MONEY

To get your message across, doodle

RICH NADWORNY

I'll admit right now I'm terrible at drawing. I always have been. Those people who say that kids are artistic when they're young only to have it knocked out of them at school never met me in first grade. I was just as bad at drawing then as I am now.

About eight years ago, I started noticing a number of how-to videos online produced by a company in Seattle name Common Craft. I'm sure you've seen them: they explain very complex issues using cutouts and simple drawings. They were explaining things like how to elect a president, health care, or how to use Twitter. What struck me the most was how easy it was to follow and understand what they were saying.

They inspired me so much that I went right out and bought a book called "Back of the Napkin" by Dan Roam. Roam's premise is that is much easier and far more effective to solve problems and sell ideas using pictures than it is by just using words. The book has examples and strategies for new and old doodlers, but what it does best is to encourage even the worst drawer (me) to start drawing.

A weird thing happens when you start making stick figures, arrows, shapes and connections — you start seeing things more clearly and other people get far more engaged in your process. I'll give you an example:

I was delivering a communications strategy to a client in preparation for a presentation with senior management. I warned them that I was going to "draw" the recommendations but I'd have a slick PowerPoint deck for the final presentation. I scrawled my stick figures, shapes and connections, illustrating the new approach I was recommending. While I was explaining, my clients kept jumping in and making little drawings and additions of their own. When we were done, they implored me to forgo the PowerPoint and to do the presentation in exactly this way.

What happened? I'd like to think that they were cured of PowerPoint-itis: a corporate disease unleashed on us by Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer that assumes that humans are incapable of understanding anything except bulleted lists of 18 point type. In reality, the audience needed fewer words to understand now that there were pictures. More interestingly, the type of drawing actually encouraged collaboration and participation. Simply put, the drawings made the work more human.

Human. That's the key word. In the Cro-Magnon caves in Lascaux and other places, there are no long reports or bulleted lists. There are pictures. We humans are hard wired for images.

I noticed a few years ago some colleagues of mine attending conferences were no longer taking notes. Instead, they were doodling their notes and then sharing them online. I compared what they did with the notes I took at various talks, notes that I rarely, if ever, looked back on and, when I did, could only understand about 1/3 of what I wrote.

This new type of note-taking, called sketchnoting was completely different. It was very visual; it captured only the key points; it used doodle sketches to illustrate those points; and it used visual connectors to tie different points together. It was a doodle portrait of someone's talk. And it was one of the most interesting things I'd seen in a long time.

There's science behind this, too: People who doodle while listening to someone talk recall nearly 30 percent more than people just listen, according to a 2009 article in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology.

There's a great book called The Sketchnote Handbook that I'm using to get better at doodling and to practice "drawing" my notes. The examples in the book will blow you away. But you don't have to be a good drawer to do this.

The author, Mike Rohde, is interested in coming to Burlington to hold a Sketchnote Workshop this summer. If you're interested, pop me an email at rich@empatico.us.

In the mean time, start sketching and doodling. It works both when you're trying to solve problems and when you're trying to explain them. Go out and find any whiteboard you can and start sketching. It will make your work better and make it more fun to do, too.

Rich Nadworny is principal at Empatico, an innovation and design firm in Burlington. You can connect with Rich at www.empatico.us or follow him on Twitter @rnadworny.