By Tim Wilson, Editor & Writer, Boston College Center

At this morning’s opening session of the Boston College Center’s International Corporate Citizenship Conference, more than 400 attendees reached for a napkin simultaneously. But they weren’t responding to a mass coffee spill.

What they were doing was participating in an exercise by visual thinking consultant Dan Roam to help them understand his simple proposition: Regardless of how big or small or what type, any problem can be solved with pictures.

Founder of Digital Roam Inc., and author of the bestseller “The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures”, Roam has demonstrated his proposition works in a big way. He has helped global giants such as Microsoft, Google, Wal-Mart, Boeing and the U.S. Senate solve complex problems through visual thinking.

Roam explained that of everything that comes into the human brain through senses, three-fourths comes in through the powerful visual system we each possess. He assures even those who have questioned their drawing abilities since middle school that they have the visual ability to attack problems with pictures. “If you can find a seat without a falling down,” he told the audience, “You are visual enough to do what we are attempting.”

Roam pointed out that while few kindergarteners can read and write, they will all enthusiastically raise their hands when asked if they can draw. But 10 years later, those same kids will claim the ability to read and write but doubt their skill at drawing. In Roam’s view, we don’t embrace visual thinking to solve problems because the education system doesn’t believe it’s a valid way. “It’s not what we teach,” he said. “We can’t measure it so we don’t do it.”

In explaining the power of pictures to solve problems, Roam presented a pair of unwritten rules for visual thinking.

Visual Thinking Unwritten Rule 1: Whoever best describes a problem is the person most likely to solve the problem. Roam offered another interpretation of the rule for corporate citizenship practitioners: Whoever draws the best picture gets the funding. Roam described a number of examples of times when a visual approach to solving a problem carried the day. He shared the story of a triangle drawn on the back of a napkin in 1967 delivered intrastate air travel to Texas and resulted in Southwest Airlines. He told how a visual depiction on a napkin of something called the Laffer Curve to understand the relation of tax rates and revenues led to what would become supply side economics or Reaganomics.

And he gave attendees a fascinating glimpse into something he collaborated with an MD/MBA friend on called Healthcare Napkins All that may help move the debate on health care reform so that it is better understood regardless of an individual’s position. Roam commented that generating angst and anger was not the intent of those on any side of the debate. “The issue is not disagreement,” he said, “It’s lack of understanding.”

Roam said there are visions on health care reform about where it is and where it should go. But in examining the 1,447-page House bill he found no pictures. “This is an unreadable document,” he exclaimed. “It’s impossible to say what we think about it. What might happen if we tried it with pictures?”

Roam’s visual explanation of American health care was selected by Business Week as “The World’s Best Presentation of 2009″ and was featured on Fox News and the Washington Post. He was contacted by the White House about it and told attendees that while he is not at liberty to divulge anything just yet, they should not be surprised if they begin to see more simple visual communications on health care.

Roam remarked that if anyone needs to communicate complex ideas simply it’s Washington and business. So why don’t we do it more? He believes it may be that some people see it as patronizing, as if they are telling someone they are not smart enough to understand something without resorting to simple pictures.

In looking at people’s attitudes on using pictures to solve problems, Roam has found a pretty consistent breakdown with about 25 percent who can’t wait to write on a white board if given a chance, 50 percent who maybe don’t think they can draw but can see what’s great in others’ pictures and may make interesting additions, and a remaining 25 percent who contend they are not visual. These people, said Roam, are thinking frankly, “this is all a bunch of crap.”

But Roam noted that it is important to get these people engaged in solving problems because they see and understand the details but can’t conceive that complex issues can be conveyed with simple pictures.

In explaining how indeed simple pictures can explain complex material, Roam told about his work with Wal-Mart on telling consumers that its efforts to be an environmentally sustainable business was genuine and not merely PR with a green tint. While Wal-Mart had the data to back up its claim of sincerity, that data was not compelling. Roam presented a way to use pictures to show how Wal-Mart works with “a little cartoon” built in layers. Those layers could then be broken apart to show individual aspects of the total impact of Wal-Mart’s environment efforts.

But Roam pointed out it was not the pictures in the final product that mattered. It was the simple drawings he made in his notebook while working with Wal-Mart executives to come up with ideas for analyzing and presenting their complex data in a simple way.

Roam’s story of solving Wal-Mart’s problem brought him to his second unwritten rule.

Visual Thinking Unwritten Rule 2: The more human your picture, the more human your response. We like to look at things that match the way we see.

Using simple stick figure images to demonstrate, Roam told how even those images without color or shading can invite our visual processing center to kick in and allow us to deduce meaning from what is before our eyes. In drawing those pictures, by starting with simple circles, we can identify where we stand in relation to our problems. With that as a start, he explained, our visual processing center lets us divide problems into six slices based on the six ways that we see and the questions they answer:

• First slice – Who and what we are looking at.
• Second slice – How much. It draws the charts that measure.
• Third slice – Where things are. It draws our map.
• Fourth slice – When things happen. It pays attention to changes in other slices and creates a  timeline
• Fifth slice – How things happened. It identifies cause and effect like a flow chart
• Sixth slice – Why it all happened. Where we add it all up in an equation.

After arming attendees with a new way to communicate and solve problems with pictures while they had a ready supply of napkins available, Roam issued a challenge. He told them to go into today’s breakout sessions and then back to their companies ready to start solving problems by drawing that first small circle.

“Instead of starting to talk about it, go ahead and pick up a piece of paper and draw that first circle and you will begin to think about solving your problems in a completely different way.”

Tags: 2010 Conference, Dan Roam, visual thinking
This entry was posted by Tim Wilson, Editor & Writer, Boston College Center on Monday, April 12th, 2010 at 3:12 PM, and is filed under Center News & Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.