Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah

In many ways, this would be better drawn, not put down in words.

At least that’s the sense of things having talked with Dan Roam, author of The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas With Pictures and the follow-up Unfolding the Napkin: The Hands-On Method for Solving Complex Problems With Simple Pictures (both published by Portfolio).

A word about the whole napkin metaphor. Roam says that there are the backs of a couple of things that are often used. The napkin is for conceptual things. Then there is the back of the envelope. That, he suggests, is something that is generally for numeric exercises: “The back-of-the-envelope calculation of taxation rates would be X; the back-of-the-napkin would be the Laffer curve.”

Then there is the issue of drawing. Roam admits that when he was growing up, he was the kind of kid who “drew cars, planes, spaceships, and monsters.” His goal was to attend Art Center in Pasadena and study transportation design. His hero was legendary industrial designer Raymond Loewy. Clearly, Roam was destined to draw. He went to college and obtained a degree in fine art and painting. And he acknowledges, with modesty, “I do know how to draw well,” then adds, “But I’ve spent the last five years learning to draw badly well.”

It’s because his approach to problem solving—arguably an approach that is certainly applicable to those who are pursuing creativity because of the conceptual nature of what he’s talking about—involves drawing. And all of the illustrations in his books are drawn by Roam. He wants regular people—the rest of us who don’t have degrees in fine art—to do what he does, which is to draw stick figures and diagrams and suchlike.

“Most people I work with say, ‘I love what you are talking about, but I can’t draw.’ I say, ‘Hogwash: It’s not about the drawing.” What it is about is thinking, using circles and lines to clarify things, to use your mind’s eye. While Roam does provide a discussion of brain science in The Back of the Napkin to validate what he is talking about, he says simply, “What is important about drawing is that when we draw things, we are obligating, forcing, a series of cognitive processes to take place that would not happen if you are just talking about it.”

To simplify, Roam harkens back to the 6Ws that we all learned in elementary school, and maintains that this is really the way that we see: the who/what, how many, where, when, how, and why. He writes in The Back of the Napkin: “The real goal of visual thinking”—and by extension, doing what happens on the back of a napkin or other writing surface, it seems—“is to make the complex understandable by making it visible—not by making it simple”

“Simple is great if you are addressing a nonexpert,” Roam says, explaining, “Someone who is not familiar with the idea you’re describing will freeze up if you introduce it through a complex description, visual or verbal. Once someone is no longer a novice, then it is imperative that your picture contain the elaboration and complexity that show the deeper working of the real pieces.” This then leads to flowcharts, some of which can be rather detailed and complex. “A flowchart is a visual representation of cause-and-effect,” Roam says. He explains that rather than drawing one of a particular process, “I could have written in a bulleted list or a paragraph, but the impact on the viewer, the ability to get it, to grok it, would be very different.” He maintains that by drawing there is a greater opportunity for understanding on behalf of the person doing the drawing—“As you draw, all of the holes you have overlooked as you have verbalized something become glaringly obvious, and you’re going to have to figure out what you’re going to do with those gaping holes”—as well as on behalf of those to whom something is being explained: “Suppose I tell you to imagine a circle the size of a quarter, another the size of a tea cup, then a dinner plate, and an old record. Then imagine the quarter in the upper left hand corner and the dinner plate in the lower right. As I tell you that, the mind’s eye tries to follow. But if I showed you a picture of this at the same time, you’d be activating the visual processing centers and obtain an extraordinary amount of information that’s not from the verbal path.”

A problem that Roam thinks exists is that we have learned to associate verbal ability with intelligence. “The result is that we delude ourselves that we know things because we can talk about them.”

He argues that this is far from being the case, and that as people try to deal with the big issues that face us—be it a business problem, health care, or the war in Afghanistan—“the endless litany of words, the wall of words” is not going to allow anyone to see the solution. No, he is not suggesting that it is pictures alone that will allow people to creatively solve problems. He says that a more powerful approach is “vivid thinking,” an interdependent combination of the verbal and the
visual.

“Any problem will benefit from a picture drawn to support our thinking,” Roam says. “Every time we open our mouths, we should draw a picture.