VizThink Blog

The Back of the Napkin

One of the things that became apparent while planning VizThink in San Francisco is that the visual thinking world is about to explode again with a number of  new books in various stages of development.  There are books providing an overview of the entire visual thinking space, books on visual language itself, and, of course, books covering specific techniques or applications.  Today we start a new series on the blog where we’ll review each of these books and then interview the authors.

On Thursday, March 13th, the latest visual thinking book, entitled The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, will arrive at bookstores.  A few days later, we’ll be talking to the author, Dan Roam, in a podcast that will be available here on the blog.  We were honored to have Dan as one of our facilitators at VizThink ‘08 back in January.  His session was very well received and is probably lined up already to buy the book.

This easy-to-read book is a great primer for any business person who wants to begin to use visualization as a tool to improve various processes.  Many business books are dense, long, and often veering from their main point.  Dan’s simple, direct language is supported by practical visual examples and practice opportunities on nearly every page.  The approach will help anyone who is exploring the use of visual thinking in business feel that not only can they do this, but that they know how it can be applied immediately. 

He starts off the book with a case for what visual thinking is and why it’s important:

“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 an intuitively, and then share those ideas with other people in a way that they simply ‘get’”. 

In a section that reminds me of our recent podcast with Noah Iliinsky, he goes on to say:

“One of the most important virtues of visual thinking is its ability to clarify things so that the complex can be better understood, but that does not mean that all good visual thinking is about simplification.  The real goal of visual thinking is to make the complex understandable by making it visible–not by making it simple.  Whether that goal demands a simple picture, an elaborate one, or an intentionally complex one is almost always determined by the audience and it’s familiarity with the subject being addressed.”

Dan, a management consultant, provides multiple frameworks throughout the book.  The first, and also his framework for the book, is his visual thinking process:

He then presents a methodology for imaging the message we might want to convey to our audience before we begin creating.  The process, awkwardly named SQVID (yes, V not U), is:

He uses his final framework for analyzing both what to See (Step 2 from above) and what to Show (Step 4 from above).  A reporter may be very familiar with this framework:

And just to make every business school student happy, he crosses SQVID with the 6 Ways of Seeing to get a nice 30-square grid.  It gets even more fun when multiple pieces can be combined like How Much? & When?  While it sounds complicated, it actually provides a simple chart to get started with visualization.

All of these categories and lists and grids may drive the more traditional artists a bit crazy.  They could be perceived as limiting or constraining.  A couple quotes even seem be presented as definitive, such as “there is no reason to qualitatively show how much”.  The continuous (though subjective) scale from very beautiful to very ugly comes to mind as an immediate exception.  However, for the beginning visual thinker, especially in business, the lists can provide a useful process to get started by reducing the stress of starting with a blank piece of paper (or screen).

We highly recommend this book to anyone who wonders about some of the ways visual thinking can be applied and wants to get started right away.  The writing, tools, and approaches are simple, understandable, and immediately applicable in a wide range of business applications.

The book is available for pre-order now here at Amazon.com and your local bookstore.