Anyone who has ever worked with me knows I have a weak spot for a white board. In any office in which I have worked, I have agitated until we have gotten a really BIG whiteboard. I even have a whiteboard in my bedroom (yes, this is true).
I think best with a marker in my hand (I also have a little problem with stationery shops, but that’s another story) and get a great sense of personal satisfaction from the bantering and sketching method of problem-solving that a white board in an office allows. Dan Roam, author of the Back of a Napkin series of books, has a theory about people and whiteboards that I rather like: everyone has a reaction to them. He has classified these reactions using pen colours:
- “Black Pen People” are people, like me, who see a whiteboard and have to grab a pen and stand in front of it and start sketching things out;
- “Yellow Pen People” are those who typically look over the shoulder of a Black Pen and add valuable insight or commentary but prefer to tweak and add, rather than create themselves; and, finally,
- “Red Pen People” are those who are leaving the room when I pick up the pen because they hate drawing or brainstorming or both.
I’ve worked in teams of all of these types but remain a firm fan of using drawings, whether I have had Red Pens in the room or not. But then, as a Black Pen, I would say that I suppose.
Outside of a whiteboard and the office, I have also increasingly turned to pictures in recent years, in preference to just words. I have developed a liking for the quick (and easy to talk through) sketch as a means to discuss something, present something, or just think something over. This approach is one I am beginning to even favour over a Powerpoint presentation as my go-to way of thinking and presenting stories: a couple of blank A4 pages from the copier and a black pen and I am ready to go. I have found the interface in this case helps the communication process, rather than becoming the barrier that Powerpoint can so often become. I am also quicker with a sketch: I find I can sometimes take so long to put out a decent looking Powerpoint that, by the time I’ve aligned all my shapes, I’m often misaligned with my original point. Neither power nor point in that outcome.
It’s a skill I think is worth paying more attention to and one I think we should all cultivate. Although some pretty good computer-generated art exists nowadays, the contextual doodle is something that remains a uniquely human capability. It’s also always been an important part of the creative process. As we move to a need for more creativity and innovation in corporations, so we will all need to develop skills to enhance our performance as creatives. In this article on how we’ve been doing brainstorming all wrong, the author suggests adding drawing to writing as beneficial to the creative process. He cites a number of reasons:
- Drawing is better at showing spatial relationships than words.
- The brain has a large visual processing centre and, by drawing, that part of the brain is brought into the creative process.
- Processes are best shown diagrammatically.
Meanwhile, going back to my earlier point about why we should all invest in a little sketching, a study using US and UK data to predict the most important skills most likely to be necessary in the future (around 2030), has listed fluency of ideas, active learning and creativity within the top 10 for both the UK and the US. Ready to ditch any lngering “red pen” mindset now?