Strategyzer Webinar: How To Facilitate Strategic Conversations With Visuals

Only mode. Hey, everybody. Welcome again to another Strategizer webinar session. This is the last session of the year, and it's going to be a very exciting and interactive one. While we're waiting for everybody to join in, why don't you just take a moment to think about what you hope to learn from today's session, and you can share it in the questions box in the GoToWebinar control panel, or you can even tweet it to us, raategizer. And if you like, use the hashtag strategizerwebinars along with your kind of comment or what you hope to learn today. We'll be starting momentarily. All right, let's get started. So just before I jump into the intro again, please feel free to share any questions or comments that you have about the session as it's going on in the questions box on GoToWebinar, or tweet it to us, RateGizer. And please use the hashtag StrategizerWebinars. So welcome everybody. Good evening to those of you in Europe, and good morning to those of you in North America or in the Americas, and a very early good morning to those of you in Australia and the Pacific. Welcome to our last webinar of the session for the year. Sorry. And it's on how to facilitate strategic conversations with visuals. This is going to be an incredibly interactive webinar session, so I do encourage you to maybe have a piece of scrap paper or a few pieces of scrap paper and a pen handy because we will be actually partaking in almost like a live tutorial. I'm Kavi Gupta, your moderator, and I kind of manage content and community at Strategizer. You guys probably know me from the blog, social media, and maybe at the end of some of the emails that you get from me as well. Our ever faithful host is Strategizer co founder Alex Osterwalder, who's also co author of Business Model Generation and Value Proposition Design. And our guest today is Holger Niels Pol. He's a frequent collaborator and friend of Strategizer and he's also founder of the Work Visual Institute. He's going to be taking you through what I am really looking forward to as a very interactive session today. Again, at any point, if you want to share publicly to the world what you're seeing, what you're learning, or any comments that you have, you please feel free to go on Twitter and mention us Raategizer, or follow us in those tweets, as well as use Strategizerwebinar in the conversation. And as always, you can go to blog.stragizer.com for more content that is based on some of these kind of concepts, methods and tools in the Strategizer family of products and services. If at any point we mention any of our tools in the conversation today, you can always go to our resource library and where you're going to find over 30 plus templates, tools, canvases and reference reference guides available to you for free on business model design, on value proposition design and strategy and innovation. So with that, I'm going to hand over the reins to Holger and Alex. Why don't you kind of just get started with why we're here today and why this is such an important topic?

Yeah. So first of all, welcome everybody. Thank you, Kavi. Welcome, Holger. Also, I think this is a very important topic because using visuals and visual tools in our conversations around strategy and innovation, when it comes to new business models, new strategies in general, mapping out the business model environment, I think visuals are not just a nice to have or lipstick on the pig. They're just crucial to help us create better conversations. And I'm excited that we have Holger with us today because Holger is somebody who we work with a lot in many large companies and the most conservative settings you can imagine that maybe pharmaceutical companies would resist the tools like this. But actually we have one case where they're very excited.

Right.

So I want to get started right away with Holger. Welcome, Holger.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Alex, maybe you can just say one or two words about yourself before we get started.

Yeah, sure. So I'm a friend of personal information, some 30 tics with my wife and three children in Germany, living nearby Cologne and working there as well. And I'm a trained communication designer and I started in 2009 working in this field and yeah, for the last years, happily connected to you and the team of Strategizer. In most cases. I do this thing that's called visual facilitation. And basically it is trying to help people to get some clarity and simplification in the complex processes when it comes to strategy, business model innovation or change at all. So that's what I normally do and I do this, if possible, very visual.

So let's dig into that because I think you're hitting on a really interesting point there. So visuals are often perceived as gimmicky or nice to haves and okay, it'll create a little bit more nice feeling when we do a presentation. But actually there's a real hardcore value to using visuals in business.

Oh yeah, that's true.

Just to talk a little bit about how does this really create value in business? And why should not just people who are fans of visuals already, but senior leaders start thinking visually or playing visually, or sketching out visually, or bringing in visual facilitators? Tell us a bit about the value that this creates in the space of strategy and innovation.

Yeah, so there's one kind of no brainer about it and, and that was a research in like last century and there they found out that if you only talk and you use kind of text and I try to draw while I'm talking, so hopefully it works out and you see what I'm doing here. So when you're just working with text and talking, people may remember like 70% of the content after a time of three hours. Right. Which is nice, but the problem is after kind of having a sleep around it and like a moon or something. So after three days people only remember 10%, which is not very much. Right. But if you combine words with visuals, let's draw an eye. You get like not much more after three hours, like 80% after three hours, but you get like 65% rate of remembered content after three days. And when I bring back this to strategy and business is if you want to convince your colleagues and collaborators on a common strategy or innovation or whatever, I mean, you want them to remember as much as possible. So you build up this commitment in the company and, and it shows right away that it's better to use visuals as well to get a better commitment on all what you're saying, and not only 10%. So that's one of the first points.

I love that because basically, if we want people to remember our company strategy or what we're focusing on, if we just use words and bullet points, maybe in our presentations, people are going to forget. And strategies should be implemented over days and years, not minutes after a session. So this is perfect. Maybe if you share a bit more in other contexts, this is great because that's exactly what we want to get across to our listeners. Maybe you can share in other contexts where this really creates value.

So another context is that it saves time. So that's kind of a bit contrary because you always think if you have to draw something, you think it slows down your pace. Right. So it always feels like a small blocker. But what I see is, for example, if someone is wanting to get a concept across, he saves or she Saves time by drawing it down. One good example is I break it down to a non business thing, but you can transfer the knowledge, I think. So if someone is, is talking to people about the concept of a chair he wants to design, this is a chair and the people try to grab the idea of his chair and they are only talking about the chair, then their chair might look like this one here, like a lay down something. And it's always like back and forth explaining how the real chair should look like. And the people kind of like might get nearer to it, but. But it takes a time. If you just draw down on a piece of paper your real idea or the concept or whatever of your chair, people would have noticed it right away. Right. It would not be a misunderstanding on that. And that's the same. The chair is the same. Like every strategy, innovation, idea, concept, relationship, you're talking about organizational shifts or whatever. In the moment you draw it down, people get an idea on what you're talking exactly about. And that saves time instead of taking more time at the end of the day.

Excellent. Can I build on that for a second? Because I think bringing it back to the context, you're helping us a lot with business models and value propositions, strategies in general. We can draw a business model now, now that we have a shared language or value proposition. And it brings so much more clarity. Something that is very hard to describe with words if we can map it out. One of the visual thinkers that I started out with in terms of opening up my eyes was Dave Gray, the founder of Explain. He says if you can't map it, if you can't draw it, you can't make it clear, you probably don't understand it. That's what you're telling us here with this analogy of the chair, which I think is excellent because it's very clear that this is going on in business all the time. We're trying to define a strategy or a business model with words. And just looking at your analogy, it's very clear that that's hard to do.

That's exactly what I wanted to bring across. Exactly. So yeah, a lot of people. So it's never said that when you talk to people, they think what you think. It's near to impossible to get your message across only with words. It's about the kind of explanation and sometimes people that don't grab a pen, they try to explain the idea then visually in terms of metaphors or that, they say like think of this and that example, I mean it the same way or something. So you see people that are not grabbing a pen and drawing it down. They try to get the message across with pictures as well, but spoken with pictures.

So let me just take this for a second, because when we talk about strategy and we have senior leaders in the room, they would feel probably very awkward picking up a pen and drawing some kind of ugly images because we're not all trained to draw. So maybe you can tell us a bit, how does this translate to senior teams and to boardrooms? Is this just something for the doers who have fun drawing around and already practiced in drawing, or is this something that we should get senior leaders in companies to do as well?

So definitely, of course, the last one. So we should get the senior leaders to it. And there's one thing, and you mentioned it before with Dave Gray and the understanding. So there's something in it that you can say. If you can't draw something, it's probably the case that you didn't understand it. Because if you can draw something, you did understand it. And that's the same for senior leaders. And the question is always, like, people thinking of these kind of polished drawings, like I did the two figures with abysmal canvas in the right upper corner. And people think, like, when they draw something, it should look like nice, polished, clean, perfect. But that's not the case. You have to think of working visually, and you have to think of the pen as a tool that helps you to get your message across. And it's not important how your drawings look like. I may take you as an example, Alex, if that's okay. I see you a lot of times, and for the folks who are listening, so what Alex does is let me draw that down so you see him. Let me do a short version of him and someone else he's talking about or talking to. So he's talking about an idea of a concept. Alex, you're talking about concepts a lot, and you hope the other guy understands what you say. And what I always see with you is that at least after two minutes time of talking, you want to have something like a pen. You grab something, you get anywhere. And then you start to, for example, explain your concept about, like, uncertainty and risk and developing over time so that you have, like, in the beginning, you have high uncertainties. So you're here, and I now try to copy your style of drawing so it's very high.

Deliberately making it ugly.

Yeah, exactly. And then you say, like, okay, so what we do want to have is that we go down over time with the uncertainty and something here and how we do it like, we invest little money to nothing. So we get one step down in terms of uncertainty and what we then do, if we. We learn something, we invest a little bit more to get a little bit more down here. So we're already more downwards to less uncertainty. And so we invest more and more money, but in the same time we learn more and more. And the most money spent is at the moment, uncertainty is near to nothing. So this is kind of like your drawings look like. Is it true?

Absolutely.

And what it does is it explains the concept perfectly. Of course, someone who didn't listen to the conversation later on would never make a sense out of it. That's quite true, but that's not the thing we want to focus on. We want to focus on the conversation with others in the moment and not what others might think afterwards about the drawing.

That's excellent. And I'm actually a big believer in synchronizing what you say and representing it visually. And you actually just did one thing here, which is, okay, you can use visuals during the conversation, which I like to do a lot because it helps me make things clearer. And I really can't draw, as you very well illustrated, but I try to do that. I even try to do stick figures sometimes. Maybe you want to show those later on. But I also use visuals a lot when I do presentations, so I have very visual slides. So basically what you're telling me is that you can use them in both. Right. Visuals that might be a bit more polished when I do a presentation. But here you're saying, well, visuals also make a conversation clear if you use it during Live in Action, even if you can't draw.

That's true. And you're pointing to a concept that I'm thinking awful lot in business as well. In other situations, especially in business, I think we have two phases in terms of time. So we have a preparation, a prepare phase, and we have a live face. And what I mean by that is that while you prepare something, this might be, for example, for a PowerPoint, this might be a complex poster with your new strategy on it, like a lot of pictures and details and stuff. Or this might be flip chart templates that help you structure a flip chart and then talk to people. But what they all have in common, you have a lot of time for it because no one sees you doing it. So the complexity for you creating these ones is less than in a life situation. In life, it's exponentially going up because you have some people around you listening to you. You think you Have a pressure to do it right. And in the preparation phase, you're just yourself, right? You do it for yourself, and you can prepare it no matter how long you need for it. So there is a quite important differentiation between doing visualization live on the spot and preparing yourself. So when you prepare, you can do as much as you want. You can go into details. I mean, when I see you sometimes creating charts for PowerPoint, and it takes you like two or three hours for one slide, because you want the animations right, the drawings right, the pictures right. So you want to have the concept on the spot, and life is another thing. So you just draw something down and you scribble and you scratch. And this is exactly where I want people to have in this phase of. Between preparation and life. So perhaps you prepare your. I mean, you draw your concept not only once. You draw your concepts, like, how much? 50 times. I mean, you develop them over time, but you talk again and again and again about them. So you have a combination of preparation and life. And these are looking very ugly, but they help to transfer the message. And that's what I want people to have. I don't want them to be great illustrators, but I want them to be good visual thinkers on the spot.

I really like that because I think, in particular, very senior people sometimes, if they're not already inclined to, can't generalize. Some love whiteboarding, but often senior leaders, they feel reluctant to do this. And let's be honest, most meeting rooms don't even have a whiteboard or flip chart anywhere in the boardrooms. Right.

That's true.

Maybe. I think you prepared some exercises for us so we can practice a little bit of drawing and see that it's actually not rocket science and that even some with very little drawing skills, like myself, can do that. So why don't we get started on those exercises?

Yeah, we'd like to do it. That's great. So I'll switch to another canvas. Let's see if this works. Yeah, fine.

I'll just tell people that afterwards. We're also going to go in some concrete cases where you found this in companies, so we get a little bit of an understanding of that as well.

Yeah, exactly. So I think this exercise takes us five to 10 minutes. And I prepared this exercise especially for you who are listening now, hopefully, to what we say. So it's like creating a basic visual library, so to say that helps you to get some small icons and ideas how to draw things in the context of this small innovation, because I think that's Important that we set that in the right context. And I like to tell a short story around it because that makes it easier. And you just grab a pen and paper if you like to, and just try to copy me. Right. Just try to follow me what I draw. It's quite easy.

And everybody who's not drawing automatically gets kicked off the call. Right. We can use your webcam to see if you're drawing or not.

Yeah, exactly. It's not having the green light on, but we can see you. So let's see. So first, I like to draw very, very, very simple persons like this. It's just a circle and a flipped U. Sometimes, like, for example, Alex is drawing some stick figures. I think you're drawing them like so. Right. So that helps as well. Sometimes you can add just some feats as well. So decide for yourself what you like to. What this small guy does is, is he's thinking. So we draw a thinking bubble, which is just a cloud, and he's thinking of an idea. So we draw something like a circle, we add some random shapes underneath, and then we make it blink. That's an idea. So this guy has an idea and he wants to talk about it because he's very excited. So he says, like, he's really excited. So we draw a rectangle, speech bubble, which is quite good to use for facts or very important things. So he tells someone, he wants to tell someone about the idea. So what happens now is he meets with another guy. I just go back to my stick figure version here, and they talk about the idea. So let's draw a speech bubble and a second speech bubble because we want to indicate that they have something in common. So the second guy. So Alex is with me in my idea, so he likes it. So what they do is let's explore this idea with perhaps a slightly bigger team. So we have three people and they work on a business model canvas. And the business model canvas, by the way, is super easy. So you draw kind of a rectangle. You draw two H's, H H and then a line here and a line here. And you finish with the business model canvas. And what they think is, at one time in the process, they think that they have the right business model explanation, mark, and they want to go and test it. Check mark. That's it. So how would they do this? They would, for example, I would say sit together. So for sitting together, I first have to create a table. And the table is quite complex, like an ellipse. That's my table. And I leave it open and I leave it open because I want to put in one person here, a second and a third one and it's slightly cut off at the bottom. But that's not the important part here. And I think one or two of them is talking, let's say one of them is talking and they develop some tests for the business model canvas, right? So you want to test the apotheces and perhaps you want to create a prototype that's running online like WWW in a screen or you have an idea how to create a test or a prototype on a smartphone, or you have an idea how to directly test this in a big community. And this is a globe and you might add something here. So all these kind of things are leading as prototypes hopefully if they work out to a growing business, which is a business building here. I mean, I think yours are like sometimes seen as ships or something. Let's try this one.

People usually when I ask them they say it's a boat. No, it's a one billion dollar business.

Right? Yeah, exactly. So let's make one million dollar business here. So like a big sack of gold and that's it. So here you are and that's the end of the story. So if they do the prototyping right, they will end up with a growing business. So what you have here, and it might be very fast for some of you, but I think we will provide the picture anyway afterwards. So what you have here is a small library, right? You can use every single picture of these to use it in your workshops.

So I want to build on that because this idea of the small library, you work with an organization, with a company, pretty big company, to create a visual library that they can then use in their presentations. Can you tell a little bit about the, the project, the objectives, how are these visuals and this visual library going to be used in this company?

Yeah, exactly. This is one of the biggest pharma companies in Switzerland. It's a small team, they're working on quite innovative concepts and they figured out that they have to convince their senior leaders and affiliates in the company of the new ideas. And the problem of course is with new ideas they are quite difficult to explain. Sometimes you're missing some facts because you don't know how it will went out because you have to do prototypes first. So you want to have a possibility to present in a way that the people buy your story and not the outcome of the story. And that's where visuals come in. So what we do for them is they have these kind of visual flat rate where they build a visual library with us together every time they have a new picture. I mean, sometimes we've trained them as well in drawings, so we trained them in drawing so that they can draw as well now for their own visual library. So they are not dependent on us, which is I think the most important part. And they're building up a library. I think for now they have like near to 400 pictures in their library. Everything from people to ideas to specific things from the company, from the prototypes they're creating, from the strategies and they just can drag and drop them to their PowerPoints if they have to present to their affiliates. And there's one thing that is happening there or two things. So. So people come to the workshops of this small team and they like to come because they say like, so it's so much fun to work in this environment where they use so much visual tools like business model canvas, but as well visuals from for example, Holger and his team. And it's not only fun, we see that it's quite productive to work in this kind of scenarios because we get a lot of ideas, we get a lot of ideas across can present probably with using visuals. And the other thing that happens within the company, the affiliates and senior leaders recognize this part of the company as on the one hand innovative, but very professional. And in terms of presentations, they are looking forward for the next presentations of the team. It's not that the team has to back like, could I have 10 minutes more for the presentation with you? No. Is it the other way around? And I think that's a big deal in companies.

Yeah, I think actually that was the thing that surprised me most, that one of the feedbacks of the senior leaders when they had these presentations summarizing the outcomes of a project where the team was testing new ideas, business models and value propositions. Biggest surprise for me was that they really noticed the visual presentation style and they congratulated the team and said, we really like this. It makes things simpler, it makes things clearer. And that they emphasized that because sometimes people fear moving away from the traditional bullet point diarrhea towards something a bit more innovative. And I'm not going to ask Holger to draw my visual picture that I just used, but that was really of real value. And what you said is that these leadership committees actually are fans of this seems like a no brainer, but there's a lot of resistance because we fear using visuals in these kind of contexts just because there's no tradition. Right. The other thing is, I think investing some time Visually and translating your presentation that might be in bullet points into visual communication that has words and visuals, that's not that much effort, right? That's some effort. But the return on visual investment is enormous. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about other contexts where you've seen a really good return on. Let's call it return on visual investment.

That's a nice phrase. I have to keep that in mind. So there's one example from a Nordic company who are providing ICE defense services in the Arctic. And they are an owner driven company. After working with them for six to seven months, the CEO himself was able to create a visual presentation of the strategy for the next 10 years. And this slide deck was literally containing like six lights and they all were drawn by the CEO himself. Of course, he used some help with us because we just did some sketches for him and he kind of copied them so he had like the chance to prepare well. But he did draw the presentation himself. And what happened while presenting these six slides to the owner to get the buy in for the next 10 years strategy was that he was so into the story because he did it really, he did it himself. And he did to try. He tried to get the pictures right in the concept so he had a convincing story because he owned the story. Right. And in the end that's why it's such a good example without first looking on the backup slides, which are of course with Excel sheets and numbers and stuff. But before looking at the backup slides, the owner already said, okay, I'm in, let's do that. So it's a real story, nothing made up. So the CEO was very happy afterwards. Of course, they struggled to implement the strategy at some point, but they did convince the owner of the strategy right away by using more visual presentations. So that is another context that's quite powerful, I think. And I might add one more if it's okay for you.

Yeah. I was wondering if you also have some examples of the life drawings. So Tiberi, you showed me doing a very ugly kind of conceptual sketch when I'm trying to explain an idea. Do you have other examples in strategy innovation where live drawing actually makes a difference?

Yeah. So for example, what I see a lot is that people, I call it cheating. Cheating helps. Right. So what I see, and I open a new screen for that that you can see it. Well, what I see a lot of clever senior leaders and managers and doers as well is that they kind of like if they have a flip chart, for example, let's take a flip chart as an example. But you could take a paper as well. But if they have a flip chart and they know something like they want to talk about a concept, what they do sometimes is they. And I hope you see it well as well. So they draw with a pencil, very slightly prepared their concept drawing on the paper. And when the time comes and people pointing to the concept, he just takes a black pen and then copy through what he prepared without having stress of people looking at him. So this is one thing which is a combination of preparation, live drawing, which I think is super powerful because you can prepare your stuff without having pressure and then going back to it and just copying. This goes as far as that. We sometimes prepare like 6 meters in length. So this is 6 meters drawing for management board meeting, where we just sketch the pictures on with pencils. And when it comes the time to present, so one of the senior leaders present to the rest of the board, he just grabs a big, very big marker and he just copy our drawings, which makes him look like super professional. And there's one learning in this. Of course, people see that you cheat, but by showing that you that you're cheating, you show that you are prepared, which shows that you're a professional. Right.

This is a very important topic that's very, very interesting. And I think it might also take away some of the fear of using visuals. I guess some of the listeners today actually completely sold out full house, which is awesome. Some of the listeners today are probably by nature whiteboarders. They love going to whiteboard, but some probably aren't. And I think it's also our job to get senior leaders who are not comfortable with drawing to draw. Because we know the return on this visual investment. It's not just a gimmick and it's not just a style issue. It should even be done by people who are not comfortable with working like this. And you're showing us a great way to actually get more and more people to do this. I really like this. Very powerful.

Yeah. Actually some people ask me in workshops, why would you stop drawing? So I normally stop drawing, for example, when I see that people struggling drawing themselves because they see my quality of lines. So there's always like a back and forth that people think, if people see me drawing in graphic recordings or stuff, they see these kind of polished lines and think, oh, I could never do this. And if they are, if it's their turn to draw something, I try to step back and draw nothing so that there is no comparison. Because this is one of the biggest issues in terms of why would a senior leader not grab a pen? It's the part of comparison. Because he thinks compared to others, his drawings fail, right? They're not looking nice or he's not getting them right. So you always have to see how to get this aspect of compare yourself to others out of the game. And this is only possible when you make examples. So what I then do is I just try to very roughly scribble, as I do here at the moment in the webinar. I would normally do a bit like more polished, even things. But I try now to be not too perfect in my drawings, to encourage other people to draw as well. It's not about the style, it's not about how it looks like. It's actually only about getting an idea across. And there is one basic thing that I think everybody can do and which is the most powerful thing is let's take the idea. You have a paper laying down and, for example, you want to explain a concept. That's called concept. Now, why don't you just make a rectangle around the headline? You draw a container like this one, and then you try to explain the concept just with boxes and circles and arrows. And if you name these boxes. So if you say for. For example, if I do it again, if I say to you, look, I have an idea which is about a new business. So I have a business model canvas. And this business should create a mix of visual working visually in preparation life. So we are at the. At the mixing point here. And how I want to do is like, I want to. I don't have an idea now. It's just making up at the moment. I want to do this like this and that. And so I have one and two steps for this. And how is it? Would you like it or not? What I exactly did now is I did draw nothing, right? It's only arrows and rectangles and circles. So I didn't draw a person, I didn't draw an idea. I didn't draw anything. So I think everybody can draw just circles and rectangles and a business model canvas and the speech bubble. And if you just stick to that one, you will come far more on your journey than you think. Because a lot of people, like you, Alex, that are grabbing a pen, they normally draw mostly rectangles and circles and arrows, right? That's what you do.

Because I'm useless at anything else, Right? Exactly. I understood the message. So I think we really need to encourage people to draw new visuals in strategic sessions. But let's still ask ourselves, or you can share maybe the top three mistakes that people should avoid when they use these kinds of visual tools. What are the three maybe biggest mistakes? You see, I have one in mind. I'll bring it in afterwards. But you have far more experience what people should not do.

So let's say number one, the number one mistake in doing is like, how can I have to make up a picture for that one? So let's say. A speech problem like that one. So one of the most worst thing you can do is when you grab a pen that you. Before you did draw anything, you say that you can't draw. Never say that. Because people don't want to know if you can draw or not. They're focused on the pen and what you're talking about in terms of concept. It's not about you making excuses that you can't draw because it's not about drawing. It's about using a tool. Right? So never excuse yourself before you started to draw. What you can do, of course, is after drawing like this one here, a stick figure, then you of course can say like, oh, he should look different. But I think it's not important now. So then people can laugh and it's like emotional. And that's okay because then you're making a joke of yourself, but it's not making an excuse before you start it. That's never good because then people will 100%. If you excuse yourself up front, people will look at your drawings and not at the concept. That's the thing. The second thing is that you. How do I explain it? So the second thing is that. You write something that nobody can read, right? So there is something. So either you draw something that is looking quite messy, but that's okay, right? This is okay. But if you try to write something so you draw something messy and then you write idea and nobody can read it, that's not a good thing. So better trying to just talk and not writing anything down, just drawing something, because people make up the words themselves. And if you want to write something, try to write in capital letters to make it clearer what you're talking about. It doesn't slow you down a lot, but the people can see what you write other ways. It makes no sense to do it. This is, I think, the second one. Perhaps you may take over for the third one, Alex.

Okay, so the third one, I think is in that phase where you said preparation, when people do the effort to create a visual slide, and I'll take a silly example, they make a business, small canvas, even sometimes with nice drawings Right. But then when they present, they show everything at the same time. Visuals with a lot of elements on them are very complex things. And you actually create the contrary of what you want to do. You are not using the strength of visuals to simplify. So what you're doing here is you're drawing the visuals live while we're talking. So you're building up this thing. I think when we prepare, sometimes we want to do well and we want to prepare and we have this great visual, but then we show the whole thing at the same time. And I like to call that cognitive murder. When we have a visual that's complex and we're explaining it at the same time, the listener actually doesn't know where to look. It's brain meltdown. Right. They look at the image, try to understand the image, they try to listen, and we're switching back and forth. And that's cognitive murder.

Right, that's true.

So what you really want to do in presentations is use visuals, but animate them. Not the kind of ugly animations or fancy stuff like things burning, but building up a complex image one piece at a time. And if you do that, and in this case, presenting a business model, one sticky note at a time, when you do that, you have so much clarity that it will blow people away. So that small technique of bringing in one piece of a business model canvas in this case, or one piece of a complex visual, one piece at a time, you create crystal clear clarity. Yeah, that's the wrong way to say it.

Right.

But that's a big mistake that I see all the time.

Yeah, that's. That's true. So I may add two things on that one. So the first one is, you see this slide I'm just creating here? It's a lot of drawings here, back and forth, no real structure. What I don't do is I'm not using color. Why don't I use color in this case? Because it's too slow for me. If I'm live talking to someone else, having a conversation, I wouldn't use color so much. Perhaps I would have different colored pens with me so that I easily can grab a pen and then indicate some things with the color. But normally what I do is just having one pen because the other way around is slowing me down. And there is a second thing to it, which I think is one case why some people don't use visuals, and especially senior leaders, is that if you think of our brain, so we are kind of hardwired, right? So our brain looks like something. Let me Say a brain is quite not so easy to make that it doesn't look like a walnut. But this is our brain now, right? You see it on the upper. On the left hand. What you see here is the left half of the brain is about talking, is about math, it's about logic. And the right brain is where the drawing and creation happening. And the problem is when you have to talk to someone. When you have to talk to someone, the energy of your brain is needed on the left hand. And if you want to draw while talking, the energy is needed on the right hand. So it's always a back and forth between the two parts of the brain. They're kind of fighting for energy, which creates quite a. Quite a. Like, it doesn't feel good to draw and talk at the same time sometimes because you feel like your words don't come out of your mouth. That's because you concentrate too much on your drawing and you can't talk anymore. So this is something you have to learn over time that you either draw not so complicated things so that you can draw them without thinking about it. So the energy for the brain is left for the talking. And you draw all the same things all the time. Right. Then you have more energy left for talking and for the life, for the conversations kind of thing.

Okay, so let's try to do one more thing and maybe take one question. So. So we have an interesting format to answer the questions after the call. But I want to try one more thing. Holger, maybe you can take a new sheet and I'm going to challenge you now.

Nice one.

We didn't prepare this up front, so I'm just throwing Holger right into the cold water. I know he'll masterfully manage this. So I'm going to give Holger and everybody who's listening a challenge to visualize what I'm saying. I'm just going to give a small little concept, and then you have to visualize it. I would challenge everybody to take a pen now and visualize it. And then also watch what Holger is using as a visual. Does that work? Holger, I'm going to give you a concept.

Of course. I'm fine with that.

What we like to say often when we talk about lean startup and testing business models and sharing with senior leaders, is that we need to make clear first that facts trump opinion. Okay, so maybe you can. You can. That was not supposed to be a political joke. I try to avoid political jokes. What is. Here we are. So can you maybe visualize this idea.

That.

In the design of business models and testing of business models, we don't want to hear opinion. We want people to come up with facts. So how would we visualize this idea of facts trump opinion?

Sure.

I know I'm putting you here right into the spot.

Sure. Are you talking more or should I now visualize.

Go ahead, visualize.

That's it. Okay, so what I would do is then say, like, okay, you have the business model canvas, and what you want to do is you want to focus on mostly one part of the canvas where you design some testing things. Like let's take a laboratory or something that's like, for an experiment. I'm doing it very rough to be on time here. And what I would do then is because you said something about like a difference. Right. So you want to have out of this one, you want to create clarity that is like, let's say you have a check mark list with your things you wanted to check, and you exactly now know what it brings. This is one I would say, like. And you see, I'm struggling talking now because you challenged me. So let's say this is the. This is the positive side. That's what you want to have and you don't want to have. What you don't want to have is that you just take this one and you have someone.

I love it.

Yeah. Standing here and just pushing down. His opinion. That might be a way to not do it. Because you don't know for sure. Right.

So that would be a great way to do. Right. You're showing the contrast. Right.

Okay.

Can we try one more? Are you up for it?

Yeah, sure. Sure.

Okay. So how could we kind of visualize this idea of not in our presentations, that we use visuals and that we.

Should.

Avoid bullet point diarrhea?

Yeah.

It's hard to say that with a straight face in a sniff.

Yeah.

It speaks very well to people.

Yeah, that's true. So, I mean, there are two ways. I give you two ways. Like, you can say someone's holding a PowerPoint and he's again, like, blah, blah, blah. Right. And he's very fond of his presentation. And then you have like, you know that from computer games, RIP. So this is a more metaphorical way, like, RIP, rest in peace, people are dying from PowerPoint. Right. This is once more content. I mean, the other way would be that if it's an educational case that you want to tell people how to do it is that you. And there might be colors as well. Nice. Say you are in a preparation, so you can prepare your drawing. You have a PowerPoint slide with bullet points written on. And I'm just taking some scribbles for text. And what you really want to have.

Is.

You want to have a slide that is explaining the concept with animated pictures kind of thing. For example, like this. And if I am under time pressure like I am now, I would leave it like that because I feel I have no time for coloring and stuff. But this would be, again, something like showing the difference between the how would you do it normally? And how could you do it better? Right.

From one to another. And I am putting you under pressure. Right. So we would typically work on visuals. Right. Because we've done some of these videos, animated videos, where you did the visuals, and then we would have a lot more time to iterate.

Right.

If we'd do this with more depth. Let me give you the last one. Last challenge. These were two easy ones. Let me give you a hard one.

Yeah.

Let's see how you master it.

You're making fun of me, right?

No, I'm not. I know you can deliver, so great. The last one would be something I like to say a lot, that business plans maximize the risk of failure. That would be either one. I'm going to give you two choices because both, I think are hard. The second one is actually pretty easy. The second one would be business models expire like a yogurt in a fridge. That's almost too easy. I'm giving you the business. So let's stick to the first one.

That's too easy. So let's say so there. I would use kind of a. So you just said business model, business plans are raising the risk. Right. Nothing else. So let's say I would take a picture for a business plan, which is most likely a lot of filled pages with nonsense. And to indicate that's a business plan, I would just do something like a dollar sign on it that people recognize this is a business plan, and what they create is the risk of failure. Let me see. That's the risk of failure. Could be something. So we could do it like this one here that you are. Underneath. Like, this is a guy whose hands and like, you see.

So close kill. This is a risk, man.

Yeah, exactly. The other nice thing, I think is that you might draw a skyscraper which has a window open, and a very small guy. You might nearly not see him. He's very small, like an ant, and he's like his hand is raising outside here, and he's just throwing out of the window his stacks of money. Right.

That's what we call corporate innovation these days, right?

That's what we call corporate innovation. So you think like, oh, yeah, he's just throwing the money out of the window by using business plans. Good enough.

Excellent. Well solved with two excellent images. So I would invite everybody actually to share their pictures on Twitter, their drawings, even if they're embarrassing. And I do that professionally, share embarrassing drawings while explaining concepts. So I think we can all do that. And I'll hand over to Kavi to kind of wrap it up and maybe tell us how we'll work on answering all of these multiple questions. Questions that we got.

Sounds good.

Hey, I think the one question that everyone's been asking non stop is, Holger, maybe you can talk a bit about the tools that you're using today. How are you doing the drawings that you're doing? And what other go to tools would you recommend for the audience to take a look at?

Okay, good. So what I do is just short thing here. So I switched the mode. I hope it works here. What I do actually at the moment is I'm using an iPad. Do you see the iPad now? I hope so, yeah. So this app is called Work Visual App. Making some marketing for myself here. But this is the app that I brought myself to the market because there was no tool online that I could work on the iPad remotely and live and doing proper job here. So I'm using an iPad pro with the pencil pro, the Apple pencil, which is quite nice to be honest, because you have pressure sensitivity. You're feeling like you can lay down your thumb on the iPad. And what I do, basically I'm just drawing things. So you see there's nothing underneath. I'm just drawing live because Alex didn't prepare me for that one. So I'm using the Apple pencil, having some tools down here and then creating my drawings. So all of my drawings that I did here are in my library now. Here you see all the drawings I did and where we started. So that's what I'm doing on the iPad and that's my go to tool. So it's on the iPad in the app store. I'm switching back to full mode and then use any kind of. So there is one important thing. If you're not drawing digitally, because when you're drawing digitally, I suppose this kind of tool set is the best one I can get personally. But if you're drawing on paper or with a pen, it doesn't matter at all. Right? It's not about the pen. It's not about the paper using just normal copy copying paper and using a ballpoint pen or a marker or whatever. It doesn't matter, right? If you want to look deeper in this, I would recommend to search for a marker that has a bit more thicker line than the normal ball pens because you feel a bit more solid when you draw things. When it's not a ball pen, that's the shortest answer I could give, but I'm happy to answer them on Twitter or something in more depth.

Cool.

Yeah.

So talking about audience questions, a lot of them came in and we're unfortunately running out of time. Now, for those of you that are familiar or just new to our webinars, when we kind of run out of time with audience Q&As, we tend to do a Strat chat podcast as a follow up. But we're actually going to do something different this time. We're going to do a Strat chat podcast with Holger to answer some of the burning audience questions, but we're also going to do it visually. So while we answer those questions, we'll also have Holger drawing out what he's talking about and explaining through the concepts, and we'll be doing that in the coming weeks. For those of you that attended a webinar today, I think that's all the time we have, unfortunately. We thank you so much for being with us all year. This is the last session of 2016, and we're looking really excited to coming back in 2017 and doing our monthly webinars. And this type of live tutorial is certainly something we're going to continue. And in the coming 24 hours, you're all going to get a recording to the session today. And it'll also be available live on the blog in the coming days. Gentlemen, Alex Holger, any last words? Thank you for your time.

Thank you, Holger.

It was great. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks a lot, guys. Everybody have a great day.

Thank you, Kevin.

Bye.