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:
  1. We can solve problems with picures.
  2. Our mind works from an image perspective.  75% of our neurons process vision.
  3. There are three unwritten rules of visual problem solving:
    1. Whoever best describes the problem is the one most likely to solve it.  (Corollary: whoever draws the best picture gets the funding).
    2. 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).
    3. 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.
  4. Our brains process things in 6 ways.  Every problem can be communicated by breaking it down into these 6 components.
    1. Who / what - who or what are we looking at? (drawn as a smiley face or box)
    2. Where - where is that object? (drawn as a map)
    3. How much - how many of the object are there? (drawn as graph)
    4. When - what is changing over time, in what way? (drawn as a series of arrows)
    5. How - what is the cause of something? (drawn as a flowchart)
    6. Why - what is the effect of something? (drawn as a multi-variable chart)
  5. “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
  6. Dan Roam (who gave the talk) was invited by the Microsoft CFO to prototype the next generation of financial analytics software.
    1. Microsoft wants to end the analysis-paralysis cycle.
      1. They do a quarterly business review where the CFO sits with each of the division presidents (who report to the CFO).
      2. Each division president presents a different set of numbers, and comes to a different conclusion.
      3. 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.”
      4. The presidents sit down together and think: “What does the CFO want to see?  Let’s show him everything.”
      5. There is too much data to show the CFO everything.
    2. The conclusion they came to (but they didn’t have much time to think about).
      1. Let’s get the data and people in one place.
      2. And create a customizable portal.
      3. Where people can choose what they want to see.
      4. The hand-drawn prototype that they built looked exactly like Swivel.
        1. A report/dashboard in the primary part of the screen.
        2. Links between data in the top of the side column.
        3. Links between people in the bottom of the side column.
    3. 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).
  7. He recommended the book Authenticity
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    to explain why the hand-drawn sketches worked so well.