The back of a bar's napkin has become a metaphor for improvisational and passionate brainstorming about a new business idea. In the volatile and exhilarating new technology world of just a few years ago, sometimes the business plan itself was but a collection of bar napkins.
Why not? If that plan includes a sentence on how the business is going to make money, it works.
Management consultant Dan Roam has written the book on The Back of the Napkin. In his ChangeThis manifesto Roam talks about The 10 1/2 Commandments of Visual Thinking. Visual thinking works for many learner profiles. Some thoughts on visual thinking:
1. Solving problems by visualizing
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. In conversation with writers they usually say that a metaphor is worth a thousand pictures. Fair enough. A metaphor is a powerful way to envision with the mind.
2. Envisioning futures
Working with experience design professionals is a good way to learn how to envision future paths using information. Having the ability to display quantitative data is a big advantage that can help us glean more from what we have -- and solve problems. Edward Tufte writes and teaches about the visual display of quantitative information and his book by the same title is a useful guide for experience designers.
3. From displaying to seeing
The visual display of information can lead us to insights. We are visual beings. Most of our daily stimulation -- much of which we learn to turn off -- includes a strong visual component. Our vision is always on from the time we get up in the morning, to the time we go to bed. We may temporarily block our auditory ability by zoning out, but vision stays on longest. Roam says:
[...] it’s always worth it to take our picture to the point where something new emerges. When you think you’re done, push that pen one more time to write a title, a conclusion, an insight, or a comment. Squeezing one last drop out of your visual thinking muscle almost always delivers a “eureka!”
We learn to write by writing; we learn to write better by revisiting our writing through the lens of clarity. What are we communicating? Can we say it better?
The same happens with visualizing information. We may start with doodles in meetings, mind maps as rough outlines of direction and through process. But we should not stop there. Starting with those ideas and conceptual maps we create a visual baseline of our thought process. Investigation and validation follow.