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Visual Thinking
Been revisiting Dan Roam’s ‘Back of the Napkin’. Those that really know me will recall my time in London with friend, colleague and ‘man of wisdom’ John Caswell. The last time we worked together we were delivering - well lets call them ‘insights’. through a mechanism called ‘Structured Visual Thinking’, utilizing ‘The 4D Method’. (Funny how things stick in your mind … I can still picture the table in Dallas that we were sitting at when we came up with the name - and if that isn’t the power of Visual Thinking, I don’t know what is.)
But back to the point - SVT is hard - and John is THE leading practitioner of that art and it is NOT for the feint of heart ! But, it is a subset of the wider discipline known as Visual Thinking - which needs to be understood before you can even start to think about adding structure. Dan’s book is a good reminder of the basics. And - as I was re-reading the book - out popped this visual. Says it all.
If you are stuck in trying to work out HOW to get across the idea that is formulating - does this help ? So many people get pictures when they see them. They ‘understand’ - but not like Charlie Harper’s understanding - they really do get it.
The truly odd thing is that so few people actually use visuals themselves, choosing to write gobs of words …. Just like this post ;)