Our education system is focused on producing compliant factory workers. We are graded by our ability to give that one correct answer. Emphasis is placed on mathematics and science while art and humanities are totally ignored. Unfortunately, the real world is much more complex and non-linear. Emotions play a critical role in decision-making. Conventional planning and analysis tools are inept at deriving meaning from such complexity. Therefore, visualization tools are becoming popular. They crunch all the available information in an image and make it amenable for decision-making. The same ideas can be presented with different approaches, and the final solution can be their collage.
We are never formally taught to visualize and sketch. Therefore, all of us believe that we have to be an artist to do it. That's like saying that we have to be Shakespeare to blog! Visualization is not intended to produce a piece of art but to provide a model to work with. Most of the business problems are human-centric. It is, therefore, essential to learn sketching scenarios involving people. Here are my top 5 rules for visualization.
For communicating in any language, we need to first build our vocabulary. In visualization, it starts from basic shapes and goes up to capturing emotions through body language.
We dread sketching human figures. Most often, the challenge is in drawing eyes, maintaining proportions. I don't think that it is needed in visual thinking. Firstly, we eliminate body parts that do not move or convey emotions. So, ears and nose are out. A single line is most often enough to draw an eye and lips.
Writing long paragraphs is necessary to describe something. We bring the same rigor to sketching. But that is not necessary. In drawings, less is more. Each of us has a signature facial feature. For example, Hitler can be sketched by a tooth-brush style mustache or a reverse Swastik symbol.
A good comedian does not complete his joke. He pauses at 80% and lets the audience figure out the remaining 20%. That way, people get involved and enjoy it even more. The same applies to sketching. We should not spend time in detail. In the brainstorming session, people fill in the gaps with their imagination.
Thinking in metaphors is essential in visualization. Metaphors make complex issues easy to understand by relating them to something familiar to us. For example, a target can be represented by a dartboard or a flag hoisted on a summit.
Metrics:
List the business challenges you are facing.
Pick one of them.
Identify and observe customers who are impacted by it.
Create a storyboard sketching the steps from problem to solution.
Gain insights from it and develop solutions.
Subodh
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