Category Archives: BookNotes

Your Visual Thinking Toolkit

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Any problem can be made clearer with a picture, and any picture can be made using the same simple set of tools and rules.

–       Dan Roam, The Back of the Napkin

Author, consultant, and visual thinker Dan Roam (The Back of the Napkin, Unfolding the Napkin, and Blah, Blah, Blah) argues that everyone is born with a talent for visual thinking, even those who swear they can’t draw.

Here are the main concepts as covered in his first book The Back of the Napkin and expanded on in the next two books. Using these simply powerful tools, he shows anyone how to clarify a problem or sell an idea by visually breaking it down using a simple set of visual thinking tools.

3 Basic Visual Thinking Tools

  • Our eyes
  • Our mind’s eye
  • Our hand-eye coordination

4 Steps of the Visual Thinking Process

  • Look
  • See
  • Imagine
  • Show

5 Questions to Help Open Your Mind’s Eye

  • Simple or Elaborate
  • Qualitative or quantitative
  • Vision or execution
  • Individual or comparison
  • Change or status quo

6 Ways We See and Show

  • Who/what – portrait
  • How much – chart
  • Where – map
  • When – timeline
  • How – flowchart
  • Why – plot

The Back of the Napkin proves that thinking with pictures can help you discover and develop new ideas, solve problems in unexpected ways, and dramatically improve your ability to share your insights. You will literally begin to see the world in a new way. Ven though the book has been available for several years, if you haven’t got one I encourage you to pick up a copy as soon as possible to fully understand, and implement, these powerful communication tools.

These tools have a new meaning to me as Vision Room Curator at Auxano. To help me better prepare for my new role, I’m starting school today: Dan Roam’s Napkin Academy, the first online school for visual thinking. I’ll be posting more about it later this week.

You should pick up a pen and join me!

Smart vs. Healthy

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Being smart is only half the equation in a successful organization. Yet it somehow occupies almost all the time, energy, and attention of most leaders. The other half of the equation, the one that is largely neglected, is about being healthy.

– Patrick Lencioni, The Advantage

In Patrick Lencioni’s latest book The Advantage, you will find the following chart:

Lencioni comments: “Whenever I list the qualities for leaders, I usually get one of the following reactions, and sometimes both. Often they laugh quietly, in a nervous. almost guilty kind of way. Or they barely sigh, like parents do when they hear about a family where the kids do what they’re told the first time they’re asked. In either case, it’s as thought they’re thinking, ‘Wouldn’t that be nice?’ or, ‘Can you imagine?’

None of the leaders – even the most cynical ones – deny that their organizations would be transformed if they could achieve the characteristics fo a healthy organization. Yet they almost always gravitate to the left side of the chart above, retreating to the safe, measurable “smart” side of the equation.

Why?

Because it’s relatively safe and predictable, which most leaders prefer. That’s how they’ve been trained, and that’s where they’re comfortable.

It takes discipline to move beyond the safe and predictable, into the sometimes awkward and messy area of organizational health.

Tomorrow: Four Disciplines of Organizational Health

Adapted from The Advantage, by Patrick Lencioni

Brainsteering

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Part of the “BookNotes” series – highlights from interesting books I’ve recently read

Brainsteering: A Better Approach to Breakthrough Ideas, by Kevin Coyne and Shawn Coyne

Brainsteering – taking all the creative energy normally associated with brainstorming and steering it in a more productive direction

2 Secrets to Brainsteering:

  1. If you ask the right questions, answers and good ideas will follow
  2. The right process for generating breakthrough ideas looks very different from what you’ve been taught

4 Criteria for the Right Question

  1. Forces you to take a perspective you haven’t taken before
  2. Limits the conceptual space you can explore
  3. Must still provide lots of highly attractive possibilities
  4. Just plain succeeds

5 Patterns of Right Questions

  1. Identifying unsolved customer questions
  2. “De-averaging” users and activities
  3. Exporing unexpected successes
  4. Imagining perfection
  5. Discovering unexpected headroom

Brainsteering Workshop

  • Understand the criteria that will be used to make decisions about the workshop ideas
  • Select the right questions
  • Choose the right people
  • Separate the group into small subgroups
  • Match the question to the subgroup
  • Isolate the idea crushers into one group (the Boss, the Bigmouth, the subject matter Expert)
  • Orient the participants
  • Conduct each ideation session according to a strict formula

An Idea Everyone Will Like

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There’s no such thing as a truly original idea.
I don’t know who said it first, but it’s something I really believe! I’ve found a fascinating book by creativity expert David Kord Murray that takes that saying to the outer limits.
Over the last month I’ve been working on a project related to innovation and design in ChurchWorld, and this line of thought resonated a lot with me.
Borrowing Brilliance will challenge you as it examines the evolution of a creative idea. It also offers practical advice, taking the reader step-by-step through Murry’s unique thought process. Here are the six steps:
  1. Defining – define the problem you’re trying to solve
  2. Borrowing – Borrow ideas from places with a similar problem
  3. Combining – Connect and combine these borrowed ideas
  4. Incubating – Allow the combinations to incubate into a solution
  5. Judging – Identify the strength and weakness of the solution
  6. Enhancing – Eliminate the weak points while enhancing the strong ones

Read a quick summary of the six steps here. You can also get more information at this website. But don’t stop there – by all means pick up a copy of the book and explore it deeper – and you will find yourself looking at creativity in a whole new light.

Got a challenge staring you in the face, and looking for a solution. Why not follow the steps above by “borrowing some brilliance” and formulate your own unique solution?