The back of the napkin

I've enjoyed browsing through Dan Roam's The Back of the Napkin (Penguin, 2008). Dan makes the point convincingly that you can clarify a problem or sell an idea more effectively with a simple, hand-drawn picture than you can with a any number of words. And Dan demonstrates that you don't have to be an artist, or even the slightest bit artistic, to be able to represent your ideas clearly and effectively using only basic shapes.

What I personally found most interesting was Dan's assertion that a simple picture, drawn from scratch right in front of you in real-time, will be more engaging and memorable than a glossy chart or diagram created in advance using PowerPoint or some other program. This sort of makes sense to me, and of course teachers and trainers will already be experienced in visualising ideas on whiteboards and flip charts, but these tools are not always available at meetings or conferences and most presenters have little experience in their use.

Dan comes up with a number of interesting models for visualising ideas and I'd like to share one of these with you. The idea is that there are six ways in which we can 'see' the world and that there are six ways in which we can correspondingly represent what we see in pictorial form:

Who/What: Represented by a simple drawing of the object or portrait of the person in question.

How much: Represented by a chart (such as a bar chart) to represent quantities.

Where: Represented by some form of map.

When: Represented by a timeline.

How: Represented by a flow chart.

Why: Represented by a graph showing the interaction between two variables.

Of course there's more to Dan's method than this, but if I made it any more complex I'd be forced to draw you a picture. Now there's a thought.