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Monday, August 18, 2008

Solving Problems, Discovering & Selling Ideas Using Pictures


The Back Of the Napkin

Excellent book for learning how to Solve problems, discover & Sell Ideas using Pictures

They Say a Picture is worth Thousand words. After reading this book(The Back of the Napkin- by Dan Roam), I truly believe a picture is worth thousand words and should be extensively used in corporate boardrooms for explaining everything instead of those boring bulleted power point presentations.
The book gives a methodology regarding how we can solve problems, discover new ideas & sell these using just pictures.
To give you a Jist of the book, the book starts with describing four steps of visual thinking process which are LOOK, SEE, IMAGINE & SHOW.
LOOK means collecting & screening of Information, SEEING means analyzing the information, IMAGINING means imagining ways in which information/ideas to be shared can be, SHOW means displaying the information.
Inorder to analyze/solve the problem efficiently, The author has given Important tool- the 6W's of seeing which include Who/what, How much, Where, when, how & why. Using this tool one looks at any problem from WHO/WHAT, HOW, WHEN, HOW MUCH, WHERE & WHY angle and thus can solve any problem.The author has given examples of how to use this tool efficiently using pictures.
After look & see section, the next section is Imagine which includes one more tool, SQVID which stands for Simplicity, Quality, Visual, Individual & Delta. With the help of this tool one learns to imagine ways to represent ideas depending upon the Target audience he/she is dealing with. This tool works as a graphic equalizer to help visually displaying ideas based on TG which may be number crunchers MBA's or imaginative designers.
But whenever one is solving problem or giving Idea, how much detail pictures should be used and whether they should be give qualitative or quantitative information. Well Combining both tools mentioned above the author gives a codex which helps to know what kind of pictures to select and what is the nature of information to be shown using pictures (Simple/elaborate, Qualitative/Quantitative, Vision/Execution, etc)
In the last section, the author informs about selling ideas using pictures.
By solving real life business problem and dozens of example along with which pictures to be used, this is an excellent book for managers as well as designers who wants to Simplify the whole process of solving problems, discovering & selling Ideas using Pictures.


Till next time

Keep Imagining


NeErAj

image source: www.idea-sandbox.com/.../back_of_napkin_book.jpg