and any opportunity to make more money was at least worth a look. Ken's inst.i.tution saw itself as a guardian of scientific truth, and was uncomfortable with potential conflicts of interest from business sources of funding-so uncomfortable that our entire study had to take place under the cover of darkness. If word got out internally that we were even looking at funding options, scientific mutiny was feared.

We were again thrown into the bowling alley, but this time with most of the lights switched off. We had the inst.i.tution's insights and reports on federal funding, but that lit up only so much. If the inst.i.tution was going to look outside for money, it was going to need to look outside for ideas. As with Daphne's challenge, we had to define our coordinates first. Again, we started with the 6 W's as a way to frame the problem: Who: Who were roughly similar organizations-science based, academic and research oriented, focused on the natural world-and in need of large sums of nongovernmental money?

How much: How much money did these organizations need, and how much did they get?

Where: Where does their money come from? Where are they located in the overall landscape of scientific and natural sciences funding?

When: How often do they get their money? Weekly? Annually? All the time?

With these framing criteria in place, we went out and looked for the right whos. We found numerous organizations worth including-museums, environmental organizations... everything from Conservation International to the Sierra Club to the Monterey Bay Aquarium-they all fit in the frame: science, natural world, needs money. So we took names, and between the laws of public disclosure and the miracle of the Internet, we were quickly able to find much of what we were looking for: size of organization, financial status, source of funds, etc.

With nothing to start with other than a simple problem statement-"What are nongovernmental ways we can get funding?"-we used active looking to collect the pieces necessary to build a visual model of the natural sciences funding landscape. It looked roughly like this: Visual model of the natural sciences funding landscape.

With that framework in place, it was now a matter of plotting in the numbers we'd collected, and we were on our way toward looking at the viability of all kinds of funding options. Once again, active looking provided the guidance we needed, even in darkness.

Having collected everything, we now have to lay it all out where we can really look at it. This is such an obvious rule that it often gets ignored, and yet it is the single best way to effectively look at a broad range of inputs-take everything we've collected and lay it out side by side, where our eyes can scan it all in a few pa.s.ses.

The Garage Sale Principle: How Do We Even Know What We've Got?

Let's call this the garage sale principle: Regardless of how well organized all the stuff in our garage may be, laying everything out on tables in the light of day yields a completely new perspective on it all. The same is true of data: When it is packed away in individual files and records, it's impossible to look at the big picture-but getting everything out in the open makes otherwise invisible connections visible.

A couple years ago, I was working with a computer manufacturer in Silicon Valley. In order to keep up with global changes in software sales, the CEO of this company made the gutsy decision to turn his sales process upside down. No longer would customers buy a shrink-wrapped package of software CDs and then receive complimentary upgrades and technical support. In the new world that the CEO envisioned, the software itself would be given away for free, and customers would pay for the upgrades and support-kind of like going from a "buy a book a month" club to joining an expensive private library: The same books are available; we just pay for them differently.

The garage sale principle: Everything looks different when we can see it all at once.

This was a huge change. It meant that everything had to be revised, from the way software was written to the support process. In order to avoid company-wide panic among the tens of thousands of employees, the decision was made that the first word should go out through a series of low-key, "impromptu" meetings-hundreds of them.

What a disaster. From the moment that the designated speaker first mentioned the change, he was overwhelmed. Salespeople demanded, "What about commissions?" Engineers demanded, "How will we release the binaries?" Everybody demanded, "Are we insane?!"

All the speaker could say was, "Let me finish. I promise we'll get to that! For now I just want us to look at the big picture!"

The problem was that there was no picture at all. It was as if he had said that everything in the garage was going to be rearranged, but n.o.body could look in the garage-all they could look at was their own little stack of boxes. It's too bad, because the message to deliver was simple and almost entirely visual-here's what we do now, here's what it will look like in the future, here are the parts that will be the most difficult to change-and could easily have been introduced with no more than two or three pictures.

But no pictures were ever made. These meetings went on for weeks, with the same result every time: shock followed by confusion followed by anxiety. In the end, momentum finally built up enough to where people either got on board or left the company. Today the company is well along the path to implementing the change, fine-tuning the new process, and waiting to see how the market reacts. But when I think about the time and money that was wasted in those meetings and the angst they generated, all I can think is how much could have been saved by simply laying out the big issues side by side on the table and letting everybody just take a look.

WHERE CAN WE PUT EVERYTHING SO THAT WE CAN LOOK AT IT?.

From a practical perspective, laying everything out where we can look at it means we need plenty of s.p.a.ce, so it's important to be prepared to spread things out and let the room get messy. Cover every table, chair, wall, and flat s.p.a.ce: It's amazing the connections that our eyes will find when given free reign to look everywhere.

When I was still working for the company that sent me to London, my team had to present a design to a client. The day before the presentation, I asked everyone to print out a copy of everything they had created, from notebook sketches to typeface tests to final designs, and pile them all in a stack in the conference room. When I came in early the next morning to set up the room, the table overflowed. When Susi, the receptionist, arrived thirty minutes later, the conference room looked like a war zone, with papers spread from end to end.

Susi freaked. Our boss Roger was notorious for neatness-especially in the conference room. Here I was, ankle-deep in paper and, even worse, taping things to the walls. When she saw that, Susi really went buggy. The only thing I could do was ask for her help.

It was a great day. When our clients arrived, a surprising thing happened. We couldn't start the meeting. As people moved into the room, they immediately gravitated toward the walls; fingers pointed, arms waved, designers and clients who had never spoken before spontaneously conversed-and great ideas emerged as people really looked at everything for the first time.

At some point during the presentation, I noticed that Roger was in the room. He smiled, and after the meeting he insisted that the work remain on the walls for several days, to let other people coming and going in the office take a look. In the end, the final design emerged not from a formal review, but from the perceptive comments of an accountant who couldn't stop looking at two of the drawings.

But big open s.p.a.ces aren't always needed to lay everything out. Many times the data we need to look at is just that: numbers, plain and simple. That's where spreadsheets come in. Although some Black Pen people may be convinced that numbers buried in rows and columns can never be "visual," spreadsheets are excellent tools for spreading out lots of data on a single sheet, where it can all be looked at and compared in one go.

Remember that instant 3-D model of the bowling alley that we created in our minds the moment we walked in? We were able to build it so quickly because our eyes could immediately discern the room's underlying coordinate system: which way was up, left, right, front, back. Since we live in a three-dimensional world, our eyes are really good at recognizing these coordinates, otherwise known as length, height, and depth. As an example, imagine holding a small box.

A box has three dimensions: length, height, and depth.