Blah Blah Blah Read online

  Remember the example of the word ball and the picture ? Let’s keep going with that for a minute.

  First, let’s add a bit more detail to our word. In the spirit of “When we say a word, we should draw a picture,” let’s add a corresponding Jhterlett more increase in detail to our picture.

  NOW SAY:

  NOW DRAW:

  “beach ball”

  See? Vivid Thinking—making sure that our verbal and visual minds are working together—is the simplest thing in the world. We say a word, we draw a picture. The two halves of our mind have been working together for millions of years and know exactly how to do it. We’re just out of practice. Let’s try a few more.

  SAY:

  DRAW:

  “sun”

  “car”

  “run”

  “love”

  “progress”

  mesh="1em">Oops. Wait a minute: We were doing so well there, up until we hit a word that doesn’t have an instant image associated with it. Progress. How can we draw a picture of that? If we think about it for a moment, we can probably come up with something. How about this:

  “progress”

  Okay, fine picture, but that was hard. It was far easier to say the word and simply know what it meant than to rattle around in our mind’s visual closet and come up with a corresponding picture. We can do it, but it takes a kind of thinking we’re no longer used to.

  Vivid Thinking Speed Bump No. 2: Concepts That Aren’t “Visual”

  Here’s a problem common to those people in the conference room and Oog and Aag out on the savanna: Many of the ideas we have—especially abstract concepts, intuitive feelings, and complex arguments—don’t lend themselves to simple corresponding pictures.

  That’s where names and words shine. A word is easy to recall, easy to say, easy to write, and easy to read. But how often does saying a word make us really think about what we mean? Coming up with the meant that we had to pause for a moment with that word progress and look at it in a new way. Reading the word and drawing the symbol are not the same: They don’t trigger the same thoughts, don’t stimulate the same processing centers, and don’t make us feel the same things.

  To get the words and pictures working together, we’ve got to get our whole mind working together—and that requires a new way of thinking about our mind.

  The Fox and the Hummingbird: We’re of Two Minds

  Because all the terms we apply to our brain balance—verbal versus visual, analytical versus synthesizing, linear versus spatial—are words, they make sense to only half our mind. If we’re going to wake up our visual mind (the half that wouldn’t know a word if it fell over it), we’re going to need a better way to see the balance.

  Instead of getting tripped up with words-only distinctions, let’s instead imagine that we’ve got two different (and very hungry) animals living in our head: a fox and a hummingbird.

  As with our verbal mind and visual mind, these two animals have much in common: Both are high-energy creatures that require constant feeding to survive. Both are quick and agile, both are whip smart, and both are highly adapted to thrive in rapidly changing environments.

  al Pro">Be>

  High-energy creatures that must keep moving to survive, the fox and the hummingbird have much in common.

  These similarities are important. They help us see that, like the fox and the hummingbird, the verbal and visual sides of our mind aren’t radically different creatures with little in common. On the contrary, it’s their great commonality that links them together.

  But it’s the differences between the fox and the hummingbird that are more interesting—and that’s why these two creatures make such a good metaphor for exploring what’s going on inside our own heads.

  THE FOX

  The fox is sharp: Once he has spotted his prey, he advances step by step with laser-like focus. The fox is linear: With his objective clearly in mind, he stalks stealthily forward, shifting this way and that to avoid being seen yet always keeping his own eyes straight ahead. The fox is analytical: Noting that the direct path might put him in plain sight of his prey, the fox darts from point to point to take advantage of cover. The fox is patient: As long as he keeps his eye on the prize, he knows that he’s got time on his side. The fox is clever: He tests the wind, calculates distance and velocities, and, at the precise moment . . . he strikes!

  The fox is our president giving a speech, the CEO delivering the financial update, the lecturer teaching the class, the salesman giving the pitch. It’s the me-to-you, here-to-there, A-B-C-D, “I said it and I hope you got it—any questions?” approach.

  After successfully feeding (or speaking, delivering, teaching, or selling), the fox becomes a bit smug: Having achieved his objective, he kicks back to admire his own mastery of the forest. “Look how clear I am,” says the fox. “I impress even myself.” The fox is our verbal mind.

  Sharp, linear, analytical, patient, clever . . . and a bit smug: The fox is our verbal mind.

  THE HUMMINGBIRD

  The hummingbird is aware: With acute peripheral vision, she sees clearly in all directions at all times. The hummingbird is spatial: She sees her environment as a three-dimensional space with food potential everywhere; she can fly backward (and even upside down!) to get to the nearest flower. The hummingbird is spontaneous: She is so fast that she doesn’t travel along a path from one flower to another—she just appears there. Zip. And there. Zip. And here. The hummingbird synthesizes: Touching and seeing everything, she builds a complete model of the forest in her mind.

  The hummingbird is the accountant checking the books one more time, the CFO scanning the spreadsheets for the rounding error, the pilot preparing for landing at the busy airport, the architect reworking the facade on th Jontckie drawings. It’s the back-and-forth, up-and-down, rolling, scanning, “I know it’s here somewhere . . .” approach.

  The need to see so much so quickly makes the hummingbird flighty and easily distracted—not to mention exhausted. After expending bursts of energy scouring all corners of the forest, she needs frequent breaks—after all, tomorrow she’ll cover it all again. “Whew!” she says, “All done . . . but wait: where did I put the keys?” The hummingbird is our visual mind.

  Flighty and easily distracted: The hummingbird is our visual mind.

  Seeing the World Both Ways

  Verbal mind = piece-by-piece mind = fox mind. Visual mind = all-at-once mind = hummingbird mind. Let’s see how they each see the world. The fox goes first.

  Read the following sentence. (This is our fox talking.)

  The beach ball rolls down the sand, picking up speed as it bounces over tufts of grass, getting higher and higher with each bounce until it finally leaves the sand altogether, a final leap sending it high over the foam and straight into the sea. Splash.

  Now look at the following picture. (This is our inner hummingbird drawing.)

  Let’s go back and do that once again: Read the paragraph, then look at the picture. This time pay careful attention to how different your brain feels while “reading” and “seeing” the same scene as described in two different ways.

  In reading the first description, the fox’s view, we followed along the sequence of words in order, A-B-C-D, from beginning to end. We had to: The only way to process the words was to look at them one at a time and let our verbal brains piece them together to create the scene.

  But in looking at the hummingbird’s picture, something very different happened in our heads: We saw the entire image all at once, taking it all in near-instantaneously as our eyes rapidly zipped around searching for (and eventually finding) a meaningful sequence.

  The Forest According to the Fox and the Hummingbird

  The fox and the hummingbird both live in the same forest. Let’s imagine how each of these creatures might see their home. The fox (our verbal, piece-by-piece mind) sees the forest as a set of landmarks linked together along a linear path that takes him from here to his prey. This path might no
t be straight—after all, he will need to shift from time to time to stay under cover—but it Jhe wraitan is a single line with a clear beginning and end. The forest according to the fox looks like this, a line from point A to B to C to D:

  The forest according to the fox: a linear path containing a series of landmarks that lead from here to there.

  But the hummingbird’s view of the forest is different. Because she is so fast and moves so freely in all dimensions, her path is an endlessly looping set of rings, nearly devoid of the constraints of time and sequence. Touching everything, her path has no particular beginning or end but rather builds a complete all-at-once sense of space. The forest according to the hummingbird looks like this, a series of overlapping swirls and circles that describe a space containing many areas of interest:

  The forest according to the hummingbird: sets of interconnected rings with no beginning or end but a complete sense of space.

  Both views of the forest are accurate and correct; both are complete as far as their respective critters are concerned. But both are missing something: They are both missing the insights that come from the other perspective. Clear as the fox’s A-B-C-D line is, it misses the fact that the forest has height as well as distance. Sweeping as the hummingbird’s circles are, there is no clear path through them.

  What if We Combined Our Fox and Our Hummingbird?

  To make our metaphor complete, let’s imagine what we might see if we could get our fox and our hummingbird to work together. (Tricky, yes: As with our verbal mind’s learned dominance over the visual, our fox has a powerful desire to eat the hummingbird. Until our fox sees the value in what our hummingbird has to offer, we’re going to have to work to keep the fox firmly in check.)

  We need to be careful that our fox doesn’t immediately eat our hummingbird (which is precisely what our verbal mind has been taught to do).

  Let’s say that we’ve got an idea, something we picked up in a meeting. If we wrote it down, we’d end up with a linear outline, a string of words taking us from the beginning of the idea to the end. Conceptually, it would look like the fox’s view of the forest. We’d “get” it, but we might be left asking ourselves, “So what? How does this idea fit in with all the other ideas I have?”

  Our fox’s piece-by-piece view of our idea: We get it, but might ask, “So what?”

  If we sketched out the idea, we might end up with intersecting shapes and circles, a crude map of the many elements of the idea. It would look like the hummingbird’s view of the forest. We’d probably be dazzled with what we’d drawn but have no idea how to approach it.

  Our hummingbird’s all-at-once view of our idea: dazzling but impenetrable.

  If we could find a way to bring these two views together, we would have a singularly powerful idea—and who knows, we might even see something in it that neither individual view saw. Let’s try it: If we superimpose our hummingbird map on our fox line, an entirely new picture emerges. . . .

  As we superimpose our two views . . .

  . . . a new view begins to emerge.

  In this case, what was originally a zigzag line and a bunch of circles emerges as a person. Now we see the big picture:

  Aha! Only by combining both views do we see the big picture.

  What does all this mean in the real world of business, politics, and education? It means this: Most of us have been taught to capture, record, and present our ideas in the linear structure best suited to words. We have become pure fox. We end up with a long-winded document that was as much of a challenge for us to write as it will be for most people to read. (In other words, they won’t.) We create explanations that move us from introduction to conclusion—but because words don’t contain a map of the territory in between, we usually get lost somewhere along the way.

  Our typical fox document: linear and tedious, more likely to lose us than illuminate us.

  In recent years, there has been an admirable rise in recognizing the power of our inner hummingbird. Many people see the powerful capability of pictures in data visualization and mind mapping; both are visual ways to collect and represent context-rich and content-rich ideas. However, because these approaches open the door to such a breadth of possibilities, they often become—just like the hummingbird’s Jllowmovrd, view of the forest—impenetrable to anyone other than their original author.

  Our typical hummingbird document: so rich with connections and layers, it’s nearly impenetrable.

  Either way—pure fox or pure hummingbird, long-winded narrative or complex picture—it’s difficult for us to be sure that we’ve really nailed our idea, and even more difficult for anyone else to willingly approach it. There has to be a way that brings these two together. There is, and it starts here.

  Really: Who wants to approach either one of these ideas?

  So Why Does Our Fox Seem Smarter?

  Remember the first question I ask in a workshop? I ask the participants, usually well-educated professionals far along in their careers, about their comfort with drawing. Most express unease with, or in many cases outright hostility to, visually communicating an idea. There is something just plain wrong about using a picture to develop or explain a thought.

  How could this be? On the surface, it doesn’t make any sense. More of our brain’s total processing capacity is dedicated to vision than to any other thing that we do—more than to memory, more than to rational thought, far more than to listening, and orders of magnitude more than to feeling—and yet most of us remain profoundly uncomfortable with visually expressing our ideas, in spite of the fact that we perceive far more of the ideas in our heads as images than as words. Why?

  The answer is simple: grammar—or rather, the lack of it.

  Asking a group of professionals to draw is as inappropriate as asking a group of kindergartners to read. They—we, all of us—haven’t been taught the grammar yet.

  The Training of Our Fox

  Since we first entered kindergarten as five-year-olds, our teachers and parents have been feeding and training our verbal mind’s fox: Group conversation (Circle time! Show-and-tell! Family meeting!) taught us the basic rules of talking. Then we learned to recognize and write the letters of the alphabet. Then came sentence structure and spelling, then basic grammar, then introductory writing, and finally critical reading.

  Over many years of intense and thoughtful guidance, our fox grew and became ever more confident through rules, practice, and experience. We became literate. All along the way, we measured our fox’s progress: From spelling tests in first grade through the SATs in high school to our dissertations in college, we taught, trained, and tested our verbal minds. And we were intelligent.

  Neglecting Our Hummingbird

  But what of our visual mind? What formal training did we give our hummingbird? Aside from a couple of art classes (which focused on creatively valuable but intellectually lame approaches to self-expression), nobody ever gave us anything visual that remotely demanded the level of rigor required to learn to read.24

  Think of the balance: By the time we left high school, we had hundreds of tools and a dozen years of word training behind us—and not one single tool to help us draw. No wonder our hummingbird is feeling a little uncertain.

  Centering Our Brain Balance, Part 2

  The goal of Vivid Thinking is to get our brain balance back to center, to make sure that our verbal fox mind isn’t trying to eat our visual hummingbird mind, and then get them to work together. But as things stand now, that’s impossible: Compared with our fox, our flitting hummingbird weighs nothing. As far as our verbal mind is concerned, our visual mind is out to lunch. So to make Vivid Thinking work, the first thing we’ve got to do is get our hummingbird back on the scale.

  How can we get our brain back in balance when our hummingbird side is weightless?

  To coax our hummingbird down to a landing, we’ve got to provide two things: a perch for her to sit on (so we can carry her weight) and a wall around her (to keep the fox from eating her). Wh
at we need is a structure that provides our hummingbird a place to come down to earth and protects her from the hungry fox.

  We need to provide our hummingbird with a structure to sit on and protect her; we need to give her a perch.

  That structure is the grammar of Vivid Thinking: a simple set of “How do I draw that concept?” guidelines. These guidelines give us the means to make the first rule of Vivid Thinking work: When we say a word, we should draw a picture.