Digital Roam

Want be more creative? Move abroad.

Frommer's travel site today quotes a study in the May edition of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association, indicating that people who have lived outside their native country may develop more creative minds. The full study is here.



I can't speak for anyone else, but I know that in my own life the times I lived outside the USA forced me to become a more creative thinker. At age seventeen I moved from Montana to Thailand for a year. That was an extreme shock, but after the initial cultural drowning period I loved every minute of it. It was a wonder in every way to see that the world was more than downtown Billings, MT.

Later, I lived and worked in Russia for several years. I often say that everything I learned about business I learned while watching communism stagger towards becoming capitalism. It wasn't all pretty, but it was without a doubt the most formative business experience of my life.

The APA study concludes with this thought:
It may be that those critical months or years of turning cultural bewilderment into concrete understanding may instill not only the ability to “think outside the box” but also the capacity to realize that the box is more than a simple square, more than its simple form, but also a repository of many creative possibilities.

I can easily see that picture. And I agree completely.

Who has a hoodie, who has a hat: the best (the only?) song about charts

Geoff was watching PBS with his daughter last night. They saw this clip for kids about charts and went bananas. Then they sent it to me.

Next time anyone needs theme music for their charts, look no further.

Chrome in comics

Scott McCloud's classic book Understanding Comics had long been in my mind when I decided to write my own book on visual thinking. Although I don't agree with everything in his approach (and suspect Scott probably doesn't agree with everything in mine), I admire tremendously his genius in understanding how we process visual stories, and his ability to tell stories with pictures. When it comes to communicating with images, Scott is a god.

As of yesterday, Google clearly agrees.

Google announced the Beta launch of Chrome, their new open-source web browser. Sort of aimed at Firefox, but clearly targeting Microsoft's territory, Chrome in theory represents a new concept in how we will browse the web. More importantly, Chrome (again, in theory) represents a new concept in how our computers will themselves talk with the web.

I emphasize "theory" here because superficially Chrome doesn't seem to do a whole lot more than existing browsers do. (I've been testing it all day and mainly notice its drawbacks -- like the fact that in Chrome my Typepad interface shows only raw HTML code. Yuck: back to Firefox folks.)

But here's where things get interesting. Because the important nuances of Chrome lie in the guts and technical details of how it was designed and built, a lay person like me is unlikely to get right away what makes it so great.

And that's where Scott's genius enters the picture. Google hired Scott to create an entire comic book explaining Chrome's inner workings. Not only is the comic lovely, after reading it I now for the first time understand what the heck a browser really does.

Proving once again the power of a simple picture to clarify a complex concept. Thank you Google. And thank YOU Scott!

This one time at brand camp...

Tom Fishburne is the funniest brand manager alive. (Probably the smartest too -- especially when it comes to seeing what really goes on in the alternate universe known as "product marketing".)

Tom just published a new book of his marketing cartoons called "This One Time at Brand Camp". It is good. I mean, really good. It's not just that these are great cartoons (they are) nor that they are timely (Tom's brilliant take on greenwashing is alone worth the price of the book), it's that Tom gets inside the mind of marketers better than anyone I've ever come across... and then draws it out in a way that will be beautifully painful to anyone who has ever wondered "where in the heck did they come up with THAT slogan?"

Anyway, enough words. Here's my Post2Post review:

I had a chance to ask Tom to single out his favorite single cartoon. Here's what he picked, and the story behind it...

From Tom: About 8 years ago, when I first started drawing cartoons in business school, I took a trip to Paris with my wife and stumbled across a gallery filled with cartoons by Jean-Jacques Sempe (who I later learned does covers for the New Yorker, among other things). I had a Wayne's World "I'm not worthy, I'm not worthy" moment. They were screamingly funny and poignant all at the same time, but none of the cartoons had any caption or dialog.  He did it all without a single word, just by how he drew it. 

 

Since then, I've thought the highest zen master form of cartooning was where you didn't need to even say the punchline. It's deceptively hard to do.

 

I like this cartoon because (even though it does have a title), all of the humor is in the scene. We've all heard the expression, "you can't cut your way to growth", but most organizations are equipped with cutting tools, not with growing tools. And, if we've ever been passionate about innovation, sometimes you feel like that lone farmer in the center, planting the tree while warily looking at all of the naysayers. But, you do it anyway, even against those odds, because you believe so much in the idea. And every once in a while, the idea blossoms and proves all of the naysayers wrong.

 

In the case of the inspiration for this cartoon, the cutting tools won the round, but I kept at it, and eventually got it to grow.

I love that story. What I love even more is that when I read Tom's book, I marked my own favorite cartoons with post-its. My top choice?

The same cartoon.

The ultimate master class of visual thinking. With Kermit.

Every once in a while we stumble across something that we connect with so deeply, we're left transformed and breathless with wonder. So it is with Kermit.

This unbelievable clip is from the Ed Sullivan show of 1966. Wow.

Click here to watch.

I've always known that I was only only standing on the shoulders of giants. Now I know that those shoulders are green, and about 10 inches high.

As Mr. K, the visual guru says, "You gotta rewind into the cosmic infinity of everything, see... cause I am a bonafide, true-blue, guaranteed-or-your-money-back visual thinker."

Ah. To learn from the best.

Guy Kawasaki has a smart momma

Guy Kawasaki was intrigued enough about my visual thinking approach that he interviewed me here and posted about it here. Thanks Guy!

But then he went further and asked me to put my money where my mouth was and prove that a potentially complex idea really can be made more clear through a picture. He pointed me towards Alltop (one of his many brilliant online tools) and asked me to come up with a simple visual explanation of what it does.

My final analysis:

Alltop helps you find your nuggets.

We're both happy with the result. That's the best reaction any picture can generate: smiles of comprehension!

The best drawing appliation ever -- and you already own it!

Based on feedback I've received at hundreds of presentations, the most important single piece of visual thinking advice I can give is this: if you want to draw on-screen, just open PowerPoint.

Yes, the best drawing program on the planet is already on your computer -- and it's not even from Apple. :-) It's the built-in "PRESENTATION MODE" drawing application in PowerPoint (aka PPT).

The drawing is smooth, touch-sensitive (for those of you on a tablet PC) and intuitive to use. Here's how to access this wonder:

1. Open your PPT document.
2. Go to presentation mode.
3. You will see 4 faint icons in the lower left corner (if you can't see them, open up a blank white page in PPT; sometimes colored backgrounds make the icons difficult to see.)
4. Still in presentation mode, mouse over the PEN; a set of options will pop up (see attached)
5. From there, select pen type, color, etc.
6. Draw directly on your slide.
7. When you exit presentation mode, PPT will ask if you want to "keep notations" If yes, your drawings will become embedded 'vector' objects in your original PPT; if no, you'll go back to your original.*

* For Office 2003 and earlier, you'll need to right-click on your presentation and choose "pointer options".

I use this lovely little application 100% of the time when I am presenting. It works for large audiences (you draw on screen while connected to a projector) and small audiences (people can see you work right on-screen). I even use this as my standard drawing tool when creating new illustrations while on the plane or anyplace where I don't have access to a scanner. It even works for live drawing during webinars online.

Although I use a tablet PC, the drawing application works exactly the same with a regular mouse and screen.

Funniest thing of all, I was giving a "back of the napkin" presentation to 100 people last week at Microsoft up in Redmond. It was a great session and at the end someone asked me what application I was using to do the live sketching on-screen. When I showed them it was plain-old out-of-the-box PPT, the crowd went wild! I've never had so many cheers.

Made my day. And theirs. 

Visual thinking is 32,000 years young

As I was finishing up the manuscript for The Back of the Napkin last year, I had a bunch of fun conversations with Will Weisser and his publicity team at Portfolio, brainstorming on the promotional copy for the book. We were all excited about how the book had come together and knew we were on to something powerful. There haven't been many business books about how to solve problems with pictures, so it was hard not to say, "Wow! This is a completely new way of thinking!"

We all knew that wasn't true, of course: people have been drawing since the dawn of time. (Maybe not businesspeople, but you never know.) Which got me wondering. How old is "visual thinking" anyway? Who were the first people to use pictures as a way of understanding the world? How far did the use of pictures predate written language?

I recalled from art history classes a couple vague facts about the famous cave paintings of Lascaux in France, but couldn't put those sketchy bison into any broader context. (And frankly, with a business book about to come out, the last thing I needed to lose focus by digging through pre-ancient history.)

So it was with snowballing fascination that I read last week's New Yorker article by Judith Thurman about the earliest cave painters. From the opening paragraph, something clicked in me: this wasn't just a story about some random proto-humans a zillion years ago scratching out animals on cave walls; this is OUR story.

As Thurman makes clear, nobody has any real idea who these cave painters were or why they were compelled to draw, but we do know that they -- forgive me, WE -- drew long before we wrote. And as Picasso said after viewing the paintings at Lascaux, "They've invented everything." That got me hooked.

As much as I loved the descriptions of the paintings, the debates about how they were drawn, and the academic battles about why, what really got me about the story was the description of time; more specifically, how close we really are to the earliest humans who drew.

When I read this paragraph, my mind was officially blown:

"Since recorded history began, around 3200 BC, with the invention of writing in the Middle East, there have been some two hundred human generations."

What?? Only 200 of generations of humans since the beginning of written history? How could that be? I thought history was a lot longer than that: the ancients, the Greeks, the Romans, the dark ages... you're telling me all that happened (*everything* happened?) in a number of generations I could count in less than a minute. That I had to see.

So I mapped it out. And here's what the length of recorded history looks like, generation by generation. (Click the image to enlarge.)

Then if we add in all the generations since the earliest cave paintings ever discovered (those of the Chauvet Caves, dated to 32,000 years ago), we see that there really haven't been all that many of us. (Click the image to enlarge.)

Solving problems with pictures isn't new. It's what we've always done. "Always" just turns out to be a lot shorter than I thought.

Boeing vs Bloomberg: Visuals are the key to situational awareness

I recently had the career highlight of giving a talk about my book to the Boeing Managers' Association up in Tukwila, WA. As a lifelong airplane fanatic and nearly lifelong pilot, having the undivided attention of one hundred people who build the big airplanes is as good as it gets.

I don't normally show family photos in a business presentation, but this time I had no choice: what better way to illustrate how I got my start in visual thinking and 3D "situational awareness"?

Having thus established my bona fides, I shared an example of how good visual information displays help people make good decisions -- especially when too much information is coming in. (This was an example I'd been waiting for years to share, and with Boeing I knew I had the right audience.)

The example is this. Seventy years ago, it took a crew of five looking at 200 instruments to guide an aircraft across an ocean.

Today, it takes a crew of one looking at two screens to do the same thing. (Not that anyone flies with a crew of one, but they could.)

The most interesting thing here is that the crew today requires exactly the same information as sixty years ago: speed, altitude, orientation, direction, distance, and fuel remaining. What's changed is our technological ability to collect, synthesize, and display that data.

Why not apply the same concepts to other tasks that require the quick analysis and synthesis of vast amounts of data? Financial analysis comes to my mind. With all the computing horsepower we have available today, why do most spreadsheets look exactly the way they did 200 years ago?

Why do we have to pay thousands of dollars a month for a Bloomberg terminal? And where's the financial services equivalent of the pilot's PFD (Primary Flight Display)?

I'm convinced anyone trying to come up with a better spreadsheet should take flying lessons. Nothing forces you to think about better data displays than trying to land in the rain.

Who knows: if the gang at Bear Stearns (not to mention everyone who touched our latest 'special financial instruments') had a better display of where they were going, we could have avoided this latest crash.

After all, there hasn't been a single commercial aviation fatality in the US in three years. Wouldn't it be nice to say the same thing about the mortgage industry?

Southwest Airlines keeps up the napkin spirit

The founding of Southwest Airlines on the back of a cocktail napkin is my favorite "solving a problem with a picture" story. It goes like this:

Way back in 1967, Texas businessman Rollin King's WILD GOOSE AIRLINES (a small charter flying operation that shuttled sportsmen around the Lone Star state) failed financially, so he hired ex-NY lawyer Herb Kelleher to close the books. Afterward they retired to San Antonio's swankiest bar, The St. Anthony's Club, for a commemorative drink.

What they drank remains a mystery, but what is known is that at some point King picked up a napkin and said, "Herb, I have an idea for another airline; one that connects just the main metro areas of Texas..." He drew three dots on that napkin to represent Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio, then connected them with three lines to form a simple triangle.

Presto: Southwest Airlines was born. From that humble napkin emerged the most profitable airline in history.

(It's evident why the Southwest model was so innovative when you compare it to the route maps of the existing airlines of the day: the traditional hub-and-spoke models meant that a simple connection between these three Texas cities wasn't possible.)

Nice story. But what's even better is that I flew Southwest recently for the first time and guess what I saw on the cocktail napkins the flight attendants handed out?

That's right: the new Southwest route map. Southwest is the only airline that prints their map on their napkins. I've got to believe that's an homage to their heritage.