Musings of a Marketing Maven

At some point in most con­sult­ing engage­ments, some­one will ask, “Is every­one else as screwed up as we are?” The answer, of course, is yes. Most con­sul­tants’ busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties are cre­ated by their clients’ inabil­ity to solve (or com­mu­ni­cate) vex­ing prob­lems or challenges.

And now there’s a decep­tively sim­ple busi­ness book that can help you become less depen­dent upon con­sul­tants’ help, if you learn how to apply visual think­ing to prob­lem solv­ing and group communications.

This book is writ­ten espe­cially for peo­ple like me and you who think they can’t draw. It focuses on help­ing you see dif­fer­ently, explore and think things through visu­ally, and then con­vey the insights you develop by this visual think­ing technique.

In its own way, this is a prac­ti­cal guide for peo­ple who want to “Think Different.”

Sim­ply Powerful

Besides its charm­ing stick-figure sketches, the secret to The Back of the Nap­kin is its sim­ple but pow­er­ful frame­work and the expla­na­tions on how to apply this frame­work to real-world problems:

• “see­ing” prob­lems in terms of the clas­sic 6 W’s: who, what, when, where, how and why;
• explor­ing what’s most impor­tant to under­stand and then con­vey — for you as prob­lem solvers, and for your audi­ence (or the peo­ple you’re try­ing to con­vince) — via 5 key dimen­sions the author calls “SQVID”;
• dis­cov­er­ing insights or fresh alter­na­tives through the pat­terns that emerge from your visual combinations;
• and then apply­ing the best com­mu­ni­ca­tions approach given the audi­ence and your objectives.

As evi­dence for the power of his frame­work, the book’s author, Dan Roam, cites sci­en­tific research that reveals the brain is “hard-wired” for fast pro­cess­ing in response to the 6 W’s, when infor­ma­tion is con­veyed visually.

As an anti­dote to “death by Pow­er­Point,” I highly rec­om­mend The Back of the Nap­kin: Solv­ing Prob­lems and Sell­ing Ideas with Pic­tures, by Dan Roam.

Have Mark­ers, Will Travel

When you’ve mas­tered the visual think­ing frame­work laid out in Dan Roam’s book, all you need for client pre­sen­ta­tions is a set of mark­ers and a sur­face to draw on. (The sur­face depends on the size of the team you’re inter­act­ing with: a nap­kin or piece of paper works fine in small meet­ings, a white­board or easel pad for larger groups.)

For sit­u­a­tions that require Pow­er­Point (or Apple’s Keynote), the author rec­om­mends scan­ning hand-drawn sketches and insert­ing those graph­ics into your slide deck. He’s not sug­gest­ing you stop using Pow­er­Point, but instead learn how to visu­al­ize and con­vey impor­tant prob­lems using his framework:

When we think about the more elab­o­rate and insight­ful pic­tures required to show com­plex inter­ac­tions of when, where, how, and why, the point isn’t to replace all the words; the point is to use a pic­ture to replace those words that are more effec­tively con­veyed, under­stood, and remem­bered visually.

Mak­ing Your Point

For best results, Roam rec­om­mends think­ing through what should be drawn on the white­board before oth­ers arrive, and how to stage ele­ments to be added later. He’s learned through expe­ri­ence that some­times the best com­mu­ni­ca­tions occur when you take peo­ple through an abbre­vi­ated tour of your visual think­ing journey.

Peo­ple who mas­ter visual think­ing will find them­selves in great demand in the busi­ness world or in sit­u­a­tions involv­ing mul­ti­ple stake­hold­ers and lots of com­plex­ity or ambiguity.

And as Amer­i­can schools fail more and more to teach stu­dents how to think crit­i­cally and com­mu­ni­cate clearly, books like Back of the Nap­kin have some­thing impor­tant to offer.

Print PDF