I am a visual thinker.  For me, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Dan Roam’s book, The Back of The Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas With Pictures, has been on my Amazon Wish List since it was released earlier this year.

The book jumped up a few notches on my Wish List the other day when I got a chance to see a few of the Visual Thinking tools from the book that Dan made available for download on his blog.

This is good stuff.

Dan explains in his book that there 5 Focusing Questions (or S.Q.V.I.D) to ask when you have something to explain….

1) Simple or Elaborate?

2) Quality or Quantity?

3) Vision or Execution?

4) Individual or Compare?

5) Change or As-Is?

He also presents the <6><6> rule which explains the 6 ways we see things and the 6 ways to show things.

And then brings it all together in the Visual Thinking Codex.

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The Back of The Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures by Dan Roam (website, blog)

Kind of reminds me of those cool UPS commercials where the guy draws on the whiteboard

Question -

Can you draw….

- your organizational model

- your business model

- a product idea

- a solution to a problem

- your sales pitch

using a few pictures on the back of a napkin?

And if you can’t, could that mean that your organizational model, business model, product idea, solution, sales pitch is too complicated? Is there room for simplification? Are your employees, teammates, customers going to get it?

So I gave it a try…..on a virtual napkin (really just wanted a reason to try out Twiddla)

I took a few minutes to draw a map of the teams at my work that I interact with to get things done

What did I learn?

- I need a really big napkin

- Lots of handoffs (if you have lots of handoffs, they better be clean and well-defined)

- Lots of different groups that roll up to different managers

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