So, I was in the bookstore and I picked up this book along with Presentation Zen, and wouldn’t you know it, shortly afterwards I see a post on the Presentation Zen blog about this book. Undeterred by being scooped by Garr Reynolds on two of the books I’ve read lately, I decided to press on and read this book anyway.
As a man who loves whiteboards and feels most comfortable in a meeting with an Expo Dry Erase marker in his hand, I was definitely keen to read Dan Roam’s Back of the Napkin in order to see what I might be able to do to improve. Fortunately for me, the book assuaged my fears that I would have to learn to draw. Which, for any of you who may have seen me at a whiteboard in the past, knows that me learning to draw well may be impossible. For those of you, who haven’t seen me at a whiteboard, picture Jackson Pollock with dry erase as his medium, combined with a doctor’s handwriting labeling everything.
I’m not sure that any of that will change, per se, but I’ll be able to tell stories a bit more compellingly after reading this book. Dan Roam does a great job outlining the basics of visual thinking here. He outlines the steps we use to think about problems visually into looking, seeing, imagining, and showing. Then he walks through the various things we are trying to depict, who, how much, when, how, and why. After that he gives a set of depiction options for the drawings, either simple or elaborate, qualitative or quantitative, vision or execution, individual or comparison, delta or as-is. Then he creates a matrix of the five questions with the 10 depiction options and talks about the appropriate time to use each with tons of great examples.
Visual Thinking Steps
- Look
- See
- Imagine
- Show
Visual Thinking Questions
- Who
- How Much
- When
- How
- Why
Drawing Depiction Options
SQVID
Simple Qualitative Vision Individual Delta
Elaborate Quantitative Execution Comparison As Is
This is a book that I can’t recommend enough. I’m a big believer that good communication requires simple picture depicting difficult to grasp concepts. One of the items I liked best in A Brief History of Time is the depiction of the event horizon, which was essentially shown as a set of cones radiating out from a point in space time. A difficult concept, a great simple drawing, and the concept is then able to be understood by the masses. This is what we should strive for as we are trying to communicate, we need to get ideas across quickly and completely, and drawings are great for that, and having a simple framework that you can refer to for your drawings helps to frame your thinking around what to draw, and how to draw it (not how to draw artistically, but the basic steps of drawing).
I think that’s enough though on the word front, how about a couple of scanned in images that I drew to kind of show what I got out of this.
Dan Roam’s Back of the Napkin Site
Very cool blog, every entry is a drawing like the ones you see here, except hers are better qualitatively, quantitatively, and more insightful than mine. It’s a must read!
Addendum: My dad spells knapkin with a k at the beginning. His reasoning? It works for knife, why not knapkin.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
perhaps more relevantly, it works for knapsack.
you are both knuckleheads. Haha
Good stuff Paul.