Back of the Napkin
This week, I was able to see Dan Roam speak at Adaptive Path about some of the ideas behind his book The Back of the Napkin
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Here are my notes from the event.
Executive Summary:
Our brains think visually, but abstractly. Quirky hand-drawn sketches can communicate and solve problems better than other methods.
Details:
- We can solve problems with picures.
- Our mind works from an image perspective. 75% of our neurons process vision.
- There are three unwritten rules of visual problem solving:
- Whoever best describes the problem is the one most likely to solve it. (Corollary: whoever draws the best picture gets the funding).
- The more human the picture, the more human the response. (Corollary: when we look at a hand-drawn picture, we’re seeing things the way we think them).
- Everything is a layer cake. Different people enjoy different layers of the cake. They focus on their part of the task. Hand-drawn sketches can communicate the idea of the full cake to each audience focused on a different layer.
- Our brains process things in 6 ways. Every problem can be communicated by breaking it down into these 6 components.
- Who / what - who or what are we looking at? (drawn as a smiley face or box)
- Where - where is that object? (drawn as a map)
- How much - how many of the object are there? (drawn as graph)
- When - what is changing over time, in what way? (drawn as a series of arrows)
- How - what is the cause of something? (drawn as a flowchart)
- Why - what is the effect of something? (drawn as a multi-variable chart)
- “The barrier to change is not too little caring, it’s too much complexity. To turn caring into action, we need to see a problem, see a solution, and see the impact. But complexity blocks all three steps.” - Bill Gates
- Dan Roam (who gave the talk) was invited by the Microsoft CFO to prototype the next generation of financial analytics software.
- Microsoft wants to end the analysis-paralysis cycle.
- They do a quarterly business review where the CFO sits with each of the division presidents (who report to the CFO).
- Each division president presents a different set of numbers, and comes to a different conclusion.
- The CFO goes back to the division presidents and says, “Why are you looking at different things and coming to different conclusions? Give me a report is consistent and coherent.”
- The presidents sit down together and think: “What does the CFO want to see? Let’s show him everything.”
- There is too much data to show the CFO everything.
- The conclusion they came to (but they didn’t have much time to think about).
- Let’s get the data and people in one place.
- And create a customizable portal.
- Where people can choose what they want to see.
- The hand-drawn prototype that they built looked exactly like Swivel.
- A report/dashboard in the primary part of the screen.
- Links between data in the top of the side column.
- Links between people in the bottom of the side column.
- They presented the first sketch after three days as a hand-drawn picture and it elicited tremendous response (much better feedback than the illustrator prototypes I had done in the past).
- Microsoft wants to end the analysis-paralysis cycle.
- He recommended the book Authenticity to explain why the hand-drawn sketches worked so well.