Dan Roam gave a workshop to the heads of staff for Senators from the Democratic side. His post shows a great working example of his principles from his book The Back of the Napkin. He condenses a lot of heavy data comparing eight years of the Clinton Administration with eight years of the George W Bush administration into graphics that are easy to understand and that anyone could produce.
Consider this next time you have to present any boring company data!
See the full post with many more graphics here
I was intrigued by a posting on David Sibbet's blog of The Grove Consultants. He eloquently recapped a recent Facilitation Mastery session that he led where participants learn the Grove's methodology and the four flows. Having a meditation practice of my own I was drawn to this exercise on working with the flow of attention (see below) and his metaphor that likened personal growth to the growth rings on a tree. I really like that metaphor and believe we are always adding to our edges or rings through our experiences.
From his posting Working the Flow of Attention
Since attention is fundamental, we threaded reflective process throughout. If you think of attention as a flashlight (metaphor again), then it can be broad or narrow beam. It can also be turned inward or outward. A facilitator needs to not only be aware of his or her own awareness but also imagine what people in the group are attending to. So how does a person develop mastery in being aware of attention?
Our big exercise day one was having people create large personal portraits of themselves inside an outline of their bodies drawn by a partner. These portraits were “current state” pictures looking at four aspects of ourselves (these questions were derived from thinking about the four flows). The question we asked of ourselves are the following:
1. What inspires you?
2. What nurtures you?
3. What intrigues you?
4. What are you committed to?
5. What gifts are you bringing to this workshop?
The graphic below was David's answer. Answers to question #1 are along the top. Question #2 answers are along the left side. Question #3 answers are along the bottom. Questions #4 answers are on the rights side. And Question #5 answers are inside his body outline.
The BIGVIZ is an exploration in visualizing the Big Ideas presented on the TED mainstage. Two visual cartographers, David Sibbet (Grove Consultants) and Kevin Richards (Autodesk), created over 700 spontaneous sketches of the presenters' ideas using Autodesk Sketchbook Pro software running on Wacom Cintiq tablets and rendered on a Perceptive Pixel multi-touch display. These tools illustrate the power of interactive visualization to present the big picture to foster insight and communicate ideas visually, central principles of design innovation.
You can download the TED2008-BIGVIZ Book and see an amazing Movie of the 700 plus illustrations.
Dan Roam's new book The Back of The Napkin is a hit. All in a style that is quick and enjoyable to read, Roam offers great practical advice that you can put to use immediately to solve problems and sell ideas with pictures ! He introduces a powerful system that eases the removal of the barriers and fears associated with visual thinking. I've really enjoyed this book.
Additional resources you may find useful:
A 53 minute podcast from the Principled Innovation Blog
Back of the Napkin Book Overview on Vizthink
A 59 minute podcast from Vizthink Podcast is broken into 3 segments.
Peter Durand's interview from the Center for Graphic Facilitation is also very good
The Back of the Napkin site and blog
More Napkin Sketch Examples on BusinessWeek
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