Drawing Attention

They say a pic­ture is worth a thou­sand words.  If that is the case, Dan Roam’s book The Back of the Nap­kin is eas­ily worth a mil­lion.  The book is ded­i­cated to teach­ing pro­fes­sion­als to use sim­ple draw­ings to visu­al­ize prob­lems and their sub­se­quent solu­tions.  I once had a boss, Brian Mont­gomery, who was the mas­ter of this skill.  He could use stick fig­ures, a tri­an­gle, some cir­cles, and a few labels and in sec­onds illus­trate a point that I had been pon­der­ing for hours.  I always won­dered how he did it and now The Back of the Nap­kin is teach­ing me.

These days I fre­quently find myself explor­ing new ideas, con­cepts, and busi­ness mod­els.  Things like social media inte­gra­tion, data visu­al­iza­tion, and orga­ni­za­tional mar­ket­ing strate­gies.  Pretty quickly these con­cepts can get my head spin­ning.  One easy way to com­bat this is just to draw the ideas out on paper or a white­board. Dan Roam lays out a some very easy, very pow­er­ful meth­ods for visu­al­iz­ing and solv­ing prob­lems with draw­ing pictures.

“I can’t draw,” you say?  Dan’s method does not require you to be a great artist, but rather a great lis­tener.  By com­bin­ing sim­ple pic­tures with basic ques­tions in an easy to fol­low process, The Back of the Nap­kin will imme­di­ately improve your abil­ity to solve prob­lems, develop ideas, and gain under­stand­ing with others.

The book presents a series of basic ques­tions, and then shows sim­ple graph­i­cal ideas that depict the answers to them.   The ques­tions are noth­ing new.  They are in fact very sim­ple.  Who? What? How Much? Where? When? How? and Why?  The solu­tions that these sim­ple sketches uncover are priceless.

Here is a short video of Dan talk­ing about how his the­ory can improve presentations:

Here is a longer video of Dan speak­ing at Google:

I encour­age you to visit Dan’s web site for some Free Tools he has made avail­able and for more infor­ma­tion about the book.  I hope you choose to read it and draw on Dan’s wis­dom to add to your own.