steelcase blog

Oodles of Doodles…

   … I don’t know about you, but I’ve always been a bit of a doodler.  Many of my doodles are rather meaningless, and are really just a way to pass the time when listening to a presentation/discussion that has gone on well beyond the point of sustained interest.  The drawings I create generally do not require huge amounts of cognitive capacity,… and in fact are often nothing more than a pattern I repeat over and again.  For example, I might start from a single point and draw straight lines of varying lengths in all directions.  Or to change it up, I’ll create a loopy spring-like pattern,… and repeat it many times over by starting a new loop off the previous loop drawn.  I’m sure there is someone out there that could tell me the deep meaning behind such images, but for me it passes time and allows my brain to take a bit of a break.

But the drawing doesn’t stop there.  I tend to also draw ideas or concepts,… certainly at the early stages of ideation.  Maybe it’s because it is so forgiving.  I can change this or that by merely making certain lines bolder, or if need be just start over.  The investment is really minimal,… and at least for me, I find the return on imagination is quite high.  As such I’m not shy about going to a white board, and putting down my thoughts in picture form.  I especially like to do this when I feel the group is really onto something, but just can’t seem to bring it together.  Most group discussions seem to belabor the differences, often minor, between alternative solutions,… when in reality they often agree on much more than they disagree with.  This is when I like to go the board, and capture the collective common in a simple diagram.  What tends to happen is that everyone sees in the simplicity the threads of their thinking,… and alignment often occurs.

This is why I was so delighted to run across a new book titled The Back of The Napkin by Dan Roam.  He talks, through example, of the power in “a simple drawing on a humble napkin”,… how when done well, can communicate far better than the mind-numbing PowerPoint slides and Excel spreadsheets used so often today.  Of particular interest were the three reasons Dan gives for why pen/pencil on paper is better than a computer mouse.  First, he claims people prefer hand drawings to polished graphics.  If done well, a well-designed computer image can communicate very well.  But I would agree that a hand drawing does more to invite one into the process,… and as such may be more memorable.  Dan’s second reason is that hand drawings are easier to change in the moment, as fluid as your thinking changes.  And finally, computers tend to put your thoughts into a standard format, and what you have to communicate may not be best represented by one of these formats,… so your limited.

I was reminded just this week of the power in pictures.  I had the opportunity to meet and talk to one of the authors of Innovate Like Edison, Sarah Miller Caldicott.  And guess what Sarah shared as one of the key behaviors of Edision’s brilliance,… to record everything in a notebook.  Whether the idea was good (and he had over 1,000 patents) or bad he put it down in sketch form on paper.  He was no artist,… his drawings make mine look like masterpieces.  He had good company over the years,… as Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Albert Einstein all used hand drawings to capture their thoughts.  So why not give it a try.  That next million dollar idea is just waiting for you to put it down on paper, or a napkin.  Stick figure anyone…?

Captain Nemo Lives…

... who hasn’t read, or at least hasn’t been assigned to read in school (and maybe just skipped that assignment), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea…?  The star figure of this 1870 Jules Verne novel was Captain Nemo, who roamed the sea in a submarine named the Nautilus.  I hadn’t much thought about this fictional character until I attended this year’s TED Conference in Monterey, CA (which was phenomenal by the way),… and saw and heard first hand a modern-day version of the Captain himself.  His name is Dr. Robert Ballard, a geologist and geophysicist, probably best known for his deep sea discovery of the unsinkable Titanic in the North Atlantic, 73 years after it vanished below the crest of the waves.  His current day version of Verne’s Nautilus is called Alvin.  This submersible vehicle also allowed the Dr. to discover other famous ships of historical significance – the German battleship Bismarck sunk in World War II, and the Lusitania passenger liner torpedoed in World War I.

This would have been reason enough to listen to Dr. Ballard,… but it’s what ‘else’ he discovered while down there that is really amazing.  And that is that the entire volume of our planet’s oceans is recycled through the earth’s crust every six million years or so,… which explains their mineral composition (its salty taste).  It’s done through these hot thermal springs.  He talked about the total absence of sunlight miles below the surface, and yet their cameras took pictures of living plants,… that used chemosynthesis instead of photosynthesis.  Now that’s cool.  There were animals down there too, living in these hot springs,… an ecosystem that doesn’t live off the energy of the sun…!  Now what does that say about the potential of life on other planets, life that lives off the energy of the planet itself…?

But the most interesting fact he shared was the disproportionate time and money spent in exploring the planets and stars in our galaxy vs. exploring what is under the oceans.  Facts like; 50% of the USA is beneath the sea; almost a quarter of our planet is a single mountain range called the Mid-Atlantic Ridge; there are more earthquakes and volcanic eruptions under the ocean than there are on land by a huge factor; and most of our planet’s surface does not receive any sunlight.  I can’t remember the exact figure,… but Dr. Ballard said something like one year of our national budget on space exploration, could fund over a thousand years of what we spend to study the oceans on our planet.  I found this somewhat depressing, and encouraging at the same time.  Just think what we might find…!  New species of plants and animals that may enhance and extend human life beyond what we know today.  New sources of energy that could support our growing demand for sustainable power.  Can you imagine…?