XPLANE @ VizThink3

Presentation by Dave Gray and Scott Matthews from XPLANE.

Note about Notes: These notes were originally taken by JayGoldman. If I missed something, or got your name wrong, please correct and supplement!

• Visual Thinking School: 2 hours of focused on getting better at visual thinking at every office throughout the company per week.

• Business schools don't teach communication, which is a problem.
  • Strategies, business plans, new technologies, new services.
• Communicated through PPT
• The impact is that people fall asleep or check their email
• The Visual Thinking Company
• Very hands on sessions, lots of whiteboards
• Customers more and more were asking for how to do this themselves
• Adding pictures to words increases people's ability to understand new information by 89%
  • 3M Study:
    • Decisions 12% faster
    • Meetings 31% faster
    • Movement to action 43% faster
• Visual thinking leads to discovery game:
  • Da Vinci, Galileo, Newton, Edison, Ford, Einstein, Picasso, Feynman, Hawking
  • Sample of illustrations done by all of the above
• Badley Hitch model of working memory
  • Fastest route to the brain is through the optic nerve
  • Hold about 2 secs of info in your auditory memory
  • Visual Spatial Sketchpad is like a movie screen in your head (capcity is unknown)
• Definition of visual language: words and images, tightly integrated.
  • Most clear, concise, and globally consitent communication possible
  • Traditional communication is abstract, visual is concrete
• The most valuable informatin is locked inside people's heads
  • If you can describe it verbally, they can depict it visually
• Sales guys tend to draw metaphorically
  • Best is if you can get people drawing literally what happens
• Show, don't tell
  • It's more powerful to put a diagram up on the wall than a Motivator poster
• Visual communication is nodes and links
  • A node is any item that's part of a larger system
  • Communicating visually is like opening Pandora's box
  • Writing in Word is linear, visual thinking is spatial
• You're invited to XPLANE Visual Thinking School!
  • Madrid, Friday 4-6pm
  • St. Louis, Portland: Thursday from 4-6pm

• First activity:
  • Tags on post-it notes - nodes
  • Complete the sentences:
    • What I want from VizThink...
    • What I love about VizThink...
  • Silent Sticky Capture/Node Generation
    • Lots of ideas in the room and more divergent thinking
      • First talkers set the tone for the room, but this way the ideas are more divergent

• Second activity:
  • Have everyone pick a 1 or 2, then split the group based on that
  • First group goes to the "I want..." wall and organizes nodes into five categories
    • Don't focus on naming the categories
  • Second group does the same for the "I love..." wall
  • Swap walls and name the other groups' categories
  • Have everyone write down their favourite category from each side
  • Poll the room for show of hands for each category
    • I want Ideation
    • I love Clarity

• How to draw a stick figure
  • Don't start with the head!
  • Picture someone doing the activity from 20 feet away
    • You don't see the head from that distance
  • Draw the body first
    • Think of it as an index card twisting in space
  • Next draw the legs
  • Now the arms
  • Finally the head
    • The head's relationship with the body shows movement/speed

• Some primitives:
  • 2D:
    • Point
    • Line
    • Circle
    • Square/rectangle
    • Triangle
  • 3D:
    • Cube
    • Cone
    • Cylinder
  • Useful:
    • Arrow
    • Word balloon
    • Thought balloon
    • Pointer box

• Dave: "Trees have to die in order for us to be creative!"
  • As poor as Van Gogh was, he never skimped on paint

• Most people stop drawing around 5 - 7 years old
  • Might be part of how we "design our brains"
  • For those people, going back to drawing is like reverting to their childhood

• I Want...
  • Slide 1: Ideation (pages 1a and 1b)
    • Thing + Idea = New Thing
    • Stick figure sees an object, conceptualizes, creates new thing
    • See an thing (puzzle piece), conceptualize it in a great scope, it becomes a new thing
  • Slide 2: Mad Skillz (pages 2 and 3)
    • 2a: Lisukka
      • Thinking about how someobody could look at all the pieces of a problem and be able to organize the concepts and see a bigger picture using visuals and graphics
      • The process of what that could look like
      • See it with a client, draw it out, see what it looks like
      • Funnel process leading to a metaphor
    • 2b: Bryan
      • Trytrytrytrytrytrytrytrytrytry
      • Lots of paper falls to the floor
      • Confusion
      • Moment of clarity
      • More confusion
      • Aspiration Realized (if you're lucky)
    • 2c: Mike Jones
      • Concept maps (using a nice computer program that does it for him)
    • 2d: Michael
      • A hand drawing something on a paper, stick figures running, people, cubes
      • All things which show mad skillz
  • Slide 3: Community and Social (pages 4 and 5)
    • 3a: Libin
      • Listen
      • Try to understand
      • Exchange ideas with other people
    • 3b: Dan Rose
      • As we move into the future we'll have more of a collective where we'll share ideas
    • 3c: Sandy (pages 4 and 5)
      • Crowd sourcing
      • People generating ideas (by themselves, at a computer, having a beer)
      • Thinking their own things leads to bigger collective ideas
      • Social networking
      • Unity concept
  • Slide 4: Insight (pages 6 and 7)
    • 4a: Yendre
      • Having a whole universe of insight inside ourselves
      • A-ha moment when someone sees the connections or you see them on your own
    • 4b: Martin Cleaver
      • Three stick figures, each having a graph with a local optimization
      • Each optimizes inside of what they know
      • Knows the scope of the things they do
      • Understands requirements from other people/departments
      • Extracting the three graphs shows there might be disconnects between them
    • 4c: Hassan
      • Pythogrean theoreum
      • Random lines mapping into magical shapes
      • Lightbulb!
    • 4d: Matt
      • A guy opening his chest and looking inside
      • The guy inside the guy
    • 4e: Robin
      • Guy with a third eye, which gives him the ability to look into things
  • Slide 5: Desire (pages 8 and 9)
    • 5a: Dave
      • Walking along the street and you're notthinking about anything and there's windows with stuff in them
      • That's where desire turns into interesting things
      • Something in a store window catches your eye and you get pulled through a door and something amazing happens
      • Be open to your desire taking you places you couldn't have predicted
    • 5b: Scott
      • Everyone loves ice cream!
    • 5c: Ryan
      • Kid staring at a candy store with a closed sign on it
      • Wants to enjoy it but he can't

• I Love...
  • Slide 6: Clarity (pages 11 and 12)
    • 6a:
      • Golf balls flying around and getting caught on a butterfly knife
    • 6b: Rohan
      • Jumble of information which gets sorted out into a clearer form
      • Traffic sign thing showing no confusion and yes to clarity
  • Slide 7: New Paradigms (pages 12 and 13)
    • 7a: Lee
      • It was really hard to figure out what "new paradigms" are
      • Thinking outside of the box
      • Hatching new ideas
  • Slide 8: Community (pages 14 and 15)
    • 8a: Rochelle
      • We all collaborated on it
      • People holding hands
      • Love, family, communities
      • Clothing is a connector
      • Food and wine - booze is part of what ties us
      • Trees and branches
      • Skyline of Toronto
    • 8b: Ellena
      • We tried to show an unconference by crossing out the shirt and tie and pointing to the t-shirt and jeans
  • Slide 9: Iconography (pages 16 and 17)
    • 9a: Kaleem
      • Pure iconography, no conciousness
      • Whatever came to mind
    • 9b: Angelica
      • Icons are important to our global society
      • Woman's washroom sign
      • Can't have a dog in the apartment because the neighbours are scared, so no dogs
      • Envelopes (with flames would be Hotmail!)
  • Slide 10: Marker Fumes (page 18)
    • 10a: They all passed out :)

• Dave:
  • This is so much better than PowerPoint!
  • You can do this in your company when you need ideas