KnowledgeWeave

Dan opened by describing a “horrible meeting” back when he was working as an IA for Razorfish in San Francisco.  The meeting motivated him to write his book “The Back of the Napkin.”  To get started on the book, he consulted with Steve Krug and Lou Rosenfeld, and he credits the IA community with giving him the impetus for it as well as its “essential base of information.”

Writing the book itself was “an extraordinarily difficult thing” and “no fun at all.”  Background: Dan was very impressed that pictures are used to guide the construction of the largest Boeing airplanes l well as the development of complicated bills in the Senate.  “Every problem we have can be solved through pictures,” he asserted.

He then ran through thru 3 related questions:

1. Which problems are we talking about? Answer: ANY problem.

2. Which pictures are we talking about? Answer: The “most bone-headedly simple ones.” He then had us draw a simple stick figure on pre-distributed napkins to prove his point?

3. Who can draw these pictures? Answer: Anyone.

Tidbits: More of our brain is dedicated to visual processing than anything else. Visual thinking unwritten rule #1: “Whoever best describes the problem is the one most likely to solve it.” (And: Whoever draws the best picture gets the funding.”)

The greatest napkin drawing story of all time happened in Texas in 1967. It led to the establishment of SWest Airlines, the most financially successful airline of all time.

Dan then described going to the Senate in DC to describe the use of simple pictures to solve problems.  Tidbit: George Washington was trained as a mapmaker.  Dan then showed some drawings by presidents Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan – all very revealing of the personalities behind them.  (E.g., Reagan’s drawings were of horses, cowboys and stereotypical Chinamen.)

The best political napkin drawing ever? By Arnold (?) Laffer in 1974: a simple X-Y plot with $ tax rate on the horizontal axis and the amount of $ collected by the govt. from taxation on the vertical axis.  He then added the “Laffer curve” to illustrate how reducing the amounting of taxes increases the amount of $ the govt. collects. The two chiefs of staff took the napkin drawing back to the Reagan economic team, and became the basis for “Reaganomics.”

It turns out President Obama is “an extraordinarily good drawer” and left-handed.  Tidbit: 5 of the last 7 U.S. presidents have been left-handed.  Reagan was naturally left-handed but was forced to become right-handed while growing up.  Dan’s question to Obama: Why don’t you use your drawing skills to explain complicated political issues to the American people?  (Interesting idea.)  Problem: “It’s not that most people disagree with what Washington says. It’s that nobody understands what Washington says.”  This is perfectly illustrated by the recent healthcare debates.

Who has the “big picture” behind the healthcare debate?  Funny moment: in 1447 pages of the Healthcare Reform bill, there’s not a single diagram or visual depiction.  “This is not an understandable document.”

What if someone tried to draw some pictures of what this healthcare debate is all about? Dan worked with a healthcare specialist to do exactly that. He then shared the simple drawings he created to illustrate the core issues of the debate.  One, for example, shows a seesaw with the Providers on one side, Payers on the other, and “me” (taxpaying citizens) stuck in the middle. The drawings progress to show how the citizen is the only source of money in the equation, and how the focus of the healthcare effort was all on the insurance payers and not on the healthcare providers.  “It should have been called ‘insurance reform,’ not healthcare reform,” he concluded.

Dan posted his napkin sketches to Slideshare and there have been 1/4 of a million downloads of it to date.  The end result: “Now that we all understand what we’re talking about, we can go ahead and eviscerate each other” (!).

Dan was then invited to go on Fox during prime time to explain the essentials of American healthcare with his pictures. He then got a call from the Whitehouse Office of Communications: “Dan, we have to talk.”

Tidbit: It turns out that the Whitehouse cannot hire consultants. Dan has since worked with the Dept of State and Dept of Defence to figure out how to use pictures to conceptualize some huge problems.

Why are the communications coming out of Washington so difficult to understand?

In any meeting, about 25% of attendees are “black pen people” who can’t wait to run up to the whiteboard and start drawing out their ideas.  50% are “yellow pen” people or highlighters, whose minds are excited by the drawings and usually ask the drawer, “do you mind if I add something?”  The other 25% are “red pen” folks who skeptically “watch those idiots at the whiteboard” and think it’s all being oversimplified.  It really bothers those people that so many nuances are being left out by the simple drawings.

Exercise 1: If you’re in a meeting with a whiteboard, what would you do (choose from 5 possibilities). My answer: #2 – “Go to the board and start writing lists.”

Ex 2: What do I do? #3: “I can’t draw…but draw anyway.”

Ex 3: Someone gives me a complicated spreadsheet and asks me to look it over.  My answer: #1: “Glaze over and hope it will go away.”

Ex 4: If I’m asked to explain what to do, I… My answer: #5: “Start talking about someone interesting.”

Ex 5: As an astronaut floating is space, I… Me: #2:  “Pull out my camera.”

What does nobody in DC draw pictures? “It goes back to our educational system.” At an NEA meeting, 100% of the audience self-identified as “red pen” people (!).  “No wonder we’re afraid to draw.”

“I debated heavily whether I’ll show you the next picture” – the xPlane poster for the Summit!  “It’s beautiful, but it explains absolutely nothing about how a website gets made.”

The rest of the session was dedicated to the audience’s drawing simple pictures to solve “any problem you want to.”

Tidbit: The brain chemicals that get activated when we’re excited are the same ones that get activated when we understand something.

Dan followed with a story about Rob Walton of WalMart and Peter Seligman of Conservation International.  It turns out they are very good friends who like to travel outdoors with their families.  Seligman started taking Walton and his family to places where you can literally see the effect of global warming. The point was to understand the connection between human consumption and its impact on our planet.

WalMart decided to incorporate environmental sustainability into its business plan. But they had to commit Lee Scott, the then-CEO, first. So they did a pilot project, developing “organic cotton yogawear.”  It sold out in 3 months at an enormous profit.

In 2005 when Katrina took place, WalMart was down in New Orleans “instantly.”  This prompted Scott to ask, “Why can’t WalMart be the company every day that we were during those days of Katrina?”

As a result, WalMart became the flagship company for environmental responsibility. The problem is, “all WalMart has is a tremendous amount of data.” Dan responded: Why don’t we use pictures to create a little scale model of WalMart’s entire supply chain?

They did this, but “those were not the pictures that mattered.”  The ones that mattered were the simple sketches that were drawn up by decision-makers as they end drawing was being developed.

Visual thinking unwritten rule #2: We like pictures that map the things the mind sees.  Dan illustrated this through a sequence of drawings illustrating the passage of time.  “We just saw every fundamental piece of our visualization process in action.”

We’re beginning to understand that “vision is an extraordinarily complicated process.”  It works in 6 different ways, overloading the brain.  But the brain has figured out how to “divide up” that work among six pathways: The “what” pathway, the “how” pathway, the “where” pathway, the “how many” pathway, the “when” pathway and the “why” pathway.  This division of the process led Dan to articulate the “6 x 6″ rule.

Illustration: “Let’s draw in 6 slices” on a napkin to demonstrate the pathways.  Note: “We have an emotional response from stick figures!”

Conclusion: Why does visual thinking matter? Dan ended with 5 minute story to illustrate “why visual problem solving is so good for us?” Where did visual thinking begin?  In France. In the caves of Chauvet in south central France. There’s a beautiful natural bridge there; in 1993 a spelunker named Chauvet discovered the entrance to a cave on the backside of that arch. They discovered a complex series of caves with “unbelievably beautiful” ancient pictures. People kept coming back to this cave over the course of 800 years, drawing similar pictures.

These pictures were drawn 32,000 years ago.  How long ago is that? Dan drew a chart showing the course of human generations from Chauvet’s time to today. It turns out not really all that many; you can draw it on a napkin.  “2,000 years ain’t nothing’” his illustration showed; it’s only 200 generations.  Going back 32,000 years (to the time of Chauvet), Dan could fit it on another napkin.

How did visual thinking begin? Dan showed a picture of the brain’s development.

Why did visual thinking begin? Picture of a wild animal chasing a human.

> Listen to the podcast of this talk on Boxes and Arrows.