The Four Steps of Visual Thinking

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Look - See - Imagine - Show

The backbone of visual thinking is four simple steps, repeated over and over:

Look: collect information, focus on what’s important and screen out everything else.

See: recognize patterns, select those that are applicable and group details together.

Imagine: use your mind to see what’s not there yet but should be.

Show: get others to catch on to what you’ve thought up and make it all clear.

Look

Looking is simply the process of taking in visual information about the world around you. It means to collect data and make some rough initial assessments. Looking includes scanning the environment to build a big-picture sense about what’s going on. Looking is the starting point of the entire visual thinking process. If you can learn to look better, you can become proficient at visual thinking.

To develop good looking skills, there are four cardinal rules to follow:

1. Collect everything you want to look at: start with a quantity over quality approach. Put together an exhaustive sample which includes every conceivable thing you may need in the future. Gather as much raw data as is reasonably availablye to you to start the ball rolling.

2. Lay everything out in one place: side by side preferably so your eyes can scan everything in a few passes. Put everything in one place so you know you’re able to analyze everything systematically.

3. Establish a coordinate system that makes senes in this situation: some variable that you can use to compare the relative merits of different items. In some cases, this will be the amount of money involved. In other cases, you’ll use a combination of the 6W coordinate system:

Who/What is involved?

How Much does it cost or generate?

When will these things happen?

Where will these things take place?

How will these things be achieved?

Why are these things happening?

4. Practice some ”visual triage”: make a first pass to eliminate what will obviously not apply, leaving just a few options that are worthy of further examination and analysis.

Any problem can be made clearer with a picture, and any picture can by created using the same set of tools and rules.

–Dan Roam

The basics of visual thinking have nothing to do with creating charts on a computer. Visual thinking is learning to think with our eyes, and it doesn’t require any advanced technology at all. The most important reason to rely on our built-in tools is because in the end, visual thinking isn’t about how polished our presentations are, it is in how comfortable we are in thinking with our eyes.

–Dan Roam

See

While looking involves collecting visual information and making an initial rough asessment about what’s out there, seeing is where your eyes get more consciously active and involved. Looking means to scan the big picture whereas seeing means to select what’s important to the task at hand. Good seeing means you recognize what exactly is causing the problem or presenting an opportunity and focus on that.

Broadly speaking, there are six ways you see things in the physical world:

1.You can see objects: the ”Who” and the ”What” is interacting in any situation. Discrete objects always exhibit known measures and physical attributes.

2. You can see and note quantities or grouping of different objects: the ”How Many” or ”How Much” of the situation. You’re so used to seeing numbers of objects that you get good at grouping things together wither even realizing you’re doing it.

3. You can see position in space: the ”Where” of any situation. Again, you’re already good at noticing where objects are in a physical scene. In’s a basic part of the way the human mind is hardwired.

4. You can see position changes over time: the ”When” of any situation. Based on your knowledge of physical objects, you notice whether something is moving in a predictable or anticipated way.

5. You can see cause-and-effect relationships: the ”How” of any situation. You can tell how what one object did influenced the actions of other objects and how everything came to end up the way it did.

6. You can see a complex interaction of different objects play out: the ”Why” of any situation. Based on what you already know, you can make an educated guess on how things should turn out and then compare reality with what was anticipated would happen. If things don’t go as planned, you can then become intensely focused on uncovering why the normal rules of physical interaction did not end up applying in this context.

Imagine

Imagining is what happens when you’ve collected all your visual material and you’re now ready to start manipulating it. As you imagine, you see things that aren’t there physically in your mind’s eye. Put another way, the act of imagining means you take what you see in the real world and translate this data into abstract pictures that you manipulate inside your head.

In a business setting, most times imagining means coming up with an original idea or a new solution to a problem or challenge. A good way to do this is to use the SQVID exercise. Ask yourself five questions:

SQVID–The 5 questions that open the mind’s eye

S: Simple or Elaborate?
Q: Qualitative or Quantitative?
V: Vision or Execution?
I: Individual or Comparison?
D: Change or Status Quo?

S: What is a somple way and a corresponding elaborate way to draw a picture that proposes a solution to the problem or opportunity at hand?

Whether you ultimately decide to use a simple or an elaborate picture is usually dictated by the audience you’ll be speaking to and their familiarity. However, often when you think about the best way to describe your solution in both a simple and an elaborate format, new and creative ideas will come to mind. Being able to chooes between a simple solution and a more elaborate solution and showing each graphically is very powerful.

Q: Am I better off talking about quantity or quality in my solution?

In other words, will it be better to use a graphic that focuses on one example in depth or is it preferable to consider what happens to a large number of examples simultaneously? There are times when either the quantitative or the qualitative approach is superior, and by trying both, you get a feel what the best will be in this particular setting.

V: Is it preferable to show a solution that is visionary in its nature or a solution that is much more obviously practical and executable?

Sometimes, it’s important to convey to your audience the message: ”We know where we’re going and we have a very bright future.” In these cases, the visionary approach will probably resonate best. At other times, however, it’s more important to send the message: ”We know exactly what we need to do to get there.” In these cases, a more practical set-by-step execution pathway will be of greater interest and value. The most widely used chart in this second setting is a Gantt chart, which is in effect a bar chart laid on its side with the length of each bar representing how long a specific task will take to complete. Whichever of these two approaches ends up getting used, if you can come up with some graphics that illustrate both alternatives clearly, then you’ll have a message that people can relate to through their eyes.

I: Should I focus on one individual example or compare the characteristics of a large group of samples?

Sometimes, the greatest illumination will come when you zoom in to the individual level and focus there. At other times, comparing a large group of data and how they break down will be better. Once again, if you can come up with graphics for both scenarios, you can then choose the optimum approach for what you’re trying to say or think about.

D: Is it better to talk about the way things are at present or to dwell on the way they could be in the future if we make a few clanges?

Again, both these perspectives can throw up different points of view and comparing both can be quite helpful. By articulating and drawing a graphic showing what’s happening at the present time, people can get motivted to act to free up the more obvious logjams. The other side of the coin is that developing a graphic that encapsulates what the ideal world of the future will look like is also helpful. It can give a mental model to aim for that can act as a guide. As with the other questions previously discussed, doing both is a great idea. You can look at things from two different perspectives and capture the various ideas that get interjected that way. This stretches your imagination and brings your ideas into clearer focus.

Show

Once you’ve discovered some interesting patterns, made sense of them, and figured out some creative ways to manipulate them so you come up with something new, it’s now time to show this to others. You need a good framework for summarizing your ideas in visual format so everyone else can get up to speed with what you’re thinking. To show means to make clear your best ideas so you can inform and persuade.

In order to show well, there are three steps involved:

1. Select the right ‘’show-and-tell” framework: which shouldn’t be all that hard, because there are just six to choose from. The most appropriate framework will correspond to the type of problem you’re attempting to solve. If you go back to the See step, you’ll note that there are six basic problems:
1. ”Who/What”?
2. ”How Much”?
3. ”Where”?
4. ”When”?
5. ”How”?
6. ”Why”?

2. Use the framework to create a suitable starting-point picture: which in effect means adding the appropriate coordinate system and then whatever details will enhance the picture you’re trying to draw.

3. Present and then explain your picture: add whatever explanatory text is required for someone to understand what your graphic represents. Sometimes, this will need to be a detailed explanation, while at other times a very simple and straightforward explanation will suffice.

Visual thinking means taking advantage of our innate ability to see–both with out eyes and with out mind’s eye–in order to discover ideas that are otherwise invisible, develop those ideas quickly and intuitively, and then share those ideas with other people in a way they simply ‘get.’

–Dan Roam

We can use the simplicity and immediacy of pictures to discover and clarify our own ideas, and use those same pictures to clarify our ideas for other people, helping them discover something new for themselves along the way.

–Dan Roam