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JUST PICTURE IT
Visualize an important business presentation. One where you are attempting to convey essential information to your audience. One for which you have spent months preparing.
While each of us probably pictured a different type of meeting, with variations in audience, location, and purpose, it is likely that all the meetings pictured had one thing in common: a presentation loaded with graphs, charts, and other elaborate visuals, many incorporated into a slick PowerPoint show.
Now imagine that same presentation. Only this time, you are not loaded down with glossy computer-generated charts, and your PowerPoint program is sitting unused on your laptop. Instead, you are surrounded by whiteboards, and when the presentation begins, you pick up a marker and begin drawing your ideas for the audience. As the meeting progresses, you might even ask a few people to add their own ideas to the pictures.
Crazy? Not according to Dan Roam, author of The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures. Roam touts the advantages of learning to utilize visual thinking through the use of hand-drawn pictures to get to the heart of complex matters and to identify the most effective way to present information. "Any problem can be made clearer with a picture," he says, "and any picture can be created using the same set of tools and rules."
But I Failed Art…
Roam recognizes that many business people are intimidated by his visual approach to solving problems. However, he is quick to point out that "solving problems with pictures has nothing to do with artistic training or talent." Rather, it is about tapping into the power of visual thinking, something he asserts we already do every day.
According to Roam, we can learn to use our built-in biological tools (our eyes, our mind's eye, and our hand/eye coordination) to follow a four-step process of visual thinking (look, see, imagine, and show). This process, when combined with the six major ways in which we see (who/what, how much, where, when, how, and why), can then be used to analyze complex information and present that information in easy-to-grasp, vivid pictures.
Don't worry about your lack of artistic talent. "In most presentation situations, audiences respond better to hand-drawn images (however crudely drawn) than to polished graphics," Roam says.
He walks through techniques for more effective looking, seeing, and imagining, then moves on to choosing the appropriate pictures to draw when working with different types of information. He shows how drawing can be used to identify key concepts, and the most effective frameworks for presenting those concepts to others.
A software company that must turn itself around before it loses significant market share is presented as a case study. Roam demonstrates how each aspect of his system can be applied to this real-life scenario, complete with a plethora of hand-drawn images for each concept.
Roam presents his ideas in an entertaining, informative style, but he takes too long describing how and why we visually process things, despite already including an appendix on the science of visual thinking. However, Roam organizes his text clearly, and readers can skip directly to the sections that most interest them without becoming lost. His process is intriguing and holds immense potential for changing the way the business world solves problems and sells concepts.
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