The Back of the Napkin | Dan Roam | Talks at Google

Welcome, everyone, to Authors at Google. Today we have Dan Rome, who's going to show us and talk about his book, the Back of the Napkin. So originally when I thought about doing an intro, I thought, okay, maybe I should draw the intro, because that would be more appropriate. Unfortunately, my drawing skill is not quite there. So I, I will say the best I can do at this moment is welcome to Google.

There we go.

All right, Dan. Oh, yeah. And that's you. Ok. But on a more serious note, Dan Roam owns Digital Roam, which is a management consulting company. Usually he presents to executives, and today he's going to present to us. He has 20 years of experience in visual thinking and illustration, and his book is really about learning how to look, see, imagine, and show. So today he's going to show us how to use the napkins that you all have.

Thank you, Katina. Thank you. Are we going to avoid a conflict? Do I need to shut that one off? And I want to thank you all for coming. Good afternoon. My name is Dan, and for the next 45 minutes, I'll try to limit it to 45 minutes. I want to talk with you about solving problems with pictures. Because what I do, as Katina mentioned, I tend to work with major corporations, executives at big companies, and the proposition that I make to them is actually very simple. So what I say to these business people is I say we can solve our problems by using pictures. And I find that to be a pretty powerful statement. And people tend to agree with me. They find it very intriguing. But immediately when you think about it, solving problems with pictures, it really does right away bring up three big questions. And those questions, of course are, you know, which. Which problems are we talking about then? Which pictures are we talking about? And finally, and this is the most contentious question of them all, is, who is we? Meaning, who is going to do this? Who are these people who are going to solve problems with pictures? These three questions, which problems, which pictures? And who is going to do it? Are really the agenda for the rest of the time that we're going to talk. But I'm going to give you now kind of the quick. The quick answer. If you only had 30 seconds to think about this, this is the answer. Which problems can we solve with pictures? I firmly believe we can solve all of them. I mean this. Every single business problem that I have ever come across in any context with any company, whether it's a project management problem, a resource allocation problem, a business strategy problem, a technology or enterprise architecture type of problem, any problem can be clarified significantly. If not Outright solved through the use of a picture. I am completely convinced of this. And the problems that we're. The pictures that we're talking about are extraordinarily simple. I mean, literally, if you can draw a square and a circle and an arrow. And as Katina, who admitted that she's a terrible drawer, was able to do a stick figure and the ever treacherous smiley face, if you can draw those things, I guarantee that you can draw every type of picture that we're going to be talking about, which automatically kind of answers for us this third question, who's going to do this? It is my fundamental belief that we can all do this. And it's interesting because the biggest question that I get when I start talking about solving problems with pictures, every time I walk into a workshop or a seminar or a business session or a brainstorming session, there are people in the room who automatically say to me, dan, this sounds great, but I'm not a visual thinker. I'm not able to do this. I can't draw. I can't do what you're talking about. And I say, I understand that we all have our talents, we all have things that we're good at and things that we're not so good at. But think about it like this. I set the bar extraordinarily low. If you're visual enough to be. I'll say to this person who says they're not a visual thinker, if you're visual enough to be able to walk into the room and find a place to sit down without falling down, I guarantee you are visual enough to. To understand everything that we're going to talk about. We will talk about some of the neurobiology of why I believe this to be true, but it boils down to this. Essentially, we are fundamentally visual creatures. Well over 75% of the neurons in our brain that are processing sensory information, sensory input, are processing vision, which tells us a couple of things. Number one, it tells us that vision is really, really complicated, which is true. We're only just barely beginning to understand how vision works. But the second thing it tells us is how incredibly powerful and important vision and our sense of sight is to us as people, as we go about from the time that we're born, learning about the world, solving problems when we're infants, all the way up to solving problems when we become executives or when we become people who are working in a corporation. And what ends up happening is most people tend to forget that. And really, if there's one key takeaway, my central message Is that we already know how to do everything that I'm going to talk about. We already know how to draw the pictures, we already know how to think visually. Every single person in here, what happens is from about the time we're age 6, nobody continues to teach us in most cases how to take advantage of that ability and improve it. And kind of the proof is, if you think about this, if you ever have an opportunity, I doubt if there's very many of you. Is there anybody in here who has a child who's in kindergarten? Is there anybody here who's ever themselves been in kindergarten? Now think about this for a moment. If you have a chance, go into a kindergarten class where a bunch of six year olds are. And of course, with the teacher's permission, ask all the 6 year olds how many of you can draw. And every kid is going to raise their hand. I've tried this and I've seen it. It's true. Every kid will raise their hand how many can draw, Then ask them how many can read and write, and maybe one or two hands will go up. But now come back to the same class 10 years later, 10th grade, 16 year olds ask the same two questions. Ask how many people can draw. Maybe three hands will go up. Ask how many can read and write, and every hand will go up. Now don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with learning to read and write. I mean, that's absolutely critical and fundamental. But the shame is that something happens. We knew how to do this before we knew how to read and write. And what I'm really suggesting is we can get extraordinarily good at adding on and complementing our verbal abilities by focusing a bit on our visual abilities. I want to give you an example of exactly what I'm talking about when we talk about back of the napkin sketches. Because sometimes people say, well, how can that be powerful? How can you actually solve or clarify a business problem with one of these simple pictures? Let me show you how to create a napkin sketch. A business problem solving napkin sketch. And this is one I did not create. But this is the most famous back of the napkin business sketch that I've been able to come across. Was drawn in 1967. There's two guys, they're sitting in a bar in San Antonio, Texas. A guy named Rollin King and a guy named Herb Kelleher. Now, Rollin King had been running an airline in Texas. It was a little charter airline. It was called Wild Goose Airlines. And what he would do is he would transport. It was A charter airline. And he would transfly hunters from one part of Texas to another. And it was a total failure from a financial perspective. It was completely non successful. So he had to shut the company down. He hired his lawyer, Herb Kelleher, to come and shut the business down. They did so then after the business was closed, no more wild goose airlines. They went out to the bar to commiserate. And as they're sitting at the bar, St. Anthony's Club in downtown San Antonio, Rollin pulls out a napkin and says, herb, you're going to think I'm crazy because we just shut down an airline, but I have an idea for another airline. If you think about Texas, it's a big state. We've got a tremendous amount of business that's going on here. We've got these three main business areas. We have Dallas, we have the Houston area, we have the San Antonio area, and these are the three main business areas of Texas. Imagine if we made an airline that just connected those three cities. This could be a huge breakthrough because we could now for the first time have a business airline that was able to connect for Texas business people. The main method, metropolitan hubs. Herb said, sounds like a great idea. Why don't we go ahead and do it? Literally, off the back of the napkin was started Southwest Airlines. Now, the interesting part about this is that that napkin sketch itself I find to be a great story. And it's very simple and pictorially was able to create effectively a business plan. But where that picture becomes really interesting is when you compare it to what would have been the other pictures representing the competitive airlines of the time in the same area in Texas. And because at that time you couldn't fly directly between those three cities of Dallas, Houston and San Antonio because of the way that the hub and spoke system was set up of the airlines, you would have to go off through Cleveland or through Denver or through Phoenix in order to make the connection. So the real brilliance of the idea was pictorially imagining what is it that's complicated about the system that's out there now and coming up with a more simple idea and representing it with a picture. And if you think about it, I mean, that picture, that little triangle connecting three cities, it's so boneheadedly simple. I mean, any one of us could draw a picture like that. And those are the kind of pictures that I'm talking about. Now. It's interesting though, because when I keep sort of insisting that everybody can draw pictures, let's face it, we all recognize that everybody has a different level of visual talent. People approach visual thinking in a very different way. And the way I kind of map it out is, is I like to think of it as this sort of spectrum. And what I've been able to do through literally thousands of business meetings in a highly non scientific way is kind of try to keep track of where do people fall across this sort of spectrum. And what I've noticed is that one end of the spectrum, you have what I'm going to call the black pen people in any meeting. And this is typically in a typical business meeting, this is about 25% of the people is what I found. Just can't wait to pick up the pen and run to the whiteboard and start drawing out their idea. Call them the black pen people. They've got no fear, they're highly confident. Take a big black marker and go ahead and make some bold drawings right up there on the whiteboard immediately. Then in the middle, typically representing about half the people in a meeting are what I call the yellow pen people or the highlighters. Now the reason I call them this, these are the people who will be kind of sitting back watching the other person draw the picture and are kind of into it. But at the same time, the yellow pen person is the one who always says, you know, I can't draw, but. And then we'll go up to the picture that's already there. And what's really interesting is make the connections. This is why I call them the highlighter people. Find the areas in the drawing that's already there, that are really important, or the places where a lot of information can be drawn that are really fascinating and be able to say, those are the areas we need to focus on. And then that person who said I can't draw, but will start to create their own picture, which is starting to push forward the amount of information and the amount of insight that's contained within the picture. The last group, the last time, 25% of the meeting, the last quarter of the meeting, I'm going to call the red pen people. And I'd like to think that this little sketch is pretty representative of the body language that's going on. Because what the red pen person is doing most of the time when they see someone running up to the whiteboard and sketching out and then they have someone else connecting the dots, the redhead person is kind of sitting back and thinking, you know, this is bullshit. This is way, way, way too superficial. There is no way that this picture can be deep enough, can be significant. This is over so grossly Oversimplifying the situation we have, it's probably more dangerous to us than what we really need to talk about. Because the red pen person, typically, just by nature of this person's personality, is the person who probably does have the greatest real grasp of the facts and the details of the challenge that's in front of us. But typically then, because there are so many facts and details, often tends to look at the complexities and focus on the complexities that are in the situation. And when they look at the picture, they get really kind of anxious about it because it's not adequately representing what they think is the real issue. So what needs to happen is that, and I firmly believe this, I've seen it happen enough times, you really essentially have to get the red pen person pissed off enough, upset enough that they will finally go to the board themselves. They will take the eraser, they will erase half of what's there. They'll then take the red pen and then draw out what the real picture is. And so the kind of the joke that I think is that when you think about creating a true problem solving picture, as simple or as complex as it may be, in order to develop the picture that really is going to help you solve the problem, it sounds kind of funny, but it really does take. It takes a village to do it. You really have to get all of these different people involved. And every one of us I'll bet, falls somewhere on this spectrum. In fact, if I could just ask loosely and if we had more time, I have a little self assessment exercise that we can do. But just by a show of hands, how many people in here would consider themselves a sort of a black pen person? Can't wait to run up to the whiteboard and start drawing. How many people would, let's take the other end. How many people would consider them as kind of a red pen person and how many people would consider themselves kind of in the middle? It seems like a pretty good balance. And it's intriguing because I've gone to a lot of different companies. In fact, As you go to different businesses, you find out that each different business has a very distinct type of culture. And sometimes the culture is very much skewed towards this side and sometimes the culture is very much skewed towards this side. And it's interesting because I was very curious to think how at a company like Google was all of this going to shake out. I find it intriguing that you kind of map to what is. I've found the normal setting in most business situations, regardless of where we sit on that spectrum, though. What I have found is that as people who are involved in business, remember back ever since kindergarten, most people have not really been encouraged to think visually or develop their visual abilities. We essentially have two ways that we're taught in business to communicate. On the one hand, and I'm curious to know, is everybody familiar with the notion of an elevator pitch? Has everybody been taught an elevator pitch? Does Google even have an elevator pitch? Is there something the notion of the elevator pitch? Katina?

Yeah, to make information universally accessible.

To make information universally accessible. The whole idea behind the elevator pitch, you know, the whole concept is imagine that you get stuck in the elevator, you've got 30 seconds, and you need to convey to the potential partner or investor or CEO or what have you exactly what your business is about. Now, typically what I found is when people think about their elevator pitch, they come up with things that are almost by definition so generic that it's very difficult to get a lot of meaning out of them. You know, we leverage synergies in order to integrate touch points in order to maximize shareholder value. You know, the typical kind of elevator pitch. So this is on the one extreme of what we have for business communications. The problem I have with this is, let's face it, the reason that you're meeting someone in this metaphorical elevator is because they're on their way someplace else. So the likelihood of them really remembering what you had to say to begin with, their minds on something else anyway, is pretty low. So God only knows what they're going to recall of what you actually said to them. So we have that on the one extreme, and on the other extreme, if we're not doing the elevator pitch, the other option is we have literally death by PowerPoint. This, believe it or not, is a screenshot of an executive summary that I was given of a presentation a couple of years ago. This was the executive summary. And when you really started to get into it, you realize the amount of information in here is completely overwhelming. And really what you find is in business communications, we fall between those two. Either we're giving the 30 second elevator pitch, or we're going into a meeting where we know we're going to be sitting there for two hours having this tremendous amount of information that there is no conceivable way we're going to be able to digest. So what I suggest, and I think we're about to see the dawning of a new age, the age of the napkin sketch. I really believe that there is an extraordinary power not only in the communication side, but for ourselves as a way of coming up with discovering ideas and then developing those ideas and then sharing those ideas. When we simply figure out a way for ourselves initially to draw a simple picture that describes what our idea is. And now think about it like this. Now we've got an opportunity. We meet someone, let's say, in the airport. And this is the person who may be the potential investor or partner. If we can sit down with them and say, what my business does is we do three things, and we connect those things in this particular way. And this thing is really important to us. And this thing's a little bit less important if you're creating the picture. And again, this is something you work out in advance. In the same way the elevator pitch was not made up on the spot. Even though it may have seemed to the audience like it was spontaneous. The fact is it was worked out in advance. If we can take the time to use these simple pictures to help us figure out what we're talking about, we now have this incredibly powerful tool to use to share with other people when we meet them. And the beauty of it is that they're not going to forget what we told them. A couple of amazing things are going to happen. One is when we draw in front of someone at the same time that we're talking. For some reasons that we'll talk about in a moment, we are actually activating processing centers in the brain that are really, really excited. Our brain wants to get information visually as well as verbally. And if we were just talking them through, you know, we're running on a couple of cylinders. When we draw the picture at the same time that we're talking, they get it. And it's like mana for the person's brain. This is the way the brain wants to process information. So not only are they going to understand really well what we're talking about at the end of it, we then give them. We give them the napkin, and they've got the picture to keep. Now, I mean this metaphorically, of course, but the idea is really true. The picture is something that is archival and can be taken along. And. And we essentially guarantee that the person we gave it to that we drew this picture for really does understand what we were talking about in almost invariably, we can guarantee that they understood it in exactly the way we meant because we created the picture with them. So enough talk for a moment. I would like to kind of prove this point to you. So you all have a napkin? Is there anybody who doesn't have a napkin? I All hope you have something to write with as well. Is there anybody who needs a pen or something? Is there anybody who doesn't have something to write with? Because what I'd like to do really through the rest of this session is I want to create with you a little back of the napkin sketch, a problem solving toolkit, one way. And of course, in my book, in the book, the back of the napkin, there are several tools that I give that help us think better from a visual perspective. And I want to focus on just one of them for now. But what I'd like you to do on your napkin is up in the upper left corner, I'd like you to draw a little circle about so big and I'd like you to label that circle and I'd like you to call it me. And then I'd like you to just take one second and maybe make it look a little bit like you. But I don't want it to be a really happy you. And interestingly enough, every time I talk to someone about creating a problem solving picture, I tell them to start in exactly the same way, which is exactly what we just did. Draw a circle somewhere on the page, relatively small, and give it a name. That's all you need to do. The biggest fear that most people have is that fear of a white canvas, of a blank piece of paper. Couple of things are going to happen the moment we put the first circle down. We're getting our brain engaged a little bit. We're getting over the fear of the blank canvas, and we're already starting to get our brain thinking about where am I going to go next? So next, in the case of this particular one, and this is tricky, I want you to draw a bigger circle, kind of in the middle, and I want you to make it look a little bit cloudy, something like that. Kind of a big, loose, lumpy thing. Lumpy circle, second circle. And I want you to label this one as well. And I want you to call this my problem. Automatically. In this simple little picture, our brain is starting to wonder, what's the connection between the two? Why is one small and why is one big? Let's go ahead and see what's going to happen. As we continue, I want to talk for a moment about the kinds of problems that can be solved through the use of these pictures. I'm going to give you a couple of examples. I have used very simple back of the napkin sketches, whiteboard sketches, in a lot of different contexts now in business strategy, product development, project management, all the things we talked about before, and I want to show you a couple of them. And I'm going to start. I do do a lot of work with Microsoft, and of course, I'm not at liberty to discuss the work itself. But I think there are a couple of funny things that I have learned in working at Microsoft that I'm going to share with you that go directly into how we can look at things from a pictorial perspective. This is a quote from Bill Gates. He delivered this at the Harvard Business School graduation this past year. Friend of mine was attending and sent me this quote because he thought I would really enjoy it. So at Bill gates, he wasn't. Mr. Gates was not talking about technology. He was talking about philanthropy and corporate giving. And what he was saying is the barrier to change is not too little carrying. It is too much complexity to turn caring into action. And this is the part I really loved. We need to see a problem, we need to see a solution and then see the impact. But complexity blocks all three of these steps. Great comment. And from a software perspective, I couldn't agree with Bill anymore. The fact is, what we're looking at, I don't know how many people know what this is. This is. It's a little bit of an unfair shot. This is Word 6. If you were to take Word 6 on a standard 1024, 768 monitor and open up every one of the menus that there are, this is what you would see. The issue becomes one of thinking through problems. And I find it ironic that Bill Gates is talking about the reason it's so difficult to deal with big problems out there in the world is because it's too difficult to. To see through the complexity that this is mirrored in most software that we use as well. Now, in this case, obviously this is a screenshot of Word, which is intended to be a software program for writing words. So it's very nice that Microsoft left us this amount of space to actually write words in there. One of the things that I've been able to do working up in Redmond is help think through. And Microsoft is actually fantastic at doing this now recognizing some of the difficulties that have been inherent in the way that they've approached software in the past and making some pretty significant changes from a user experience perspective and a developmental perspective on how to go about thinking through how is someone actually going to use the software? Not necessarily from the engineer's perspective, but from the user's perspective. I can't show you what we've been able to do, but I want to show you a Picture that, a simple drawing that I hope clarifies a complex problem. That's something that we've, that's a, It's a challenge that's difficult to get our heads around. And how with a simple picture it relates to Microsoft, we can do this. So obviously over the last couple of, well, last several weeks, last six or seven weeks or so, there's been of course a tremendous amount of press about the fact that Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo. And it's interesting, as you look through some of the headlines, you'll find everyone saying, you know, what would a combined Microsoft Yahoo. Look like? Here you have Silicon Valley Insider saying, why the Microsoft Yahoo. Deal will be a disaster. Microsoft itself saying, Microsoft Yahoo. Deal could reshape the Internet. We have the battle for Yahoo. The question I have, and in fact what I was asked, it was very nice. I was asked by CNN and by Fox News, would it be possible to come up with a simple picture that explained what is the background behind why Microsoft would want to buy Yahoo to begin with? Can we make the strategy clear from a simple pictorial perspective? So I took up the challenge and I said, okay, let's go ahead and do it. And I went through the process that I talk about in the book of how to go about using creating a simple picture to look at a problem, look at a challenge. And what I decided to do is just let's start out. You don't have to draw this on your napkin. But I want to show you what I came up with. I said, let's just draw a ball up here and let's call this Microsoft. And I happen to know, because I looked this up recently, that the market cap of Microsoft is $282 billion. This is as of a couple of days ago. And I thought, okay, let's look at Microsoft. People are saying, why are they buying Yahoo? They're going to buy Yahoo because it makes great business sense, or they're going to buy Yahoo as a defensive move. They're going to buy Yahoo for this or that to get into the advertising market. Here's the way I thought about it. What do we know about Microsoft? Let's plot it out on a little graph. We know that Microsoft has lots and lots of applications that are available. So let's call this axis along the bottom. Very few applications to very many applications. How many applications does the company actually create and put out there on the market? And then let's think about what is the cost of using those applications to the actual user? And let's face it, Microsoft Products are very expensive to buy or to license. So if we have zero cost to the user on this side, we have high cost. Microsoft sits out here, lots and lots of applications, but they're very expensive to buy or to license. Fair enough. There is another company, a company you know, well, that's sitting down here. This would be you guys, Google, with a market cap of about $181 billion. So from a proportional perspective, a ball, oh, slightly half the size of Microsoft's ball. Think about this. Not so many applications yet. Not so many yet. But what is the price of a Google application to its user? 0. Nobody pays to use the software. So if you're sitting up here, if you're sitting in Microsoft spot and you say, well, we have the most applications, we have the os, we don't have to worry about that, the paid OS is never going to go away, is Microsoft ever going to be in a position where it can suddenly drop the prices of its software? Well, maybe. But are they going to bring their prices down to zero? That's very difficult to imagine. Is Google in a position where they're going to start increasing the price of their software to the user? Also pretty difficult to imagine. What is however going to happen and not difficult to imagine at all is if you think a couple of years ago Google's bubble was about that big and now Google's bubble, your bubble, is starting to roll in this direction. More and more applications, but they're still all going to be free. So my take on this, the picture I create is if you're Microsoft and you look at this, you say we've got to do something to block this. There's a little company, relatively little, sitting right here, a few more applications. This is Yahoo. Market cap of 35 billion. From my simple pictorial perspective, if Microsoft decides to go in there and buy that, Microsoft can't afford to lower the cost of all of its software. Can't do it. This is not its business model. But it can buy its way in to the free advertising driven software model. And this is exactly why it's interesting to Microsoft, because it potentially blocks this move by you or at least puts them in a position to be able to compete. Ok, fair enough. Some people have said to me as I've made the picture, well that's obvious, that's a no brainer. Okay, I'm glad that it is. I'm glad that this simple picture has been able to make it obvious because what other people have said to me is that's an extraordinarily clear way of thinking about what's happening in a way that is not reflected in the traditional way that we talk about what's happening. So I really like this kind of simple picture. We'll talk about it a little bit more in a moment. But I want to move to one more business strategy example that was also solved, if you will, through the use of a picture. And I like to think of this as the real reason. The real driving force behind technology we all know, is coffee. It's caffeine. So I want to ask you a question because I've done a lot of work with a coffee company in the Bay Area. Now, we all know who is the biggest coffee company in terms of number of coffee retail. Retail outlets out there. Kind of pure play coffee retailer. Who do you think that is the biggest? It's Starbucks. Does anybody have any idea how many retail outlets, how many stores Starbucks has? Does anybody have any guess how many? 12,000. You're pretty close. It's 15,000. Starbucks has 15,000 stores worldwide. The number two in terms of number of retail outlets, if we discount McDonald's and Dunkin Donuts, I don't consider them pure coffee plays. The number two in terms of pure coffee is a company called Peet's. People here, you've heard of Peet's, right? It's a local, started in Berkeley, Peet's Coffee. Does anyone want to take a guess how many stores Peet's has? And this is number two after Starbucks. 3,000. 3,150. So if you happen to be the CEO, if you're Pat O', Day, the CEO of Peetz, you see that there is tremendous opportunity for growth in spite of the fact that Starbucks, which is entirely another picture, has been having some serious bobbles in the size and height of its bubble lately. You still recognize if you're the CEO of Pete's, that there's great opportunity to grow. But how do you do it? Now, here's an interesting thing about Pete's. Both the original CEO and the original brewer at Starbucks came from Peet's. Peet's started it was in the late 60s, probably 1967. Again, as far as I know, Peet's started in Berkeley. And what Peet's was known for when it first started was offering the first really quality coffee, really gourmet coffee in the country. Started in Berkeley and never had any desire to grow and become a really big company. Some people who were working there had an idea that we could grow this into a much bigger business. Moved up to Seattle started Starbucks. The interesting thing, though, is that to this day, Peet's generally is recognized, even though it's infinitely smaller than Starbucks, as still having the best quality coffee that is out there. So if you're the CEO of Peet's and you want to grow your business, but you don't want to lose sight on the thing that differentiates you and has always been in your heritage, is the fact that you have the best coffee. How do you do that? Especially given the fact that as you grow, you're going to have a whole bunch of new people coming into the company. How do you convey the message out when you're growing rapidly? What is the essence of your company? And you have to do it in a way that is simple enough and clear enough that everyone's going to be able to get it. So we worked up a picture and literally you could draw the picture. This is Pete, and I'm at liberty to share this with you. This is Pete's operational strategy structure. And it goes like this. At the very top, the vision of the company, our vision, is to always and ever remain the gold standard of coffee, and nothing is ever going to change that. The mission then becomes to create the broadest possible group of people who really appreciate good coffee and recognize that it comes from Peet's and have a taste for good quality coffee and want more of that. So the way you do that is you actually break your business up into four pieces. From an operational perspective. You have what you call the people who are responsible for serving the coffee. So these are the people who, who are facing the customer, who are pulling the shots, who are making the espressos. Then you have the people that are responsible for development. So this is HR and training. These are the people whose job it is to make sure that those folks know exactly where they sit, sort of in the quality chain. Then you have the managers. These are the people who run the stores and are much more focused on the bottom line, making sure that the business continues to grow. And then you have the group that's responsible for inspiring everyone else, which are the senior executives and the head brewer. And these are the people who really are the carriers of that vision to make sure that they're always inspiring everyone back to that vision. And underneath that, you have a couple of very clear measures of how you're going to be able to determine whether you're successful in building each one of these. Now, of course, the way the picture works is behind each one of these sections, there's a whole other series of small pictures that explain exactly how, if you're on the serve side, what would be great for you to do in order to make sure that you're building this mission and this vision that you're achieving those. When you're pulling every shot, a whole series of specific things. How to pull the shot, how much espresso to put in, how often to clean the counter. But the beauty of it is you can summarize the entire operational strategy in this very simple picture. So those are just a couple of examples. Now let's go back to the napkin that we're working on. If we think about one of these problems. How to explain what Microsoft is doing as it makes an acquisition of Yahoo. How to explain a good way to come up with articulating the vision for a growing company. One of the tools that I recommend is not to look at the problem as a whole, but to actually slice the problem up into six slices. And we're going to talk a moment about what these six slices are. And there's a little bit of neurological basis behind what I'm going to describe. So I'd like you to go ahead and divide your circle up into a pie, and I'd like you to put six slices in your pie. Now, I'm going to go off on a tangent here for a moment. I'm going to take you through just a little bit of vision science, a little bit that we know. Now. In working on my book, I had an opportunity to talk with a handful of scientists in vision science, neurobiologists, and I really wanted to find out why it is that certain types of pictures seem to clarify a problem, whereas other types of pictures seem to almost make things worse? What was the magic difference between a simple picture that really sang when you looked at it, you just got it immediately, versus one that kind of left your mouth agape when you first looked at the picture and didn't know what you were seeing. It turns out that whenever we look at something, whenever we open our eyes and take in any environment around us that could be what I'm looking at right now in this room. You don't want to think about this stuff too much because it gets really weird. But what is actually happening in our brain right now as we are looking at each other in this room is exactly the same thing our eyes are doing. Exactly the same thing as when we're looking at a spreadsheet or when we're reading a book or when we are looking at a picture. Our eyes don't know the difference between the amount of visual signal, it's always the same that's coming in. So here's what our eyes do. When we actually look at an environment, when we look at a scene, our eyes, as the data is coming in, as the visual signals are coming in through our eyes, and it's being processed into electrical signals on our retina and then going through our optic nerve into our brain. The signal itself, right from the beginning, is actually split into different pathways. And these are called the vision pathways. And I really love this about this is one of the few times I've ever seen a scientific name for something that is so intuitive and so great. One of the pathways is called the what pathway. Now, what's happening is, as the signal comes in, about 20% of the signal is immediately shunted off for processing in a different area. And a big piece of the signal goes into processing. What it is. Now, here's what that means. When I look out there at this scene, I look over at Katina. Now, I've met Katina, so I know who she is. Part of my brain says, there's Katina over there. It says there is a thing over there that, according to some measurements that I've already made, visually looks like Katina. There's Katina. But that part of my brain has absolutely no idea where in that room, where in this room Katina is. There is another pathway being processed in a completely different part of the room. Completely in parallel, has no overlap whatsoever. No overlap whatsoever in our brain that is called the where pathway. And what that part's saying is there are a bunch of things out there and my proximity to them is such a. There is an object which is off to my left, slightly below and about 10ft away, and it is of about approximate size. Then there is another object over there. I am here in the room. The ceiling is about that high up. All that part is processing is where everything is in relation to each other. It is only far later in the processing that the two signals come back together. And my mind says, oh, that thing that was over there is Katina. It happens later. Now, the interesting thing is there is another pathway which is called the how pathway, which is going to a completely different part of the brain and is processing the interactions of the things as I watch them. And one of the ways that I'm noticing things change and what interactions is I'm actually seeing when things are happening. Now, what this means, and I'm going to tie this all together for you here in a second, is that I know there's a catena over there. I've determined that through my what pathway and my where pathway. Now, as I watch for a while, in this particular case. Katina, could you do me a favor? Could you stand up and move to another chair? Doesn't matter. I am now seeing the thing that I identified that was in that position, has just changed position, and it has done it over time. The way that I recognize visually the passage of time is through the change, the physical change of the spatial relationships of things to myself or to where they were before. So it's literally I'm seeing geography. And as I see more geography, I'm seeing the passage of time. Now, where this gets really cool is that later on my brain adds all those things together and I start to make up rules about how the world works based on what the objects were, where they were, and where they shifted over time. And I start to put those, all those together, and I start to make up rules of causality. What is it that's out there in the world that's happening? And then the real kind of ultimate one is after I have done enough hows, after I've learned enough rules created in my own mind from what I've seen about the way the world works, I start to make references and inferences about why things happen. I start to make answers to the questions about why we are doing what we're doing. Very abstract. But here's where it all comes together. If we can break the problem down that we're looking at into those six different pieces, and I'd like you to go ahead and write these on your napkin. I've clumped them. One of the slices is going to be called the who and what. One of the slices is the how much. One slice is where, one is when, one is how, and the last one is why. Now, anybody who's ever been through fifth grade English class remembers the five W's. Who, what, where, when, why that we were all taught. When you were writing your, your five paragraph expository essay, if you'd covered the who, what, where, when, why, you were golden. It turns out that I doubt if our English teacher knew this, but he or she was absolutely right. Because the way that our brain is seeing the world literally breaks into those different pathways. Now, the punchline is this. This is something I call what I call the six by six rule. And I want to just be full disclosure on this. This is my take, this is my interpretation of a little bit of gee whiz science. I know just enough to be very Dangerous with things that I've learned with pictures that I have made or worked with other people to make. The reason why I find this important is because if you can identify the aspect of your problem, if you can break your problem down into these six discrete pieces and start with the easy ones, you can create just six pictures that are all we ever need as the basic building blocks of any picture that we're ever going to create. And here's what I mean. If the nature of our problem is a who or a what problem, what is that thing over there? Well, that's Catena. Okay, fine. I just simply need to draw the picture I would make to reflect. That is a simple portrait. If I'm interested in how much, which we didn't really talk about, but is another processing capability that we have. I see the object in a and I recognize how many of them there are, I would simply draw a chart. If I'm interested in representing where those objects are located, I simply draw a map. If I'm interested in indicating when over time, those pieces interact or when they happen, I draw a timeline. If I'm interested in how they work, what's the causal effect? What is the trigger that makes something else happen? I draw a flowchart. And if I'm really interested in understanding the big picture, why is it that these things continue to happen in this way? I'm going to make the granddaddy of all pictures a multivariable plot, which we're going to talk about in a second. This is going to take a minute on your napkin, but what I'd like you to do over the next couple slides, and we're getting near to the end, just a few more minutes. I'd like you on your napkin to draw out the six basic pictures that we need to be able to draw. That will help us come up with a way to draw each aspect of our program problem. So if we are interested in who and what, we simply draw a little portrait. It could be a smiley face, it could be a little box. Again, if we're interested in how much we draw ourselves a little chart, it could be a bar chart, it could be a pie chart. Anything that shows amount. Where we make ourselves a little map. Here's me, here's my problem. There's a river in between us. I'm this far away. If I want to indicate pictorially when things happen, I create a little timeline. No surprise there. Gantt Chart, Microsoft Project. If I want to indicate visually how things work, again, no surprise, I create a flowchart. And if I want to create a picture that shows why things are the way they are, I'm going to create a multivariable plot. That little napkin, I'm going to give you some examples now pretty quickly is the tool that is an extraordinarily powerful starting point for thinking about taking apart our problem and and then creating these set of simple pictures to help us start to resolve it. I'm going to give you an example of each. A very simple portrait. This is all we need is a very good way of describing much more powerfully than words could do what are the discrete differences between all of the who's and what's that are out there. So in this particular case, Wong Baker faces this is actually a medical diagnostic tool that was invented by two doctors that's used in emergency rooms where you don't especially in places where you don't all speak the same language. Used a lot in major emergency rooms at hospitals in major cities where people will be coming in who might not be speaking English or you might have a doctor who doesn't speak the language. What they'll be able to do is create a simple picture and say can you point out to me how you feel everybody can figure out when the doctor pushes on your abdomen and indicates what are you supposed to look at? You can say I feel like that pretty powerful diagnostic tool. Very simple pictorial way of representing those portraits. Simple chart. You might say, well what does all this have to do with the price of tea in China? Well, let's see what the price of tea in China is. Here it is, it's down here. It's less than the United States, France. Why is tea so expensive in France? I want to get a pictorial representation of how much of things make a little chart. Maps are interesting because there's lots of ways of thinking about the spatial relationships of objects. I could create a map that maps out, let's say a company that I'm working with from a geographic perspective to help me think about. You know, we often talk in businesses about organizations and corporations having different fiefdoms. Well, what do we mean? We actually have these different parts of the business and they're blocked off by these walls. If I can create a map, I can think about ways to get through. Another map shows me where all to put everything. Another map might show me back to our coffee again. It's a simple map. All it's showing is the geographic relationship of or the conceptual relationship of these ideas. A timeline when I want to show when things are supposed to happen. No Kennedy says, hey, let's go to the moon. Okay, sounds like a great idea. How are we going to do it? What needs to happen first? Let's go ahead and make a timeline that indicates what are all the steps we need to take. And if you want lots of discussion and you make a timeline, go ahead and make it in a circle. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Which one came first? In fact, here's just from a cognitive perspective, if you're going to be making pictures that do represent when things are going to be happening, timelines, it's often really nice to think about making them in a circle because things often are loops. From a visual processing perspective, it's far harder for us to process a series of steps that are represented in a circle and remember it than if we just were to do it linearly, even if we know that it loops back at the end. Typically, if you want to convey the process to someone else, it's still better to go ahead and do it in a line and then have it connect back. This is the last one, second to the last one I want to show you. If we want to show how something works, we create a simple flowchart. And here we have a very simple diagram of how the human brain works. I copied this from a guy named Jeff Hawkins. I don't know if anybody knows his name. Jeff Hawkins was the creator of the Palm and the trio. He wrote the graffiti software. Very simple little sketch that he showed that he created essentially a flowchart indicating how does the brain work? Sense information comes in, it gets processed in our reptilian brain. If it's very low level and gets formed into the form of behaviors that we express, things that we do. If, however, the incoming sensory information is more complex, it then goes into our neocortex for more advanced processing and more advanced behaviors come out. Very simple little flowchart that explains essentially how does the human brain work. The last one, When I talk about a multivariable plot, it's the same picture that I already drew for you a moment ago. Why is it that Microsoft is interested in buying Yahoo. The best multivariable plot out there is one that I'm sure most of you already know. I'm sure many of you are familiar with Gapminder. Does everybody knows gapminder.org does everybody know gapminder.org Is there anyone who is not familiar with this? Okay, there is a guy named Hans Rosling. And if you go to ted.com technology, entertainment, design, the TED conferences take place every year down in Monterrey. And they invite about 40 or 50 of the smartest people, give them 40 minutes to talk about anything that they want. Guy named Hans Rosling has come and by rights should be giving the most boring talk that you've ever seen. Because what he has is he's collected 60 years worth of United nations data about child mortality, gross national product, family size, you name it, Any kind of boring piece of demographic data from around any. From every country in the world. For 65 years. He's been able to come up with a single plot which you can actually see@gapminder.org the guy gives a talk. It's just magnificent because for the first time we are suddenly visually understanding what, why globalization is taking place and why it is that China as an economic power is rising and why India as an economic power is rising and why the United States as an economic power is relatively shrinking or relatively staying in the same place compared to some of the others. It's miraculous. And he's got all this data. The guy's magnificent. That's what I mean by truly a why chart. It answers the big questions. And I'd really strongly recommend that you, you all go take a look at it. I am now done with the talking part of my session. I'm going to leave it with this. This is another napkin sketch that I've created. In fact, this is the visual summary of everything that's in my book. The six problem slices that we just talked about represent this set of tools. What I actually wanted to do was create a kind of a literally a universal problem solving toolkit from a visual thinking perspective that I could take with me anywhere and anytime I was faced by a problem. I know that I would be able to pull out this problem and start to this toolkit and start to solve that problem. And so I based it, of course, on the famous Swiss army knife. The idea being if you have a Swiss army knife, you can survive anything. You can live in the woods, you can slay the grizzly bear. If you've got a Swiss army knife, you can fix the airplane when it's in flight. You can do anything with a Swiss army knife. I wanted to have a Swiss army knife, a mental one, because let's face it, you're not allowed to take a knife on a plane. A mental one that I could take with me anywhere. And this is how I've broken down all of the tools that I've come up with for helping do what we've just talked about for solving problems with pictures in a very simple and intuitive way. And with that, I thank you for your time. And I know we've got about seven or eight minutes left. If anybody has any questions, I'm happy to take them.

Thanks.

We also have DC Locations, so people may have.

Can I ask a question? Does this make sense, what I've just described to people? Is there anything in here that felt wrong? Is there anything that anybody took particular exception to? When I was making one of these pictures, is there anything that seemed very out of place? Yes, I showed that Google has few applications. Well, when I was first drawing. Oh. So the question was in. And I can show you the picture. There it is right there in the plot that I made. I was trying to think of a way. But the question was this. Why did I show that Google has few applications? I was trying to show a way that if we were to take these players between Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, what, on initial glance, makes them different, so that I could figure out a solid way of plotting them and compare them to each other. And I was coming up with lots of different ways that I could map this out. What makes these companies different? And in the end, what I decided, the thing that to me resonated the most was how much do these companies charge for the applications that they offer? Because, let's face it, from a consumer's perspective, probably nothing is more important than how much does it cost me. And there's a huge difference between what Microsoft charges and what Google charges. And then I thought more broadly, another difference is how long, of course, have the companies been around. And an artifact of that is how many applications are truly available. And if you think about the entire array of applications that are available from Microsoft, it's extraordinarily broad. I mean, everything from the Xbox through operating systems, through Office, you name it, it's an extraordinarily broad range of offerings. In fact, most businesses now. Well, certainly most businesses we know this, use a Microsoft product as an os. Far and away, most do. Most other. Most businesses use Microsoft products for doing most of their business because there is such a broad range. Now, of course, Google offers more and more products all the time. Fundamentally, though, to the consumer's perspective, what Google still mainly represents is extraordinary search and some other things that are coming. Yes, there are Google documents. But what I wanted to do is not say that Google has just one, but relative to Microsoft has few. And the reason I think that's important is because as we think about if we build this model out, our intent here is to understand how, over time is this model Going to change. I wanted to set things to the extreme so that as we started to play it forward we could see where it goes. Does that seem legitimate? I see another question back here.

Oh, I just wanted to add something which is that I'm not sure if you're aware that Google actually acquired the software Gapminder behind gapminder. So people can. You could always mention in your talks that people can use the gadget to create a.

That it is actually acquired by Google. Yeah, well, and it's amazing because you just, you have to go and look at this. I mean, talk about a way to make sort of the ultimate example of many of the things that I'm talking about is just go to gapminder and start playing with the data. Have you played with it? It's magnificent, isn't it? What do you think of it? What did you use it for? I haven't used it for anything yet.

I've met people who, I've met the. I think it's the son and then.

The daughter in law of Hans Rosling. Yeah.

Who work at Google now. So I just had breakfast with them and a friend who's working on designing the part of their.

I would suggest this. The amount of data that is now available to be plotted in what you can do with Gapminder is essentially you can choose those two axes. You can pick what you want this axis to show and it's from a demographic perspective. So that could be again child mortality, gross national product, population size. And I think more and more data is being added all the time. Technological reach, Internet penetration.

I just wanted to say I think.

It'S been added as a gadget restoration product has it. Fantastic. Because then you pick your axes, you pick which data sets and in the case of what Hans Rosling was showing, his data sets were countries, but they don't have to be countries. And then you can actually plot it over time and see how the bubbles move over time and talk about one of these really remarkable ways of seeing why the world is going the way it is and why we're taught why the big trends that we have today are emerging now. It's really fantastic.

I think we have time for one more question. Anyone has one? Anyone on VC in the back?

We have one.

Oh, here we go. Okay.

Yeah.

Thanks for your talk.

Thank you.

It looks like we can definitely use pictures and these visual aids as kind of a really good starting point for solving a lot of problems. But are you aware or would like to kind of pass on of any scenarios where drawing Pictures actually kind of retards our thinking process, if any. And what would you say to that?

No, you all heard the question. Can I think of any examples where drawing retards our thinking process? No, on the contrary. Because what happens, and again, there's so much stuff that's interesting here, is that if you think about fundamentally the way our brain works, and I do not want to pass myself as a neuroscientist, I mean, I literally have read. But what happens is when we are processing information solely verbally, we are only accessing certain processing centers of our brain. Fair enough. When we are processing information visually, we are actually processing far more centers of our brain than just pictures. But when we put the two together is when we get this whole new mind kind of phenomenon, when we are combining our verbal ability. Nothing is more powerful when it comes to conveying an idea or seeing how something works than watching someone draw the picture at the same time that they talk. And I can't think of any example where that might be a detriment. With one exception, the combination of words and pictures is so extraordinarily powerful as a way to convey an idea that it is also very easy to abuse it. And we've all heard that it is very possible, through statistics, to say anything you want. You can bend statistics to say anything you want, depending on which data set you choose to show versus which one you choose not to show. So I would say, given the power that there is in what a picture can convey, it becomes even more important for the person to be very ethical about what they're going to show. I know we're out of time. Again, I want to thank you very much. This stuff I find particularly fascinating, and I would really encourage you the next time that you do find yourself facing any challenge at all, whether it's with a team or whether it is on your own. To go ahead and try what we just did, take a piece of paper or go to the whiteboard. And I'm sure here at Google, you probably do this all the time and just start drawing out. Draw that first circle and imagine, just give it the name, say it is me, or it is my problem, and then imagine what would be the next circle, and then start to connect them. And automatically, by virtue of the fact that you are drawing this out and even speaking aloud to yourself as you do it, your brain will start to pick up the pace, and before you know it, you will be creating these pictures. It's almost unavoidable. That will help you see what all the issues are of your problem and help you start to find ways to solve it. So thank you again.