1. 16/07/2012 20:14The simple power of the doodle - FT.com
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July 16, 2012 7:11 pm
The simple power of the
doodle
By Ian Sanders
In the offices of Brille Records on London’s trendy
Shoreditch/Dalston borders, managing director
Paul Benney is wrapping up a meeting. His
notepad is full of notes that have captured ideas
for a business strategy.
But there is little text on the page – he has simply
doodled a diagram showing the core business in a
box at the centre, with arrows branching off to
potential new revenue streams. “Pictures are a
great way of capturing your thoughts,” he says.
It might only be a basic diagram but Mr Benney is
one of a growing number of business people who
see the merits of visual note-taking.
Communicating through pictures is not new:
people have always doodled thoughts on blotter
pads, agenda papers and the backs of napkins. Indeed Dan
Roam wrote The Back Of The Napkin, an entire book about visual thinking for the business
world.
At the Edelman Academic Summit at Stanford University in June, Richard Edelman,
president of the global public relations company, argued that visual storytelling is more
important than ever. He cited the big social media success stories of 2012: the image
curation site Pinterest; the blogging platform Tumblr; and the mobile photo-!sharing app
Instagram that was acquired by Facebook for $1bn. In a content-saturated world where
ideas compete for attention, a visual representation of a meeting, project, business or idea
may be more effective than reams of text.
ft.com/frontpage All times are London timeUK
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Mr Benney says he started doodling by accident after he had switched his “to do” lists to an
online app that syncs with his digital devices. All of a sudden, the pages of his paper
notepad remained empty. Without thinking, he started filling them with doodles. Now, he
says diagrams are more effective than a bullet-point list. He rarely revisits the drawings as
the exercise is more a way of ordering and visualising his thinking at that particular
moment. “Putting it in a diagram, not a list, is a more positive way of outlining a business
strategy. And doing it like this made me more excited about the process,” he says.
Mr Benney’s discovery that doodling could help him run the business is no surprise to
Sunni Brown who is leading a self-billed “doodle revolution”. The continued use of simple
pen and paper may seem surprising in the digital age but she believes few digital tools can
match analogue for the physicality involved in human learning and thinking. “We still learn
very much through visceral experience – through the acts of moving and manipulating
objects, sketching and doodling, seeing things take shape before our eyes and shaping
those things with our hands and bodies,” she says.
Ms Brown and her team at BrightSpot Info Design, based in Austin, Texas run visual-
thinking workshops for businesses such as banks, retailers and television networks,
including Dell, Disney and Turner Broadcasting. She acknowledges that executives’
preconceptions range from “bemused to sceptical”, but she finds their new skills give
businesses the chance to expand their approach to solving problems.
Jennifer Dorian, senior vice-president, strategy and brand development, at Turner
Broadcasting is a convert. “I have found visual thinking a powerful tool for getting others to
explain their concepts,” she says.
Visual note-taking can also be a useful way to summarise meetings. It is tempting to try to
emulate the speed and accuracy of a court stenographer, but the fact is no one else writes
as fast as people speak. Ms Brown argues that incorporating visual imagery into note-
taking is a good solution. “Imagery doesn’t compete with words for your brain’s attention.
It literally moves us into a different head space and allows verbal information to be taken
in and better absorbed.”
This side of the process was recently employed at Google’s London headquarters. During
the latest of its quarterly Firestarters talks, as one guest speaker addressed an audience of
digital media executives, an illustrator from graphic facilitation company Scriberia used
coloured pens to make a graphical representation of the speech on huge sheets of paper.
Fast sketched cartoons, arrows, icons and quotes captured the themes of the presentation.
Neil Perkin, organiser of the Firestarters series, says that using Scriberia gives an added
dimension to the talks. “We deliberately place the scribe in line of sight to the audience to
enable a visual narrative for the talks to emerge as it unfolds. When it’s finished, we have a
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graphic record of the event and a great piece of equity to send to attendees” he says.
Dan Porter, creative director at Scriberia, believes anchoring discussions with a drawing
can become a touchstone in a way that text cannot. “It’s attractive as an antidote to
charmless, boxy PowerPoint slides and spreadsheets. It doesn’t look too finished, which
makes it more approachable and easier to engage with than more polished messaging,” he
says.
Mike Rohde is a designer and professional visual note-taker from Milwaukee. He dots
down details from meetings and conferences in his pocket Moleskine notebooks then
uploads scans of his sketches to Flickr, the photo-sharing website, making them available
to executives attending the event.
Mr Rohde has expanded his note-taking to include hand-drawn letters, arrows, icons and
other visual elements to help capture and express the ideas he is hearing. “Sketch notes
offer more options for emphasising concepts, which also means I can more easily read,
remember and comprehend notes later on. As a bonus, I find sketch noting an enjoyable
process, so I take more notes and take better notes,” he says.
However sophisticated digital tools are, pen-and-paper have the edge for speed, efficiency
and portability.
But why stick to one piece of paper? John Willshire, former chief innovation officer at PHD
Media, the communications agency, has come up with Artefact, a pack of cards where you
can lay out thoughts as drawings and headings, and move them around quickly. “Someone
said it’s like building a dry stone wall; lay out all your thinking around you on the cards,
and work out how they all fit together in the strongest way,” he says. Mr Willshire believes
working with the current range of digital tools makes people think in too linear a way.
At Brille Records, Mr Benney confesses that, apart from meetings with lawyers, the music
industry does not have a reputation for diligent note taking. “I wasn’t a big note-taker
myself, but now I’ve started doodling I’m motivated to capture more meetings and ideas in
pictures,” he says.
Lunch with the FT: Nicholas Serota
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