Visual Problem Solving, Part II
Dan Roam has written a book about show-and-tell, and why it's all you need to solve pretty much any business problem. Don't be fooled -- it is not the business version of "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten." His key point: visual thinking makes the complex understandable by making it visible (not simple).
As I said in the first part of this review, The visual way to solve problems, Roam's book, "The Back of the Napkin," is a textbook. It's clever, pleasant even. But it's a textbook nonetheless, and if you want to really learn how to use images to solve business problems, you're going to have to study it some. You need to learn how to take an intuitive idea â€" pictures provide an effective way to understand and solve business problems â€" and put it into action.
The perfect case in point comes at the end, when Roam tells us what happened to a team he advised. It used his methods to develop what looked like a brilliant presentation, taking more than 100 pages of information and distilling them into six handouts and a dozen slides. But when the presenter got up, she couldn't tell people what the slides said. They were too different from what she was used to doing.
To use his concepts effectively, you have to understand his models, of which two seem to me most significant:
1) SQVID, which stands for Simple, Quality, Vision, Individual Attributes and Delta (change).
2) The 6x6 model, where you meld the questions you want to answer (grouped into Who, What, When, Where, Why, How and How Much categories) with six frameworks he's defined (Who and What map to a portrait, How much to a chart, Where to a Map, When to a Timeline, How to a flowchart and Why to multiple-variable plots).
You also need to know how to put them all together. He spends all of part III showing how to use each, and then introduces us to his client and her failed presentation. At that point, he shifts gears and shows how to do things aloud â€" tying back to his first point that we need to look, see, imagine, and show, only we need to tell people what they're seeing.
If you can stick with the book and put it into practice, it should prove useful in solving business problems. Just don't expect you're going to get it right away.
Big Think Breakdown: Worth the effort for solving problems, and taking advantage of our amazing visual biology.
UPDATE: I meant to link to the BNet video on Roam's book.