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Episode #131: Dan Roam
171 Plays6 years ago
Dan Roam is the author of five international bestselling books on business-visualization which have been translated into 31 languages. “The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems with Pictures” was named by Fast Company, The London Times, and BusinessWeek as ‘Creativity Book...
The post Episode #131: Dan Roam appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction to Visual Communications
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy Viz Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. On this week's episode, we are going to talk about visual communications. As we do a lot of times on this show, and to help me do so this week, I'm really excited to have Dan Rome, who is an author and a management consultant who focuses on visuals.
00:00:29
Speaker
Dan has written a number of different books. Hopefully you've read them. He's written Back of the Napkin, Draw to Win, Show and Tell. Show and Tell is my favorite book of his and many others. And we are going to talk about all sorts of ways to visually communicate your work. Dan, how are you? Welcome to the show. John, I'm great. And thank you. And it was interesting you said that Show and Tell was your favorite. We're going to have to dive into that a little bit.
00:00:54
Speaker
Well, I have them all sitting right next to me. So so much as your favorite of your own books, you have a favorite? Are they like your kids? You're not allowed to have a favorite child. But I do. And it is the most
The Evolution of Dan's Work
00:01:06
Speaker
recent. It's draw to win. And largely because it is the most recent. So it's the freshest and closest in my mind. But also because it was weird. I realized a couple of weeks ago that the back of the napkin just hit its 10th year anniversary.
00:01:20
Speaker
And that kind of blew my mind to realize it's been that long. And the publisher, the great folks over at Portfolio from Penguin Random House, contacted me about maybe a year and a half ago. And they said, Dan, it's been 10 years. We need another book from you. And let's do one that really covers everything that you've learned or every insight that you've had or every great project that you've discovered or worked on since the back of the napkin. So if it's 10 years old, what has changed and how would you summarize it?
The Visual Mind in Problem-Solving
00:01:50
Speaker
Draw To Win, in a way, is kind of like the greatest hits album, and it was fun for me to be able to go through everything, the 978 presentations I have on my PC, etc., and say, okay, what do I really think that I know now, and break it down into 10 simple commandments. So that was fun. That's great.
00:02:10
Speaker
So let's talk about your presentations. And so you go around the world teaching people how to communicate better, right? I do. And the communication better falls into a very specific category. I share with people the incredible and underutilized power of our visual mind. And I literally mean, John, when I say that our eyes, our visual neocortex, our optic nerve, the biomechanical elements of our visual system.
00:02:40
Speaker
as well as the cognitive elements of our visual system, meaning we've got this hardware. What is it actually doing as it's processing light and turning the light into meaning? Because as it turns out, roughly half of all of the hundreds of billions of neurons that we have in our brain, half of them are focused on simply processing vision. More of our brain, more of your brain is dedicated to processing vision than any other thing that we do. And when you think about that,
00:03:07
Speaker
A couple of thoughts come to mind. Number one is, wouldn't it be cool to understand that process a little bit more since it's taking so much of our calories and our horsepower to just process vision? It'd be cool to understand it. And two, maybe by virtue of understanding how vision works, we could become far better problem solvers and communicators because what vision is doing, and just bear with the concept with me for a moment, vision is constantly like a thousand times a second.
00:03:36
Speaker
solving the problem of having too much visual information available to me. There is far more light. There's far more photons coming into my eyes that I can possibly hope to process. So what Vision has figured out how to do over the last couple of million years is do really, really good quick processing of an overwhelming amount of information to try to get me the information that's most important for me right now, like in this next 10th of a second.
00:04:05
Speaker
so that I don't fall off the cliff, bump into the doorway, hit the car ahead of me. You know, these kind of basic brute force mechanical problem solving.
Scientific Research and Visual Perception
00:04:14
Speaker
And I thought, well, if that's what vision is doing anyway, it's problem solving for us really fast all the time. Wouldn't it be cool to figure out how that works and see if we could apply that to the more sort of theoretical world of say the written word or of data where we have an overwhelming amount coming at us.
00:04:34
Speaker
So let me pause there and say, so John, does that make sense? Yeah, it does make sense. And it's interesting because the books that I read more and more
00:04:48
Speaker
pull in a lot of this scientific research, biological research, neuroscience on how our brains work to perceive visual information. And, you know,
Consultative Selling and Drawing
00:05:01
Speaker
for me it kind of started with John Medina's books on the brain and it extended to Carmine Gallo's work on presentations.
00:05:09
Speaker
And yet, to me, it's sort of funny. It's one of those things where I feel like I don't actually need the evidence. I don't feel like I don't need the fMRI results to, you know, know that vision is so powerful. But I guess it's vitally important to convince people who are non believers in in the importance of visual imagery. Bingo. And, you know, it's a matter when I set up to write the back of the napkin.
00:05:33
Speaker
What the book was really about was just stuff that I had discovered worked just empirically and and worked in the sense that I came out of Management consulting initially in in financial services media and entertainment and high technology I was working abroad in Europe for several years then I was working in New York for several years and I just realized that all of that time what we were doing I didn't know it but it's called consultative selling and the idea is you go into a client with a problem and
00:06:02
Speaker
You listen really well and then take the toolkit that you have and figure out smart ways to apply your tools to the problem that the client has just described to you and you kind of consult them towards a solution that would require your tools, if that makes sense. So it's called consultative sales as opposed to just coming in there and saying, you know, let me show you my blender and it's got five speeds and you know, it makes a really great milkshake.
00:06:30
Speaker
Instead, what you do is you're listening more and you're playing back a lot of what the client is sharing with you about their particular industry or challenge or opportunity. And what I would do, I would immediately go to the whiteboard or the flip chart and start drawing out with very simple shapes, circles and boxes and arrows and a triangle here and maybe an occasional stick figure, trying to really quickly capture what I thought it was that they were describing.
00:07:00
Speaker
I got really good at it to the point where the sales teams would say, let's not even go in and try to do a sale or a pitch unless we bring Dan along or someone that Dan has helped train. Because the magic that happens when someone goes up to the whiteboard and starts deconstructing the verbal conversation into these simple pictures, it is remarkable. So I took that knowledge of what I had just learned worked really well. Like certain types of pictures seem to move the conversation
00:07:30
Speaker
forward when you hear certain types of questions. And John, if we have a moment, I'll walk you through a little bit of what I mean by that in a moment. But what ended up happening was I said, oh, I think I've discovered a secret magic trick that's pretty simple and everybody can do it. We just haven't been taught how to do it. So I'm going to write a book about
Scientific Evidence and Visual Techniques
00:07:54
Speaker
it. And I did. And then I realized halfway through the process that
00:07:59
Speaker
Everybody, everybody in academia, everybody kind of outside the sales world said, can you prove it? Can you prove that that is the right answer? Where is the research? And I said, well, you're not going to like it, but my research is having done 150 successful sales using this technique. OK, that's not good enough. If we're going to hire you to come in and teach our people how to do it, we need
00:08:27
Speaker
We need to know more than just it works for Dan. So, what I did is I dusted off my undergraduate biology minor. I did study, you know, I have a degree in science. And I dusted it off and said, well, let's go look at the latest brain research. And it's the same books, John Medina's Brain Rules, David Eagleman's book on the brain, V.S. Ramachandran's book, Phantoms of the Brain. I just went into the literature looking for
00:08:57
Speaker
possible evidence-backed scientific theories that might explain why the things I was doing would work. And I was able to find them. And that, to your point, is where the sort of the brain research side comes in.
Neuroscience, Creativity, and AI
00:09:16
Speaker
Because, John, I'm also with you that, at this point, we've got a stack of books, some very, very good, on how to create habit-forming products, right?
00:09:26
Speaker
We've got a whole bunch of books on neuro marketing. We've got a whole bunch of books and videos and podcasts on neuro linguistic programming and how to tap into how humans are actually thinking. And then on the other side, we've got things like, you know, Joseph Campbell and, and the hero's journey. And we've got Carl Jung and sort of archetypes and we've got all of this evidence that certain types of stories do certain types of things.
00:09:53
Speaker
that trigger certain types of reactions in the human brain. And it's really cool. And it's also really, really scary. Because at some point you start to say, well, where is creativity in this? And by the way, on a little bit of a riff off to the side, I've been doing a really cool project with an enterprise AI startup out here in Silicon Valley over the last several months, helping them craft and tell their story in an oversaturated artificial intelligence market. What is actually artificial intelligence?
00:10:24
Speaker
and what makes this particular company unique and different. So I had to learn a little bit more about what AI really does, and so many intriguing things. Imagine this, John, if we know how the human brain processes, say, sound, and we know some cognitive science around how does sound trigger particular types of thoughts in our mind, and then we have AI that is able to go out and parse every number one billboard song ever.
00:10:54
Speaker
and put those together, how far is it into the future before the computers are writing music that's better than we could ever do? Interesting.
00:11:03
Speaker
It's scary. It makes me nervous. It feels like an episode of one of the cartoons my kids watch. It's either Teen Titans Go or one of the other ones where they do those sorts of things where they identify what are the key trends or characteristics of a building or a song and they come up with, like, we're going to make a hit song today. And that's what they do.
00:11:26
Speaker
You told this little story about early on with the sales and the marketing and drawing on a whiteboard or a piece of paper. And I want to come back to that for a minute because I wonder how important this idea of empathy is in your work and your teaching. There's this really good new book by Alan Alda of all people talking about how scientists in particular should use empathy more
00:11:53
Speaker
to think about the person who's receiving the information and the story you told really, to me sounds like everything you were doing was really about empathy about thinking about how do we how does this person who's trying to explain this product or this event? How do we do that in a better ways that the receiver of the information can understand it more quickly and
Overcoming Hesitancy in Drawing
00:12:16
Speaker
more easily? Wow, what a great question and what a great word empathy.
00:12:20
Speaker
I don't use it as often as I should, but I think you hit something on the head. What I often say is if you decide to become more visual, if you choose to try to take advantage of your visual power a little bit more to be a better problem solver and a more effective communicator, you're going to need to start drawing a lot because whereas writing is simply the recording mechanism of verbal communication,
00:12:48
Speaker
Drawing is the recording mechanism of visual communication and many many people are very very scared of drawing so I've got kind of this other hurdle that you have to get a lot of people over to get them drawing and to your point about empathy something that I have learned to be absolutely true and there is no scientific evidence for this one is something that we call the more human you're drawing the more human the response and what I mean by that is I have spent
00:13:18
Speaker
30 years learning how to draw badly really well so that I know how to draw really well. My bachelor's degree is in fine art in painting and as a kid I drew all the time and I still do draw a lot and I'm good at drawing. That's just maybe a little bit of a talent I have and something that I put a lot of time and effort into getting better at. But I don't want the people I'm working with to get upset about that because that'll stop them because what I'm trying to say is
00:13:46
Speaker
If you just sketch out a crappy little stick figure on a piece of paper with a Sharpie, there's something so real about that being your drawing that when you show it to someone else, they are not going to judge the quality of your drawing. They're going to judge the quality of your thinking and
Visual Thinking in Education
00:14:06
Speaker
they're going to judge you with a great benefit of the doubt because when you make a hand-drawn picture live, people do not negatively judge you.
00:14:16
Speaker
And I think it goes to your word of empathy. It's such a profoundly human way to communicate. Hey, John, do you mind if I take a picture and just sketch out what I'm thinking? I'm going to put a circle over here, and oh, it's a terrible circle, and I'm going to put another one over here. You don't care if I drew them beautifully or not. What is interesting, and I've seen this 100% of the time, the audience, the person you're engaging with, the person with whom you want to have, I love your word, empathy, is going to open up very, very far.
00:14:46
Speaker
When they see you kind of taking the risk to draw out your idea it's it's a super powerful tool that way.
00:14:54
Speaker
run into this a lot of people saying well I'm not the you know they don't say this to me but they you know to designers that I know you know who are trying to visualize some content the researcher will say well I'm not a designer you draw it right there's a lot of pushback about drawing and I think you hit the nail in the head of you know it's insecurity it's that's not my skill set so when you work with people how do you convince them that it's okay that you're not a designer you're not an illustrator but
00:15:22
Speaker
We're just trying to get to the, to the core of the content. Just draw out the idea for me. Well, I begin every training program with, there are, there are essentially three building blocks in my back of the napkin style, visual communication, visual problem solving training. And the three building blocks, the first one is a visual alphabet. Uh, and it's very simple and you can teach someone in about four minutes. The visual alphabet is seven elemental shapes that are, they're a lot easier. They're a dot, a line.
00:15:52
Speaker
an arrow, a square, a triangle, a circle, and a blob. That should be seven if I did my math correctly. And what I do is we give everybody a whiteboard and we say, one by one, we're going to draw these shapes. This is your visual alphabet. And within about two minutes, everybody is able to draw all of those shapes and they're laughing and it's like, Oh, that's not so scary. And so step number one is just giving people a visual alphabet and it's those seven shapes, real easy.
00:16:19
Speaker
Then step number two is say, okay, now we're going to give you what I call the visual framework. Um, it's in show and tell it's, I call it the six by six visual framework, which is something I was alluding to a little bit earlier in our conversation. And this is something I created just based on realizing that when you are working with people or when you are even thinking through an idea on your own, there really aren't that many problems in the world. I mean, if you can really boil things down.
00:16:47
Speaker
you have a pretty limited number of types of problems. You have problems about scarcity of a resource. I don't have enough money or I don't have enough people. You have problems of location, meaning I'm over here and you're over there and we need to be in the same place. You have problems of sequence, meaning this is the thing that happens first and then this is second, but there's something wrong about that. Maybe the order is incorrect. And there's really a very limited set of underlying frameworks of problems, which means that to draw pictures of those problems,
00:17:17
Speaker
you need a really limited set of underlying drawings that you create. And they're based on that visual
Simplifying Complex Ideas through Drawing
00:17:25
Speaker
alphabet. So if the problem that we face is one of location, and what I mean by that is, let's say you and I need to work together, but I'm out here in San Francisco and you're over there in DC, there is a problem. And that is a problem that's really easy to draw because I just draw a map that says, here's Dan on
00:17:45
Speaker
west coast and here's john on the east coast and the problem is they're not the same place, real easy and that can apply to problems of segmentation. If you think kind of in the business and policy world anything that involves sort of spatial relationships can be drawn out with a map and how do you draw map what's really easy you take two of those arrows from the visual alphabet you put them at 90 degrees to each other come
00:18:11
Speaker
creating a coordinate system in north, south, east, west, or whatever you want to call it, you label those two intersecting arrows, you know, with two binary extremes, like good, bad, hot, cold, expensive, cheap, effective, ineffective, whatever you are. And then into the four quadrants that you've created, you start to map in whatever elements you're talking about me and you or, or, you know, my car or your business or whatever it is, you just map them in and you've created a map. So
00:18:41
Speaker
I'm saying a lot. I'm spinning a lot of things together here, but the actual answer to your question is number one, you don't have to worry about drawing because drawing is not an artistic process. It's a thinking process. Bear with me for five minutes. I'll show you the alphabet. You can draw that. Now I'm going to show you the six underlying pictures that you will create from your visual alphabet and show you when to apply each. And guess what? You are done and you're now an expert. The whole thing takes two hours.
00:19:07
Speaker
So do people ever push back on you that they say, well, yeah, okay, so fine. You taught me how to draw, but you know, my idea is so complex or so complicated that, you know, drawing it is, is not doing it justice. It doesn't account for all the subtlety and the nuance and the details. Yeah. People say that, but I like to disabuse them of that illusion fairly rapidly. We'll just take an example, something I worked on
00:19:34
Speaker
in DC a few years ago is we will all remember when the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, first started, you know, this is nine years ago now, it's ancient history, but first started to make its way out into the American consciousness. And as you, we will all remember, it was the Affordable Care Act in its earliest forms when it was first being created and then being pushed through to try to make it into law, really,
00:20:04
Speaker
started to tear apart the nation. If you look over the history of perhaps where we are now, and I don't want to really get into any big political discussion, but we're not in a good place right now as a nation. We're pretty torn apart. And a lot of that, it's a long time coming, but a real inflection point was when we had a new president who tried to push through healthcare reform. And some people thought it was awesome and some people thought it was terrible. And a lot of the split around policy really began there. Well, I thought
00:20:35
Speaker
It's crazy the way we're tearing ourselves apart around health care reform, which just even by definition sounds like it's got to be good for people. Reforming health care, that's got to be good, right? Because health care, it's OK, but it's not perfect. Doing anything to improve, it's got to be good. So I drew a series of very simple pictures. I went to the law. I actually dug up House Resolution 3962 from October of 2009, the first piece of health care legislation passed as part of the Affordable Care Act.
00:21:03
Speaker
And it's 1500 pages long. And I read the first, tried to read the first three or 400 of those pages and realized I was totally lost. And John, I bring this up because for the people who say a picture doesn't work to describe a really complex situation, I would argue, well, argue, I don't want to argue. I would say you may be right, but a written description is often worse because what a written description does is it takes a really complex
00:21:32
Speaker
Set of layers and tries to force it into a single linear narrative. And to do that, you have to, you cannot even begin to account for third tier connections, spatial overlaps. And so what I try to get people excited about is not words are bad and pictures are always going to be great. But if you could open up your visual mind and begin to use pictures to compliment
00:22:00
Speaker
You're already really well-developed verbal skills. What you're going to find is you will be able to look at your own idea in a completely new way and quite literally see things that were invisible when you were just talking or writing about it. And that's the real power of it. They're complementary. They're not opposite. That is words and pictures. You need both yet. And then I'll get off my kind of high horse on this for lots of reasons, good and bad.
00:22:30
Speaker
we have forgotten the visual side. We don't teach it. We don't believe in it. We actually somehow in a lot of places think it's bad. And my real challenge or maybe my purpose, yeah, let's go the Simon Sinek route. My why. My purpose is to get people to re-embrace the power of their visual mind because it's awesomely powerful. And on the contrary, it's not like
00:22:56
Speaker
Oh, a picture is too simple. It's going to grossly oversimplify my problem to the point that it makes it, it comes up with the wrong answer. On the contrary, you start with a simple picture and then in the same way that when you're writing a paper, you write an outline and then you dive in deeper and you go in layer after layer and look for the connections and keep drawing into this thing until it starts to become clear. And it will, and it's hard. It's hard to do it, but you know, thinking is hard.
00:23:25
Speaker
Right. So if you were the secretary of education for the US, what policy or policies would you introduce to help maintain this concept that visual thinking, drawing, sketching, that sort of continues through the education system? I feel like when we're young kids, we draw a lot, we read picture books, we draw picture books, and then it sort of slowly gets sort of beaten out of us in some way. So this would put you out of business for sure.
00:23:55
Speaker
Because everybody would come all set to go, but what would your ideal system be to help people draw and not lose that sort of childhood focus on creating visuals? Oh my goodness. What a great question. So if I were the secretary of education, I would immediately initiate at the kindergarten level, a parallel path with learning the ABC alphabet, which is learning the visual alphabet.
00:24:19
Speaker
I would immediately initiate a program starting at about third grade of learning visual grammar in parallel with verbal grammar. And I would develop a curriculum that was testable and measurable in the same way that you can test. Does someone know the ABCs? Does someone know syntax and grammar as they move through their grades of school? I would do exactly the same thing.
00:24:45
Speaker
And it would not be an art class. This is a huge mistake that we make thinking, oh drawing, we're going to relegate that to one hour on alternate Thursdays. No, this is as much a part of our learning and our development and how we think pictures are. They are as much, if not more than all of the verbal constructs in the world. And so I would start that program and then the program I would cancel immediately is
00:25:10
Speaker
It's not even a program, it's more of a mindset that says at the second or third grade level, you, dear student, have drawn in kindergarten and that was okay because you didn't yet know the alphabet. And then you were reading Dr. Seuss books and picture books in first and second grade and that was okay because those pictures help you to get to the words. But now that you're a successful reader, you're gonna move on to chapter books and we are nuking the pictures. We're gonna take the pictures away.
00:25:39
Speaker
That is insane because the whole way we got to learn to read was by comparing the pictures to the words. So now, you know, some people say, some educators say, well, the pictures are like training wheels. And at some point they have to come off the bicycle. I call BS on that noise. Absolutely not. Pictures are not the training wheels. Pictures are the front wheel of the bicycle by saying no more pictures. Now you got to go to picture books. It's as if we're now being given unicycles, you know,
00:26:09
Speaker
You can't use half of your brain that, by the way, is faster and much more fluid and much more powerful. You can't use that anymore. And so the two things I would do, one on the positive is I would initiate the program of learning the visual alphabet and visual grammar in a program way. And I would cut anything that says that at a certain age, pictures are no good. And in fact, if you did the two of them together, what would happen by third grade and all the way up through college is that people would be
00:26:39
Speaker
all students, not the 20% who happen to be exceptionally verbally talented, who tend to be those that we consider the most intelligent, but all students, those who are more visually intelligent or more emotionally intelligent or what have you. And I do believe in the multiple intelligences. A lot of people argue with Gardner, but I, I believe in them. That what you'd find is when people got up to high school and college, students were far more confident thinkers.
00:27:07
Speaker
and far more willing to engage with the world as it is, not as a 1500 page bullet point law. Yeah. Okay. You got me wired up. You got me going on that one fixed. I'm coming to DC. We solved it. We solved it. We just have to institute it. No problem.
Tips for Beginning Visual Thinkers
00:27:29
Speaker
Let me ask a question about for people who have not read the books.
00:27:34
Speaker
or of not taking your classes. What's the easiest way for them to, I don't even wanna say start drawing, but to be thinking more visually, starting to create more visual content. I mean, clearly they're gonna need to learn something and your books might be the way they need to start, but what would be the one or two things that you would say to someone that they could learn or they could start with to be thinking and creating more visually?
00:28:04
Speaker
Right wow also super super good question and i have part of an answer for that the simple. Unfortunate answer is just pick up a pen and paper and draw a little bit more okay draw what well that's that here's what i'd like you to do the next time you're writing an email. Or you've got to make a post it note to your spouse to buy more bread or whatever it is.
00:28:34
Speaker
Just for kicks, pick a post-it note or take a piece of paper and a pen and draw a little picture of what you want to happen as opposed to writing it down. Just why not? What does it hurt? Instead of writing down by a loaf of bread, just draw a picture of a loaf of bread. And what's going to happen is you're going to find it's actually not that hard, and it's kind of fun. And it's as if you're almost introducing emojis into your language. I mean, why not? It's kind of fun, so just get started.
00:29:03
Speaker
And what you're going to find is a lot of things are really kind of easy to communicate with a picture and it's fun as well. So that's kind of a way to start. And then you do that for a couple of days and then you're going to say, Oh, that was a great exercise enough. But now amp it up a little bit and say, just for kicks, the next time you're thinking about a problem in your business or your organization, try the same thing.
00:29:30
Speaker
What would happen if you just drew a circle on a piece of paper and label that circle me. And then made another circle next to it and labeled it my colleague or my project and then just started to draw these circles and think about how are they connected these are the underlying elements of my problem you might think and just draw them out on a piece of paper and. See what happens because what's going to happen is after you've drawn a couple of these circles.
00:29:58
Speaker
a bunch more are going to start to flow. And you'll probably get a little confused because you won't know where to put them, but that's okay. Just go with it for a little while. Eventually, some sort of really kludgy map is going to emerge that is based on all of the pieces of your problem or your challenge. And you might say, well, what was the use in doing that? Well, the use in that was you've identified all of the pieces in your challenge now, which often you don't do when you write it down. And now you've got this initial map, maybe look at it and say,
00:30:27
Speaker
Well, what would happen if I moved these things from here over here? Or what would happen if I actually represented this one as a much bigger circle? Because in fact, this group is far bigger than this other group. And now what you're going to do is key into how our visual mind processes this information spatially and a whole series of doors are going to start to open up in your brain. Some of which are going to be a little bit scary and some of which are going to be a little bit confusing.
00:30:55
Speaker
but you've now tapped into what your visual mind wants to do. And just practice that a little bit and cool stuff's gonna happen.
00:31:02
Speaker
It's great. Hopefully a lot of listeners will actually approach being more visual and thinking more visually. Let me ask you one more question before we go, which is what do you have in store next? Do you have another book on the horizon? Are you thinking about another book on the horizon? Are you, if not, if someone just gave you a boatload of money and said, here you go, you have time to go do something, what would you do?
00:31:29
Speaker
John, thank you. That something is already moving and we already talked about it. Remember when I was jumping up and down a moment ago and say I'm coming to DC? So some colleagues of mine that I've been working with for years and myself have started to take and codify the visual alphabet and visual grammar and have started to create a pedagogy and a training curriculum.
Visual Literacy Programs and Resources
00:31:54
Speaker
Remember when I said, this is what I would initiate immediately? Well, guess what?
00:31:58
Speaker
I've got the beginnings of that program sitting right here on my desk. And it's field tested now from over 1,000 training sessions around the world and lots and lots of contributions from lots of other good visual thinkers and academic people. And we're kind of loosely calling this, I'm not in love with the name, but we're loosely calling it visual literacy.
00:32:22
Speaker
I think that's going to change because I don't want it to be as academic as that. I want it to be a little bit more intuitive, what we're actually talking about. But if I had a zillion dollars right now, I would pick two or three public school districts in the United States, two or three private schools in the US, probably one or two or three pilot schools, maybe in places like Singapore, maybe in Dubai,
00:32:49
Speaker
maybe in Finland, places where some of the schools have a really, really interesting record of innovation around really good education and create over the next year and a half a pilot program where teachers would be introduced to these very basic tools. Teachers would be trained up on how to use them. And at those pilot schools over the next two years, we would actually run a program introducing visual alphabet, visual grammar, visual problem solving, and visual communications, not as an art class, but as a class
00:33:19
Speaker
in parallel with verbal communications and then do some tests. We'd have to evolve the tests in the meantime, but two or three years from now to see if we've actually helped the students be more confident in their ability to engage with their world. My hunch is we would, we would find that to be so, and then we'd roll it out a little bit more and a little bit more. And for anybody that's listening and is concerned, well,
00:33:44
Speaker
isn't, that's pretty weird. Shouldn't education be focused on the basics, the common core reading, writing and arithmetic? Absolutely, absolutely it should. And in every one of those, we should introduce the visual mind as one of the key tool sets for learning to do those things. That's fantastic. That is fantastic. I'm excited to see, see the evolution of that and where you end up. So that that is that is exciting. And I'll point people over to your site and hopefully they can follow up and see what's going on. So
00:34:15
Speaker
Well, in fact, John, on that note, if I might just do a little bit of a plug. Yeah, I do have danroam.com, which is great, which is kind of a holding pen for things around my books and some tools. But for anybody who really wants to engage, I have something called napkinacademy.com, which is my full training site. It's been going for about six years. We've got about 5,000 folks who've participated from around the world. It is a paid site, and I'm not trying to sell anybody anything.
00:34:43
Speaker
many of the videos are available for free. So what I'd encourage is anybody who wants to know a little bit more, take a look at napkinacademy.com, watch the free videos and you'll get a clear sense of what's going on and join or don't join, but it's a really great way to begin to test. Is this something that's interesting for you to follow up on? That's great. That's great. So I'll put that on the site too, for folks who want to follow up. And of course they should follow up with your books and I'll link to those and all the other things that we talked about today. Dan, thanks so much for coming on the show. This has been really fascinating. I really appreciate it.
00:35:13
Speaker
Well, John, I really appreciate it. And thanks for letting me pontificate on a couple of things. I figured out this is, in many ways, my life purpose. And it's nice to have found it. And so I love being able to share this, the power of the visual mind. So thanks, John.
00:35:26
Speaker
Yeah, that's great. And I hope everyone who's listening has either found their passion or finding it soon. So thanks again, Dan, for coming on and thanks to everyone for tuning into this week's episode. If you have comments or questions for me or for Dan, please do shoot me a note either on the website or on Twitter or via email. So until next time, this has been the Policy Viz Podcast. Thanks so much for listening.