The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures

One Minute Bottom Line

Review

While "The Back of the Napkin" isn't about a new language or programming technique, it may be one of the best investments in time and money you could make. That's because what it does address is how to think about problems and communicate our solutions in a visual way. If you've been in this business for any length of time, you've probably sketched out ideas for a design or drawn boxes and arrows on a white board to explain how something works. This book shows you how to be better at both.

“The Back of the Napkin” is divided into four sections. Section one introduces and explains visual thinking. Each of the remaining sections covers one of the steps for using visual thinking to solve problems: Discovering Ideas, Developing Ideas, and Selling Ideas.

Because the chapters are relatively short (about 15 pages) and contain lots of drawings, I’m going to focus on the book’s sections instead of individual chapters.

Part I: Introductions – Anytime, Anyone, Anywhere
The introduction starts by asking a few innocent questions:

• What if there was a quicker way to look at problems, understand and confidently address them, and quickly convey that understanding to others?
• What if there was a way to solve business problems efficiently, effectively? And what if the process was enjoyable?

Not surprisingly it turns out that such a process exists, it’s called visual thinking, and this book shows you how to do it in a reasonable time frame. In fact, the author’s goal was to create a book that you could read in the time it takes to fly coast to coast, and then be ready to start “solving problems with pictures.”

The rest of the introduction expands on those goals. We look at the six kinds of problems that can be solved: issues about who and what, how much or how many, when, where, how, and why. We look at what kind of pictures we'll draw and, in keeping with the book’s title, the author states that you don’t need any advanced technology to use visual thinking. All you need are your eyes, mind, hands, and something to draw with and on – like pen and paper, or a whiteboard and erasable markers.

The introduction ends with a quick look at the four steps of visual thinking (and a reminder that this is not necessarily a linear process):

• Looking: is semi-passive and involves taking in visual information to build a big-picture sense of things.
• Seeing: is an active process, scanning for things worth a deeper inspection – pattern matching is involved on some level.
• Imagining: taking the information from Looking and Seeing and manipulating it using your mind’s eye.
• Showing: creating a visual representation of information from the previous steps to form an answer to the problem we’re trying to address.

Part II: Discovering Ideas
Part II lays the groundwork for learning about and understanding visual thinking. Roam states that the key to drawing well is being able to see well, which depends on looking. So, he starts with the basics of looking: how our eyes and brain work together, and what happens when we first step into a new environment and take a look around.

First, we orient ourselves in space and determine our position, then we do a little pattern matching to identify people and things we’re familiar with, and after that we determine which direction we need to move so we can get where we want to be. The interesting thing is that, according to Roam, we perform the same exact tasks when we’re looking at a business diagram.

Now that we understand a bit about why looking is important, Roam presents four rules to help improve our looking skills and build a foundation for visual thinking; not surprisingly, this section has plenty of sketches to illustrate the author’s points.

The next chapter focuses on the Six Ways of Seeing, which involves taking the information gathered from Looking, determining what’s important, and finding patterns in the information. Roam explains each of the six ways and provides images to help lock-in the ideas presented, then shows how to use the six ways to solve a problem.

Chapter 6 takes us from Seeing what’s there to Imagining what isn’t, and introduces us to the SQVID which is a framework of sorts based on five questions. The questions will help you examine a problem from many viewpoints, and answering them will help you decide what kind of pictures would work best for a presentation. The chapter ends with an example showing how to using the SQVID when solving a problem.

Now that we’ve covered Looking, Seeing, and Imagining, it’s time to take a look at different ways of Showing. Roam presents the <6> <6> model which maps each of the "Six Ways of Seeing" to a type of picture. Roam then reveals the Visual Thinking Codex which combines the <6> <6> model and the SQVID on a shared grid; the intersections show the two types of pictures you might use to present that kind of data.

Part III: Developing Ideas
This section is subtitled, “The Visual Thinking MBA: Putting Visual Thinking to Work”, and it is a case study showing how to actually create the type of pictures described in the Visual Thinking Codex. In it Roam walks us through the process of using the Codex and producing at least one example of each of the pictures in the Codex.

While this is a short description, the section itself takes up almost a third of the books pages.

Part IV: Selling Ideas
Part IV is about presenting our ideas to others and explores the answers to two questions:

1. What’s the best to verbally describe out pictures?
2. If they require verbal descriptions, are they bad pictures?

The last chapter is an example of using visual thinking to describe the visual thinking process by comparing it with a Swiss Army knife. It’s a great self-referential example that produces a nice visual reminder of the entire process. BTW, the finished diagram (and other useful pictures) can be seen and downloaded from the Downloadable Tools page on the Back of the Napkin website.