The Back of the Napkin Part 5

3. We Saw Position in s.p.a.ce-the Where Meanwhile, a third part of our vision system was simultaneously occupied with noticing where all these objects and quant.i.ties were located, both in relation to us and in relation to one another. We saw that our friend was maybe twenty feet ahead of us and toward the right, for example, and that the dog was at our friend's foot level, but just beyond. We saw that the baby carriage was way over there to the left, and the bird was another twenty or thirty feet past that.

We also saw that all these objects were solidly attached to the earth, and that even though they were all grounded on the same horizontal plane, we had no trouble noticing what was in front of what, what was next to what, and we could even estimate the distances between everything.

Instantly recognizing these objects' positions in s.p.a.ce was entirely distinct from simultaneously recognizing the objects. The nearest person to us may have been our friend, but her proximity had no bearing on her being our friend: She would have been the same friend even if she'd been the character farthest away. Likewise, the fact that there was a good distance between the dog and the bird didn't alter the fact that one was a bird and the other was not.

Our minds were completely capable of seeing the who simultaneously and yet independently of the where, and it turns out that that's not just academically interesting; it's actually the way we're neurologically wired. Studies in neurobiology over the past few years have revealed that two vastly different pathways in our brain's vision system account for identifying objects' positions and for identifying the objects themselves.

The first pathway has been given the wonderfully descriptive (and thankfully unscientific) name "the where pathway," and it identifies the parts of our brain that help us visually determine our own spatial orientation and the position of objects around us. Much of this visual processing takes place in an evolutionarily ancient part of our brain known as the reptilian brain, or brain stem, and much of the processing-if we recall the precognitive attributes we discussed in the previous chapter-takes place long before we have any conscious awareness of even knowing what we're looking at.

The second pathway, which has the equally descriptive name "the what pathway," is composed of visual processing centers located in the evolutionarily newer outer layers of our brain known as the neocortex. The what pathway-not surprisingly-is responsible for identifying things and attaching names to them.*

We've accounted for three independent yet interrelated ways of seeing: who/what, how much, and where. We're halfway done. Did you notice how the ways of seeing correspond to the 6 W's? That relations.h.i.+p is going to continue for the remaining three, but with a slight difference: While the first three ways of seeing are instantaneous, the next three depend on the pa.s.sage of time.

4. We Saw Position in Time-the when As we let our scene play out, our characters and objects moved about. Our friend walked a little, the dog jumped more, and the bird may have flown away entirely. We know this because while the various parts of our vision system were working on what we were seeing, how many there were, and where they were, yet another part (or perhaps several parts-n.o.body is entirely sure how this neurologically happens) was keeping track of the objects and their positions as they moved over time. In the case of the baby carriage for example, at the beginning of our exercise we saw it in one place, but by the end it was in a different place: Over the couple minutes' time of the exercise, it had changed location. And yet our eyes didn't question whether it was a different carriage just because at one point in time it was here and at another point in time it was there. We knew it was the same carriage because our eyes knew that we were literally seeing time pa.s.s by.

Had we observed for several more minutes, we would have seen the carriage visually change in other ways. It would have become smaller as it moved farther away, it would have changed shape as its angle from our eyes s.h.i.+fted, and if we'd been able to watch for a really long time, it might even have changed color as its paint faded in the sun. But no matter how long we watched-as long as we stayed on the scene-we'd still see it as the same carriage.

Seeing the when is different from the three ways we've already discussed. While we saw the who/what, how much, and where instantly, to see when demands that at least some time pa.s.s. As obvious as that sounds, it's an important idea that has real ramifications for how we see and represent things that change over time. We can (and often do) make immediate visual judgments about objects, number, and spatial position, but we can't do the same when it comes to how things change. To see when, we have to see at least two different points in time-before and after, now and then, yesterday and today, etc.

5. We Saw Influence and Cause and Effect-the how Up to this point, the four ways of seeing have been largely independent. Our eyes saw and processed who and what separately from where and when. But as we watched our scene unwind over time and saw our characters and objects s.h.i.+ft their positions in s.p.a.ce, something else happened: We started to see chains of related events and the impact of one thing upon another. In other words, we saw how. If our friend's dog lunged toward the bird, any of several things could have occurred. Perhaps our friend yanked the leash and caught the dog up short; perhaps the dog snapped our friend forward; perhaps the dog bolted, leaving our friend in the dust.

No matter what took place, we saw cause and effect in action: The dog did something (ran, barked, jumped) that forced our friend to do something in response (fall down, yell at the dog, jump even farther). Our eyes saw all of this and compared it to what we expected would happen-based on similar cause-and-effect scenes we'd seen in the past-and confirmed that the world still made sense. In the unlikely event that the dog suddenly sprouted wings and flew or our friend teleported to the other side of the park, our eyes would have been very surprised, and we would have had to rea.s.sess how our world works.

Like when, seeing how requires the pa.s.sage of time, long enough for at least a little cause and effect to be visible. But unlike the other ways of seeing, how isn't something we distinctly see on its own. Hows are usually combinations of whos, whats, how muchs, wheres, and whens all rolled up together. In other words, the first four W's serve as the raw materials that we build together in order to see how things happen.

Our eyes visually deduce how by observing the interactions of the first four W's.

This means that of the five ways we've covered so far, hows are the most challenging to see: They don't appear immediately, and they require that we see (and visually combine) at least two or more of the previous W's first. We'll come back to this point several more times as we apply all this to real problem solving, but first we've got one more way to see.

6. We Saw All of This Come Together and "Knew" Something About Our Scene-the Why Friends, dogs, baby carriages, birds, objects, positions, locations, changes over time, influences, causes and effects: For a simple exercise that took just a few minutes, we certainly saw a lot. And by seeing the objects, measuring their attributes and numbers, determining their positions and sizes, tracking countless changes to them over time, and detecting interactions between them, we came to know something about our world. In fact, we've started down the path of seeing why.

Perhaps we don't yet know from our little scene precisely why birds fly away from dogs or not, or why a leash is an effective way of keeping a dog from cras.h.i.+ng into a baby carriage, but given what we've seen, we won't be able to stop ourselves from making some guesses. Whether those guesses will turn out to be right or wrong will be answered only by observing similar scenes over and over, and seeing if they end up the same way.

But the truly amazing part of our vision system is how often our guesses turn out to be right. Bird-dog drills are entering our eyes every second of every waking moment, and it's staggering how rarely we make a mistake in keeping track of the whos, whats, wheres, etc. Most of us would probably struggle to recall times when we fundamentally misidentified someone or something, profoundly confused the positions of objects in s.p.a.ce, or saw time flow in the wrong direction. It's not that these things can't happen; it's just that if they do, we become intensely aware of them, since they run counter to what we know. They mess up our understanding of why.

Back to the Bird This wraps up our exercise on the six ways we see, except for one last thing: the bird. When we ended the exercise, I asked, "Is the bird still on the ground or did it fly away?" While I have no idea where your bird ended up, I do know this: After going through the bird-dog drill with hundreds of people, I've seen a pretty consistent two-to-one split. Two-thirds of bird-dog partic.i.p.ants say the bird flew away-usually because it got scared by the dog-while one-third say the bird stayed on the ground-either because the exercise ended before the bird noticed the dog, or because the bird was bigger than the dog and would have been happy to eat that puppy for breakfast.

Wherever your bird ended up, the final point of the exercise is the same: Based solely on things we saw, we can begin to make rational arguments about why particular things happened in our world, and back up those arguments by pulling from the 6 W's. Whether we come away believing that birds fly away from dogs or not, we've justified and solidfied our understanding of the hows and whys of the world, simply by seeing the whos, whats, wheres, and whens.

Putting the Six Ways to Work When we see problems according to the 6 W's, we're taking advantage of the way our eyes and mind naturally view the world. By seeing a problem as six individual yet related components, we've got a problem-solving approach that is entirely intuitive (since it mirrors the way our eyes already see) and powerful (since it's usually a lot easier to address a handful of small challenges than one big one).

The Chocolate War All it usually takes to see a problem clearly is to consciously seek out the 6 W's. A couple years ago, I worked with the training and personal development manager at one of the world's largest online stores. Lila had been with the company since day one and had seen it grow from a shop of twenty people to well over a thousand, and as training manager, Lila knew every one of them. Ask her a who, what, where, when, or why about anybody, and she could answer. Over her five years with the company, Lila had become an irreplaceable business a.s.set, the one person who knew everyone, and her managers agreed that they'd bend over backward to keep her.

But one day Lila got a call from a headhunter with an offer that no amount of executive back bending could counter: chocolate. One of the nation's most highly regarded luxury chocolate brands was s.h.i.+fting into growth mode. All around the country, sales of high-end chocolate were up as Americans' tastes became more refined, and the company realized that if it was ever going to expand its small base of regional shops into a nationwide chain, the time was now. But in spite of the need for speed, the company's leaders made the decision that growth would not come at the cost of quality.

Which meant that everyone involved in opening the new stores-from the managers to the chocolatiers to the cas.h.i.+ers-would need quality-oriented and quality-centric training, and lots of it. The company needed a training manager with experience in rapidly growing organizations, which meant that the company needed someone like Lila. And Lila, tasting a real opportunity, realized that she was more ready for a change than she'd thought. She took the job.

When Lila met her new team, she was awed by their experience and dedication. Most had been with the company for the bulk of their careers and knew exactly how things worked, inside and out. This was good for Lila, because it meant she'd have the collected insight in the company available to her as she ramped up the new training engine. But it also turned out to be bad for Lila because it meant that her people had been looking at their same materials for so long that they could no longer see them.

When Lila asked for a sample of existing training materials, her team brought her hundreds of doc.u.ments in dozens of binders, each with cryptic names: LLT v. 12, CTFS&C 2005, and ISMT Lvl 2 (SM) (Leader-Lead Training, Chocolate Tasting for Staff and Customers, In-Store Management Training for s.h.i.+ft Mgrs). When she asked for an overview to orient herself within these unfamiliar terms, her team came back with another dozen doc.u.ments: calendars and schedules, org structures and job t.i.tles, training locations, lists of desired outcomes, and test result summaries.

Her team didn't "get" what Lila was asking for, and Lila wasn't "getting" what she wanted. For her, it was like looking under the hood and not seeing anything useful: There were too many pieces with too few visible connections to discern any patterns. There was no question that her team knew what they were talking about; they answered any query from Lila with speed and confidence. When Lila asked, "Who attends Leader-Lead Training version 12?" they all answered in unison, "All new hires who have completed Bean Basics but have not yet qualified on customer tastings management."

It drove Lila crazy: Her people knew their training programs so well that they could n't remember what it was like to not know them. Since the curriculum had grown around them, her team couldn't see training as anything but a fully integrated piece-which was the last thing that Lila could discern. As an experienced trainer herself, Lila knew that the fix relied at least as much on her as on her team. They knew what was what but couldn't describe it; she didn't know what was what and couldn't see anything.

Lila had three choices: She could bear all the pain (attend the entire training series herself-a minimum eighteen-week commitment, normally spread out over five plus years); she could make her team bear all the pain (by telling them to go off as a group and not come back until they'd rewritten everything in a way that could be summarized in an hour); or they could all share the pain.

Lila chose the shared-pain option, and that's when she called me. She wanted to arrange a whiteboarding session to which everybody brought all their training materials, looked for connections with everybody else's materials, and kept at it until all the pieces gelled into visible alignment. Not being a fan of daylong "brainstorming sessions," Lila wondered if I had any ideas about how pictures might minimize the pain.

I suggested that she and her team lay everything out and then work through it piece by piece, trying to see the chocolate training process as it is reflected across the 6 W's.

1. Looking over all the materials in front of them, I suggested that they try to see the who and the what of the training system.

Who gets trained and who does the training?

What topics are taught and what lessons are presented?

2. Next, try to see how much and how many.

How many lessons are required; how much time do they take?

How many people can attend each lesson; how many instructors are needed?

3. Next, try to see the where.

Geographically, where do the lessons take place: in-store, training facilities, at home?

Conceptually, where do the lessons overlap in content, structure, or attendance?

4. Then the when.

When do the lessons take place?

In what sequence do they need to occur?

5. Then the how.

How does one lesson relate to another; how do they fit together?

How are the lessons taught: face-to-face, in a group, online?

How are the lessons applied; how do you know you're ready to move on?

6. Finally, try to see the why.

Why is training necessary; why make the effort at all?

Why judge, why test, why track, why follow through?

Then I suggested that as they see these things, they map them on the whiteboard according to the 6 W's categories. Lila thought that sounded fine and asked me to join in. I did, and here is what I saw on the table when I arrived: The Chocolate Training Process as Seen According to the 6 W's First off, we looked through the training materials with an eye toward seeing which people were involved. Each time we came across a role, job t.i.tle, or position, we wrote it down. There were a lot of specifics, so we decided to summarize them by organizational level. This turned out to be a good way to start, since everyone in the room already had a common understanding of how the organization was structured, making it easy to capture the basics.

Here we see who needs to be trained, from staff to executives.

Next, we looked for specifics describing what was taught. This was a little harder, not only because the list was long, but because different trainers thought about courses in different ways. Some summarized by teacher, some by materials, others by outcome. After a brief discussion, we agreed to make our list based on what specifically was taught, which led to the emergence of a fairly natural set of categories. Even at this early point in the day, there was a shared sense of accomplishment in generating a single list that everyone could see and agree on.

Here we see what the employees are being trained on, from chocolate manufacturing and retail basics up to advanced business management courses.

When we came to how much training was required, it was difficult to separate out the specifics. It depended on the subject, the audience, previous experience, etc. But since we'd just created a shared list of whats, we had a common base from which to start. So we took the top categories from the what map and estimated total training hours a.s.sociated with each.

Seeing the geographic wheres was a no-brainer since there were only three physical places that anyone could think of where training took place. It offered a nice rest and we all took a breather... until we started in on the conceptual side of where. When we started to discuss such ideas as where the courses overlapped in terms of content or audience, or where they mapped on various career paths, the going got tougher. Not wanting to lose momentum, we decided to press on with the whens and come back later.

It was a good decision to make: As we mapped out when the various courses needed to be taken, another natural pattern emerged. It turned out that there wasn't a single timeline, but rather two: the path for employees entering the factory and the path for employees entering the retail side of the business. Both took the same amount of time to complete, but both were completely distinct from each other-which effectively accounted for the course overlap challenge we'd hit a few minutes before. In this case, by seeing when, we resolved the issue of where.

Then we took a break.

Here we see how much training is required, and that the hours increase as people become more expert and have more to learn.

Here we see where training takes place, from factory training to home learning.

Here we see when training occurs throughout the entire career of the chocolatier, and for the first time we see that there are, in fact, two different timelines.

It turned out that the break was a good idea, too, since mapping out the how proved to be the most difficult. This wasn't surprising since we know that how is fundamentally the intersection of all the previous W's. Since we'd spent all morning on the who, what, how much, where, and when, we were able to finally nail down a model of how training worked that, again, everyone could see and agree with.

Seeing the why was a good way to end the day. Everyone knew exactly why all this training was needed-to provide a way for a lot of people to start making, selling, and enjoying really good chocolate without sacrificing quality.

Who, what, how much, where, when, how, and why: For the first time, everyone saw eye to eye.

Here we see how training takes place, and we see that the two different paths have options based on previous experience and individual career choices.

Lila saw why it had been so difficult for her team to summarize everything (there were a lot of pieces here) and the team saw why she needed a summary (in order to see how to optimize and grow the training process). In one day, we'd managed to convert hundreds of pages and many years of experience into a handful of pictures. Now Lila could see what her team was talking about, and they could see what she was after.

Last, we see why training takes place: to make the best chocolate in the world, and to make sure the largest number of chocolate lovers possible can get some.

Lila still had an enormous amount to learn from her people, and she faced the even larger task of finding a way to scale up all this training in order to support hundreds of new people, but her new career in chocolate finally felt under control. Now she could see where she was going.

Preview of Coming Attractions:

Get Ready for the Six Ways of Showing

There is another way to use these six ways. Because they encapsulate all the ways we see, they also encapsulate all the ways we can show. When the time comes to move to the final step in the visual thinking process, we're going to come back to these same six. But next time, we won't be using the 6 W's as ways of seeing, we'll be using them as the basis for showing other people what we've seen, and thus completing the visual thinking cycle.

The six ways we see: who/what, how many, where, when, how, and why.

But we're not quite there yet. So far, we've been focused on our eyes and looking and seeing-the tools and steps that we rely on to process visual information from the outside world. In the next chapter, we're going to close our eyes and start spinning all those visual inputs around, manipulating them, turning them upside down, and trying to create entirely new patterns. We're going to turn on our mind's eye and start imagining.

Everything we've seen up till now is going to come back around when it's time to show.

* If you're interested in the neurobiology and science behind the six ways we see, be sure to read Appendix B: The Science of Visual Thinking.

* There are several theories as to why the visual processing of where and what are not only physically remote from each other in our brains, but are also separated by several million years of neurobiological evolution. See Appendix B: The Science of Visual Thinking.

CHAPTER 6.

THE SQVID: A PRACTICAL LESSON IN APPLIED IMAGINATION.

Seeing with Our Eyes Closed: The Art of Imagining Up to this point, our eyes have been our windows on the world: Through active looking we used our eyes to collect visual information about the challenges in front of us, and through careful seeing we broke that incoming information into six different visual types. But as useful as our eyes have been, we're now going to leave them behind. In this section, we're going to be seeing in ways that don't require our eyes at all; what we will require is our ability to imagine.

Imagining is how we let our mind's eye take over so that we can see things that aren't physically visible in front of us. This means taking the concrete coordinates, patterns, and components that we see in the world and translating them into abstract pictures that we can manipulate inside our heads.

Imagining isn't a magical process that requires us to enter a trancelike state or visualize positive energy or anything equally disconcerting to most businesspeople. Imagining is simply another approach to seeing, and in most respects it is not far removed from the six ways of seeing we've already discussed. The only real difference is that when we imagine, we're letting our mind's eye see things that aren't actually there. When we imagine, we're using the same high-level mental vision processing centers that we do when our eyes are open. We're just letting our mind's eye do the visual cooking instead of ordering in.

From a business problem-solving perspective, imagining is an extraordinarily powerful way of conjuring up ideas and solutions, and there are dozens of approaches, exercises, and books available for improving the creative thinking process. Some, like visual memory games, mind mapping, visual a.n.a.logies and metaphors-yes, even specific kinds of meditation-can be applied with great success to the visual thinking process.

Since excellent descriptions of many of these are available elsewhere,* we're going to focus on a single imagining framework that I call the SQVID. The SQVID (we'll get to the origin of the name in a moment) is a visual imagination activation tool that I rely on constantly when I'm working with clients. Like the other visual thinking tools, the SQVID is a stand-alone exercise that can be used anytime, anywhere to fully engage our visual imaginations. As we'll see, the SQVID simultaneously helps us complete two critical tasks of imagining: It activates every corner of our mind's eye to fully realize a mental image, and it helps us see that image through the eyes of our potential audience.

The best way to see something that isn't there is to look with our eyes closed, and that's where imagining comes in.

The Many Ways to Slice an Apple The best way to introduce the SQVID is with another visualization exercise. (Ironically, this time I'd rather you didn't close your eyes.) But instead of sitting on a park bench, we're going to travel farther from home: This time imagine that you're on vacation on a tropical South Seas island, and on a gorgeous sunny day you're taking a leisurely stroll along the beach. On one side of you is white sand and turquoise ocean. On the other side is deep jungle, blooming with tall palms and colorful plants. Got it? Not too hard to conjure up that scene, I hope.

Now imagine that as you stroll along, you meet a local islander coming the other way, eating an unusual purple fruit. Although you don't speak the local language, this is a very friendly island, and the islander nods h.e.l.lo. You nod back, and the islander stops and hands you one of the strange purple fruits, indicating that you should taste it. You accept and take a tentative chomp. Hmm... it's really good, almost like an apple, only sweeter and juicier.

The villager doesn't seem to be in any hurry to go anywhere, and you've got nothing pressing to do, so you decide to reciprocate by sharing something about apples back home. Of course, there's nothing around that looks like an apple, so the language barrier dictates that you'll have to use pictures. Luckily, you have several c.o.c.ktail napkins from your resort and a felt-tip pen in your pocket. As you pull out these excellent visual thinking tools, you begin to imagine the best way to visually describe an apple.

Your first sketch is a simple little drawing of an apple, the first thing that pops into your mind's eye.

But, thinking about this sketch and noting the lush jungle around you, you realize that perhaps it makes more sense to elaborate a bit and add an apple tree.

Then again, maybe it's better to show the whole orchard.

Odd: All three of the drawings are valid descriptions of apples, yet each looks different-and this is just the beginning. Now that you're thinking about it, you realize that depending on what you most want the islander to understand about apples, you could sketch all sorts of other views.

You might wish to try to describe the apple in all its luscious glory: red and s.h.i.+ny, round and shapely.