Visual Thinking as Business Problem Solver

I just completed a project for a client whose product development team was interested in learning how to deploy visual thinking frameworks to their development process in order to better understand how to break problems apart, identify insights and then create visual outputs for their clients. It was a fun project from start to finish and the two-day workshop was exhilarating for a number of reasons.

First, the participants were every bit as talented as I thought they would be.

And second, the frameworks we experimented with worked quite effectively. So much so, that we jokingly referred to the possibility that they should just send the workshop outputs directly to market. Their job was done.

We drew upon a number of different approaches, but some of the most fruitful discussions emerged from material supported by the following books:

Graphic Discovery: A Trout in the Milk and Other Visual Adventures. Howard Wainer.

Beautiful Evidence. Edward Tufte.

Envisioning Information. Edward Tufte.

Semiology of Graphics. Jacques Bertin.

Dan Roam’s work in Back of the Napkin and Unfolding the Napkin has influenced my thinking in this area for years and was also quite helpful.

The first part of the workshop focused on how we can even know something --- in the context of identifying the right problem to be focused on in the first place. Because, of course, if you’re asking the wrong question you will obviously get to the wrong solution. And here the notion of active looking supported our activities and exercises designed to crack open to our analysis the business opportunities, problems and questions that lie before us.

To get us started, I suggested we ponder the question, “when is a thing not a thing”?

I did so in order to drive home the notion that analogies, as Douglas Hofstadter tells us, are the fuel of human cognition. And perhaps the first step to understanding lies in our ability to see the connections between seemingly disparate things. So the answer to the question is, “a thing is not a thing when it stands for something else.”

To introduce this notion I used a fabulous scene from the DaVinci Code --- linked to here for your amusement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcfNpfaGejA

It’s the wonderful scene at the end in which the hero of our story, played by Tom Hanks, cuts himself shaving and in the moment during which the drop of blood transforms in the sink to a “sword-like” shape, then into a thin line drawn toward the drain, he makes mental connections to a number of facts he knows.

Those facts --- The Knights Templar, Sangreal, bloodline and then finally Roslyn, or Rose line…come together into an insight which convinces him to walk out into the Paris night to trace his path along the Rose Line to the Louvre where, reciting the poem which lay at the heart of the clues to the mystery, he figures out where the Madonna is buried. It’s a dramatic scene at the end of a wonderful movie, and for a movie nut like me, it plays nicely to the point I was trying to make for my millennial audience who, disconcertingly, had not seen the film!

The point is, insights happen quite magically in moments when our brain, by relaxing constraints, chunking and other neurological machinations, moves us to make connections between things, take concepts and create categories, and expand categories into analogies that stand for other things. In that moment we learn something and can then act on it ---behave differently and like Tom Hanks walk whatever Rose Line we must to uncover the solution to whatever problem lies in front of us.

However disconcerting it was to discover that Millennials don’t watch the movies I watch --- it was great to see them take that point and run with it in activity after activity so that they could apply visual thinking frameworks to their workflow and actually move the dial on a project sitting on their desks right now.

So the first step in understanding is to know to ask, “when is a thing not a thing?” 

And its answer, “when it stands for something else” propels us to seek connections. It pushes us toward moments of discovery and deciphering, toward enlightenment and epiphany, which lie at the heart of learning and changed behavior.

I’m not telling you to cut yourself shaving like Tom Hanks --- but if you do, ask yourself, what does this resemble? What does this remind me of? Can I make a connection between this and something I am thinking about? If you can, you might just have solved whatever riddle you are puzzling about.