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Meet the MasterMinds: Dan Roam on Visual Thinking

Dan Roam is the founder and president of Digital Roam Inc., a consulting firm that helps clients solve complex problems through visual thinking. He’s also the author of The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures.

We asked him how simple visual images—like what you might sketch on the back of a napkin—can sharpen our focus on ideas and free our minds for problem-solving.

McLaughlin: What inspired you to write The Back of the Napkin?

Roam: Well, I was always drawing pictures, even as a kid. My first job out of school was as a graphic designer, and it made sense that I drew because that’s one of the primary ways everybody in graphic design communicates.

When I shifted into management consulting, I realized that people in business don’t draw much. In business meetings, when I wanted to explain an idea or clarify what someone else had said, I would start drawing.

I was amazed by how my simple drawings worked a kind of magic in the room.

I was amazed by how my simple drawings worked a kind of magic in the room. People’s level of attention to what I was saying went through the roof. And people were much more willing to participate, to help me work out an idea or to add their own. And I thought, business people need to do more of this because it’s tremendously powerful. So I decided to write the book.

McLaughlin: Why do you think people don’t rely more on visual thinking and problem solving?

Roam: Visual thinking is prevalent in many fields. Scientists, for example, use pictures all the time to explain ideas. TV sports announcers draw plays on the screen. Military leaders in the field might use a stick to sketch out the plan of attack in the dirt.

It’s in business that you don’t see as much of that. I think it comes down to this: The way we determine success in business is with quantitative measures. What is the return on investment? What is the profitability? What is the market share or market cap? It’s all about numbers.

Maybe it’s in their nature, through practice, or the way business schools teach, but people who go into business tend to be or become more quantitative. That is what business rewards, so it’s a self-perpetuating cycle. It’s much harder to measure the success of creative, qualitative, visual thinking.

75 percent of the sensory neurons in our brains are processing visual information.

The fact is, though, we are visual. 75 percent of the sensory neurons in our brains are processing visual information. Our other senses are also critical, but vision is by far the most important. 30 million years of evolution make our brains work that way, so we should try to convey ideas to other people’s brains that way.

McLaughlin: Your book is a great example of that. You can look at a picture and take in its entire meaning immediately. To communicate the same in words, written or spoken, would take a lot longer.

Roam: In a meeting situation, it can take five minutes to explain a problem verbally that you can communicate instantly with a picture. That's because of how we process information cognitively. By the time someone finishes speaking, we don’t have the ability to remember what that person said at the beginning.

After “brainstorming” sessions, you end up with a pile of phrases—what you said, on top of what I said, on top of what someone else said. Imagine a stack of firewood, with each log a phrase. The only ones we can see are the most recent, the ones on top. If we’d captured each phrase visually as someone was saying it, at the end, we would remember and be able to see the points that got us there.

McLaughlin: For people who aren’t trained to organize and communicate information visually, is there a process they can learn?

Roam: Yes, and it’s quite simple. Back in fifth grade English, the teacher taught us that, when writing an expository essay, you ask the five Ws: Who, What, When, Where, and Why. If you answered all five of those questions, you got an “A” on your report because they cover the main points.

I have expanded those five questions into six categories: Who/What; How much/many; When; Where; How; and Why. If you deconstruct a problem into those pieces, you get a useful way to think about and draw the facets of the problem. Whose issue is it and what is it about? What are the physical manifestations of the problem? Who does it impact? What are the pieces of the puzzle? How many of them are there? When in time do they interact?

Next, where are those puzzle pieces located, both physically and conceptually? What relationships do they have to one another? And how do they interact? Interestingly enough, if you put the previous questions together, you start to see the interactions, and that takes you to the final point, which is why. If you are able to discern causality by looking at how things work, eventually you will be able to answer the question why are things the way they are?

McLaughlin: How does the process you just described differ from other methods, for instance, Tony Buzan’s Mind Mapping?

Roam: A Mind Map is one way to break down certain kinds of problems visually. There are equally powerful tools for looking at other types of problems. Timelines, for example, add an additional dimension. Multivariable plots, or complex X-Y axis charts, are useful when you want to understand the numeric relationships between the elements of a problem.

McLaughlin: Once you organize all your information visually, how do you communicate it well to others?

Roam: Practice, practice, practice. No, that’s a facetious answer. The real answer is that you should never wing it when explaining ideas to others. If you expect to deliver any presentation effectively, you have to be very familiar with the material and practice what you’re going to say. The same holds true when you plan to use pictures.

When communicating a visual representation, there are challenges. Let’s say our team creates a picture that summarizes our entire problem brilliantly. But when you show it to people who didn’t help create the picture, they don’t get it. And then people say, see, pictures don’t work. I have learned this the hard way. I would take a team drawing to an executive and say here’s the solution. He’d look at it and say what the heck is this?

So before you meet with that executive, you should look at your team’s picture and identify the three or four most important ideas that emerged from your work.

So before you meet with that executive, you should look at your team’s picture and identify the three or four most important ideas that emerged from your work. And you need to conceive of a way to redraw it to show those key ideas. Then you go to the executive and say, Mary, we figured out the solution to the problem and I want to show it to you. She asks to see your slide deck, and you say, I don’t have a deck, but let me walk you through it.

As you recreate that picture for her, you are literally transferring to her the entire process the team went though. That’s like manna for the brain, which wants to get information, piece by piece, step by step, visually. When you do that, Mary will say, holy smoke, I totally get it. And not only that, she’s going to pick up a pen and start adding to your drawing because you jumpstarted her thinking.

McLaughlin: If you’re trying to communicate visually with people who either consider themselves non-visual or resist the idea, what do you do?

Roam: Often in business presentations, we tend to forget that there’s an audience. We think that a presentation is about us. We’ve all heard this a thousand times: It’s not about us, it’s about the audience. But if we haven’t thought about what our audience members are willing to accept, we’re not going to convince them of anything.

Much as I’d like to say I would go ahead and draw pictures, even if the senior executive of Mega Corporation said that’s not what they want, I probably would not run to the Whiteboard and start drawing. But I would eventually want to take the group there. You have to be cognizant of the nuances and undercurrents in the room.

In most cases, though, I still believe that the rewards for people “getting it” are worth the risk of going visual. Even if someone says I’m not visual, go ahead and say, let me map out something for you and see if we can make sense of it anyway.

When somebody claims to be non-visual, it usually means “I don’t like to draw.” So you do the drawing. The person who insists “I can’t draw”—the one I call the red pen person—will sit behind the desk as you’re at the Whiteboard and get a little frustrated with your over-simplification.

But often, the red pen person will start to throw out ideas and say, Dan, you drew it wrong. You need to move that triangle to the other side and make it bigger. And I say, okay, like this? Eventually the red pen person will stand up, take the pen and go draw pictures. It’s natural for people to respond because, again, that is the way our brains work.

McLaughlin: One last question: If you could give somebody one piece of advice about tackling a complex problem visually, what would it be?

Roam: Just do it. People worry about not being able to solve problems with pictures because they think they can’t draw. There’s nothing in my book about how to draw because I don’t care if you can draw or not. It’s not the quality of the drawing that matters.

Once you look at a situation from a pictorial perspective, your brain automatically starts to think through, well, what are my options for dealing with this? Whether you are trying to solve a problem or you are selling an idea to others, visual thinking opens up those receptive brain channels.

McLaughlin: Thanks for your time.

Find out more at www.thebackofthenapkin.com and www.digitalroam.com.