Running notes from the recent Dave Gray workshop at Arvetica.

Dave Gray, founder of Xplane, gave a great workshop on how to use visual techniques to organize ideas and share them more effectively with others. Here are my notes:

• Drawing allows to agree more easily on things and is a more effective way to present and share ideas. Pictures allow to communicate with short term memory via the visuospatial sketchpad, and to reach long term memory.
• A picture is worth 84.1 words ;) which is not bad even if it is below what conventional wisdom teaches us.
• Every 5 years old can draw. We have all been 5 years old. We can all draw ;) and it proved right for
• With a basic set of shapes one can draw everything. It is a sort of visual alphabet (line, arc, circle, square, angle, etc…) that can be combined to draw anything. Dave offers a few tricks, like the fact that we tend to draw large heads and small bodies while the opposite makes it more simple to show attitudes.
• Now to the core of the process Xplane works with:
  
  Clarity leads to Understanding, which leads to Decisions that turn into Actions who produce a result. Dave advocates a process that allows to work on all the steps of this process and produce better results. The idea is to start from the end and work back to finally create 5 or 6 drawings which will create clarity, and all the steps afterwards.
• Results
  What are the expected results? For example: convince my boss our team needs a new office. That’s the easy part.
• Actions & Decisions
  The goal of this step is to identify the actions that will have to be made to achieve the goals. To do this, Dave suggests to start identifying the “ministries of no” - i.e. those who can prevent you from achieving your result (a boss, a colleague, a client) - and list the decisions they will have to make.After that, impersonate each ministry of no and draw the following on a poster:
  
  • What is the decision that person needs to make for you?
  • What is that person thinking about what you are asking?
  • What is that person seeing? (in our example, could be “sees the Google offices pictures in Wired)
  • What is that person hearing (from peers, boss, etc…)?
  • What is that person saying

  Do this for each “ministry of no” and you will be able to come up with the most common questions, which allows to decide on which ones it is crucial to communicate.

  Once you have all the key questions, order them by topic without any pre-conceived notion of what the topics should be. Put each question on a post-it, and start organizing them in columns. Naturally you should come up with 5-6 columns, one of them very likely will be all questions related to money (”how much will it cost? why should I spend my budget on this?”). Each column is a topic you will need to address with one drawing, so you just found out how many pictures you will have to draw.

  Now we need to order the drawings. For that rely on simple story telling techniques: your drawings should follow the Situation -> Complication -> Resolution flow used in movies. In our example, “Why the team needs a new office” is the situation, “What is the new office we propose” the complication and “How we will move to the new office” the resolution.

• Understanding & Clarity
  Now is time to draw. Each of your drawing should address one of the topics identified at the previous step. Remember that metaphors are good to express emotions, literal drawings are good to illustrate processes, and schematic drawings the best way to explain logic. A mix of these types of drawings should allow you to clarify your points. Try this, it is much easier than you think.

That’s it! You just used visual thinking. This method, starting from the goal, moving up to the more complex and numerous questions to find the “meta questions” and address them via drawings is quite powerful.

I am now looking forward to Arvetica’s next workshop on may 28 on how to make powerful powerpoint presentations. I will be looking for a few tips to pass to the LIFT speakers.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 3:08 pm and is filed under design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.