Your Visual Thinking Toolkit

The basic premise of Dan Roam's book The Back of the Napkin is that anyone can use a visual medium to powerfully communicate their message. Here are the main concepts - but I encourage you to pick up a copy of the book as soon as possible to fully understand, and implement, these powerful communication tools.

3 Basic Visual Thinking Tools

• Our eyes
• Our mind's eye
• Our hand-eye coordination

4 Steps of the Visual Thinking Process

• Look
• See
• Imagine
• Show

5 Questions to Help Open Your Mind's Eye

• Simple or Elaborate
• Qualitative or quantitative
• Vision or execution
• Individual or comparison
• Change or status quo

6 Ways We See and Show

• Who/what - portrait
• How much - chart
• Where - map
• When - timeline
• How - flowchart
• Why - plot

Tomorrow, I'm going to dive into how I'm using these concepts on a couple of brand new projects: a consulting project for a church in the Bronx, and a new presentation for the Church Solutions Conference in Phoenix next February. For now I've got to run - I'm sketching in my journal at Panera!