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I am a small business Conversation Consultant and public speaker that uses the power of the internet to leverage your success. Productivity in Context is a web magazine focused on Productivity and tools for organizing. Make this your headquarters for improving your life and work through increased mindfulness, education, and workflow practices.

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This book by Dan Roam is fantastic. I highly recommend that you watch this video, then go out and buy this book. (Amazon Affiliate link:The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures)

In his book, The Back Of The Napkin, author Dan Roam asserts that that everyone is born with a talent for visual thinking, but that we — especially in the business world — are never encouraged to develop it. In this video, Roam shows us how anyone with a pen and a scrap of paper can exercise their imagination and work through any business problem by creating pictures. ~From BNET

“The Back of the Napkin” will transform how you think about learning and teaching. Here is an excerpt from the review at Metropolismag.com

How does this tie back to your theory of thinking in pictures?
We all have an innate ability to think in pictures. Well over half the sensory neurons in our brains are oriented towards vision. It is far and away our most sophisticated sense. Designers spend a lot of time studying such things as composition, color, drawing, sketching, all of which are approaches that take advantage of our innate ability to think visually. This is something almost completely missing in business.

Your book could be seen as almost a quiet screed against mind-numbing PowerPoint presentations. How do you sit through these things?
Very painfully. When I have to sit there and watch someone else’s PowerPoint now, I find it difficult, because in my mind I’m screaming, “Please put it away! If your idea is good enough to understand in the amount of time that we have together, couldn’t you just go up to the wipe board and sketch it out for me?” I’m convinced there is an almost magical power in creating a picture, regardless of how simple or ugly it might look, in front of an audience.

The main points:

• Visual Thinking is a four-step process:

1. Look
2. See
3. Imagine
4. Show

• Looking means Collecting and Screening information. Our brains do a lot of this automatically, delivering to our conscious minds the information about our surroundings relating to-
  • Orientation (which way is up?),
  • Position (where am I?),
  • Identification (what is that?), and
  • Direction (where is it going?)
• There are rules for learning better Looking skills

1. Collect everything that you can
2. Lay it all out where you can look at it
3. Establish fundamental coordinates (are you looking at time, at a quantity, etc.)
4. Practice visual triage (what do you not need to look at?)

Roam has pulled together an amazing amount of information and presents it in a clear and concise manner with examples and sample drawings. You can also check out his website here. Buy this book from Amazon The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures and support Productivity in Context.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/55lt6u. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen