The Back of the Napkin Challenge - First Update

The Pressure is On

This is the first update on my personal challenge to launch a new project, product, or service using the methodology in Dan Roam’s book, The Back of the Napkin - Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures.

To my surprise, the author left a comment on the first challenge post saying that he would be cheering me on. Very cool! Knowing that he is looking over my shoulder makes the project even more fun. I need to knock this one out of the park. I don’t want to disappoint.

My First Baby Steps - Looking

For those of you not familiar with the methodology used in the book, the visual thinking process is divided into four parts: looking, seeing, imagining, showing.

To get the visual thinking process started you first look. There are four rules for better looking:

1. Collect everything you can - I had to get the ideas floating around in my head into a visual form. I did a massive brain dump and wrote everything I could think of onto 3×5 notecards. I wrote a total of 44 cards.

I didn’t worry about filtering the ideas. I knew that many of the ideas weren’t going to be relevant to this project but they might spark some more ideas that would be.

I planned on saving the cards that were culled from the pack to later review and organize the ideas for use in future projects.

2. Lay it out where you can look at it - I laid out all of the cards on my desk without trying to organize them.

The idea is to get everything out there so that you can begin establish the underlying information coordinates in rule 3.

3. Establish fundamental coordinates - I used business vs. personal and online vs. offline as the fundamental coordinates for my ideas. The index card below shows how I visualized the coordinates.

4. Practice visual triage - I removed 6 cards that had ideas that didn’t fall into the business/online cuadrant of my coordinates chart. That leaves me with 34 idea cards to start the next step of the visual thinking process, seeing.

Read about what happens next in the Back of The Napkin Challenge.

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Tagged as: challenge, problem solving, visual thinking