Dan Roam's book. He proposes a methodology to create simple graphics and solve business problems using visual thinking.  Source: Copyright 2010 Dan Roam with permission. Click on the image to enlarge it.

Who hasn't learnt mathematics or language and literature at school? Probably none of us are great mathematicians or illustrious literates, but we can manage well enough when dealing with numbers and writing understandable texts that carry our needs of communication or register.

Nevertheless visual thinking is not something taught in basic education and, in fact, it still doesn't appear to be present in the minds of many people. On the other hand the academic developments in Information Visualisation tend to be complex and, in terms of the diversity of the possible visualisations, the gap between visual illiteracy and graphic complexity appears to be almost insurmountable.

Recently we have seen the appearance of some books that give pre-eminence to visual thinking. One of them even presents from a simple and integrating perspective, a methodology that could constitute a gateway to jumping the gap.

The Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam proposes a methodology for problem solving based on visual thinking oriented towards business that adheres to simple principles and equally simple and understandable tools that, notwithstanding, cover a wide spectrum of the possible business graphics and constitutes, in my opinion, a solid foundation  from which to approach visual thinking to the layman.

The best thing of all is that you don't even need a computer to implement it, you  just need the good old pen and paper.

The first thing Roam does is to consider what types of problems we need to solve usually. His answer is that there are six basic types of questions that, alone or combined, answer most of the problems that can arise. These problems are of the following types:

Who / What	How many	Where
When	How	Why
Source: Copyright 2010 Dan Roam with permission.

These six types of problems can be considered like axes on which to draw our graphics, except for the how and why problems, in whose case the graphics get a little more complicated. Roam shows it this way:

We already know the types of problems but how do we represent them graphically?	Using them as coordinate axes except in the how and why, that are a little more complex

and this leads us to graphics like these ones

Some examples of graphics using the types of problems to designate the coordinate axes. Source: Copyright 2010 Dan Roam with permission. Click on the image to enlarge it.

Realising that the elements of our problems provide the foundations to create appropriate coordinate axes we can now concentrate on the fundamental point, i.e. the process or as Roam calls it the ways to see.

• To look is gathering and selecting. It requires an open attitude in order
  
   
  1. to gather all the data that can be relevant for our problem,
     
      
  2. to deploy the information in such a way that we can look and reflex on it,
     
      
  3. to establish the coordinates, the main axes, (What/Who, When, etc.) and
     
      
  4. to classify the information; to see what's really relevant for our problem.
     
      
•  To see  means processing the relevant information, selecting and identifying patterns. According to Roam "seeing well is equivalent to identifying the problem". Again the idea is to apply the six types of problems in order to generate what the author of the book calls "The six ways to see". This means trying to see which if not all of the six types of questions (What/Who, When etc.) apply best to our problem. 
  
   
• To imagine means in this context to use the "eye of the mind" to take the coordinates, patterns and components we have seen in the preceding phase and think how we can convert them into drawings and graphical representations. For this Roam proposes "the SQVID".
   

  Scheme of the SQVID process. Source: Copyright 2010 Dan Roam with permission Click on the image to enlarge it.

  The SQVID is basically a set of 5 elementary questions that allow us to submit our initial idea to a  scrutiny directly related with the way in which we want or we can show the data. It helps us visualise how to better represent the visual messages that we will have to show eventually. It also helps to structure the transition from information to visualisation. It's, in the end, a way to decide between opposites to graduate our message as a function of the audience or the essence of our own idea.
  
   

  • Simple or elaborated. This question forces us to identify whether the nature of our problem can be better understood by means of a simple representation, with a certain level of detail or it requires a much more elaborated depiction (we draw a rainbow or the electromagnetic spectrum, a lock and key or an exploded view of the pieces and mechanisms that make it up to understand how it works. The one we choose will depend on the level of our audience and what we hope to communicate. 
    
     
  • Quality or Quantity. That is, qualitative, conceptual graphics or numerical ones. Schematic drawings showing the properties or qualities of the things or charts based on numerical information about those qualities.
    
     
  • Vision or Execution. That our drawing expresses where we want to go (the vision) the goal we are pursuing or how we are hoping to get there and how we'll  execute a particular project. A simple image of the trajectory to reach the moon from the Earth or a Gantt diagram specifying the phases, tasks and dependencies between them to put the man on the Moon.  Do we show the apple cake or the recipe to make it? 
    
     
  • Individual or Compared.  Do we concentrate on something by itself or is the really important thing to show it in comparison with other items? Will we show a section of the apple cake to show it in all its glory or will we show it comparing it with a cheese cake and a chocolate one?
    
     
  • Delta (Change) or such as it is.  Here what we intend to ascertain is whether we want to show things as they are, the "status quo" or, on the other hand, if we want to see how they change, how they have changed or how they will change.
    
     
• To Show  is the final act of the process. It consists of
  
   
  • choosing an appropriate frame (a type of representation)
    
     
  • using this frame to create a drawing or graphic representation.
    
     
  • presenting and explaining the drawing to others.

  The underlying idea here is that since there are six problem types that modify our way to see, there are six frames for each of the problems, six appropriate ways of representation for them. If the problem of the "Who/What" type, the frame is a portrait, a qualitative representation. If it is of the "Where" type a map shows best a spatial location; if it is of the "When" type you use a chronogram, temporal location; if it is "How" a flux diagram shows cause and effect and if it's "Why" we are talking about deduction and prediction and this Roam represents using a multivariate matrix, typically a bubble diagram.

Finally, with all this, Roam creates a matrix crossing the frame types with the SQVID scheme which provides him with a table with the most appropriate graphics for the visualisation in the field of business problem resolution.

Frames related to the ways of seeing Source: Copyright 2010 Dan Roam with permission. Click on the image to enlarge it.	The graphic matrix (visual thinking codex) Source: Copyright 2010 Dan Roam with permission. Click on the image to enlarge it.

This matrix, that he calls "The visual Thinking Codex", serves as a foundation to choose the most useful type of representation for our problem. What remains once we reach this point is just to present it to our audience (or to ourselves) and in any case to iterate the process until we get the best result.

The process is iterative and feedbacks itself. Source: Copyright 2010 Dan Roam with permission. Click on the image to enlarge it.

Roam's book simplifies notably the process of information visualisation and the types of graphics that are possible to represent. Nevertheless, if we compare it with the visualisation diagram that we presented  in number 187 it retains the basic steps and provides simple guidelines to go from data to information, from this to visualisation and maybe the weakest link being the step from visualisation to understanding, although it's implicit in many of the explanations and examples that appear throughout the book.

A purist of Information Visualisation would find it perhaps limited and oversimplified. But the great merit of this book and of others that are beginning to appear (as for example "Visual Meetings" by David Sibbet and "Business Model generation" by A. Osterwalder et al.) is that it's  making the decisive step from theory to practice . And the only way to do this is by producing books that are simple, divulgative and above all, practical.

In a world where the teaching of visual thinking, unlike literature or mathematics, is still not part of the school syllabus and when the only thing we know how to do is to put data into a spreadsheet that builds some graphics without knowing which question they answer or which type is the most appropriate, books like these represent a need.

All the images Copyright 2010 Dan Roam with permission.

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