BookLight: The Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam
Welcome to a new feature I’m calling “BookLight” (to continue with my firefly-centered theme.) Periodically, I take a break from reading historical mysteries to actually learn something new about the world, so I’ll share my reviews with you. If you’ve read the book (or want to), chime in with your thoughts and opinions.
This week, I finished The Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam. It’s a primer on thinking and communicating visually, and I learned about it through one of the presentation and visualization blogs I follow. I won’t try to summarize the entire book for you – we’ll rely on the dust-jacket summary for that:
Consultant and lecturer Dan Roam argues that everyone is born with a talent for visual thinking, even those who depend mainly on their left-brain analytical skills. The problem is that most of us — especially in the business world — are never encouraged to develop our intrinsic ability to create pictures. Roam teaches business leaders around the world how to look, see, imagine, and show — with immediate results.
Used properly, a humble napkin is more powerful than Excel or Powerpoint. It can help you crystallize your ideas, think outside the box, and communicate more powerfully than any traditional business presentation.
I agree with the premise, because our brains have evolved to be highly responsive to visual cues, and I’m a firm believer in using the act of drawing to tap the latent creativity of the human mind. But will this book actually help you to solve problems and sell ideas as it suggests?
If you’re already a person who understands data visualization and likes to sketch and draw, there’s not much here for you. At times, the book is painfully thorough, expounding on what seem like pretty simple concepts. I found myself skimming pages at a time, and I was thankful that there were many pictures that sum up the major points. I guess that makes sense in a book on visual communication!
Still, the author does an effective job of coding and categorizing the many ways we see and communicate that will put all of the left-brained data-heads at ease. By wrangling the wild world of imagination and drawing into neat boxes, he helps all of us straight-laced number crunchers to identify which tools we’ll need to do the job. Trying to figure out who your customers really are? Draw a portrait. Want to figure out how to reach someone with purchasing power within an organization? Try an influence chart.
The very act of drawing helps us see the who, what, where, when, how many, why and how of any business problem, and better than that, it gives us a communication tool that our colleagues and customers can grasp.
My favorite part of the book is his “SQVID” tool for visually brainstorming an idea. The SQVID exercise asks you to express a single concept or problem in ten different ways, forcing your brain into some mental gymnastics that really jump-starts the creative process. In his example below, he attempts to explain an apple in simple and complex terms, qualitatively and quantitatively, as it is and as it changes, etc. When you’re through with the exercise, you’ll have a better understanding of the problem, and 10 different ways to describe it for 10 audiences that approach that problem in unique ways.
In the end, there’s enough information on the book’s website that I can’t recommend buying it. But, if your library has a copy, it’s worth a quick read.
Even if you can’t read the book, you can benefit from its message by starting today. Pick up a pencil and paper, and start drawing out your problems and ideas. Then share the drawings with a friend. What you create may not be a Picasso, but it could change your business or your life in a beautiful way.
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