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  The Arrival of the Verbal Mind

  Although both paths began by detecting things in the world around us, as the paths specialized, they diverged. The piece-by-piece mind, with its ability to use names, didn’t need to see the “things” any longer in order to think about them. By using words, it didn’t need pictures at all. This is how, over time, our piece-by-piece path became our verbal mind.

  Eventually, the piece-by-piece path didn’t need the pictures at all.

  The Staying Power of the Visual Mind

  But names had their limitations. First of all, our all-at-once path wasn’t fooled: It knew that the name being used by the verbal mind wasn’t actually the thing. Real things could move and change and disappear, only to reappear later in a different place and in a different form. Names struggled to account for that.

  A second limitation of the word-only model was that it was linear. It had to be: For words to express a thought, they had to be strung together in a sequence. That meant that word ideas needed a beginning, a middle, and an end—something the visual mind knew to be false. (A landscape doesn’t have a beginning and an end; it’s all there all at once.) Precisely because it was not linear, the visual image remained necessary to account for the spatial reality of the world.

  While our piece-by-piece path was naming things, our all-at-once path kept the picture in mind.

  Two Paths, Two Ways of Accounting for the World

  It was a great system, and it stuck: two paths, two ways of seeing the world, two ways of recording it. The piece-by-piece path provided the words that became spoken language. The all-at-once path gave us the pictures that showed how it all fit together.

  The piece-by-piece path gave us names, words, and language. The all-at-once path gave us pictures and vision. The two paths are equal (they see the same world) but not the same (they describe it in two different ways).

  The two paths are not the same. Nor should they be: They see the same things in different ways. One provides one particular type of information about the world (“I see a rabbit”) and the other provides a different type: It is this difference that makes the two so valuable. As one path complements the other, they cover each other’s limitations. As long as they stay in balance, the two work together to give a full account of the world—and that makes our whole brain happy.17

  When both paths are in balance, our brain is happy.

  Three Examples of Our Two Minds at Work

  Because these two paths coexist in each of us, we don’t spend much time thinking about them. Verbal mind, visual mind—so what? Isn’t that just how our brains work? But we should: We can learn a staggering amount about things we describe all the time simply by noticing the descriptive differences of our verbal and visual minds.

  Let me show how with three increasingly complex examples.

  Visual-Verbal Example No. 1: The Three-Legged Chair

  You and I are businesspeople. I invite you over to my office for a discussion. When you arrive, my receptionist invites you into the conference room and asks you to take a seat while he calls me.

  You step into the conference room. The first chair you see looks like this:

  Do you sit on it?

  No, you do not.

  You don’t need to think about that verbally to know that you won’t. You’ve got millions of years of visual processing in your brain that takes an all-at-once look at that three-legged chair and rejects it as a safe place to sit. No words needed to be spoken. Your verbal mind did not need to say, “Oh—that chair only has three legs and is therefore unstable. If I sit on it, it is likely to tip forward, leaving me on the ground.” (Your verbal mind might very well say that, and probably will, but that’s an afterthought.18) Your visual mind picked up on the problem and made the decision not to sit long before any words had a chance to form. In other words, your visual mind did its job.

  But then I come into the room. I’m so focused on meeting you that I don’t look at the chair. When I go to sit down, you stop me by saying, “Wait! Don’t sit on that chair—it’s only got three legs!”

  In the instant it takes me to turn around and look, my verbal mind (lacking any visual input from the actual chair) kicks into gear, thinking, “A three-legged chair? Is that bad?” My verbal mind might even have the time to pull up the words “three,” “legged,” and “chair” and call upon my visual mind to generate an image to go with them, perhaps coming up with an image that was safe:

  If I didn’t look—if I relied entirely on the image conjured up from my verbal mind’s words—I might very well go ahead and sit down anyway, hurting myself and embarrassing both of us.

  So I look, see the problem with the three-legged chair, and pick another.

  Verbal mind, visual mind: They see the same world, but they don’t see it the same way.

  Visual-Verbal Example No. 2: Shafted

  Richard Feynman, a younger colleague of Einstein, was a Nobel Prize–winning physicist who played a key role in our understanding of how the universe works. When he was young, Richard spent a lot of time thinking about “thinking.” He came to the conclusion that thinking means “having the ability to use words to walk through an idea in your head.” He became so convinced of this approach that he spent years teaching himself to put the ideas he saw floating around in his mind into strings of words.

  One day, when he was working on a project in the garage with his childhood friend Bernie Walker, Richard said what had to him become obvious: “Thinking is nothing but talking to yourself inside.”

  Bernie, himself a deep thinker, was shocked that his otherwise brilliant friend could be so deluded. “Oh, yeah?” Bernie said. “Do you know the crazy shape of the crankshaft in your car?”

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  “Yeah,” replied Richard, “what of it?”

  “Good. Now tell me: How did you describe it when you were talking to yourself?”

  Although Richard could see the all-at-once image of the crankshaft in his mind, he struggled to find the right words to even begin to describe the image.

  From then on Feynman knew that thoughts can be visual as well as verbal. It was to be a breakthrough insight for his work on the Manhattan Project, the U.S. government’s Second World War–era program to develop the atomic bomb, and he became the most highly regarded physics professor in the world.

  Richard Feynman never believed again that “thinking” was the same thing as stringing together words, which was what led him to create Feynman diagrams, the visual language used to this day to model subatomic particles.

  Verbal mind, visual mind: They see the same world, but they don’t see it the same way.

  Visual-Verbal Example No. 3: Porter and the Five Forces (or: Shafted, Part B)

  When Michael Porter arrived at the Harvard Business School as an MBA student in 1969, he’d just completed a degree in aerospace engineering at Princeton. He wanted to learn about something “more holistic” than the aerodynamic forces that drive airplanes, so he chose to study the market forces that drive business.

  In those days, “business strategy” was mostly the study of “great men.” When professors wanted to describe why one business succeeded and another failed, they would tell war stories of the gutsy decision making of GM’s Alfred Sloan or the take-no-prisoners management style of IBM’s Thomas Watson. But to Porter, that was like saying the Wright brothers’ airplane flew because Wilbur had a strong personality. Porter wasn’t interested in that approach; he wanted to see and map the larger competitive forces behind business success.

  The problem was that Harvard Business School didn’t look at business that way. So after getting his MBA in 1971, Porter jumped ship to join the Harvard Department of Economics (far removed from the business school both geographically and conceptually), and there he found what he was looking for. In the economics department, the professors of “industrial organization” modeled things. They didn’t write business history; they created systems and developed frameworks that described the forces
acting on the economy. Porter loved it.

  For the next two years, he sketched out a model of his own, one that bridged the theoretical aspects of IO economics with the practical applications of business policy. When complete, Porter called his picture the Five Forces framework. A single chart that accounted for all the major forces acting on the competitiveness of a business, it was the “holistic” model Porter had long been seeking.

  T Jparrghtson. But the framework “worked” by placing a company (any company, which was itself a breakthrough in business thought) at the center, then surrounding it with the five forces of competition: industry competitors, potential industry entrants, buyers, substitutes, and suppliers. Looked at this way, it became possible to see, all at once, everything that had a direct impact on a company’s market position.

  Michael Porter’s Five Forces That Shape Industry Competition, the picture that turned business strategy (and the Harvard Business School) on its head.

  So radically did Porter’s Five Forces framework upend the way economists thought about competition that the economics department awarded his work the prize for the best dissertation of 1973. And so radically did it upset the professors back at the business school that they rejected Porter’s application for associate professor.

  Shunned by the degree programs at the Harvard Business School, Porter spent the next three years teaching executive education, where he introduced real-world business managers to his Five Forces framework. His picture proved a breakthrough. As business historian Walter Kiechel describes students’ responses in his book The Lords of Strategy, “Instead of walking away from class discussion wondering what they were supposed to have learned, they came away with charts, templates, lists that they could apply to the next strategic problem thrown at them.”

  If Porter wanted revenge, he got it. His “tons of takeaways” (chief among them his simple Five Forces picture19) made Porter’s classes the most popular in the school. Big ideas about business—many new but many that had been discussed at length—became visible, and in so doing also became visceral. The Harvard Business School, no longer able to resist that visceral pull of Porter’s thinking, instead made him a full professor—and there he still teaches today, the “most famous business school professor in history.”

  Verbal mind, visual mind: They see the same world, but they don’t see it the same way.

  Vivid Thinking Means Balanced Thinking

  These two ways of looking at and describing the world are the two balanced sides of a scale. On one end, we have lots of important little pieces to note and recognize. On the other end, we have one big piece to pull it all together. The two sides “weigh” the same because they are the same—after all, they’re the same world, just seen differently. As long as the scale stays in balance, we can think, lead, teach, and communicate well.

  Our brain is happiest when we keep both halves in balance; the piece-by-piece view has equal weight to the all-at-once view.

  J, we kThis balance is generally stable. Because our brain has evolved to believe it’s dangerous to only focus and equally dangerous to try to always see everything, our brain instinctively fights any tendency for the balance to tip.

  But the balance can be tipped. If we spend too much time looking only at the big picture, we’ll lose the elements that make it up. This is known as “having our heads in the clouds.”

  Having our heads in the clouds: If we spend too much time seeing only the biggest picture, we’ll eventually lose our ability to recognize detail.

  The balance can also tip the other direction. If we focus too much on the pieces, we’ll collect so many details that we will lose the big picture. This is known as “getting lost in the weeds.”

  Getting lost in the weeds: Too much focus on the details and we’ll lose both the big picture and, eventually, many of the details as well.

  The Root of Blah-Blah-Blah

  Now we come to it: the real reason we’re so overwhelmed by the overuse, misuse, and abuse of words. Ready? The reason we are talking more and saying less, hearing more and listening less, learning more and knowing less is simple: We’ve moved off the center of the balance.

  That’s it. The reason for all the blah-blah-blah is that we’ve simply forgotten how to use both our minds. For thirty thousand years,20 humans have been making marks on walls (then on paper, and more recently on touch screens) to reflect our thoughts. For twenty-five thousand of those years, we drew pictures. Only in the past five thousand did we begin the gradual shift to writing words. The problem is that now we’ve gone too far. As we’ve become increasingly enamored of and reliant upon words, our verbal minds have become heavier and heavier, while our visual minds have gotten lighter and lighter. The balance has shifted so subtly that we d

  idn’t even notice it. But now that we find ourselves facing some of the most difficult challenges of all time, we suddenly realize—oops!—that we’ve lost half our mind.

  For the rest of this book, we’re going to get our visual mind back, get both our piece-by-piece and all-at-once views working together, and get ourselves back on the center of the balance.

  CHAPTER 4

  Together Again: The Fox and the Hummingbird

  Vivid Thinking Is Simple

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  Getting our balance back on center is simple: All we have to do is take a half-step back from our unshakable belief in the power of words and at the same time give our visual mind a kick in the pants. That’s what “Vivid Thinking” does.

  Vivid Thinking stands for visual verbal interdependent thinking, which means actively forcing our visual and verbal minds to work together when we are thinking, leading, teaching, and selling.

  Here’s a semi-wordy way to say that:

  And here’s a semi-pictorial way to look at that:

  It’s so simple to get our verbal and visual minds working together again that Vivid Thinking really has only three rules.21 They are:

  VIVID THINKING RULE NO. 1: When We Say a Word, We Should Draw a Picture (and Vice Versa)

  VIVID THINKING RULE NO. 2: If We Don’t Know Which Picture to Draw, We Look to Vivid Grammar to Show Us the Way

  VIVID THINKING RULE NO. 3: To Make Any Idea More Vivid, We Turn to the Seven Vivid Essentials

  That’s all there is to Vivid Thinking. Improving our thinking, teaching, and selling really is that simple: (1) draw when we talk; (2) rely on a few basic rules of visual grammar; and (3) learn to visually identify the essentials of an idea. Let’s start with Rule No. 1. It’s the simplest, and everything else originates from it.

  Vivid Thinking Rule No. 1: When We Say a Word, We Should Draw a Picture (and Vice Versa)

  Rule No. 1 tells us that the next time we have an idea, instead of just talking about it, we owe it to ourselves (and our audience) to draw it out, too. That’s the essence of Vivid Thinking: When we say a word, we should draw a picture.

  SAY:

  DRAW:

  “ball”

  That’s it. That simple little rule sums up well all we really need to do to become clearer in our own thinking, more effective in our teaching, and more persuasive in our selling. When we say a word, we should draw a picture. That step alone, actively engaging our visual mind each time our verbal mind kicks into gear, will take us far along the path away from blah-blah-blah.

  But just because Vivid Thinking is simple, that does not mean it’s easy at first: We’ve got a couple of speed bumps to cross before we hit the gas.

  Vivid Thinking Speed Bump No. 1: We Forgot How to Draw

  The proof that our visual mind has faded to the background is our inability to draw, or, more specifically, our belief that we can’t draw. Every time I go into a business meeting, I first ask everyone how comfortable they are with drawing. Almost without exception, three-quarters of the room says they can’t.22

  But it’s an unfair question. Asking a roomful of professionals if they can draw is about the same as asking a roomful of kindergartners if they can read: Of course they
can’t. Learning to read takes a level of neurological development that most five-year-olds haven’t attained and an intensity of training that they haven’t received. Knowing how to read isn’t something we were born with; we had to learn how—and that took years.

  The same is true of adults and drawing: Even though 75 percent of our entire sensory processing capacity is dedicated to vision,23 nobody has ever taught us how to use it. When it comes to expressing ourselves verbally, we’ve completed high school and college. When it comes to expressing ourselves visually, we never got out of preschool.

  We all have the capacity to be excellent visual thinkers, but we’ve never been given the tools or motivation to try. Yet with the most basic of tools and a little encouragement, it doesn’t take more than two minutes before the whole room stops thinking about not being able to draw and just does it. All we have to do is draw a circle.