Sketch it out

Could this be the way forward for developing business plans for creative people?

A book about how to solve problems using pictures has become a surprise bestseller in the US. Author Dan Roam explains why drawing can be such a powerful work tool


In late 1987, the Irish airline leasing magnate Tony Ryan asked Michael O'Leary, his accountant, to help launch a new airline. One of the first jobs Ryan had for O'Leary was to go the US and study Southwest Airlines. The Texas-based carrier had for years been the world's most profitable airline, in spite of defying traditional airline logic in every aspect of operations.
O'Leary came back from his field trip a man possessed. He immediately went to work on turning Ryanair into Europe's first "low-cost" carrier, and in the process turned the entire European airline model on its head. We'll never know exactly what O'Leary saw at Southwest, but whatever it was, it inspired a vision in O'Leary that still burns.
I'm going to take a guess that he saw "the napkin".
American business lore tells us that one late night in 1967, Rollin King (another wannabe airline tycoon) asked his lawyer, Herb Kelleher, out for a drink. That evening, King told Kelleher about an idea he had for an airline. Picking up a pen, King wrote the names of Texas's three biggest cities on his cocktail napkin: Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio. Then he connected the three with a triangle. It was a bone-headedly simple drawing, illustrating a bone-headedly simple concept: forget the "hub-and-spoke" system; instead, just connect the secondary airports at the three places most businesspeople in Texas wanted to go.
It worked. Kelleher bought the idea, and Southwest took off using the napkin as its route map - it has never looked back.
I love that story. As an impassioned advocate of the use of simple pictures in business, I can't think of a better example of how a quick sketch on the back of a napkin can convey an idea.
I've always drawn; sketching things out is one of the clearest memories I have of childhood. When I started my working life, my first job was as a graphic designer, and it made sense that I drew all the time, because everyone in design draws. But when I moved into managing my own businesses and then into management consulting, the fact that I drew made me odd, because nobody in business draws.
Which I always thought was a shame, since I knew that every time I picked up a pen in a meeting and started sketching out my idea, magic would happen in the room. People would pay an extraordinary amount of attention to what I was saying, would actively look and listen, and most important of all, would quickly join in the development of the idea.
Twenty years of consulting for organisations such as Microsoft, Wal-Mart, Wells Fargo and the US Navy has left me convinced in the power of pictures as a business tool. I know that any business challenge - business strategy, resource allocation, project management, product development, you name it - can be clarified, if not outright solved, through the use of a picture. And I also know that the pictures that work are so simple that anybody can draw them.
I doubt if it will surprise anyone when I say that pictures can convey more specific and memorable information than words, that pictures - especially of complex concepts - "stick" better than bullet lists, that pictures can communicate many ideas simultaneously and immediately, and above all, that pictures can transcend language barriers. What may be surprising is that the pictures I'm talking about are something we can all create.
Thinking with pictures is not the exclusive domain of the artistically talented or trained. It's a talent we are all born with, yet few of us ever have the opportunity to improve - 75% of the neurons in our brains that are processing sensory information are processing vision, and sight is far-and-away the most important means for us to learn about the world around us. Think about this: walk into a class of primary school children and - with the teacher's permission, of course - ask the six-year-olds how many can draw. Every hand will go up. Now ask how many can read: perhaps two little hands will go up. Now walk into a secondary school and ask the 16-year-olds the same two questions. How many can draw? Maybe three hands. How many can read? Every hand.
Don't get me wrong: reading and writing are fundamental and essential. So is vision. The reason most businesspeople are uncertain about their ability to solve problems with pictures is that they are uncertain about their ability to draw. "I'm not visual; I can't draw," is the comment I hear from someone in every meeting I attend. My response is that if we're visual enough to walk into the room and find a place to sit down without falling down, we're visual enough to understand everything we are going to talk about, and to find value in it. I've never been let down.
To help people overcome this lack of confidence, I break the entire "visual thinking" process down into four discrete steps: looking, seeing, imagining, and showing. Each step makes demands on a different part of our innate visual abilities, and each step plays an important role in learning to take in the big picture.
Most important of all, once we realise how good we already are at visually processing the world around us, we realise that drawing itself is only a small part of visual thinking, and it comes at the very end of the process, not at the beginning.
Nothing is more engaging to a live audience than seeing a picture created in real time. It really is pure magic. Partly that's because when we see the problem and solution drawn out for us, we mentally participate in the process and "get" what we're seeing. Even more importantly, a picture drawn by hand is not perfect, and its imperfections invite commentary and discussion, rather than the arguments about minute details that usually accompany a "finished" diagram. In fact, because a more polished picture looks "done", it is more likely to shut down discussion than stimulate it.
Like anything, becoming confident enough to start drawing in a business meeting or presentation takes practice. Next time you face a business problem, try this on your own:
1. Draw a small circle in the middle of a page and label it "my business" (or "me").
2. Now, off to one side, draw a larger second circle, and call it "my customers".
3. Draw an arrow between the circles, and label it "my sales channel".
4. Add a few words describing that channel: is it "good", "needs improvement", "solid", "stretched", etc.
5. On the other side of the "my customer" circle, draw a third circle and call it "my competitor".
6. Is this circle bigger than yours? Is it closer to your customers, or further away? Think about what you're starting to see here in the relationships of these circles, and note down any thoughts that occur.
7. Draw an arrow between "competitor" and "customer" and describe that channel.
We've just started, and already our minds are starting to seeing sizes, relationships, and interactions that would have been invisible if we hadn't started drawing. Keep going and see what emerges. Within seconds we'll begin to come up with ideas that we wouldn't have had if we'd just been talking. We can't help it: all we're doing is feeding our brains the chance to do what they love - solve problems with pictures.
· Dan Roam is author of "The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures"